So many questions arise since a sniper with demonstrated skill assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk in broad daylight on Sept. 10 — this as he addressed a crowd of several thousand no less. We have only our questions as of now, and history suggests these may be all we will ever have as to the who and why of this very public crime. But we damn well better get on with the business of posing them: Questions, the right ones, have a power all their own.

Charlie Kirk’s murder abruptly confronts us with the disintegration of what little remains of any shared identity and purpose among Americans, with the force of ideology, the invisibility of power, how much may be left out or simply falsified when officials give accounts of politically momentous events and when media reproduce these accounts with no hint of questioning them. We find ourselves plunging well beyond the apple-pie authoritarianism that threatened a few years ago. No apple pie this time.

To begin at the beginning, who is Tyler Robinson, the 22–year-old formally charged Sept. 16 with murdering Kirk with a single shot fired from a .30–06 Winchester at considerable range? Who — the much larger question for its implications — was Charlie Kirk, the 31–year-old wunderkind of America’s conservative movement? At this point we have no certain answers in either case. We have, instead, what appear to be fraudulent narratives that are messily under construction even as we speak.

Tyler Robinson, by all accounts, was an upright student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah, until Sept. 10. Churchgoing, “very considerate, quiet, respectful:” These are the descriptions of a neighbor in a Utah suburb called Washington. “He was a good kid,” Kristen Schwiermann added when she spoke to NBC News the day after Robinson was detained as a suspect. His grandmother called him “squeaky clean.”

The NBC report noted: “Robinson’s evolution from standout student to the subject of an FBI manhunt is not clear.” This is to put the point too mildly.

On Sept. 11 the FBI — admitting they had no certainty on this point — released two blurry photographs that showed someone in a stairwell at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was assassinated the previous day. A friend of Robinson’s saw them and remarked in a messaging platform called Discord that Robinson resembled the man in the photos. Robinson replied immediately, according to a widely circulated New York Times report, that “his ‘Doppelganger’ was trying to ‘get me in trouble.’” Somebody else on Discord then wrote, “Tyler killed Charlie!!!!”—this “apparently in jest,” as The Times rightfully reported.

The thought that this was anything other than a humorous exchange among friends is patently ridiculous, in my read. But matters nonetheless proceeded. Robinson was arrested at his home later that day. Initial reports had it that he turned himself in peaceably; we now read he is not cooperating.

The air has since been thick with innuendo. So far as one can make out, Robinson seems to be of mildly progressive political persuasions and, naturally enough, did not like Kirk. We read that he favors the sort of gender politics Kirk stood against. There are reports he, Robinson, has been romantically involved with a roommate who is transitioning from male to female. There are other reports that bullet casings found at the scene have, Luigi Mangione-style, inscriptions on them referencing video games with various anti-fascist and gender-related messages. OK, but strictly for the sake of argument. None of this comes even close to holding up as a motive.

“We’re trying to figure it out,” Spencer “We got him” Cox, Utah’s conservative governor, said on “Meet the Press” last Sunday—this as he explained how a clean-as–Gene college student, in a feat of exceptional marksmanship, turned into a deadly assassin after he was “deeply indoctrinated in leftist ideology.”

How and when did that happen, we are compelled to ask. There seems to be no record of any such conversion. Here is Cox elaborating his case:

Friends have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.

Deep and dark places and going deep, just as friends have confirmed. I’m sorry, Governor. This starts to come over like “Invaders from Mars,” that 1953 Cold war classic, wherein plain-vanilla suburbanites fall into a pit and aliens from outer space turn them into enemies of the state by putting mind-control buttons in the backs of their necks.

Brilliant, if you go on for that sort of thing. And I suppose some people do.

Governor Cox has it that Tyler Robinson acted alone. As if to confirm this, we now read he plotted his plan of action for a week and wrote text messages to this effect beforehand. President Trump and his adjutants say — I may as well quote The Times again — “the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives.” Here is Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, speaking apoplectically on Fox News Sept. 12:

There is a domestic terrorist movement in this country. When you see these organized doxxing campaigns, where the left calls people enemies of the republic, says they’re fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil, and then prints their addresses, what do you think they are trying to do? They are trying to inspire someone to murder them. That is their objective. That is their intent.

Questions, questions. Is Robinson the lone gunman, the Lee Harvey Oswald of the case? Or does he belong to some dangerous movement on a murder spree? What is this “left” Miller and his employer talk of incessantly? We do not know even this much. But these questions lead to the obvious conclusion — obvious to me, in any case — that the official account of the Kirk assassination is still under construction and good old American paranoia and ideological imperatives mix to make the mortar that will bind its bricks together.

