Yes, there are multiple layers of consideration, but at the core, the Ukraine question hinges on a clear right and wrong

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There’s currently a traffic jam in the marketplace of ideas regarding Ukraine. From absolutist positions ranging from handing Ukraine to Russia to digging in of heels regarding Ukraine getting every last square inch of its territory back, to nuanced insistence on “realistically” settling for a murky, unsatisfactory outcome, there’s no shortage of depressing takes on the matter.

A lot of the commentary about the issue takes some particular aspect and uses it as a launching point for an overarching conclusion.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute uses the indisputable decadence and disregard for its own history on the part of Europe as the point from which she zeroes in on what kind of outcome she thinks is feasible:

I defer to no one in my appreciation of much of Western Europe, including the UK. I love the history, the art. the languages, the culture, and the food (not in the UK). I speak three European languages, four if you include English, my family hails from the continent, and I spend a great deal of time there. But the Europe of the elite imagination does not exist.

And so we come to the much-discussed Trump National Security Strategy. The first, and most important point to make about the new NSS is, like the old NSSs, it will neither dictate strategy, nor likely be read by anyone with enough power to make grand decisions for the United States. (Niall Ferguson covers this neatly in The Free Press.) That anyone who knows anything about how Washington works is pretending the NSS is an “important” document is a testament not to its new weight, but to their own boring Trump derangement syndrome.

Later on, I’ll come back to her “boring Trump derangement syndrome” remark.

A bit later, she admirably covers the but-what-about questions by stating for the record that in her heart she’d like to be an absolutist about Ukrainian territory, but sees an alarmist tendency about where the US is going (related to the above-mentioned Trump derangement syndrome informing that sentiment):

Do those of us who are fierce partisans for Ukraine, not because we love Ukraine per se, but because we recognize Putin’s threat, and the dangers in the collapse of the Westphalian system, actually disagree that the war must end? That Ukraine must be stabilized? That it must be rebuilt? Here’s that section:

It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.

It would be nice for Ukraine to regain all of its territory, Crimea included. But I do not know a single American analyst who believes that is currently possible. This is not surrender, but ugly reality. (It might have been possible in 2022, but Joe Biden put paid to any idea of Ukrainian victory with his “minor incursion” BS.)

So let’s return to Europe. Here’s a small selection of headline reactions to the NSS:

Der Spiegel (Germany) US security strategy: [leading politician] no longer sees the US on the side of Europe

The Guardian (UK) Trump’s new doctrine confirms it. Ready or not, Europe is on its own

Il Foglio (Italy) With Trump’s National Security Strategy, America is officially an opponent

Um, what in the actual hell? Did American politicians of either party ever announce that our European NATO allies, who have serially welshed and under-invested in their own defense and the transatlantic alliance ever suggest Europe was our “opponent”? Or that it wasn’t “on our side”? How about telling Europe it was “on its own”? The answer is no, we didn’t. Because we have our own interests in the transatlantic alliance, and we recognized that it was important even over the decades — decades! — that Europe did not.

The “we” in her assertion that “we have our own interests in the . . . alliance” is rather assumptive. It implies some grownups somewhere. Alas, they don’t exist in this administration.

Then she gets to the crux of her point - Europe’s decadence and willful untethering from its historical contributions to human flourishing:

Then there’s the question of European cultural collapse. Here we come to my love of the continent, and its culture. I can assure you that I know more about Italian history than the average Italian high schooler. More about the Magna Carta and the birth of Anglicanism and Shakespeare than the average Mancunian teen. More about French colonial history, De Gaulle’s role in World War II, and France’s part in the Holocaust than the average resident of Paris’s banlieues. And it isn’t because I am a savant or uniquely educated. It is because they are no longer educated.

Like Americans who don’t know who their congressman is, where their state capital is, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or why we fought for freedom from British tyranny, the youth of our nation is, like the youth of Europe, uneducated. Civics? Bah. Culture? Meh. History? Blah. Is it any surprise that in America — not in Germany where there are one million Syrians — Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral?

But Europe is still worse. For all that our melting pot is disappearing, Europe’s efforts to assimilate its own immigrants is gone. Totally. There are schools in Milan that teach Arabic and preach hijab. One million Syrians arrived in Germany a decade ago, and now too many live in ghettoes, failing to learn German, with more and more women veiled. France long ago abandoned any notion of integrating its own North African Muslim communities. All of this is visible on the streets of every major European city.

Europe’s self-abnegation is a perverted reaction to the nationalist excesses of World War II, a justified effort to reject the sentiments behind Deutschland Über Alles that went wildly in the opposite direction. From a continent dominated by the Third Reich, eugenics, and rabid antisemitism, Europe has become a continent bereft of national pride, national culture, and patriotism. But nature abhors a vacuum, and for those who have not signed up to the Thunbergian religion of Climatism, too many have followed blindly the unquestioning Wokeism that America is now rejecting. Yet others in the growing Islamic communities of Europe have recreated the intolerance of their homelands, worshipping Islamist extremism.

