The Vandals Are Inside the Gates

Trump, Vance, and the sellout of the Western world

I do not consider myself a partisan person. I have voted across party lines. I have served this country in uniform, and I have watched, from some of the ugliest corners of the world, what American power actually produces when it is applied with coherence and purpose. What I want, from any administration regardless of its political coloration, is a foreign policy that strengthens the position of the United States, honors its alliances, and does not hand adversaries the victories they could not win on the battlefield. That is not a complicated standard. It is the minimum.

The current administration does not meet it. Not remotely.

Before indicting the men responsible, it is worth establishing what is actually at stake, because the provincial fantasy of American insularity makes this harder than it should be. A mechanic in Iowa, a teacher in Tennessee, a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, none of them wake up thinking about Ukrainian drone corridors or Baltic force posture. That is understandable. People build competencies suited to their lives and their communities, and this planet, governed as it is by creatures of spectacular shortsightedness, can feel abstract when the fighting is ten time zones away. A Roman farmer in the southern provinces likely asked himself what the wars in Gaul had to do with his harvest. His descendants found out. The Visigoths did not stay in Gaul.

The Illusion of Insularity

The argument for isolationism recurs in every generation because it is emotionally appealing and strategically catastrophic. It has failed every time the United States has attempted it. The nation is not built for withdrawal. Its economy requires access to global supply chains, rare earth minerals, maritime lanes, and financial systems that extend far beyond its borders. Its security depends on forward deterrence rather than continental defense. Its prosperity is inseparable from the stability of the international order it largely constructed after 1945. Isolationism is not a policy. It is a mood dressed as a doctrine.

What the United States built after the Second World War was something genuinely unprecedented. It inherited the structural power of the British Empire and refashioned that inheritance into something that did not look like empire but functioned as one. Two superpowers emerged from the wreckage of the old order and contested influence across every continent. Yet the world, by almost every measurable standard, became less violent, more prosperous, and more politically open over the subsequent decades. Development reached parts of the globe that had known only extraction and colonial subjugation. Countries that were poor became rich. The Cold War was won decisively, and it was won because Western solidarity held.

It did not hold by accident. It held because of NATO. It held because of the Atlantic bond, a fraternity forged not in sentiment but in blood, industrial capacity, shared legal tradition, and the hard recognition that the security of New York and the security of Hamburg were not separable questions. Europe is not peripheral to the American strategic project. Europe is its foundation. The civilization that produced constitutional government, market economics, scientific inquiry, and the political rights that Americans treat as birthright did not emerge from one side of the Atlantic. It was built across both. Those who speak of Western civilization as though it is coextensive with one religion, one flag, or one nation have not understood what they claim to be defending.

That inheritance is now being vandalized by men too ignorant to understand it and too vain to preserve it.

Donald Trump treats the Atlantic order with the strategic comprehension of a man reviewing a lease. He sees burden where statesmen saw leverage. He sees grievance where an intelligent president would see the most successful sphere of American power ever assembled. When he threatens Denmark over Greenland using language of seizure and domination, he is not negotiating. He is signaling incomprehension. When he imposes punitive tariffs on European partners, he is not recalibrating a trade relationship. He is corroding trust in the foundational partnership of American preeminence. When he tells the world he is beyond reconsideration on NATO, calling the alliance a paper tiger and noting that Putin knows it too, he is not executing strategy. He is doing Moscow’s public relations work for free.

The Vandals Are Inside the Gates

The damage to Ukraine is the most concrete expression of this betrayal. In March 2025, Trump suspended intelligence sharing with Kyiv, cutting satellite coverage, surveillance flights, and real-time data on Russian troop movements, two days after pausing military aid. A Russian legislator had explicitly called for exactly this outcome, saying it would allow Russia to achieve results more quickly. Trump delivered it within weeks. JD Vance, for his part, declared that ending American weapons transfers to Ukraine is one of the proudest achievements of this administration. The Kiel Institute reported that U.S. aid to Ukraine dropped by 99 percent in 2025. Vance announced this at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, to applause.

