Tom Nichols:

I felt physically sick watching the president of the United States yell at a brave ally, fulminating in the Oval Office as if he were an addled old man shaking his fist at a television. Zelensky has endured tragedies, and risked his life, in ways that men such as Trump and Vance cannot imagine. (Vance served as a public-relations officer in the most powerful military in the world; he has never had to huddle in a bunker during a Russian bombardment.) I am ashamed for my nation; even if Congress acts to support and aid Ukraine, it cannot restore the American honor lost today.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

I just want to say that I’ve heard and read a dozen thoughtful, pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump folks call the whole Oval Office debacle beyond shameful, defending Zelensky to the hilt, while still a) describing it as a shouting match between Zelensky and Trump/Vance, and b) conceding some misfortune in the situation because Zelensky “does not speak fluent English.” And it’s bullshit. I’ve watched the video several times — with absolute, physically sick horror — and not only did Zelensky never raise his voice, but he was calm, measured, and well spoken against an absolute ambush by two giant, ignorant, thoughtless, poorly spoken, self-righteous, pandering, spoiled, morally gangrenous fuckheads who were controlled by one thing alone: their inability to hide their violent hatred of this man.

Though this time it’s coming up a little emotionally short for my anger toward the petty behavior (I will not offend children by calling it childish) of our two highest and democratically electedofficials, I turn again to Simone Weil:

But the will to humiliate the defeated enemy which revealed itself so loathsomely everywhere … was enough to cure me once for all of that naive sort of patriotism, I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Yesterday, I pulled Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace off the shelf, a random act impossible to regret.

Here are a few things from his chapter on “Embrace.”

In The Killing of Sarajevo, a soldier in the Serbian army says to his best friend living in Sarajevo, the city which was, even as they spoke, being pounded with Serbian shells: “There is no choice. There are no inno-cents” (Vukovic 1993, 41). The two claims seem inseparable: since there is “no choice” —since, as the same friend will later say, it is “either us or them” — there can be “no innocents,” and since there are “no innocents” there must have been “no choice.” Though it has a ring of truth, the logic is faulty. Within the vast expanse of noninnocence whose frontiers recede with the horizon, there are choices to be made, important choices about justice and oppression, truth and deception, violence and non-violence, about the will to embrace or to exclude, ultimately choices about life and death. The “no choice” world in which people’s behavior is determined by social environments and past victimizations is not the world we inhabit; it is a world the perpetrators would like us to inhabit because it grants an advance absolution for any wrongdoing they desire to commit. Suspicion is called for when, from behind a smoking howitzer, we hear the words, “There is no choice.”

As it is undeniable that “there is choice,” so it is also undeniable that our choices are made under inner and outer constraints, pressures, and captivities. We choose evil; but evil also “chooses” us and exerts its terrible power over us.

“Caught in the system of exclusion as if in some invisible snare,” says Volf, “people behave according to its perverted logic.” He goes on to describe what he calls a “background cacophony of evil.”

This is the low-intensity evil of the way “things work” or the way “things simply are,” the exclusionary vapors of institutional or communal cultures under which many suffer but for which no one is responsible and about which all complain but no one can target. This all-pervasive low-intensity evil rejuvenates itself by engendering belief in its own immorality and imposes itself by generating a sense of its own ineluctability.

But it does not always remain there; these are background flames that can be stoked into bonfires. This will sound very familiar:

In extraordinary situations and under extraordinary directors certain themes from the “background cacophony” are picked up, orchestrated into a bellicose musical, and played up. “Historians” — national, communal, or personal interpreters of the past — trumpet the double theme of the former glory and past victimization; “economists” join in with the accounts of present exploitation and great economic potentials; “political scientists” add the theme of the growing imbalance of power, of steadily giving ground, of losing control over what is rightfully ours; “cultural anthropologists” bring in the dangers of the loss of identity and extol the singular value of our personal or cultural gifts, capable of genuinely enriching the outside world; “politicians” pick up all four themes and weave them into a high-pitched aria about the threats to vital interests posed by the other who is therefore the very incarnation of evil; finally the “priests” enter in a solemn procession and accompany all this with a soothing background chant that offers to any whose consciences may have been bothered the assurance that God is on our side and that our enemy is the enemy of God and therefore an adversary of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.

As this bellicose musical with reinforcing themes is broadcast through the media, resonances are created with the background cacophony of evil that permeates the culture of a community, and the community finds itself singing the music and marching to its tune. To refuse to sing and march, to protest the madness of the spectacle, appears irrational and irresponsible, naive and cowardly, treacherous L toward one’s own and dangerously sentimental toward the evil enemy.

Of course, Volf is not interested mainly in describing but in prescribing. As a Christian, he is advocating, he says, “for a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of [God’s] reconciliation that cannot be undone.”

Enter the “politics of the pure heart,” without which, says Volf, “every politics of liberation will trip over its own feet.”

