Has History Ended?

It happens on a fairly regular basis now. From time to time someone trots out the tired and shopword thesis proposed by one Fancis Fukuyama and declares it to be truth. This time, the author is one Michael Cohen, writing in The New Republic.

The thesis was that history has ended and that we won. Assuming that history was a struggle between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, the end of history occurred when the latter emerged victorious. Excuse the simplification, but Fukuyama’s Neo-Hegelian spirit is basically warmed over Biblical eschatology. 

In truth, it’s an old Enlightenment idea, described clearly by Carl Becker in a book called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. The great thinkers might have thought that they were overcoming religion. In truth, they were simply describing it in different terms.

The end of history is like the stories of the end of days. The result, to Fukuyama, is that everyone now believes that liberal democracy is the best way to govern human beings.

Which is manifestly untrue.

One feels obliged to remark that, in the world of subliminal suggestion, if you are told that liberal democracy is the future you are more likely to believe that you should be a liberal democrat.

One also feels compelled to note that, as Michael Cohen remarks in his essay, that liberal democracy has not arrived in Russia or China or the Muslim world. That is, the majority of people on the planet have not embraced liberal democracy.

Cohen notes this fact:

Then there is the case of China, a “market-oriented authoritarian state.” in which widespread demands for recognition have largely failed to materialize. Fukuyama has argued that China’s lack of democratic accountability has led to corruption, mismanagement of the economy, and government crackdowns intended to suppress political dissent. Similar phenomena have occurred in other authoritarian states like Russia and Iran. All that is true, and more than three decades after publication of “The End Of History?” China has become less free and more authoritarian and is not remotely close to adopting the tenets of liberal democracy. The perpetuation of Chinese market authoritarianism is a direct rebuttal to Fukuyama’s optimism.

As you know, China increased its per capita GDP by 3000% over the past four decades. It did not do so while having elections and ensuring human rights. As for the notion that the people of China might be yearning for democratic elections, we can examine the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. 

Not so much because the regime crushed the student rebellion mercilessly but because all of those who insisted, according to good Hegelian thinking, that the repressed impulse toward democracy would necessarily lead to the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, were manifestly wrong.

Rumor has it that the people of China, while they witness the American political system, express happiness with their own.

As Donald Trump is wont to declare, the people running China are seriously intelligent and competent people. We cannot say as much about all of our own recent democratically elected leaders.

Fukuyama was wrong. He has every right to be wrong, but let’s get over our jejune attraction to liberal democracy and liberal democrats.

Friendship

We Americans have fewer and fewer friends. We are socially disconnected and increasingly isolated. Being as we function best in society, the loneliness epidemic is compromising our mental health.

Karol Markowicz isolates and analyzes the problem in a recent New York Post column. She is not the first to do so. And she is not the first to blame it on social media and smart phones. As the reasoning goes, people are too attached to their gadgets; they spend too much time online, and do not have the time to make and keep friends.

 

She writes:

Loneliness is a silent killer. A US surgeon general’s report from 2023 found it as dangerous as smoking, “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death” — while upward of 60% of Americans feel lonely on a regular basis, surveys have found.

Along with the impact on personal well-being, the trend is dangerous for America itself. A nation that lacks interpersonal relationships is a lower-trust society, more prone to crime and unrest.

As for the causes, let us try one unrecognized cause-- therapy culture. As it happens, the great theories in the therapy world have very little use for friendship.

Beginning with Freud, they emphasize family relationships or personal growth and development. Whether Freud’s Oedipus complex or theories of maturation, the therapy world cares mostly for blood ties, familial connections. Even when it recognizes social ties, it tends to see them as a replay of family ties. In many other cases it focuses on the individual, as a self=contained autonomous monad.

We consider this to be normal. And yet, we recall that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, offered two important chapters on friendship. That is, on social ties that had nothing to do with blood ties. Thus, with the kinds of social ties that produced a community.

The difference is clear and stark. If blood ties are all that matter, you are connected to your blood relatives by biology. Only in the most extreme circumstances does one break off blood ties. There are no specific behaviors, no codes of conduct that connect people who are blood relatives.

