What are we fighting for?

Talking with Eric. 1

Last week I introduced Eric, my interlocutor with whom I imagined talking, as I used to with conservative students back in my University of Chicago days. With great good timing, another Substack I follow, I Might Be Wrong by Jeff Maurer, just featured Maurer talking about his old professor at the U of C, John Mearsheimer. Maurer reminisced about how he and Mearsheimer agreed about almost nothing, but they liked each other, or at least liked arguing. So before Eric and I get going here, I’m just going to nod to Maurer who, if anything can make us laugh in these terrible times, I Might Be Wrong can. (I don’t spam you with recommendations and he isn’t for everybody—uses more rude words than some readers like. But his comic takes are getting me through.)

I don’t know John Mearsheimer (though I did work in his department years ago), and I don’t have his takes on events that have recently happened. I have listened to some admittedly interesting lectures by him; recovering from COVID-19 four years ago this month, I remember lying in bed watching his take on Russia’s Crimea invasion in 2014. Yes, he’s that good a speaker. Basically, the realist theory holds that if a less powerful country—say, Ukraine—has something that a more powerful neighbor—Russia—wants, then the more powerful country is just going to take it (Crimea). Other countries will not intervene unless it is in their interest so to do. Crimea was taken, and no countries came to Ukraine’s aid to keep Russia from taking it, although some sanctions were applied to Russia. According to realism, in this sense, for the U.S. to do anything to stop Russia and help Ukraine, there has to be a national interest: in this instance, it would be that Russia is a strategic adversary of the U.S.

Maurer’s point in bringing up Mearsheimer is that according to this theory of realism, Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Sen. Lindsey Graham, et al. are not realists. Their behavior does not accord with political realism at all, because if they were realists, then their personal feelings about Ukraine’s president, or Russia’s president, or anyone else would not make the slightest difference. They would be acting in the strategic interest of the U.S., and that would not change rapidly from Russia being America’s adversary to Russia not being America’s adversary; and it certainly would not change within moments, as a result of a heated exchange among men. You can hate someone, according to the realist theory, and it doesn’t change how you should act in terms of interests.

With that intro, I’m going to bring Eric in. Eric is not based on any one individual, but I’m giving him the name of a guy. And given the U of C context, he has a high chance of being of Korean ancestry, or maybe Taiwanese, if you want to picture him that way. (Though Eric would be the first to tell you his ethnicity is not the most important thing about him, that his thoughts should stand on their own…) I’m giving Eric a name, gender, and description so this isn’t just an intellectual exercise where I argue with the other half of my own head. This is a conversation I can imagine having with another person.

J. Welcome to the program, Eric!

E. Good to be here.

J. There are a lot of things we could talk about, and I don’t want this to be a reactive conversation where we just jump every time something bad happens in the news—because there are too many things. But I think we really have to start with Ukraine. What’s going on? How did Americans spend 80 years, since the end of World War II, understanding very clearly that Russia is our strategic adversary, to where the administration is today?

E. Don’t forget, this was also the day 25% tariffs go on China, Mexico, and Canada! There really is too much to talk about.

Look, Trump stopping military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine is a big deal. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it’s not a big deal. But it shouldn’t be surprising. I continue to hear news and commentators saying how shocking and unprecedented the president and vice president’s behavior with Ukraine has been, over the past several days with President Zelenskyy, and it really shouldn’t be. I mean it is unprecedented, but Trump, and especially Vance, have been telegraphing clearly for a while that this was coming. Vance, in the Senate, always regarded U.S. support for Ukraine as a waste of American taxpayers’ money, and he was determined to get his position out in that meeting.

Now, do I think it’s a great position? I certainly don’t think tariffs are a great idea. The markets are spooked.

This has nothing to do with feeling compassion for Ukrainians, because I think most Americans feel for the Ukrainians, unless they really have fallen for the Russian propaganda line. But if we—the West, not just the U.S.—wanted to help Ukraine win this war, we needed to do it in 2022. That’s when we had the chance. Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked for a no-fly zone, and he didn’t get it, and Joe Biden provided a lot of arms to Ukraine but that was slow, it was gradual. And remember, all but a month of those three years was under a Democratic president. Now, there were reasons Ukraine didn’t get all they needed, given that Russia is a nuclear power. But so are France and Britain, as well as the U.S. And we’re not in an era now when there are two superpowers. So the U.S. lost the opportunity to push back Russia more then.

