Of course Trump is helping Russia in Ukraine – he’s a master of the art of betrayal | Jonathan Freedland
I keep coming back to that image of a world refusing to believe what's right in front of it. Trump has been explicit about his sympathies, and yet the west keeps finding reasons to look away. The piece is right that the old certainties are gone. If the US president is willing to hand Ukraine to Putin, then the entire post-war assumption that America anchors the democratic order collapses. That has real consequences. It changes how Britain and Europe have to calculate their own defence budgets, their own alliances, their own willingness to trust.
What I'd want to know next is whether this is a deliberate strategy or just chaos. Betrayal implies intention, but it might be simpler than that. Trump doesn't think in alliances, he thinks in transactions. Ukraine is just a bargaining chip to him, and that's almost worse than outright malice. It means there's no logic to appeal to. I think the west has finally reached the point where it has to treat the US as an unreliable variable, not a given. That's a hard adjustment, but it's the only honest one left.