“Trump crosses the Atlantic.”

Restoration, repair, renovation.

Then, and now again. At the G–20 in Osaka, June 2019. (Kremlin.ru/ Wikimedia Commons.)

19 FEBRUARY—Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in Donald’s Trump’s first term, the new president was pushing his case for a restored détente with Russia. Trump went on to summit with Vladimir Putin five times and conducted at least 16 telephone exchanges with the Russian president.

This was the count by mid–2019. After that and until the end of his term, the Deep State—notably the intelligence apparatus, the Democratic National Committee, and the mass media—had Trump bound in the rope of subterfuge so thoroughly that the relationship developed no further.

The neo-détente Trump favored—that Trump was correct to favor, better put—never came to be. Joe Biden and his people, to state the obvious, were by contrast neo–Cold Warriors—mere ideologues, neoliberals wholly incapable of autonomous thought, initiative, imagination, or anything else that sophisticated statecraft requires of its practitioners.

Trump began his second term not quite a month ago, having promised throughout his political campaign to end Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine within a day of assuming office. And it is already evident that his ambitions now run far beyond the settlement in Ukraine he has long promised and the modest détente with Moscow he sought during his first four years in the White House.

The Biden project, from his years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and certainly during his term as Obama’s successor, was to isolate the Russian Federation as completely as possible by way of a poorly conceived sanctions regime, covert operations such as the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, a towering wall of propaganda, and what coercions were necessary to secure the allegiance of European clients who were, in any case, already wanderers on the world stage with no clue as to their purpose or even their interests.

Biden’s Russia policy left Ukraine waging a deadly proxy war it cannot win and the Continent well on its way to paupery. Joe Biden divided the world at least as severely and dangerously as it was during the Cold War years.

It is precisely these conditions that assuaged the anxieties neoliberals shared with the Deep State during Trump’s first term and the whole of Biden’s. They succeeded in warding off the threat of any kind of constructive co-existence between Russia and the Atlantic alliance—between West and East, this is to say.

This is a pencil-sketch of the world Trump inherited from his predecessor when he moved back into the White house a month ago.

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Trump seems to have done a lot of thinking during his four years in the political wilderness. Last week, a week of exceptional events, each adding more surprise to those preceding it, indicates that Trump and those around him now propose to transcend altogether the binaries Washington has enforced since it assumed its position of global primacy in the late 1940s. Russia is to come in from the cold and the Atlantic is to grow wider.

In this context, extricating the U.S. from the Ukraine quagmire is more than a footnote but nothing like the main attraction. Assuming all goes to Trump’s apparent plan—and we must make this assumption with unsparing caution—the center-stage attraction is discarding what has passed for a world order since the 1945 victories.

To be noted immediately: Sending the ancien régime into the history texts is not the same as constructing a new order to replace it. At this early moment it is not clear whether Trump and his people have an idea for one; yet more doubtful is whether he or any of his people would be up to a project of this world-historical magnitude. I cannot stress this point too vigorously given how many commentators I have previously assumed possess level heads now tip over in exultation that Trump is some kind of epochal “revolutionary.”

Whatever the future may hold, and seldom does it present such promise and peril as now, Trump and his new cabinet appointees on the national-security side set a lot of wheels in motion last week. A little oddly—a coordination problem here?—Pete Hegseth, the Fox News presenter turned defense secretary, got them rolling last Wednesday morning, some hours before Trump announced his instantly famous telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin.

At a speech in Brussels before NATO defense ministers and various senior Ukrainian officials, Hegseth followed Trump’s habit of bringing several longstanding unsayables into the sphere of the sayable. Retaking land Russian forces now occupy—Crimea, of course, but also sections of eastern Ukraine now formally incorporated into the Russian federation—is “an unrealistic objective… an illusory goal.”

In addition—a couple of other big ones—Hegseth said the U.S. will not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO; neither will Article 5 of the NATO charter—an attack on one member is an attack on all—cover the troops of any NATO member dispatched to Ukraine in any capacity. By the time he said these things, Hegseth had already surrendered U.S. leadership of what is called the Contact Group, a Biden-era creation comprised of 50–plus nations that manages weapons shipments and humanitarian aid—whatever that may mean at this point—to Kiev.

Could the defense secretary’s message—the opener for Trump’s very eventful week—be any clearer? The U.S. is stepping back from Ukraine, Biden’s proxy war, and any thought of a NATO role in it. The Europeans are on their own as they contemplate their course in these new circumstances.

