Help Wanted: Leader of the Free World

A very important job is now, unfortunately, available.

Dear Need to Know Subscribers,

I’ve been traveling this past week (which was certainly an eventful one). And I missed you all. But I’m back now and will make up for the lack of posts this past week in the days ahead. Starting right now. However, if you do want a taste of my reactions to some of this week’s clusterfuckery, you can check out two columns by me in the Daily Beast, one here and one right here. We also did an emergency episode of Deep State Radio following Trump’s attempted mugging of Ukrainian president Zelensky that featured some very important insights you won’t get anywhere else from the likes of former US Ambassador to NATO Doug Lute, former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, Georgetown Law professor and former DoD official Rosa Brooks and yours truly. You can find that here. And if you’re not subscribing to the DSR podcasts, you should do that, too. You can find out more at www.thedsrnetwork.com.)

And now, on to the business at hand…

R.I.P. The American Century

There is some debate about when the period of U.S. international leadership often described as “The American Century” began. Most frequently, people assert it commenced in the wake of the U.S.-led allied victory in World War II. Others, who see it as referring to the gradual rise to preeminence of U.S. power on the international stage might set the date earlier. Some might point America’s entry into World War I. Others might even suggest it began with the period of expansion that commenced near the turn of the century during the presidency of William McKinley and immediately afterwards that of his successor, Theodore Roosevelt.

There will likely be less disputing when the American Century died, however. While our decline began with ill-considered military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan during the first two decades of this century (and with domestic policies that favored the rich, increased inequality and therefore division within our society, and the general sense of lazy entitlement that marked the checkered leadership tenure of the Baby Boom generation, our period of global leadership, the product of generations of great sacrifice, vision and commitment, was undoubtedly pronounced dead on February 28, 2025.

On that date, this past Friday, America’s worst president, a man who has already contributed enormously to the country’s decline, Donald Trump, effectively announced his government’s formal abandonment of the principles, values, allies and institutions that were essential to our global leadership role. While he had attacked those foundations of American leadership throughout his first term in office, seeking to withdraw into a gated community vision of America’s role, and while he has accelerated his assault on that leadership role since reassuming office in January (see below for more on this), his pre-meditated ambush of Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office was a public confirmation that America had renounced its role as leader of the free world. Instead, it was more clearly communicated than ever before that Trump had chosen for us—with the support of his administration acolytes and the MAGA colony of worms on Capitol Hill—a new role as a satellite nation of Russia and a vassal state of its dictator Vladimir Putin.

The Belarus of the West

We have gone from being the “shining city on the Hill,” “the home of the free and the land of the brave,” to being, the Belarus of the West.

Trump and his slavering Igor-by-way-of-Eddie-Haskel-like henchman J.D. Vance deliberately set up the encounter to lay the groundwork for the final reversal of America’s position on Ukraine. They sought to try to humiliate Zelensky and denigrate him as an ingrate as a way of once and for all cutting off support to the brave people of Ukraine and promoting an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict that was 100 percent on the Kremlin’s terms. If Putin had scripted the meeting…and it is not entirely clear that he did not…it would not have gone any differently.

Of course, their approach went off the rails in several respects. First, it was the most embarrassing public display of diplomatic ineptitude by an American president in history. Secondly, it was so ham-fisted that their intent was telegraphed from the outset. Thirdly, Trump’s mob boss like approach, his threats, the fact that his “preferred” alternative plan was a shakedown of Zelensky to provide the U.S. with access to Ukrainian mineral reserves in exchange for U.S. support, looked as ugly as they were and instantly produced revulsion and denunciations from virtually all of America’s former allies.

Indeed, the speed of the European rejection of Trump’s stance and their public acknowledgement that we had entered a new, post-American leadership era in global affairs, was as breathtaking as was its unanimity. (The only ones cheering for Trump in Europe were the likes of Viktor Orban, the other members of the growing authoritarian, ethno-nationalist movement led by Putin.)

The EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, immediately not only grasped the significance of the moment but framed a central challenge for the countries of this world that seek to defend democracy and the rule of law as the US had once done. She stated bluntly that "the free world needs a new leader."

It is not immediately clear who will fill that role. EU leaders like Kallas and her colleague European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen are already playing an outspoken role. France’s Emmanuel Macron would like to play the role but flip flops and stumbles so often it is unlikely his ambition will be fulfilled. Britain’s relatively new prime minister Keir Starmer and incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are going to take a while to get their sea legs.

Ironically, in many respects, the most significant champion of the values and interests for which America once stood was the man, the genuine hero, that Trump and Vance sought to beat up on at the White House on Friday. Volodomyr Zelensky has illustrated the geopolitical corollary to the old saying “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog" during his tenure as the president of Ukraine. While he has made mistakes, he has under the most trying possible of circumstances symbolized the resolve his people to stand up to an assault from their neighbor, the largest country in the world, the world’s number two military power and has done more to weaken his enemy and deplete its resources than the U.S. did in nearly half a century of Cold War.

Now, it is clear that Zelensky and Ukraine will have to stand up to not just one superpower but two but again, he showed that in circumstances such as these, character matters.

