I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Donald Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.
He’s shattering it. He’s making the world more dangerous. He’s siding with an alleged war criminal, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and poisoning relations with longtime U.S. allies. The trans-Atlantic alliance is unraveling.
“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values — largely put in place by America since the Second World War — which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity,” Chris Patten, the former British Conservative Party chair and European foreign affairs chief, told me.
Patten’s tough language is a reflection of the distress in Europe, for he is a lifelong Americanophile, and now, as Lord Patten of Barnes, a model of British dignity and restraint. He added, “I love America and was once happy to regard its president as leader of the free world. Not any longer. Where are the American values that I used to admire?”
I wish I knew what to tell him. But this is a humiliating month to be an American. When I was a young reporter, we referred to countries like Poland and Romania as Soviet satellites; now Trump is doing Putin’s bidding and seems determined to put the United States in the Russian orbit.
‘Assault on Europe’
Trump administration officials cozied up to Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this week over “a lot of jokes,” as one of the Russians put it. The two sides discussed Ukraine, and thus Europe’s future, while excluding both the Ukrainians and the Europeans. There is talk of adopting Russia’s position on Ukraine and dropping sanctions against Moscow.
This would be grotesque. I’ve covered the war in Ukraine, visited Russian torture chambers and interviewed Ukrainian children trafficked into Russia by the invaders. If only Trump and his aides had a fraction of the steel of one Ukrainian woman I interviewed in 2022, Alla Kuznietsova, who, even when subjected to electric shocks, beatings with cables and repeated rapes by Russian interrogators, refused to yield to them.
“We are grateful to Americans, but we just ask, please don’t leave us halfway,” she told me then. “Don’t leave us alone.” Yet now Trump has collapsed and seems ready to abandon heroes like her. What we’ve seen in the last 10 days from American officials is appeasement of the most craven kind.