There was a kerfuffle in political and media circles back home after Hegseth spoke: He didn’t mean it, he couldn’t have meant it, his speechwriters blew it, he has retreated—this rom prominent pols and in mass media. We are likely to get a lot of this—denial, in a word—from vested interests in the liberal press and elsewhere that simply cannot manage the thought that an order they have presumed to be eternal is about to prove otherwise.

I read news reports to this effect as nothing more than wishful distortion, of which there is much in the coverage of Trump’s new demarches these days. Hegseth said exactly what he meant to say. In a speech Friday in Warsaw, he said his intent in Brussels was to suggest some “realism into the expectations of our NATO allies.” That is clarification, not disavowal.

Trump, as noted, followed Hegseth by a few hours when he announced last Wednesday, just before noon East Coast time, that he and the Russian president had spent (at some point prior) 90 minutes on the telephone together.

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It was remarkable enough that Trump immediately described the call as the start of negotiations to achieve a settlement of the Ukraine crisis. And neither Washington nor Moscow is wasting any time getting talks going. Trump named his team of negotiators not long after he put the telephone down. These are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, and Steven Witkoff, who serves as Trump’s special envoy to West Asia but also dabbles in U.S.–Russian affairs.

These people met Russian counterparts in Riyadh this week for a sort of preliminary taking of temperatures. This was to constructive effect—fast impressive work suggestive of a determination shared between Trump and Putin. Rubio had by then had a detailed conversation with Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s FM, during which they discussed the modes by which bilateral relations would be repaired and restored.

This was far more productive than anything Antony Blinken ever got done as Biden’s secretary of state. To be honest, I didn’t think “Little Marco,” as Trump used to call him, had this kind of thing in him.

Conspicuously absent from Trump’s diplomatic team, I am pleased to note, is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and a card-carrying warmonger, who co-authored a paper last June advising Trump to force Moscow to the table under threat of redoubled sanctions—the “maximum pressure” treatment—and vast increases in weapons shipments to the Kiev regime. Bedtime for the neocon-ish Kellogg, let us hope.

Volodymyr Zelensky was also pointedly absent in Riyadh. As were representatives of the European powers. The Ukrainian president objected to this, if impotently; so did the Europeans, also to no effect. Pitifully enough, both Kiev and the Euros still insist it is “No Ukraine talks without Ukraine,” the old Biden refrain.

Trump, once again, is merely saying what has previously been unsayable. Zelensky is a classic puppet. It has been a long game of pretend to insist that he and his corrupt, Nazi-infested regime have done anything more than take orders from Washington (along with scores of billions of dollars in unaccounted funds and weapons, of course) since Russia began its military intervention three years ago next week.

That seems finished now, along with so much else. Cutting out Zelensky is simply cutting to the chase. The Russians, let us not forget, see no point talking to Zelensky until he holds elections—a very fair point—and it is a long time since the Kremlin has seen any mileage in contacts with the Europeans, who have betrayed their word to Moscow every time events require them to keep it.

What interested me about the Trump–Putin call as much as the initiative on Ukraine were those items—the dollar, energy supplies, and other such topics—that are normally considered mere bric-a-brac in diplomatic exchanges between major powers.

“We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together,” Trump declared on “X” and his Truth Social digital platform. Notably, this remark preceded Trump’s mention of a settlement in Ukraine.

All efforts to isolate Russia now appear to be over: This is Trump’s unmistakable point, and I count it the overriding significance of his call with Putin. Let us all exhale from the bottom of our lungs. If Trump makes good on this, many wasteful, destructive years of dangerous tension, conjured from nothing more than paranoia and propaganda, will now draw to a close.

The implications of this for Ukraine and, more significantly, for Europe, could hardly be more immediate or more momentous.

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J.D. Vance dropped more realism, immensely more, on those gathered for the annual Munich Security Conference this past weekend. While those present reportedly expected the vice-president to detail Trump’s plans to negotiate a Ukraine settlement, Vance had little to say on the topic. “The Trump administration is very concerned with European security,” he allowed more or less in passing, “and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine.”

