What did Trump sell to get a bowlful of lentils?

Trump does not even realise it, but he is behaving like Esau, selling off the birthright of constitutionalism and the United States’ global political leadership – a special divine blessing in human history – for that bowl of lentils that is a full tank of diesel. For all their flaws, for all the contradictions of the American experiment, the United States has the world’s oldest written Constitution; it is the heir to the code of liberty enshrined in the natural law of antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages; it saved Europe twice in the last century; it defeated totalitarianism by establishing itself at the head of the free world; and today it is Israel’s sole ally, the sole bulwark in the defence of the West against the Islamist and jihadist threat. To betray Ukraine for the sake of diesel and the mid-term elections; to collude with Putin whilst Russia escalates its bombing campaign in Europe; to demand the Ukrainians’ unconditional surrender after more than four years of resistance; to call for the head of their war leader, their hero by chance and by destiny – all this is not only morally repugnant, which would be the least of it, but is political suicide.

Yalta was a strategic plan: to agree on the terms of disagreement, to guarantee civil liberties to a part of the world, and to compete for military, economic, social and technological superiority in the shadow of mutual deterrence, the only possible guarantee of peace. The partnership with Putin and Xi that Trump is pursuing in time for next December’s G20 summit represents a resigned and cynical capitulation to the primacy of autocracies in their shared project to undermine the source of American and global freedom: a Europe that is in decline but still holding out.

Ukraine may not, after all, be of all that practical and symbolic importance. A colossal injustice and a violation of order and peace, four million refugees, twenty thousand deported children, a vile affront to a national and democratic identity built on the hopes of a generation that feels part of the European and Western way of life. Yet, in the end, the neo-imperial logic of deception, disguise and violence is bearing down on a country that does not and has never had what it takes, as the clever folk ensconced in the White House at the court of the orange tycoon would have it. The renunciation of the birthright, however, is a wound from which America – both with and after Trump – will struggle to heal. There is no point beating about the bush: America is retreating into itself and its grim notion of an elusive primacy, whilst Russian and Chinese hands are reaching out across Europe via the Donbas and Kyiv, as far as Lviv, the Baltic states, Poland and Kaliningrad. With Zelensky’s betrayal—foreshadowed and laid bare throughout Trump’s second term, and now fully realised without even the guarantee that the prices of lentils and diesel will fall as they should—the United States is ceding the decisive segment of the new global leadership to its rivals and adversaries.