Realism, Outrage, and the War We Can’t Agree On
BONUS: Marjorie Taylor Greene, the New York Times, and does it even matter?
Author’s Note: Hey all, I’m still battling what I hope is just a head cold, but I was able to churn out some thoughts on the Ukraine negotiations and whether Marjorie Taylor Greene's defection will truly matter. Tomorrow, I will post a list of my favorite pieces of 2025 as a year-end newsletter. It’s been a whirlwind year of growing pains and disillusionment met with hope and love. Thanks to all who supported this newsletter from the beginning to the present. 2026 offers more opportunities for growth with more videos, more collaborations, live events, and, of course, more thoughts and feelings. We are making it through the end of a bewildering year. That’s something to be proud of.
The loudest arguments about Ukraine right now are not really about Ukraine. They are about America and how it talks about power, how it remembers its past, and whether realism is still allowed to exist without being mistaken for betrayal.
As the meeting between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and President Donald Trump of the United States unfolded, there were the usual reactions to an altogether complex development.
The familiar cadre of anti-Trump establishment voices berated Trump’s suggestion that Russia wants a prosperous Ukraine, treating the remark as moral heresy rather than diplomatic signaling. Republican loyalists like former House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner made the Sunday show circuit, unable or unwilling to answer a basic question about whether Trump sided with Russia or not.
What struck me was not the disagreement itself, but how quickly the conversation collapsed into two familiar narrative rhythms. One is led by anti-Trump conservatives and liberal centrists who desperately want to narrate Trump as a clean break from American tradition. The other seeks to defend the unconventional head of state by accusing his critics of bad faith, hysteria, or oppositional derangement.
In that clash, Ukraine risks becoming secondary, and its tragedy absorbed into an internecine American argument over language, power, and self-image.
American foreign policy has never been cleanly moralistic, nor has it ever been purely dastardly. Yet in this moment, Trump’s way of speaking forces that unresolved tension into the open. He uses strategic ambiguity, sometimes deliberately, and oftentimes carelessly, all to preserve leverage. When he says things like Russia wants a better Ukraine, he is not issuing a moral endorsement so much as paraphrasing how adversaries justify themselves. This is how diplomats often talk in private. Trump collapses the private and public registers, saying the quiet part out loud and without polish.
For critics shaped by post–Cold War liberal internationalism, that collapse feels like betrayal. For supporters, it feels like honesty. The same sentence is heard as corruption by one camp and continuity by the other.
The center-right and center-left anti-Trump ecosystem depends on the current president being a rupture from a fundamentally noble American past. Within that frame, Trump is not merely wrong but ontologically corrupting; to them, he is a contaminant rather than a continuation. Because of this instinct, these voices struggle to engage forthrightly with American cynicism, historical realism, and the uncomfortable truth that the United States has always mixed ideals and coercion like a Saturday night cocktail. To admit continuity is to weaken the emergency they believe Trump represents.
On the other side of the coin, Trump-aligned voices rarely defend Russia outright. Instead, they weaponize historical hypocrisy and the dark undertow of international realism. Ambiguity becomes a tool to force critics to defend an idealized past they themselves distrust. In this telling, exposure replaces responsibility, and cynicism substitutes for strategy.
The result is a narrative stalemate.
Critics rely on outrage while supporters rely on cynicism. Neither side fully engages history honestly. And all the while, Ukraine continues to absorb the costs of that failure. Cities are bombed by an aggressor state tied into global power networks, both overt and covert. Zelenskyy governs under constant pressure, unsure whether today will be the day he is pushed into a settlement he cannot sell at home, as European political capital thins and the American electorate oscillates between isolationist fatigue and moralized intervention.
This is not the first time a war has been fought this way.
Something strikingly similar happened during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Truce talks began in 1951, even as fighting continued along shifting front lines. Korea, like Ukraine, became a proxy theater for larger powers whose interests capped what was possible on the ground. Negotiations dragged on for two years while people continued to die, not because peace was unwanted, but because the terms of stopping were morally and politically unresolved.