That was it. Vance then launched into the subject on which he was obviously intent to unload:

The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

So began a sort of measured tirade, if there is such a thing, against what is now an openly undemocratic defense of the neoliberal order European elites have mounted in recent years —in the name, of course, of defending democracy. Vance’s speech was an attack on censorship, on flagrant manipulations of elections, on the incessant frauds of the “disinformation” industry, on the excesses of the wokery liberal authoritarians have so foolishly insisted upon imposing on the more sensible among us.

In a single word, Vance’s speech was an attack on the hypocrisies on which the neoliberal order has come to depend for its survival. These are the remarks, let us not forget, of a political figure, a conservative populist, who has fought all these battles at home.

Vance on the suppression of various populist parties whose influence has lately risen in Germany, France, and elsewhere:

As President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think… you hear this term, burden sharing,… but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we’re defending in the first place?... I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important.

But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.

Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.

Vance on Romania, where, in December, the Constitutional Court abruptly canceled a presidential election Călin Georgescu, a conservative populist, was almost certain to win, on the specious contention his campaign appeared to have been aided by what may have been—appeared to have been, may have been—some kind of Russian digital operation:

Now I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too….

Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.

But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

On the disinformation industry and the suppression of dissent:

Now to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.

Various commentators have compared Vance’s remarks with the famously stunning speech Putin made at the Munich conference in 2007. Putin’s blunt criticisms of America’s unilateral assertion of its power was an early signal of the non–West’s challenge to the post–Cold War order.

It is said that Vance’s speech is of comparable import—an announcement that the Trump administration has lost interest in the postwar Western alliance and intends to abandon Europe to its own devices. I do not read this in Vance’s remarks. At the very least there is a danger of mis– or over-interpretation.

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Here is a transcript of Vance’s speech. Read it carefully. It is a considerable stretch, in my view, to find in it any suggestion at all that it marks “the beginning of the end of the post–WW2 Western alliance,” to quote one commentator of this persuasion.

Vance spoke vigorously in favor of “our shared values,” or, elsewhere, “European values.” He spoke, in other words, for the West’s continued unity, making his case on the cultural plane, the political plane, the plane of democratic principles.

No, Vance’s offensive was against those elites who have abandoned these values, these political norms, these principles. His was an attack on the neoliberal order as he finds it in Europe—in some respects a more advanced case than he has found it at home.

The Europeans at the Munich conference were in a state of shock after Vance spoke, not least because of his criticisms of how the Germans and others seek to block populist parties from their governments. This was the basis of Olaf Scholz’s spirited refutation of the American vice-president.

“The chancellor said Germany ‘would not accept’ suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy,” The New York Times reported. “‘That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,’” Scholz insisted. “‘Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.’”

Scholz reflected something I am tempted to call “Europanic,” but the term does not fit. Vance assailed not Europe or Europeans, but the corruptions inherent in European elites’ defense of a crumbling neoliberal order. Scholz, as is there in the Munich transcripts, stood in defense of these antidemocratic corruptions.

The panic easily detected among the Continent’s besieged elites, whose leaders have convened twice this week for emergency summits in Paris, has also been legible, pitifully enough, in the press coverage of Munich and Trump’s various demarches. All I have read in corporate and state-sponsored media on both sides of the Atlantic has been shockingly distorted, featuring more than the usual measure of outright lies.

Vance spoke in favor of neo–Nazi and “far-right” parties. (He went nowhere near the topic.) The Trump–Putin telephone call was all about the Russian leader’s cynical manipulations and Trump’s appeasement. (It was about the restoration of workable bilateral relations.) Trump has opened the door for “Putin” to advance through Europe. (He entertains no such ambition.) “Putin’s” objective is to destroy the European Union and NATO. (Ditto.)

I have not seen hyperbole so extravagant as this in I do not know how long. Panic, like neoliberalism, is a trans–Atlantic phenomenon, we must recognize.

A curious exception to this circus of disfigured and disfiguring coverage of last week’s events turned up in The Times of London’s opinion page Monday under the headline “Keep calm, this isn’t another Munich sell-out.” The subhead is even better: “Putin’s no Hitler, Trump’s no Chamberlain and Zelensky’s no angel.”

Matthew Parris’s lead is better yet. In it he quotes an old friend’s amusing mot, delivered in Latin: “Pro bono publico, no panico.” Exactly so. At this early moment, too much remains to succeed or fail or something in between for anyone among us to panic. Let us leave that to the neoliberals, whose business is not, after all, ever to act for the sake of the public good.

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This is an edited and updated version of an essay that first appeared in Consortium News.