All are united by their Jew hatred. The irony.

Trump’s NSS is completely correct that Keir Starmer’s Britain has gone insanely Orwellian, censoring speech, stifling free commentary, and policing the internet like overheated members of the Chinese Communist Party. On the continent itself, the blatant crazy is rarer, but the lethal combination of louche leftism and ignorance is levying its own costs.

She makes some other points and then ties it all together by hoping that the NSS can serve as an upside-the-head to Europe and set the transatlantic alliance aright.

Robert E. Kelly and Paul Poast, writing at Foreign Affairs, assert that Trump’s signature incoherence and transactionalism will inevitably drive Europe away:

The president’s disdain for U.S. allies and partners is much greater this time around [than in his first term]. He has talked about annexing Canada and Greenland, bombing Mexico, retaking the Panama Canal, and giving up on Ukraine and Taiwan, to name just a few. Trump, claiming that allies are ripping off the United States, is demanding large, ill-defined investments in the United States that look a lot like bribes. For instance, he wants a staggering $600 billion investment guarantee from the European Union to be used at his discretion. He seems to be leaning into the notion that alliances are not pillars of a mutually beneficial network but elements of a protection racket—and that it’s high time for the United States to reap the rewards.

If allies had hoped that the election of Joe Biden in 2020 would restore traditional American liberal internationalism, Trump’s reelection proves that the foreign policy belligerence and explicit quid pro quo basis for U.S. commitments evident in his first term was not an aberration. Instead, as demonstrated in the administration’s just-released National Security Strategy, it will probably be a core part of U.S. foreign policy moving forward. Future Republican leaders are likely to continue to promote Trump’s overall policy direction. And even if the Democrats retake control, the ability of Trump-aligned Republicans to exercise power in a two-party system will undermine the United States’ reliability as an ally.

So far in Trump’s second term, U.S. allies have not yet defected. In October, Trump visited Japan and South Korea, and each country’s leaders signaled their desire to stay in the president’s good graces. Just as we concluded in 2022, the allies still seem to be all right. But they are much more worried than before. Unlike eight years ago, countries can no longer wish away the implications of a United States that might not support them in a crisis. Instead, over the next decade, it is likely that U.S. allies will start to noticeably drift away. They may still hope for U.S. support, but they are also starting to hedge against the possibility that the United States will be absent when problems arise by building alternative alliance structures, considering obtaining nuclear weapons, and even brokering separate peace deals with, rather than confronting, regional opponents. Without being able to predict how Trump would respond to calls for help in a major war or a nuclear crisis with China, Russia, or North Korea, U.S. allies have no choice but to shift their long-term strategies to reduce their dependence on Washington.

Kelly and Poast go on to say that there are a number of reason for allies hanging in there so far:

. . . one reason that many countries in Europe and Asia ally with the United States is that its geographic distance makes it unlikely to be a direct military threat. Thus, even if it is not a dependable friend, the strategic benefits of working with the United States are enticing enough for U.S. allies to hope that they can keep placating Trump. But hope is not a strategy. And that is why concerns about Trump and the likely trajectory of U.S. foreign policy eventually, grudgingly, will push U.S. allies to hedge.

But they say that the hanging-in-there phase isn’t going to last:

Despite their ongoing reliance on the United States in the short term, these allies will seek to protect themselves against American irresponsibility going forward. This includes both increasing domestic spending to make themselves more self-reliant in defense and infrastructure and pursuing a wider range of partners for fear that the United States will not help in a conflict.

In some ways, Trump is accelerating this shift. The U.S. president has consistently demanded that allies spend more on their own defense. In the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, for instance, the need for burden sharing is a central theme. Although the United States claims it still wants and expects a robust network of allies, particularly in Europe and Asia, the strategy makes clear that Washington’s role should be as a “conveyer and supporter,” rather than primary provider, of other countries’ security. But by requiring more defense spending as a prerequisite for good relations with Washington, the Trump administration is also reducing its allies’ need for U.S. protection.

Consider the phrase that begins their final paragraph:

In an ideal world, the United States would still be the best security provider for U.S. allies. For the leaders of many of these countries, it is worth hoping that, as Winston Churchill supposedly quipped, the United States will always do the right thing after exhausting all other options. But these allies do not find themselves in an ideal world, and the possibility that the United States under Trump or one of his followers will ultimately do the right thing by its allies is more in doubt than perhaps at any time in the nearly 80 years since the modern U.S. alliance system took shape. Hoping that the United States eventually does the right thing or rediscovers the benefits of strong alliances is not a viable long-term strategy. The prudent step is hedging. America’s allies remain committed to Washington for now, but they are anxious enough to start looking elsewhere for support.