Ukraine is not an abstraction. It is the eastern frontier of Western civilization, and what is being decided there has been decided on that same ground before. The Eastern Roman Empire spent a thousand years holding the line against the pressure of the authoritarian east, against every empire and khanate and sultanate that looked toward Constantinople and saw not a city but a prize. When that line finally broke in 1453, it did not stay broken quietly. It sent a shockwave through Europe that took generations to absorb. The men fighting in Ukraine today are fighting on the latest version of that same frontier, and the authoritarian east is watching with the same calculus its predecessors used: find the weakness in the west, find the moment the defenders are abandoned by their patrons, and move. Russia is not unique in this appetite. It is heir to it. If it consolidates gains in Ukraine, the pressure does not stop at the Dnieper. It migrates westward. The Baltics become the next pressure point. Poland becomes exposed. The entire eastern flank of the alliance system buckles. This is not alarmism. It is the elementary logic of deterrence, which functions only so long as adversaries believe the cost of aggression exceeds its rewards. Trump and Vance have spent two years reducing that cost to nearly zero.

The Negotiators Who Couldn’t Find the Map

Then there is the question of how and by whom this disaster is being managed. Steve Witkoff, a Brooklyn real estate developer with no diplomatic training and no regional expertise, has served as Trump’s primary negotiator on Ukraine. He excluded State Department and National Security Council professionals from his meetings with Putin, relying at times on Kremlin-supplied interpreters, an appalling breach of basic diplomatic due diligence. His 28-point peace framework was drafted in direct coordination with Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s top economic operator and a documented figure in Moscow’s influence efforts in Washington. Ukraine and America’s European allies were excluded from the process entirely. After one Moscow session, European leaders learned that Witkoff had apparently misunderstood what the Russians told him. In a Tucker Carlson interview, he called Putin “not a bad guy” and could not correctly name the Ukrainian provinces whose fate he was supposedly negotiating. He referred to “four regions, Donbas, Crimea, and there’s two others.” The two others are Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, territories where Ukrainians are dying. A man who cannot name them has no business deciding their future.

As economic pressure on Moscow was finally biting, Russia’s oil and gas revenues falling to their lowest share of federal income in two decades, the Trump administration responded in March 2026 by lifting sanctions on Russian crude oil. The Atlantic Council warned immediately that this relief came at precisely the moment financial pressure was constraining Russia’s capacity to wage war on Ukraine. India quickly purchased at least twenty million barrels of Russian oil under the first waiver alone. The administration called the measure narrowly tailored. The Kremlin called it useful. One of these assessments is honest.

One is left with two explanations, and neither is flattering. The first is gross incompetence, a coalition of ideological provocateurs, unqualified loyalists, and provincial demagogues who have stumbled into the management of American foreign policy without the intellectual equipment to understand what they are dismantling. The second is something worse. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Paul Manafort, whose documented work on behalf of pro-Russian interests in Ukraine is not ancient trivia but a data point in a pattern. The recurrent indulgence toward Moscow, the hostility toward European allies, the strategic behavior that consistently aligns with Russian interests regardless of stated rationale, these things require explanation. The pattern is there, it is documented, and it cannot be dismissed as coincidence by anyone reasoning in good faith. At minimum, what we are watching is a president either captured by foreign interest or so catastrophically unmoored from strategic reality that the practical difference is negligible.

The administration’s decision to attack Iran produced the largest oil supply disruption in recent history, drove energy prices to destabilizing levels, and handed Russia a sanctions lifeline that Moscow converted directly into war financing. These are not the decisions of an America First administration. They are the decisions of an administration that has confused the interests of its donors and its political patrons with the interests of the republic. It does not have a foreign policy. It has a series of impulses dressed up as one.

There is also the domestic dimension of this betrayal. The administration’s plans to eliminate tens of thousands of VA positions represent a government willing to perform patriotism endlessly in public while hollowing out the institutions on which veterans depend in private. Delays lengthen. Care degrades. Claims slow. The human cost is absorbed quietly by people who have already paid the maximum price. A government that does this is not governed by patriots. It is governed by frauds.

The National Pornography

Americans who voted for this administration because they were exhausted by the ideological excesses of the preceding years had legitimate grievances. What they received in exchange was not reform but substitution. These men are in power in part because a functionally illiterate political culture has developed an addiction to outrage as a substitute for thought. Outrage politics has become the national pornography. The MAGA movement, at its most degraded, operates exactly like pornography: it requires escalating stimulation, it produces nothing, it mistakes sensation for substance, and its consumers are left, after each cycle of fury and grievance, emptier than before. The more extravagant the provocation, the more the audience returns for another hit.

