It is not every day I am accused by the vice president of the United States of purveying “moralistic garbage” and “historical illiteracy,” and of being a “globalist.” But those were the charges leveled against me by J.D. Vance this morning.
I suppose I should not have been surprised by the onslaught. This week, President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine took what struck me as a bad turn. Now, I am not one of those who objects to Trump talking to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Nor am I against the new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. A war that cannot be ended on the battlefield must be ended by negotiation, and peace talks do not get far if one combatant is excluded from the discussions.
However, in the past 10 days the Trump administration—which had up until this point been striking the right tone—made a series of unforced errors. The first indication of what was coming was at a NATO meeting in Brussels on February 12, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Ukraine’s postwar borders were unlikely to be as they were before Russia initially invaded in 2014; that negotiations would not end with Ukraine as a NATO member; and that non-Americans would have to provide security guarantees.