When there is no blood tie, then good behavior becomes more important. How you conduct your life either connects you to other people or disconnects you. It produces community or dissolves community.

So, making friends requires ethical behavior. So said Aristotle, and we are certainly not going to object. Thus, blaming it on smart phones is insufficient.

True enough, smart phones are the bane of the existence of young people today, but even if they put away their phones, they still do not have an instruction manual for making and keeping friends.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, you know that President Trump consistently declares that the Ukraine war would not have started on his watch.

Mario Nawfal offers some remarks from Jeffrey Sachs, reporting conversations he had with former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in the leadup to the war:

Jeffrey Sachs: U.S COULD HAVE STOPPED THE UKRAINE WAR FROM STARTING “On December 15, 2021, I had an hour call with Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, Jake, avoid the war - you can avoid the war. All you have to do is say NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. And he said to me, oh, NATO is not going to enlarge to Ukraine, don't worry about it. I said, Jake, say it publicly. No, no, no, we can’t say it publicly.”

Second, the Democratic Party is in very serious trouble. Not only is it lacking a reason for being, but it is floundering electorally. As it happens, according to The Daily Wire, Democratic donors are abandoning the sinking ship.

Several Democrat donors said this week that they have paused their donations to the party because of how weak and ineffective it has become in the wake of President Donald Trump’s return to office.

“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f***ing terrible. Plain and simple,” a major Democrat donor told The Hill. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”

The donor said that the 2024 loss was much worse than the loss in 2016 because the party is currently “so weak and so diminished.”

A second donor told the publication that they were equally as turned off about the party.

“They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” the donor said. “The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”

Third, you will be thrilled to notice that the lowest recorded poll ratings belong to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson:

New poll has Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson with a 6.6% favorability mark and 80% unfavorable.

Fourth, if it looks like a really bad idea, it probably is a really bad idea. Happily, the New York Times begins its story about therapists who are really chatbots with instances where these machine-made artificial therapists did a bad job.

And yet….

I-t ought to be well enough known by now that the human connection between patient and therapist is one of the most helpful treatment aspects. 

S. Gabe Hatch, a clinical psychologist and A.I. entrepreneur from Utah, recently designed an experiment to test this idea, asking human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes involving fictional couples in therapy, and then having 830 human subjects assess which responses were more helpful.

Overall, the bots received higher ratings, with subjects describing them as more “empathic,” “connecting” and “culturally competent,” according to a study published last week in the journal PLOS Mental Health.

Chatbots, the authors concluded, will soon be able to convincingly imitate human therapists. “Mental health experts find themselves in a precarious situation: We must speedily discern the possible destination (for better or worse) of the A.I.-therapist train as it may have already left the station,” they wrote.

Dr. Hatch said that chatbots still needed human supervision to conduct therapy, but that it would be a mistake to allow regulation to dampen innovation in this sector, given the country’s acute shortage of mental health providers.

Fifth, now Andrew Sullivan, not an unintelligent writer, comes forth with an essay to comfort us-- if we have not been reading his musings we have not missed anything.

His latest jeremiad about the decline and fall of the West shows us a good mind going to waste. What wastes his mind, as he recognizes and denies, is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

To state the obvious, if  it took Trump exactly one month to destroy Western civilization, then either the civilization was markedly weak or Trump was exceptionally powerful.

Sullivan sees Trump as something of a thug who is aggressing nations around the world, especially in the West. The fact that Trump has not invaded Canada or Panama, but has merely spoken ill of them, suggests that Sullivan cannot distinguish between rhetoric and reality.

That doctrine now reflects Trump’s deepest conviction: that might is right, that weak countries should surrender to strong ones, and that this is in America’s interests, because we are the strongest. Trump’s aggression toward Canada, Panama, Gaza, and Denmark is not just trolling the libs. It’s of a piece with his view that the strong should always control and bully and plunder the weak. This is Ukraine’s real crime to Trump. They dared resist absorption by a bigger, stronger neighbor.

We do not know where Sullivan conjured his fantasies, but apparently Trump;s willingness to sit down with Russia to negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine involves sucking up to Putin. As does refusing to give Ukraine a place in NATO.