And nowhere is that addiction more grotesque than among the evangelical right, who have prostrated themselves before a man who has made a sacrament of every vice they once claimed to oppose. These are people who spent decades lecturing the country about moral character, about the sanctity of truth, about the corrupting power of filth, and they are consuming this pornography of rage and resentment on their knees, calling it revelation. They have traded the Sermon on the Mount for a Mar-a-Lago press release. They have wrapped their political appetites in scripture and called it faith. Whatever god they think they are serving, it is not one that will look kindly on the men they enabled or the country they helped hollow out. They will answer for this. And if their theology means anything at all, they will answer for it alongside the man they chose to worship.

JD Vance, five-year Catholic convert whose memoir about his spiritual journey features a Methodist church on the cover, took time this week to inform Pope Leo XIV that he should be more careful with his theology. The Pope, who holds a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and spent over a decade as Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine, was unavailable for comment. He was planting an olive tree at the site of Augustine’s death in Algeria while Vance was explaining Christianity to a crowd at a Turning Point USA rally in Georgia. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops publicly rebuked Vance. The Pope said he was not afraid. Trump, meanwhile, posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ and then claimed it was a doctor. These are the men lecturing the world about Western Christian civilization.

Trump and his apparatus understand the outrage cycle instinctively. They are not governing. They are producing content for an audience that has confused arousal with conviction. The result is a republic where fecklessness is rebranded as courage, where intellectual squalor is marketed as authenticity, and where the most serious strategic decisions in a generation are being made by men whose primary skill is generating the next outrage cycle. Pete Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of Defense exemplifies the genre with particular perfection: a drunken fraternity president who somehow wandered into the Pentagon, deployed theatrical masculinity as a substitute for institutional competence, replaced planning with press releases, and substituted bumper sticker nationalism for strategic thought. He is a man cosplaying as a Secretary of Defense while actual soldiers pay the price of his inadequacy. It is a profound disgrace. And it is destroying the country.

What Traitor Actually Means

A serious American nationalism, one grounded in the actual history of how this country became powerful and remained so, would recognize the Atlantic order not as a burden but as the primary instrument of national greatness. It would understand that alliances are force multipliers, that deterrence is psychological before it is material. It would know that Ukraine is the forward edge of a system that has kept catastrophic conflict out of Europe for eight decades. It would grasp that the soldiers fighting on that eastern front are, in the most concrete operational sense, doing work that ultimately protects the American strategic position.

Trump and Vance do not grasp this, and at this point the question of whether it is ignorance or intent is almost beside the point. The damage is identical either way. These are men who inherited the most formidable strategic position in the history of the republic and have spent two years setting it on fire for the satisfaction of a domestic audience that cannot find Ukraine on a map. They wave flags at rallies while handing Putin the victories he could not win in three years of grinding, bloody, catastrophic war. They invoke the memory of American soldiers while gutting the institutions built to honor them. They call themselves nationalists while doing the work of a foreign adversary. Whatever they are, patriots is not the word. And history, which has a longer memory than a campaign cycle, will not be confused about what happened here or who was responsible.

In the moral language of political obligation, the language that applies when officials betray the trust and the strategic interests of the nation they govern, traitor is not too strong a word. And those who knowingly applaud the dismantling of the Atlantic order, who excuse strategic surrender as toughness, who cheer the humiliation of allies and the abandonment of Ukraine, will not escape the historical judgment that is coming. They will stand condemned by the record, alongside the men they enabled.

Vote them out. Run them out. Refuse every lie they are selling dressed up as patriotism. This is not a drill. This is not another exhausting news cycle. This is the architecture of the free world being stripped for parts by men who have never bled for anything. Americans have paid in blood and treasure for eight decades to build something worth defending, and these men are burning it down for applause from an audience that will not survive the consequences. Correct this at the ballot box. Demand accountability in every institution still standing. Because the reckoning is coming whether you engage or not.

We are all going to find out what the wars in Gaul meant.