This seems even truer in Kirk’s case than in Robinson’s.

Charlie Kirk was a true-blue conservative and ranked very high among President Trump’s most prominent and influential allies. He was handy enough in the cause of this or that propaganda op. His movement, Turning Point USA, had received millions of dollars in support over the years from Zionist donors — Israel’s American cutouts, as some commentators have it. He stood for freedom, truth, Judeo–Christian values, and the Zionist cause and against, among very much else, liberal censorship and wokery of all kinds. This is the Charlie Kirk the narrative- builders speak of now that Kirk is dead. It is the Kirk you can read about in any mainstream publication you may come across.

All those malign authoritarians, more than 20 of them, who gathered in Tianjin at the end of August for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: This was a festival of anti–Americanism, you need to know.

No other way to understand it. Making it all worse, Xi Jinping then invited more than two dozen heads of state to Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1945 victory.

How dare the Chinese president organize an elaborate military parade to celebrate China’s role in the historical defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army. How dare he stir pride in the People’s Republic’s determination to defend its sovereignty while refuting the revisionism — nonsensical but prevalent — that airbrushes the Chinese Communist Party out of the Second World War’s history.

The temerity of this man to suggest it was other than the Americans and their corrupt clients, the Chinese Nationalists, who did the fighting and won the war. Let us not, for heaven’s sake, make any mention of the 12 million to 20 million Chinese — there is no precise figure — who died in consequence of Imperial Japan’s aggressions.

No, nothing to honor in any of this. Between the S.C.O. and the festivities in Beijing it was all faintly demonic, a thinly veiled challenge to what the United States and the rest of the West insists is a “rules-based order.”

I keep a file labeled “Sentences to love in The New York Times.” From it: “It shows how Mr. Xi is trying to turn history, diplomacy and military might into tools for reshaping a global order that has been dominated by the United States.”

The mainstream reporting on the S.C.O. and the subsequent gathering in Beijing went on obsessively for days. You would think the Chinese were on the brink of starting another Pacific War and “invading” Taiwan—“invading” in quotation marks because a nation cannot invade territory that historically belongs to it.

As I read through the coverage I marveled at the wall-to-wall West-centricity of it. The Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, various others, even the North Koreans: They think of nothing and do nothing that does not arise from their all-consuming animosity toward the United States and altogether the West. So you read in the reporting of these events.

Then along came Donald Trump, who addressed Xi on his Truth Social platform with this, referencing the Russian and North Korean leaders as he watched the proceedings live: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against the United States of America.”

There is no beating the Trumpster when it comes to stating the case forthrightly. The mainstream press can strike the pose of objectivity all it likes, but Trump, the id of the late-phase imperium, comes right out and says it: The non–West is against us. Anti–American animosity is its sole motivation, its very raison d’être.

I write here not of our dissolute press, whose mission these past two dozen years — I take the events of September 11, 2001, as the point of departure — has been to prevent Americans from seeing and understanding the 21st century’s realities. Neither is the blunt instrument now lodged in the White House my topic.

No, the press and the president are merely exhibits, symptoms of a national failing that transcends either of these. This is the problem of America’s self-absorption, the pervasive narcissism that, it now becomes evident, is a primary cause of our troubled republic’s increasingly hostile relations with others and, so, its swift descent into isolation.

In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Narcissus is a youth of transcendent beauty who spurns Echo, the nymph who loves him, and becomes infatuated with his own reflection in a pool of water. He thereafter takes to rejecting all admirers.

Narcissus is thus blind, but not only to others: He is also blind to himself. This fulfills the prophecy Tiresias made on his, Narcissus’s, birth: He will live long, the mythical seer said, “so long as he never knows himself.”

Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. They see only themselves when they look abroad at others. And they are utterly incapable of seeing themselves as they are or their country as it is.

It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, Henry Kissinger once remarked in an often-quoted comment, but it is fatal to be America’s friend. This is the United States as run by the narcissistic cliques who set the imperium’s course. Nothing and no one matters beyond their own power.

I think too much of Americans to assign this condition to them out of hand. No, it is the media’s task to impose this condition on Americans. Consider again how the press covered Tianjin and Beijing: We are encouraged in every sentence to see our reflections in those events, for they were all about us.

Read a few of these pieces carefully, I urge. You find correspondents in this or that bureau abroad who rarely quote Chinese or Russian or even European sources in support of the reporting. No, they call reliably conformist scholars or think tank denizens back in the States to tell them how to think about what is going on in China or Russia or wherever it may be.