Pedro Drozdovsky’s monument to the Holodomor, the 1932-33 Ukraine famine manufactured by Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Manitoba Legislative Building, Winnipeg, Canada

J. I live in Britain now, since you brought it up. And of course Britain’s not in the European Union anymore, but it’s still very much part of Europe, certainly in terms of the transatlantic alliance—I mean we’re on this side of the ocean. (Although Canada’s trying, but Canadians have their hands full with tariffs—I expected you’d bring that up.)

But looking at the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who only came into office six months before Trump, I’m struck by how different the response now is here from Trump’s first term. I mean the first time he was invited for a state visit, by Queen Elizabeth, we marched in the streets. There was so much protest against all the reasons Trump was an abnormal president and should not have been invited. And now in this term, when Trump is acting way more abnormally for an American president—not just in terms of foreign policy but in terms of the balance of powers, pushing the boundaries of the law, and so on—I think the invitation for a second state visit with the King is seen as kind of one more thing Starmer has to do to butter Trump up. I mean it’s obsequious looked at one way, but in another way, how else is the relationship to be maintained? If you stand up for your country, the way Zelenskyy did, look what happens.

E. I think Starmer’s actually doing a good job so far, considering how difficult his position is. He has to use what he has to keep on America’s good side, and he knows that Trump loves the royal pageantry and that kind of thing Britain does. What would Professor Mearsheimer say? That it doesn’t matter what you think of a guy or if you hate everything that he stands for: you have to stand up for your interests. And it is very much not in Britain’s interest to fall out with the U.S.

Look, Europe should have been doing more to help Ukraine all this time. You’ve written that yourself.

J. I have. But of course, Europe has put more money into Ukraine than America has, the opposite of what Trump keeps saying. And it’s not a loan, as he also tried to claim in his meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who just flat-out corrected him. Macron got away with that—was it because he was smiling?

There’s a big responsibility here, to adjust to the way the U.S. administration actually is treating Europe, and not the way we wish they were, let alone the way they morally should be. America First. That’s not a new slogan; Trump’s isolationism is nothing new. It’s how he got here.

E. Britain is also releasing money from frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine’s war effort. As in, billions. It’s a hopeful sign, but Europe (and the U.S., for that matter) should have been giving Ukraine that Russian money for years.

J. We’ve got a lot to talk about, but let’s stay in Europe. The German elections were last week, and 20% of voters voted for the AfD, the highest percentage ever. A key plank of the AfD’s platform was German border restrictions and sending migrants back. The conservative party which won the most votes, the CDU/CSU¹, also campaigned on tougher immigration policies, but is ruling out a coalition with the AfD—so far—which is important. The presumed next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has spoken very openly of the challenge of Europe being on their own without American help. And of course, some of the same points about immigration were key to Trump’s winning campaigns in 2016 and 2024. What’s going on?

E. Remember where Germany is coming from. The longtime CDU/CSU chancellor, Angela Merkel, made the welcoming of migrants an important feature of Germany under her chancellorship. Particularly from Syria. There are more than a million Syrians in Germany—it took more Syrian refugees than any country except Lebanon—and most of them came after Merkel opened the borders to them in 2015. Now remember, Merkel was the leader of the center-right party; she’s not a leftist at all. But the world has changed since then. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship has fallen; Syrians don’t need to be fleeing their country or afraid to live there anymore. In Germany, as in other countries, people are feeling the pinch economically, and they don’t feel they can afford to support all these refugees anymore. And that’s not just the position of the AfD; the CDU has toughened its position as well. What’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t the resources of a country prioritize those who already live in the country? Part of what’s hollowed out the center on this issue, in America as well, is that the left calls any and all opposition to immigration racist.

