The Leader of the Free World

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Wikipedia file photograph

As the President of the United States has just thrown away all claims to leadership of the Free World, identifying the proper leader of the free world is blessedly easy. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has the courage, the moral high ground, the resolve and endurance. He embodies the values the free world identifies as ours.

Fortunately for President Zelenskyy, he has just succeeded in uniting Europe around him, an accomplishment that was achieved in large part because of the swinish behavior of President Trump and Vice President Vance toward a visiting head of state.

That vile meeting has been adequately dissected, analyzed, castigated, and summarized. We need to look at the path forward now, looking at foreign affairs first, and then their effects on U.S. domestic life.

Ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen has an alternative reality substack post up today, positing a What If Zelenskyy knew that Trump’s fragile ego and belligerence would be triggered in the Oval Office and that the cameras were on, so the Whole World Was Watching, and the boorishness of the President and his Hillbilly would drive European leaders and citizens to the inevitable conclusion – the U.S. was no longer leader of the free world, and Europe, leaders and people, must coalesce around a new leader.

When Zelenskyy quipped, “You have a nice ocean and don’t feel it now, but you will feel it in the future”, he wasn’t just trolling Trump. He was speaking directly to Europe’s existential dread. The line was a dagger aimed at Trump’s isolationist delusions, a reminder that Russia’s aggression isn’t a distant storm but a hurricane already battering Europe’s borders. …

Incredibly, Zelenskyy didn’t just survive the meeting; he weaponized it. By anticipating and playing to Trump’s volatility, he turned a potential disaster into a rallying cry. Europe’s response? A $21 billion thank-you note, a summit to “decide the future of security”, and a collective 2 finger salute at Trump’s “diplomacy.” ...

In the end, Trump’s tantrums didn’t isolate Ukraine; they isolated Trump. Zelenskyy’s gamble paid off: Europe’s support, once a distant reach, is now a lifeline.”

The Trump-Putin alliance is realistically horrifying, for Europe and for the United States. Writing in the New York Times, Masha Gessen states that Putin wants to restore the boundaries of Russia to the boundaries of the USSR when Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt gathered at Yalta. This means that Russia would invade and conquer Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and part of Germany.

This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.

On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)

While Trump and the GOP destroy the United States as a functioning nation, one hypothesis goes that the Trump dream is to divide the world between himself and Putin, with willing satraps Bibi Netanyahu and Victor Orban doing their parts.

The division would be both economic and military. But it would require the US to provide more military might to Putin, and apparently, up until now, Trump is gun-shy about getting Americans into foreign wars.

A very smart political activist and attorney once said that in any conflict, what you want to do is carve the interest groups into three camps and set any two against the third.

I agree with NYU Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat that Russia and China are de facto allies although throughout the centuries the relationship has flowed from alliance to conflict repeatedly. If there are three parties, the United States, Russia, and China, vying for the planet’s hegemony, that would mean that every other piece of geography is swept into the tide.

For the moment, besides destroying the functioning of the United States, Trump insists on tariffs on Chinese imports. It’s not at all clear how much those tariffs would affect the precarious U.S. economy. When you illegally fire millions of workers, demolish federal functions, and capture the courts’ enforcement arm, the Department of Justice, it’s not likely that anything will salvage the wreck of American democracy, any time soon.

Where, then, is the seat of Democracy? Pressed against the Atlantic Ocean, the nations of Europe and the United Kingdom must again be the fortress. For the time being, the free world has a leader.