Trump is clinically incapable of understanding any system of mutuality, because he cannot tolerate being anyone’s equal.

Of course, among the suspects that Sullivan abhors is the prime minister of Israel. Why miss out on a chance to add a little anti-Semitism to the mix.

Russia’s re-occupation of all of Ukraine and the Baltic states, or Israel’s looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. My own view is not that the US could have continued its current course indefinitely; but that any retrenchment should have kept the architecture of international law and support for liberal democracies, as much as we could. Trump has effectively thrown in the towel; and handed large swathes of the world to Putin, Xi, and, to a lesser extent, Netanyahu — the only world leaders he respects and understands.

Sullivan does not mention the recent remarks by one JD Vance, to the effect that the Western European democracies, besides having consigned themselves too military weakness, have been persecuting and harassing their citizens for thought crimes. 

By the West, I mean the idea that the democracies that beat the Nazis and outlasted the Soviets were and are instinctively America’s friends — “We were with you then; We are with you now,” in Reagan’s words — that the world is divided between autocracy and democracy, and that although we need to deal with tyrants realistically, and accept limits on our power in this new multipolar world, we are still emphatically the leader of “the free world.”

Sullivan concludes:

This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.

As you know, the leader of that beleaguered little democracy is going to be in Washington on Friday, to sign an agreement whereby America can share the profits from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.

Another foreign policy success. Another miss for Andrew Sullivan. The Sullivan post appeared on his Substack. The moral of the story is that you would do better to subscribe to my Substack.

Who Lost Ukraine?

In the world of contrary opinion David Goldman should receive an award for his clear-eyed analysis of the Ukraine War. Considering that most of the analysis offered by politicians and journalists is seriously lacking in cogency, we find it useful to offer the Goldman analysis,

According to Goldman the Ukraine war was the product of political errors. Nothing new there. It also involved a serious level of miscalculation. Not so much misinformation, but miscalculation of the capacity of Ukraine and Russia to wage war.

Goldman wrote:

Just as President Trump said, Ukraine and its NATO backers provoked the war. Not only did they provoke a war that never should have begun; they bungled its execution, woefully underestimating Russia’s capacity to adapt to new warfare technologies, and overestimating Washington’s ability to choke Russia with sanctions. The war party faces not only shame and humiliation but unemployment, and it will do anything in its power to prevent this.

The foreign policy establishment promoted the war. They insisted that Ukraine would win. And, if Ukraine could not win, we had to do it because we loved democracy. And besides, Putin was a bad man. The reasoning was filled with miscalculations:

The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under US sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.” On the contrary, real per capita GDP in Russia was 6% higher in 2024 than in 2021. Russia’s round-the-clock war economy has produced inflation and high interest rates, but Russians produce and consume more now than they did before the war began. 

This suggests that we have less leverage than we think.

Among the losers in this war are what Goldman called the “howling war camp” the foreign policy gurus who wanted war:

From the howling in the war camp, you’d think it was the end of the world. But it’s not the end of the world: It’s just the end of them. Nothing fails like failure, and the twenty-year campaign to launch regime change in Russia from Ukraine failed miserably, as the Russian Federation built more weapons than the whole of NATO combined. Relentless Russian gains hollowed out the Ukraine Army.

And also:

The entirety of the foreign policy establishment—from liberal globalists like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to neocon Republicans like Trump’s dismissed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Defense Secretary James Mattis insisted that Ukraine would crush Russia with sufficient Western help. They were thunderingly wrong.

How did Russia do?

To the astonishment of Western war planners, Russia produced more armaments than the combined NATO countries, increasing its overall weapons output tenfold, including seven times more artillery shells than the combined West according to Estonian military intelligence estimates. India, Turkey, the former Central Asian Soviet Republics, as well as China all increased their exports to Russia, trading in local currencies to avoid financial sanctions on Russia. 

Whatever the outcome, it ought to be worth the hundreds of thousands of casualties:

Ukraine refuses to publish casualty figures, and the Western press is full of wildly exaggerated reports of Russian casualties. But the best estimates of US military intelligence officers state that Ukraine’s casualties are significantly higher than Russia’s – and Ukraine has a quarter of Russia’s population. 