Trump tried to humiliate Zelensky. But in the end Trump only succeeded in humiliating the United States.

Trump tried to weaken Zelensky. But in the end the U.S. emerged from the meeting profoundly weaker and Zelensky emerged with greater support than ever from the “free world.”

Zelensky will not, of course, emerge in the end as the leader of that free world. But he and his people certainly symbolize more what it stands for than any other leader or country in the world right now. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for democracy. They are fighting for justice. They have stood up for a decade to an aggressor. And on Friday Zelensky stood up to one of that aggressor’s hired guns, a would-be hitman who even today does not realize how badly he damaged himself and his country with his actions.

As Zelensky has demonstrated leadership is not a title you win by virtue of an election or an inheritance. It does not come simply from seeking to lead. It requires getting others to follow, to have faith in you, to see something in your example that inspires them to be their best, to do their best.

Zelensky is a leader. The people of Ukraine are leading the fight for the security of what remains of the western alliance. Trump leads no one. He is a tool and a lackey and without a vision or a moral compass.

Sadly, for the United States, he has done what was once unthinkable. He has abandoned the work of our parents’ generation and that of generations before them.

He has put America on the side of those we fought and resisted for decades—of thugs in Moscow and of fascists. Indeed, much of the most damage he has done and is doing to America’s standing in the world is coming through the realization of his poisonous domestic agenda. Our strength throughout the “American Century” came not from being a perfect nation—we were never that. But it came from being seen as a country that held to certain values and aspired to others, one led by a “government of laws not of men.” Throughout the past century we have sought also to fix what is broken in our society. But now Trump is actively working to break much of what was fixed, to reverse progress, to exacerbate divisions and inequity.

He does all that to advance the interests of himself and his family and his friends, of the few who are in the midst of a hostile take over of a country they do not seek to build but rather one that in the mode of the corporate raiders they are, they seek to sell off for whatever they can get for its parts.

In Moscow, of course, that fills them with delight. It is the ultimate realization of Khrushchev’s promise that Russia would destroy America without firing a shot. It is the further advancement of Putin’s active measures to weaken our country—an intel op that has to be seen as the most successful in history (at least thus far.) We are no longer the leader of the free world. We have pledged allegiance to the Kremlin. We are weakening NATO. We are weakening the global trading system and undermining our alliances with a foolish regime of tariffs. The tariffs of course, will only weaken us economically…also a plus. We are dismantling the mechanisms of our influence worldwide and in so doing both alienating the planet and opening the door wide to our rivals to step in and assume the position we once we had. We are blowing up the institutions that made us great. We are repudiating democracy and social equity and falling in line with the ideology of racist autocrats that is now, rather than communism, the global movement Moscow leads.

In just weeks the intent of the Trump Administration to support Russia at the expense of America’s former role has been made explicitly clear. The unit in the Department of Homeland Security that defended us against foreign interference in our elections has been shut down. The unit the Department of Justice that tracked and penalized Russian oligarchs for their abuses has been shut down. The Department of Defense has stopped efforts to deal with Russian cyber threats (perhaps just temporarily…who knows, the furor the action has caused, may lead them to back down.) Some of the most important US AID programs shut down were critical forms of assistance to Ukraine. The US is already pulling back other forms of military assistance to Ukraine. Marco Rubio, after meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, is now touting a warming of US-Russia relations that could lead to an end to sanctions. Trump has said he wants Russia back in the G8. He has said that if his new “gold card” initiative leads to Russian oligarchs flooding our shores that’s ok, he has met some “nice” Russian oligarchs. (Apparently he doesn’t mind criminals pouring into our country so long as they are rich.) Those who investigated Trump’s ties to Russia or his mishandling of intelligence data are being punished. A Russian propagandist was put in charge of the intel community. The Secretary of Defense has spread the lie that Ukraine was responsible for Russia’s invasion of that country. The new head of the FBI seems to have a plan that will dramatically weaken our counter-intelligence efforts. And if you think our partners in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing operation are going to openly share with Trump & Co., forget it. That effort too has been weakened and I would not be surprised to see it die.

In other words, it is not just hyperbole or commentator-speak to assert that the U.S. has shifted its allegiance from the institutions and alliances it helped build in the wake of World War II to bring peace and stability to the world. It has happened. Dramatically. Decisively. Intentionally.

These are changes that will be hard to reverse so long as Trump and Vance and Musk and the MAGA movement and the current GOP leadership remain active in U.S. politics. Because it will take years to rebuild the trust of our erstwhile partners, to make them believe we can once again be relied upon as an ally or friend.

That does not mean we should not work to reverse the damage that has been done. We should because the Trump Doctrine of supporting Russia at the expense of our former allies also gravely weakens us as a country, it puts us and future generations at risk. It will be a self-fulfilling curse that weakens us in every area of our lives.

But do that work, that hard, long-term work, we must begin by recognizing what has happened. That is not easy because in so many ways it remains almost unimaginably divorced from our past reality even as it is unfolding before our eyes. But it is where we must begin.