See what I mean? Journalism this flaccid is a new one on me. If it is not American narcissism as it is in practice I do not know what else to call it.

Did you read anything in the American press about Xi’s proposal for a “Global Governance Initiative” to assist in the pursuit of a more just and equitable world order?

What about the Chinese leader’s announcement in Tianjin of a new S.C.O. development bank, grants of 2 billion renminbi, $280 million, to S.C.O. members, and an additional 10 billion renminbi, $1.4 billion, in loans?

Or his speech calling for the historical record of the Pacific War — corrupted precisely as the West cravenly erases the Soviet Union’s decisive role in defeating the Reich — to be corrected?

Let me help you out. No, no, and no. The policy cliques are indifferent to these things and you are meant not to see them, blindness to our world the preferred condition. The policy people in Washington have been captivated by their own reflections ever since they set out to achieve global dominance almost immediately after the 1945 victories.

And so long as American power was hegemonic this did not matter. Diplomacy, as Boutros Boutros–Ghali memorably remarked after the United States forced him as out as the U.N.’s sec-gen, is for the weaker nations; the strong have no need of it.

There is need of it now, to state the obvious. And we find America to be self-blinded, stumbling, uncomprehending, and altogether incapable in this, a century of swift and momentous change.

Washington’s prevalent narcissism renders proper statecraft more or less impossible, as there has been, just as Boutros–Ghali astutely observed, no need of it for most of the past eight decades. And we cannot put this down to Donald Trump alone: This has been less obviously but just as true of the administrations that preceded his.

At this point the late-phase imperium is more or less entirely dependent on force as its mode of expression in the community of nations.

Parenthetically, this is how I read the Trump regime’s stunning decision to rename the Defense Department the War Department, just as it was called until 1949, when it was judged necessary to veil the arriving era of America’s imperial aggressions.

nited Nations General Assembly sessions, held each September since 51 nations convened in a Methodist church hall in London in 1946, come and go and mostly go without event. The General Assembly is set to begin its 80^th session come Sept. 9, and it is difficult to imagine this one will go off uneventfully. To put the point simply, Israel has murdered, starved and terrorized too many Palestinians for this year’s gathering at the Secretariat in Manhattan to conclude without some conclusions. It remains only what these conclusions will be.

Several weeks ago a group of 15 nations — among them prominent members of the Atlantic alliance — stated their intention to announce their formal declaration of Palestinian statehood at this year’s session. This sets up various of Israel’s most important supporters for what is likely to prove a messy confrontation with “the Jewish state” and, naturally, the United States as Israel’s unfailing backer.

This is not guesswork. It is already evident these new recognitions will dominate the Assembly session..Since the 15 nations declared their intent to recognize Palestine as a legitimate state, the Israelis have announced plans to mount a major new operation in Gaza City. On Aug. 25, the Zionist military staged one of those disgusting “double tap” attacks — strike, then strike again as rescue workers and journalists arrive — on a hospital in southern Gaza, killing 20 people and raising the death toll among journalists to 247. Less than a week later, Israel began the large-scale attack on Gaza City it had previously announced — an act of sheer defiance and impunity.

Never to be outdone when an opportunity for outrage arises, the State Department announced Friday it will deny visas to all Palestinian officials who had planned to attend the General Assembly travel to the Secretariat — this “for undermining the prospects for peace.” I used the term “disgusting” in the above paragraph. This also qualifies, given the United States committed to allowing diplomats free access to diplomatic proceedings when it was agreed to locate the Secretariat on American soil. There is now talk of holding this year’s General Assembly in Geneva so that Palestinian representatives could attend. This will not happen, but the thought is a measure of the international mood.

I see only two likely outcomes as this storm gathers. In one, the better of the two, France, Britain and other pillars of the Western alliance will back their honorable diplomatic shifts with substantive action against the Zionists’ terror campaigns and rampant breaches of international law. That would change the diplomatic landscape significantly. In the other, these nations will do nothing, decisively discrediting their position on the Israel–Palestine question while putting the U.N.’s impotence on pitiful display. There will be no coming back from this latter eventuality.

The question of power arises.

If you do not know the flaw in the U.N. Charter that effectively disempowers the General Assembly, you should: Executive authority lies in the Security Council, whose permanent members hold veto power. Only the Council can pass legally binding resolutions and determine measures to enforce them. Apart from quotidian matters to do with housekeeping — the U.N.’s budget and so on — the Assembly is limited to voting on nonbinding resolutions.