If you read the Western press you will receive a distorted version of the war:

Ukrainian desertions are tremendous. As of the middle of December it was being reported by several different sources that there were more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers who had been charged with desertion. Russia is suffering huge losses but, in absolute terms, Ukraine’s losses are probably worse. When taken as a whole, against the fact that Russia has a population of nearly 150 million (5 times larger than Ukraine), the war of attrition is not sustainable.”

There you have it. The other side of the story. Apparently, Russia is doing better than we were led to believe and Ukraine was doing worse. Perhaps Trump will be able to pull out something that resembles a victory. It will be a daunting challenge.

Trump Tries to End a War

Is history repeating itself? Or do the same characters have nothing better to do than to read from the old script. 

As you see the news coming from the Russia-Ukraine war you would be forgiven if you thought that someone had decided to replay the same old story.

That is, the Trump-Russia narrative. The narrative wherein Trump is Putin’s stooge and where he is an existential threat to democracy.

You would think that Trump would receive some credit, however begrudgingly,  for trying to end the carnage in Ukraine. You would think that he would receive some credit for having his senior officials sit down to a negotiation with their Russian counterparts.

After all, how can the war end without the participation of the Russian side. 

Of course, part of the problem here is the Ukrainian president Zelensky. At the very least he is in way over his head. He decided to take personal pique at not participating in the negotiations in Saudi Arabia, and refused to sign an agreement with Treasury Secretary Bessent regarding rare earth minerals in Ukraine.

It was a hostile and insulting gesture after Bessent had traveled to Ukraine. Again, Zelensky is in way over his head.

Better yet, yesterday Zelensky offered to resign if Ukraine were allowed to join NATO. This suggests that he has a seriously inflated opinion of his own importance. And also, that he does not recognize that NATO membership is a non-issue.

Of course, the Biden administration had showered Zelensky with money, without seeking any payback. You would think that an American president would care about being recompensed for American largesse. Apparently, the armies of Trump detractors consider it a Mafia-like extortion of funds from Ukraine.

As for the Ukrainian obligation to pay back some of what the United States gave it, Zelensky said:

 "I don't recognize Ukraine's $500 billion debt. It was a grant, not loan, so not owing even 100B."

Normally, you would think that peace is a good thing. You might even think that the destruction visited on Ukraine is something that ought to be stopped.

But, these are not normal times. Since it’s Donald Trump who is trying to negotiate peace, more than a few of his detractors have seized the opportunity to call him a sellout to Russia. It’s Neville Chamberlain at Munich, all over again.

Especially, since Defense Secretary Hegseth declared that Ukraine would not be receiving NATO membership. One suspects that this was a basic precondition for talking with Russia. One understands that when our singularly inept former vice president declared her wish to allow Ukraine to join NATO, this triggered the Russian invasion.

When a serious thinker like Niall Ferguson looks at the situation and declares that Trump is looking to provoke a fight, you have to ask yourself how it has happened that more than a few intelligent people have gotten caught up in anti-Trumpism.

If you ask yourself whether the now discredited Democrat foreign policy establishment wants the Ukraine War to end, you have to note that if Trump can end a multi-year conflict in a couple of months, it will make them look bad. It will make them look inept and incompetent. And, the ultimate goal of the Democrat foreign policy establishment is to maintain the remnants of their reputations, to look as though they had not bungled the situation in Eastern Europe.

The indignity of seeing Donald Trump solve a problem that they helped produce would be too much to bear.

Fundraising

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

Being as today is Sunday, we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. 

Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post daily. Not very many others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that is worthy of compensation. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, neighbors, associates and colleagues.

Thank  you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, JD Vance, among others, has been speaking truth to European impotence. 

Auron MacIntyre sums up the problem clearly and succinctly:

Europeans abandoned the defense necessary for their own sovereignty so they could finance welfare states, which they then destroyed with mass immigration So now they have infinite migrants, bankrupt social programs, and a complete lack of security

Second, yesterday Hamas returned the bodies of small children they had held hostage and had murdered. They were supposed to return the body of their mother, but, as everyone now knows, they did not return their mother’s body.