J. Okay, so it may have another basis. But what about the “firewall,” the post-World War II tradition that other parties don’t work with the AfD? The CDU/CSU is saying it won’t form a coalition with the AfD, which got the second-largest share of the vote. It’s drawing a line between its brand of conservatism and the right nationalism represented by the AfD. The reason has to do with Germany’s Nazi past and the views in the AfD that German nationality is an ethnic matter: that German citizens of different backgrounds are not as German as others. That is racist, isn’t it? And very disturbing in the context of Germany’s past. Why is the CDU drawing a line—for now--against cooperating with the AfD, if they all agree that migrants are a problem?

E. There’s something hypocritical about the center right adopting the AfD’s talking points, but then ruling the AfD out as the descendants (literally, in some cases) of Nazis. Particularly misguided is for the CDU to say it won’t work with the AfD because they are “not democratic.” What’s not democratic is not respecting the wishes of a larger and larger percentage of the voters in a country. If German voters, or French voters, repeatedly vote for right nationalist parties and their votes are ignored, they will lose faith in the democratic process altogether, because participating in it isn’t getting them anywhere. That is more dangerous to democracy.

J. That brings us to the U.S. vice president, J. D. Vance. In the same week that Trump appeared to be switching sides on the Ukraine war—and before Vance’s interference leading to the bust-up in the Oval Office—Vance came to the Munich Security Conference and didn’t focus on Ukraine. Instead, he took the opportunity to criticize European countries generally for abandoning Western values, implying: Why should America defend them if their common values had been abandoned? Vance singled out free speech, which he said is “in retreat” in Europe. Examples I can think of are Britain’s hate-speech laws, or Germany banning books by Hitler.

E. Vance has a point, doesn’t he? European countries don’t have as robust a definition of free speech as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s, and less so now. You know that if you prohibit any type of speech it will only go underground. It’s the same issue.

J. Well, I’ve also written before that if you ban or restrict speech on “hate” grounds, who makes those decisions? And how long before it’s turned against you? But Vance went further than that in Germany: he embraced the AfD, saying there was no room for “firewalls.” Not to mention Elon Musk using the platform he owns, the former Twitter, to launch all kinds of free publicity for the AfD.

E. It’s being reported as Vance “embracing” the AfD, but that’s exactly the kind of leftist slant that makes people mistrust the mainstream media. All Vance did was just treat all Germany’s political parties equally—respecting the votes of everyone. His point was that the AfD should not be excluded from the process or its results ignored, as if it’s different from every other party.

J. But isn’t it? I mean Germany has a unique history. Being alert to the presence of fascist elements, even the possibility of authoritarian parties coming into power in Germany, is of vital importance, because of what happened when Hitler was the democratically elected chancellor. It only took 53 days for him to destroy the constitutional republic, according to Timothy W. Ryback in The Atlantic.

E. Well, there are those in the AfD who say that Germany’s not actually unique. They point to examples like the genocide of the American Indians and say Americans aren’t expected to spend eternity apologizing about it. If Germany isn’t working for its people, they have a right to try something else. And if the CDU doesn’t recognize them and instead forms a coalition with the center-left party, the Social Democrats, who were just defeated—what does that say to people? That their votes don’t matter. No matter who they vote for, the same old parties just keep holding power between them. People are frustrated; they want change, and if they can’t get it through the democratic process, they’ll give up on it. That’s where the danger lies.

J. So, we’re running out of time for today. But it’s clear this is a very serious week for America’s postwar allies. Macron addressed the French people last night saying, basically, he hopes the U.S. will continue to be a support but Europe can’t count on that. There’s another summit today, in Brussels, with E.U. leaders and Zelenskyy, trying to figure out how they are going to support Ukraine with or without America’s help.

So. Between Trump’s behavior over the hot war, in Ukraine, and his trade war, we can expect a poorer America and a more isolated America. In whose interest is that? Anyone?

E. Are you asking rhetorically, or do you expect me to answer?

J. Well, that’s all we have time for. I want to pick up next week on the issue of immigration, which you were talking about earlier. I also want to talk about Ronald Reagan, for whom I expect you would have voted had you been old enough in 1980 or 1984.

E. Everyone voted for Reagan in ’84.

J. Forty-nine states. It was in 1984 that President Reagan spoke the following at Pointe du Hoc, and I want to leave you with these words, which Matthew Syed just quoted in The Times (London):

“The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.”

1. the alliance of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria