USA: The Unreliable States of America

We'll get that bully off your back as soon as we're done eating your lunch.

House Speaker Mike Johnson would like you to know that those contentious voter forums you have seen on TikTok and YouTube are not real. Apparently, Congressional town hall meetings have been packed with antifa agitators and deep state disruptors instead of the concerned constituents Republican representatives expected. Donald Trump and JD Vance’s masterful handling of yesterday’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should put an end to that. Theirs was a pitch-perfect execution of Republican foreign policy by a Republican president and vice president. To label the content or delivery of their remarks as anything other than Republican would be to unfairly deny credit to other Republican politicians and our neighbors who voted for them. Antifa and the deep state will surely concede defeat after this bold display of effective statesmanship, and Republican politicians can expect standing ovations at future town hall events. They should begin scheduling them in earnest.

Russian state media gave Trump and Vance rave reviews, but Russian leaders and intelligence officers know that all Republicans deserve their gratitude and perhaps some celebratory vodka to mark the occasion. Vladimir Putin has finally found a truly reliable negotiating partner to advance his interests around the world. Soon, Russian and white American children will be able to celebrate Dictator Appreciation Day together. Oh, glory!

Some of us see it differently. To us, the Oval Office meeting looked like a clumsy ambush on an unsuspecting ally by a couple of minor-league bullies. My Republican friends would of course disagree that Ukraine is an ally or that POTUS and the VP acted like bullies. To them, Trump and Vance were more than professional, more than presidential; they were perfect.

My Marine battalion got to leave Iraq after we were relieved by a Ukrainian Army unit, so I am not easily convinced that Ukraine is not a U.S. ally, but I suppose we could agree to disagree on that point. However, there is simply no arguing with my finely tuned bully detector. Even mere mortals without bully-detecting superpowers picked up on the attempted intimidation and wannabe-thug vibe of the Trump / Vance act.

Where Vladimir Putin found a reliable negotiating sidekick, the rest of the world witnessed an unprincipled and unreliable ally ceding leadership on the world stage and abandoning any pretense of value-based foreign policy for a purely transactional model where the preferred transaction is a shakedown. Two months ago, this would have been shocking, but not now. The United States had already proven itself to be an unreliable trading partner and provider of humanitarian aid. The new administration abandoned the “perfect” USMCA trade deal in favor of tariff threats, because that’s what bullies do—they threaten. It is almost always a mistake to back down in the face of those threats.

When I was in the first grade, I had a bully. No matter what route I walked home from school, he would find me. It was his number one priority in life. He was so remarkably persistent that I wondered if his mom sent him off to school each morning with a reminder to find and torment that Hammer kid after school.

His creativity did not match his persistence. All his moves were straight out of the basic bullying handbook: blocking my path, knocking books out of my hands, shoving, name-calling, asking if I was gonna cry, and some minor rock-throwing as we parted. It was all quite survivable but still upsetting, and my mother eventually noticed and interrogated me.

Convinced that I would be in trouble, I held out for a while but finally spilled the story of my daily encounters with the bully. Even back then, some mothers of undersized first graders would have listened to a story like mine and immediately called the other kid’s mother. Not my mom. She looked me in the eye and said, “Next time, punch him in the nose.”

“Punch him in the nose?”

“Yep,” she said, “right square in the nose, as hard as you can.”

The next day, that kid blocked the sidewalk in front of me, got his face right in mine, and said something, but was interrupted by my fist. It mashed his nose with far greater force than I had imagined. He backed off, wide-eyed and crying, with both hands over his nose. When he let go of his nose and looked at his hands, blood flowed down over his mouth and chin, and he sprinted away. Before I got home, his mom called. She was never going to get the blood out of that shirt, but she heard the full story and thought her son probably got what he deserved.

Mom’s solution to the bully problem had proven so satisfying and effective that I developed an itchy trigger finger, punching noses at the slightest provocation. One kid, new to our neighborhood, grabbed a short piece of cheap twine from my hand and left the sandbox bleeding. I still feel bad about that one. It taught me that not everyone who crossed me was a bully. I retuned my detector but retained my disdain for bullies and my bias toward action.

When I began my Navy and Marine Corps career, the Soviet Union—Russia and its satellite republics—was the biggest bully on the block. They were unapologetic authoritarians who tightly controlled their economy, politics, and the media. They paraded their military might, including nuclear missiles on mobile launchers, through Red Square. They sent dissidents to Siberian gulags or killed them. In other words, they were a larger version of today’s Russia under Vladimir Putin. In my black-and-white teenage thinking, the United States was the force for good that protected the world from the Russian scourge.

I have since developed a much more nuanced view of world affairs and even accepted that the United States and our allies have at times been both rightly and wrongly viewed as bullies by people in other nations and sometimes even by our own citizens. But I never thought I would see anything like what we witnessed in the Oval Office yesterday. I never thought I would hear a U.S. president tell the elected leader of a democratic republic that the world was siding against his country and with the Russians. I was already simmering, but that brought me to a boil.¹ I am glad Zelensky didn’t back down, and I hope he has set an example that others will follow. His mom must have raised him right.

1. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil." —Walt Whitman