OK, the Security Council is where the U.N. gets things done, or doesn’t, as is too often the case. You could argue that the General Assembly serves as a sort of suggestion box for what are now the U.N.’s 193 members, but this is to say nothing of note ever occurs in the Assembly, and that is simply not the case. I expect things of note this year. I cannot yet surmise whether these will prove things-of-note-honorable or things-of-note-disgraceful.

A little history, maybe, to help U.N. skeptics.

Fidel Castro, a year and nine months in power, addressed the General Assembly in September 1960. The U.N. asks members to limit their time at the podium to 15 minutes; the fiery Fidel spoke for four hours, a nonstop rip into the history of U.S. imperialism and its abuses of Cuba since the 1959 revolution. The U.N. calls Castro’s speech “epic” and a “pivotal moment.” These are fair descriptions, in my view: It was an early announcement that Latin America intended thenceforth to speak up and stand up to los norteamericanos, just as it then learned to do.

Fourteen years later, Yasser Arafat delivered that famous speech to the General Assembly while wearing a pearl-handled revolver at his hip. The Assembly then passed two resolutions, 3236 and 3237, the former putting “the Question of Palestine” formally on the U.N.’s docket and the latter granting the Palestine Liberation Organization diplomatic recognition by way of observer status. A year after that came General Assembly Resolution 3379, which “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It took the Israelis and Americans until 1991 to coerce a vote to repeal 3379. (I wonder how another vote now would turn out.)

Closer to our time, it was but a dozen Septembers ago that Hassan Rouhani, who had assumed Iran’s presidency just a few months previously, addressed the General Assembly and stunned us all when he extended his hand Westward to propose negotiations with the Americans and Europeans to limit the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs. Pivotal, I would say. The agreement reached two years later endured until the beyond-belief Dummkopf who now serves his second term as president withdrew the United States from it.

And so to General Assembly No. 80, which is to run three weeks and conclude Sept. 29.

There is no question of this year’s session voting to send Blue Helmets into Gaza and the West Bank to protect Palestinians from the Zionist state’s daily terrors, or that it will impose an appropriately unbearable regime of sanctions against said entity, or that U.N. peacekeepers will surround and embargo all those illegal West Bank settlements. One wishes it would but it cannot, as just noted.

No, I argue that the diplomacy that has taken place in the runup to this year’s General Assembly is significant and that diplomacy — all the discredit the Western powers have brought upon it in recent years notwithstanding — still comes with consequences, at least sometimes, and we will see consequences of one or another kind next month.

Before going any further we interrupt this program with an important question, trivia-like but not trivial. Will Bibi Netanyahu attend this year’s General Assembly? He customarily does, rarely missing a chance to denounce the Assembly and the whole wide world represented there as a horror show of anti–Semites — his murderers-as-victims act. But this repulsive man is wanted under international law for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

However this turns out, it will be notable either way. If Netanyahu walks the halls of the Secretariat next month we will have to accept the near-total impotence of the courts that adjudicate international law; the Western powers will have completed their disemboweling of another of the institutions that mark out our international public space. If Bibi stays away, well, we will be pleased to say international law counts for something after all, and we can look to bigger things from there.

here is no saying yet whether Donald Trump will succeed in negotiating the end of the Ukraine war, or a new era of détente between Washington and Moscow, or new security relations between Russia and the West, or cooperation in the Arctic, or all the goodies to come of reopened trade and investment ties.

All this remains to be seen. Trump’s mid–August summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage may or may not turn out to be “historic,” a descriptive all presidents in the business of great-power diplomacy long for.

There are all sorts of reasons to harbor doubts at this early moment. Can Trump promise the Russian president peace given the policy cliques, the Deep State, the military-industrial complex, and other such constituencies that have so long and vigorously made certain no such thing breaks out?

Those who craft the Deep State’s subterfuge ops viciously destroyed Trump’s better policy initiatives during his first term — his initial attempt to reconstruct relations with Russia, those imaginative talks — too promising for their own good — with North Korea’s leader. The record suggests we had better brace for the same should Trump and his people do well in negotiations as the weeks — and it will be weeks at the very least — go by.

And so to the question of Trump and his people. Marco Rubio at State, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Steve Witkoff taking time away from his real estate ventures in New York, all subject to the president’s orders, none with any experience in statecraft: Is the Trump regime competent to navigate through a diplomatic process this complex and of this potential consequence?

Let us not count these people out, but it is hard to see it.

And finally to the Russophobia that Trump brought forth as soon as he came to political prominence during the 2016 campaign season. I consider this the most formidable challenge Trump now takes on as he attempts to end a proxy war and bring relations with Russia into a new time.