You might want to know how NPR, funded by our government, covered the event:

It was definitely more somber and much less celebratory on both sides. In Gaza, large crowds gathered in Khan Younis in the South. Masked Hamas gunmen presided over a ceremony on a stage with four coffins draped in black. There were large posters on both sides of the stage in Hebrew and English, one depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a fanged vampire, another said that if Israel resumed the war, more hostages would come home in coffins.”

Time to take the gloves off and deliver a fatal blow to Hamas.

Third, Ben Shapiro sums it up well:

This is evil. If you side with those who deliberately kidnap babies and hold them for ransom, you are siding with evil. If you demand concessions to those who perform such atrocities, you are siding with evil. From college campuses to the streets of London, from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, we can see just who sides with evil. And as Israel lays to rest the corpses of the Bibas family, we should be reminded that those who side with evil share its moral consequences.”

Fourth, if you have been following my commentary, you will not be surprised to see that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia denounced the murders in the strongest terms:

"What we saw today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah."

Fifth, a last word from Nicole Lampert, via the Jewish Chronicle:

So, world, what do you think of your “resistance fighters” now? 

There they were, masked men handing over the bodies of the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz, stars of the own sick show. It was monstrous beyond description and should have been recognised for what it was: a tarnish on a world that allowed this to happen.

But they were taking part in live news, given their own chunk of airtime like one side of a “balanced” BBC argument. Here is Hamas, a “legitimate resistance force”, handing over dead babies. Now, cut to the crying Israelis. 

Sixth, on the DEI death watch, the new Trump administration policies have now impacted Citibank, reported by Bloomberg:

Citigroup Inc. is ending workplace representation goals and removing requirements to interview job candidates from diverse backgrounds, citing pressure from the Trump administration.

The bank will no longer have “aspirational representation goals” except as required by local law, and abandon a policy for diversity in candidates and interview panels, according to a memo to staff from Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser seen by Bloomberg News.

It will also rename its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Talent Management” team to “Talent Management and Engagement”, Fraser said.

Seventh, meanwhile free speech is dead or dying in Germany. Nellie Bowles reports for the Free Press:

A Bavarian man had his home raided and tablet confiscated after reposting a meme on X that called the vice chancellor of Germany a “moron.” Court documents read that his post was “punishable as an insult against people of political life” and potentially constituted “incitement of the people.” It’s hard to imagine living in a society where calling a political figure a moron is grounds for arrest. Well, not that hard to imagine. One thinks of Russia, Syria, etc. But Germany?

Eighth, once again some news from Canada. This time, regarding its much vaunted healthcare system, from the Foundation for Economic Education:

In Canada, wait times are unmanageable, access to services is dwindling, and public trust is eroding. Recent data indicate that one in six Canadians lacks a regular family physician, and fewer than half can secure an appointment with a primary care provider within a day or two. This shortage has led to overwhelmed emergency rooms and significant delays in care. In 2023, more than 1.3 million Canadians abandoned emergency room visits due to excessive wait times. Some hospitals have even exceeded 200% capacity, forcing patients into hallways and onto floors.

Who Killed JFK?

We are apparently within days or weeks of learning what is in the JFK assassination files.

To provide an amuse bouche, as the French call it, the Daily Mail has a story about a mob-associated assassin, by name of James Files.

According to Files, he was located on the grassy knoll and fired a shot that hit JFK in the head. He added that he was not the lone gunman. A man named Charles Nicoletti fired from the Texas Book depository, near the place where Lee Harvey Oswald was located.

Nicoletti was a hit man for Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana.It is well enough known that Giancana despised the Kennedys. Before the 1960 election JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, met with Giancana and Anthony Accardo to make a deal. The Chicago mob would rig the election in Illinois and perhaps not just in Illinois. In return, the Kennedys would, once in office, lay off the mob.

As it happened, the mobsters kept their word. The Kennedy’s did not keep theirs. Bobby Kennedy had made a name for himself as the counsel of a Senate committee on organized crime. He used his position to harass mobsters like Giancana and Carlos Marcelo.

Once in office  as Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy did not lay off the mobsters. He pursued them more vigorously.

