The Return of Realpolitik

Ukraine, America, and What The Zelensky-Trump-Vance Blow-up Means for the World

In 1954, psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril conducted a now-classic study on motivated perception. They asked Dartmouth and Princeton students to watch the same Princeton v. Dartmouth football game and report on what they saw. Princeton students believed Dartmouth played dirty; Dartmouth students thought both sides were equally at fault. People don’t just perceive reality; they perceive reality through the lens of their assumptions, affiliations, and underlying beliefs.

We see this divide not just in psychology labs and sports grounds but, of course, in politics too. Which brings us to the blow-up between Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and the Trump-Vance White House on Friday. Some saw an ungrateful foreign leader full of entitlement over American tax dollars who could have shown more gratitude and deference to the leaders of a country on which his country depends. Others saw understandable frustration of a fatigued wartime leader refusing to be strong-armed into a deal and tired of frivolous political games after 3 years of death and destruction from an unprovoked war.

If you’ve only seen the clips flying around social media, I encourage you to watch the full thing, maybe on 2x. There’s tensions here and there, but it’s largely positive (C-Span’s thumbnail has Zelenskyy and Trump smiling!). Things turn around 38:20.

A journalist asks:

Poland was under Russian control for decades after the second World War. When I was a kid I looked at the United States not only as a most powerful country, richest country in the world, the country that has great music, great movies, great muscle cars, but also as a force for good. Do you [sic] and now I’m talking with my friends in Poland and they they are worried that you align yourself too much with Putin. What’s your message for them?

Trump responds:

If I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin, and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir, how are we doing on the deal?’ That doesn’t work that way. I’m not aligned with Putin, I’m not aligned with anybody, I’m aligned with the United States of America and for the good of the world. I’m aligned with the world and I wanna get this thing over with. You see the hatred he’s [Zelenskyy] got for Putin, it’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He’s got tremendous hatred, and I understand that, but I can tell you the other side isn’t exactly in love with him either. So, it’s not a question of alignment, I have—I’m aligned with the world. I want to get the thing set—I’m aligned with Europe, I want to see if we can get this thing done. You want me to be tough? I can be tougher than any human being you’ve ever seen, I’d be so tough, but you’re never going to get a deal that way, so that’s the way it goes. Alright, one more question…

And then Vance interjects, responding largely to the journalist:

Hey, I want to respond to this. So, look, for four years the United States of America, we had a president who stood up at press conferences and talked tough about Vladimir Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country. The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the President of the United States’ words mattered more than the President of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.

To which Zelenskyy asks:

Can I ask you?

Vance:

Sure.

Zelenskyy:

Yeah?

Vance:

Yeah.

Zelenskyy:

Okay, he occupied our parts, big parts of Ukraine, part of East and Crimea, so he occupied it in 2014. So, during a lot of years, I’m not speaking about just Biden, but those time was … President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, now President Trump and, god bless, now President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people, you know?

And then it devolves into the spectacle spreading on social media and covered by every newspaper in the world.

There’s a lot to be concerned about. I want to share some thoughts.

Three years ago to the day (Feb 28, 2022), I wrote a Substack piece warning that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine risked puncturing the “Long Peace” that had defined the post-WWII world. I framed it as a realpolitik problem: from the perspective of cultural evolution, moralizing about “good guys” and “bad guys” is far less useful than analyzing power, resources, incentives, and who wins in a cultural-group selective competition. The past few days have reaffirmed an important shift in the rules of that competition. We are no longer living in a world of ideals—we are firmly back in an era of realpolitik, where pragmatism beats principle, the immediate trumps the ideal, and what can I get right now matters more than what is right.

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That’s a terrifying world of tooth and claw, and as Trump put it yesterday, whether you have the cards or not. No one is playing nice. When war comes, will you and your country be ready?

Preview:

• The Budapest Memorandum and the End of Pax Americana

• Chinese Warships in Australia and ANZUS Treaty

• Border Wars Are Back

• The West’s Welfare Addiction—and the Lessons from Portugal

• Who Wins? The Playbook in Plain Sight

The Budapest Memorandum and the End of Pax Americana