[E]ven under the onslaught of extreme brutality, an inner realm of freedom to shape one’s self must be defended as a sanctuary of a person’s humanity. Though victims may not be able to prevent hate from springing to life, for their own sake they can and must refuse to give it nourishment and strive to weed it out. If victims do not repent today they will become perpetrators tomorrow who, in their self-deceit, will seek to exculpate their misdeeds on account of their own victimization.

The word “whataboutism” gets thrown around a lot these days, and for good reason: it’s an old idea and perpetually rehashed in the foreground cacophony of evil. Against it — facing it every time we read the news and every time we respond to the news — it’s worth asking ourselves, What are we doing with that inner realm of freedom, that sanctuary of our humanity that is granted to us every day?

This chapter also contains this beautiful reflection from Volf on the imprecatory Psalms.

Philip Gibbs:

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil there which was also his enemy—the evil of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch—word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its “make-up” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by the revolt of its people—not until then—there must be a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier—poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war—as many of them are now talking—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.

Bret Stephens:

The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy. […]

…the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.

Francis Fukuyama:

The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orbán to Nayib Bukele to Narendra Modi.… How can we tell Russia and China not to continue their conquests when we are busy trying to absorb Panama and Greenland? These foreign policy moves are completely consistent with the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law domestically, its strengthening of executive power and its weakening of checks and balances at every point.

Joseph Goebbels, published in Der Angriff, 30 April 1928:

We are an anti-parliamentarian party that for good reasons rejects the Weimar constitution and its republican institutions. We oppose a fake democracy that treats the intelligent and the foolish, the industrious and the lazy, in the same way. We see in the present system of majorities and organized irresponsibility the main cause of our steadily increasing miseries. So why do we want to be in the Reichstag?

We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.

If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization. That is amusing and entertaining enough to be worth trying.[…

…When democracy is near its end it will resort openly to the terror of capitalistic dictatorship that it ordinarily uses covertly. But that will not happen for some time, and in the meanwhile the fighters for our faith will enjoy parliamentary immunity long enough to broaden our fighting front such that shutting them up will not be as easy as democracy would like it to be.[…]

We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.

You are not among your friends any longer! You will not enjoy having us among you!

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

I hear echoing in my head that great line from Chateaubriand, which I have selected as my epigraph: “I can’t stand the pride of victory”. Anyone who does not share this same sentiment, I contend, shares in no real spirit of conservatism. They might support particular policies that are conservative-coded in a particular place and time, policies I myself generally do not support. But the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime. […]

Old men returning to childhood: this is a fairly good characterization of the species of conservatism I am attempting here to draw into relief — not the later childhood we call “adolescence”, where the passions grow focused on acquisition of power and status, but the first childhood, of kinship with trees, when one still has a choice of standing outside the narrowly human conflicts that serves as the motor of history and that also keeps most of us busy, with our own minuscule struggles, for the greater part of our lives. Chateaubriand spent that greater part of his life bemused, perplexed, disappointed, in love with a past of which he was never really sure whether it was his own, or humanity’s own. He was certain, anyhow, that no human effort was ever going to deliver us into a happier earthly condition — for the only real happiness is blessedness, which, in any composition with the modifier “earthly”, really does produce an oxymoron.

… But I do wish there were still some proper conservatives out there, with the learning and wisdom to recognize Chateaubriand’s outlook as a significant part of their venerable lineage, to acknowledge and to embrace the melancholy and the tragedy, to be able to regret all that is lost even as one faces up honestly to the inevitability of loss. […]

And this new arrangement is certainly not going to be a victory for conservatism either, no matter how messily that term continues to be employed. Any conservatism that is worth the name is a conservatism of spirit and of temperament. Wistful, melancholic, and utterly resistant to interpretation by anyone who is a zealot for anything, it is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of any reign of terror, today no less than in 1792.

Jonah Goldberg:

Donald Trump lashed out at the democratically elected Ukrainian president today, calling him “a dictator.” 

Forget that this is a lie, just like Trump’s insinuation that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia—a claim that is the geopolitical equivalent of saying a rape victim started it by, well, being rapable. 

But I don’t want to talk about the lie. You can defend Trump by telling me that it’s sort of true because elections are overdue in Ukraine. They are! You know why? Because the entire country is mobilized for a war it didn’t start and about a fifth of it is occupied by a country led by an actual dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by its troops. But if you don’t have something better than that, don’t even bother trying.

Elizabeth Bruenig:

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

… The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

One terrible thing about that “reshaping” is that it really doesn’t require much actual reshaping among those who cheer and champion this. The church that supports Trump and Musk — and it is a real segment of the church, at least as we here experience it — has long since shaped itself into this very mold, primed itself to despise the foreigner and love those who love us.

Vance’s priorities may not be Jesus’s priorities, but they are spot-on; he has astutely read the room nave.

Makes me all the more grateful for writers like Bruenig.