To the mob, this was surely a double cross. Giancana, in particular, hatd the Kennedy’s-- for double crossing him and the rest of the mob.

For the record, after the JFK assassination Giancana moved to Mexico. After a time he decided to return to America, and was summarily executed.

Anyway, one double cross does not preclude another. For those who were not sufficiently enraged about the situation in Chicago, there was the Bay of Pigs.

As you know, when Fidel Castro took over Cuba he expropriated hotels and casinos that belonged to organized crime figures. These latter got together with anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA to mount an invasion of Cuba. 

They were going to invade at a place called the Bay of Pigs. The invading force counted between 1,000 and 2,000 fighters. The Cuban forces were around 20,000. Obviously, the invaders had no chance. In truth, the only chance they had was the chance that the American military would provide air cover. Such was the plan, until JFK called it off. The invaders were all slaughtered.

This was obviously a double cross that required a response. One notes that the man in charge of the mob’s investments in Cuba was one Santo Trafficante, the boss of the Tampa mob. 

As it happened, Trafficante had a bag man, a man who flew bags of money from Havana to Tampa. The bag man was named Jack Ruby.

If you believe that Jack Ruby took it on himself to murder Lee Harvey Oswald because he felt badly for Jackie Kennedy, you will believe anything.

Negotiating Peace

As he sets out to end the war in Ukraine President Trump has run up against an unforeseen obstacle-- the Ukrainian president Zelensky.

Negotiations between America and Russia have begun, fairly productively. The Ukrainian president took serious offense at not being invited and began trash talking Trump. Evidently, he is not ready for prime time.

Trump responded strongly to the offense:

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy [sic], talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle, The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back.

For Trump the war represented a failure to negotiate. A failure to make a deal. While the Russians were certainly at fault for invading a sovereign country, from Trump’s perspective, Ukraine and the United States could have negotiated a solution to the problem, short of mindless carnage and destruction.

Since Zelensky needed some coaching, Vice President Vance offered lessons.

It wasn’t Munich, so it did not receive quite as much attention. Still, we pay special heed to an interview that Vice President JD Vance gave to The National Pulse.

Vance described Zelensky’s approach as “disgraceful” and counterproductive, emphasizing that such tactics could jeopardize Ukraine’s relationship with its most crucial ally.

This is called putting someone in his place. It pertains especially when you are dependent on American largesse in order to continue the fight:

“Zelensky is getting really bad advice, and I don’t know from whom,” Vance said. “He’s not dealing with Joe Biden and the Biden administration anymore. He’s dealing with Donald Trump and the Trump administration.”

Vance suggested that speaking out against Trump in public was a very bad idea. It signaled weakness, not strength:

Vance warned against Zelensky’s public protestations in recent days, stating, “The idea that he’s going to litigate his disagreements with the president in the public square—I mean, you [Raheem] know the President very well, obviously, I know the President very well. This is not a good way to deal with President Trump,” Vance said. “Of course, the Ukrainians are going to have their perspective. The way to surface that is in a private discussion with American diplomats… he’s attacking the only reason this country exists, publicly, right now. And it’s disgraceful. And it’s not something that is going to move the President of the United States. In fact, it’s going to have the opposite effect.”

Vance recommended that the Ukrainians and the other European nations get on board, to present a united front.

Vance went on, stressing the point: “He has said the goal of administration policy is to end the conflict. So now, you know that has to happen. Right. Zelensky has to take that seriously. Our European allies have to take that seriously. That is the goal of administration policy. You’re not going to move the President away from that goal. You’re not going to change his mind, certainly not by attacking him publicly in the media.”

And I think that it’s a little rich for some of our European friends to attack Donald Trump for suggesting that Ukraine should have elections when they say that this is a war for democracy. How can you attack elections when your entire framing for the war in Ukraine is that it’s a war for democracy? I just think it’s ridiculous. And, of course, the United States had a civil war. We had an election in, of course, at the, at the end of as scheduled. You know, Churchill found out that he lost. As I understand it, he found out that he lost the British election at Potsdam.”

We shall see whether the lesson gets through to  the petulant Ukrainian.