The armistice that ended active combat froze injustice. Korea remained divided, and no peace treaty was signed. Many within the United Nations Command were deeply dissatisfied. Yet the fighting stopped not because justice was achieved, but because escalation had become unsustainable.
One of the most significant obstacles to that armistice was not territory, but people.
The prisoner-of-war repatriation issue nearly collapsed the talks. Thousands of captured soldiers from North Korea and China did not want to return home. Some feared punishment, and some had been forcibly conscripted, while some just preferred life in the South. The United States and its allies argued that forcing prisoners to return against their will violated humanitarian principles. Communist negotiators insisted that refusing full repatriation amounted to kidnapping.
This dispute stalled negotiations for over a year, even as combat continued. Moral clarity did not resolve the dilemma. Instead, an imperfect compromise emerged: neutral countries like India oversaw the prisoners, who were allowed to choose whether to return. The solution satisfied no one fully, but it allowed the war to stop.
The problem of what to do with human beings caught between competing moral and strategic claims has never gone away. Ukraine faces analogous dilemmas today: occupied populations, coerced citizenship, displaced civilians, and the question of whose consent counts in any future settlement. Maps are easier to redraw than lives.
There are, of course, critical differences. Ukraine exists under a more immediate nuclear shadow. It is fighting a war over sovereignty rather than ideology. And its democratic legitimacy is far stronger than that of Syngman Rhee’s South Korea, even while corruption remains a real and corrosive Ukrainian challenge. These distinctions matter. But they do not erase the structural similarities: negotiations amid violence, outcomes constrained by outside powers, and settlements that preserve injustice without endorsing it.
This is where the shared blind spots become most visible.
Anti-Trump voices often treat realism as betrayal and ambiguity as moral failure. Korea shows that realism can freeze injustice without celebrating it, and that moral absolutism can prolong suffering even when it is ethically sincere.
Pro-Trump voices, meanwhile, treat cynicism as wisdom and deal-making as resolution. Korea shows that frozen conflicts endure not through bravado but through discipline, institutions, and restraint sustained over decades.
Ukraine today is caught between those failures.
All told, Ukraine is becoming a casualty not only of Russian aggression but of American foreign policy incoherence accumulated over decades. Even at a moment when a compelling case can be made for defending democratic institutions abroad, American elites have struggled to articulate a narrative that can sustain broad, bipartisan public support. One that cannot be easily demagogued by charismatic leaders or dissolved by historical distrust.
Ukraine is unfolding after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after covert operations and strategic half-truths that hollowed out public confidence. A democratic project in Eastern Europe now finds itself increasingly on its own, as Americans struggle to reckon with what their country actually is in this modern age of empire: neither innocent nor irredeemable, powerful but constrained, moral yet compromised.
Wars rarely end cleanly. They end when the unbearable becomes merely intolerable, when injustice is frozen rather than resolved, and when people choose to stop rather than win. The tragedy is not recognizing this. The tragedy is refusing to say it out loud until history forces the reckoning anyway.
References:
Boose, Donald W. “Fighting While Talking: The Korean War Truce Talks.” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 3 (2000): 25–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163361.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Limits of Redemption Politics
There is an uncomfortable realization at the heart of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s public turn away from Donald Trump, the man, if not Trumpism itself, that spiritual jester of American unease. On one hand, she is a woman operating in a deeply misogynistic political environment, one that has historically used, discarded, and scapegoated women with ruthless efficiency. In that sense, Greene deserves a measure of grace. On the other hand, it is impossible to forget the harm she helped normalize, the harm she championed loudly and without visible spiritual conflict when it was convenient.
The tension between those truths led me to a darker conclusion: maybe her sincerity doesn’t matter at all.
The tragedy of Marjorie Taylor Greene is not that she was misled, or even that she repented late. It is that she fulfilled her role. And by the time the scales fell from her eyes (if they did), the machine she helped power was already humming more smoothly than before she arrived. Her personal reckoning, sincere or not, does not meaningfully alter the structure she helped entrench.
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