All the takes out there about what to do regarding Ukraine have in common the acknowledgement that we indeed don’t live in an ideal world, but I resonate more with the way Kelly and Poast would have us maneuver through the actual world than I do the Dani Pletka approach, which seems to give up on Europe as a useful force because it so far has lacked the will to defend itself.

In another article currently on the Foreign Affairs front page, Michael Kimmage says that Trump lives in the present, with little attention to either the lessons of history or a long-range vision for what a livable world looks like:

For Trump, it is power, not principles, that makes the world go round. Another was Trump’s view of prosperity as a talismanic organizing principle of foreign policy. “We are going to make America wealthy again,” Trump vowed in 2016. “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” A third instinct was the close alignment of politics with personality. “Only I can fix it,” Trump declared at the 2016 Republican nominating convention.

Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which was published late last week, synthesizes and formalizes these three instincts, presenting them as the necessary drivers of international order. The NSS points to “the character of our nation, upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built,” entrusting the protection of this character to the president himself and his “team,” who in his first term “successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country.” It is Trump’s personality, power, and supporters that have enabled this golden age.

. . . Bureaucracies, institutions, and ministries of foreign affairs have all been losing stature, as ambitious, centralizing leaders—some charismatic, some authoritarian, some both—have emerged in many of the world’s biggest countries. Trump, Putin, and Xi, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, dominate the foreign policies of their respective countries.

. . . A striking feature of the strategy is its presentism. Other than its allegations of pre-Trump dysfunction and its admiring references to the Monroe Doctrine, it lacks a historical backdrop. Absent is a common historical argument: that after World War II, the United States built an institutional architecture conducive to security, prosperity, and liberty. The document offers no alternative history. It is a security strategy for the age of social media, pegged to a never-ending, fluid, ever-adjustable present tense. To the extent that this impression maps onto reality, it empowers the chief executive. The world must patiently stand by, watching and waiting for his next steps.

That presentism (what a great word) can lead to misplaced priorities:

It is bizarre, then, that the Western Hemisphere enjoys pride of place in the strategy document. The implication is that illegal immigration and drug trafficking from Latin America are the preeminent national security challenges for the United States. Severe as these problems are, they pale beside the potential for major destabilization in Europe or the Indo-Pacific. Illegal immigration and drug trafficking are also problems that demand a nuanced set of solutions, from reforms rooted in domestic American politics to collective problem solving with the countries that contribute to migrant or drug flows into the United States. Trump’s strategy risks militarizing problems that are not military in nature.

The document is at its weakest when addressing the war in Ukraine. Part of its problem is theoretical. In some passages, the document defines “stopping regional conflicts” as a U.S. responsibility. In this view, Washington must prevent any one antagonist (meaning Russia or China) from achieving a position of regional dominance. The war in Ukraine should be Europeanized so that Europe can police its own region and keep Russia from exerting outsize influence beyond its borders. Elsewhere, however, the strategy recognizes “the outsize influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” describing their influence as a “timeless truth of international relations.” Some countries are entitled to preeminence, and Russia may be one of these countries. But regional stability in Ukraine and elsewhere will not arise from spheres of influence created by a handful of great powers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in characteristically yee-haw fashion, says “hell, yeah, we’re going transactional and opportunistic”:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday launched a full-throated attack on post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, castigating former presidents and generals by name while declaring the age of American “utopian idealism” over.

Hegseth, speaking at the annual Reagan Defense Forum, outlined a new military focus on the Western Hemisphere, demanded allies fend for themselves and took a more conciliatory approach to China’s armed forces.

His remarks underscored the new National Security Strategy released late Thursday and previewed the Pentagon’s own upcoming strategy, which will lay out the military’s global priorities.

“Out with idealistic utopianism,” he said. “In with hard-nosed realism.”

. . . The U.S. should not be “distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building,” Hegseth said. “We will instead put our nation’s practical, concrete interests first.”

The fact remains, though, that it is wrong for Russia to have annexed Crimea in 2014, fomented instability in Donbas, and launched a full-scale 2022 invasion, which sees Ukraine subjected to a never-ending nightmare of drone and missile savagery focused on energy infrastructure and places where Ukrainians live and shop.

Wrong.

That word doesn’t get employed in the service of the Ukraine situation so much. And t’s for the reasons given above. Europe - but the West generally, including the US and Canada - is largely uninterested in its own heritage and what its great thinkers have had to say about how to tell right from wrong.

It’s at the core of this situation nonetheless. And any other “solution” to it merely perpetuates the perilously muddled state of affairs we’re experiencing. And Xi, Putin, Kim, Erdogan and Modi, whose visions of what the world stage ought to look like are far more coherent than the Very Stable Genius’s, can continue playing him for a mark and bringing their visions - also known as great-power spheres of influence - to fruition.

Being concerned about such a handoff of global influence is not “boring Trump Derangement Syndrome.”