That moment is especially painful for those now on the front lines in Ukraine. “The treaty is not worth the paper it’s written on,” says Lt. Yulia Mykytenko, the Ukrainian commander of a drone reconnaissance unit and the first-person narrator in the journalist Lara Marlowe’s How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine (Melville House, 290 pp., $29.99). “Every country in the world will learn the lesson,” says Mykytenko. “If you have nuclear weapons, nobody messes with you. If you give them up, you get invaded.”
Such laments have drawn little sympathy from within MAGA world. Trump and many of his allies hold that the United States has no real national interest at stake in Ukraine and wasted tens of billions of dollars arming it — never mind that American weapons manufacturers received most of the money. For Trump, Ukraine is Europe’s problem.
Newly in office, Trump elicited some surprise by saying that Moscow would face new sanctions if it did not work to end a “ridiculous war” that was “destroying Russia.” But, a couple of weeks later, as the Kremlin dangled lucrative investment deals for U.S. businesses, the president extended a hand to Putin, called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and suggested that Russia should keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine that it has seized in three years of war. Republican legislators who had once been vocal supporters of Kyiv softened their tone.
This would no doubt alarm players with personal ties, like Vindman, who was born in Ukraine and fired by Trump in 2020 for his involvement in a House impeachment inquiry. But even outside observers like Brands suggest that Ukraine is a crucial piece of the global order. The country has been pivotal in every great-power conflict for more than 100 years, he writes.
Far from the more value-neutral approach of traditional realism, regime realism, for Brands, means acknowledging the danger in the imperial ambition of autocratic and illiberal countries. Russia and China, harnessing renewed wealth to regenerate their militaries, have allied themselves with Iran and North Korea to roll back the American-dominated order, a struggle Brands calls “the defining feature” of current global politics.