I say this because Russophobia is about more, much more, than near-term geopolitical strategies and policy choices. This is a question that goes to the ideology that makes America America, to the collective psyche, to Otherness and identity (which are intimately related in the American mind).

It was interesting to hear Trump make reference to the Russiagate rubbish during his post-summit remarks in Anchorage. Here, according to the Kremlin’s transcript, is part of what he had to say as to the disruptive effects of the Russiagate years:

“We had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we would like to have dealt with. But we will have a good chance when this is over.”

This is fine, true enough so far as it goes. But behind Russiagate there is a century of history — two if you go back to the beginning. Trump may not understand this as he pursues his démarche toward Moscow — almost certainly he doesn’t, actually — but this is the magnitude of his project when viewed in the large. This is the history, in the thought he might accomplish something “historic.”

Can Trump put a long, regrettable past thoroughly into the past, or at least set America on a path such that it may finally embrace the 21^st century instead of continuing to fall behind in it?

Of all the questions I pose here, this is by a long way the weightiest.

History’s Ebb & Flow

This may seem a frivolous line of inquiry given the unrelenting prevalence of anti–Russian fervor abroad among America’s power elites. There is no faction in Washington on either side of the aisle — if, indeed, any such aisle any longer matters — that does not nurse one or another measure of Russophobic paranoia.

But the history of America’s Russophobia is to be read two ways. Animosity toward Russia, from the Czarist Empire to the Soviet Union and now to the Russian Federation, is a sort of basso ostinato in the history of U.S.–Russian relations. But we also find a top-to-bottom ebb and flow among Americans, in policy and popular sentiment alike.

Speaking straight into the poisonous state of U.S.–Russian relations, Putin went to considerable lengths in Anchorage to note the many occasions in the past when Russians and and Americans took harmonious and constructive relations more or less for granted.

This story begins in the first decades of the 19^th century, when the United States was but a half-century old and the West began to take note of the modernizations Peter the Great set in motion a hundred years earlier. Here is the ever-perceptive de Tocqueville in the first volume of Democracy in America:

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time …. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

Apposition from the first, then — if not opposition. Indeed, the idea of “the West” as a political construct arose during de Tocqueville’s time precisely in response to the rise of Czarist Russia. It was, thus, a defensive reaction from the first.

Seven decades later America swooned into the first Red Scare in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. And two more decades after that, what? With the World War II alliance against the Axis Powers, F.D.R., clever man, had Americans referring to Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”

Alas, the extraordinary powers of media and propaganda. No sooner was World War II over (and Roosevelt in his grave) than America plunged into the second Red Scare, a.k.a. the McCarthyist 1950s. And after that the détente of the late 1960s and 1970s, and after that Reagan’s “evil empire” nonsense.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse we had the Russia-as-junior-partner years, when the inebriated Boris Yeltsin stood aside while Western capital raped the formidable remains of the Soviet economy. And then to the Putin years. What we live through now would amount to a third Red Scare apart from the fact Russia is no longer Red.

Looked at another way, U.S.–Russian relations are back where they more or less started. “Putin’s Russia,” as the phrase goes, is again America’s great Other, and by easy extension the West’s, just as it was two centuries back. Then as now, the project is to “make Russia great again,” as we might put it; then as now the West drifts into irrational reaction in response to the emergence of a nation of another civilizational tradition.

There is no missing the fungibility inherent in the U.S. stance toward Russia over the years, decades, and centuries — the extent, I mean, to which it is changeable according to changing geopolitical circumstances. It is not merely possible that the reigning Russophobia of our time will at some point pass. History’s lesson is that this is probable — maybe even inevitable.

No, the Trump–Putin summit at a joint-forces military base in Anchorage last Friday did not produce an agreement on a ceasefire in Ukraine. President Trump made no reference to “severe consequences” if Vladimir Putin did not consent to such an accord. Nothing was said about new sanctions against Russia and nothing about sanctions against nations that trade with Russia. Trump appears not to have mentioned those nuclear-armed submarines he ordered to “appropriate regions” a couple of weeks ago, and Putin seems not to have asked about them.

No, there was no such talk at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson. After not quite three hours behind closed doors with the Russian president, Trump departed Anchorage ahead of schedule, dropping the thought that he and Putin might linger so that Volodymyr Zelensky, president of the autocratic Ukrainian regime, could join them for further talks.

And so the story got written after the summit concluded. “No ceasefire, no deal,” the BBC concluded curtly. “Trump and Putin Put on a Show of Friendship but Come Away Without a Deal,” The New York Times reported late Friday. And from CNN, which had a dozen reporters on the story beneath this headline: “Trump–Putin summit ends without concrete deal.”

How yesterday, how swiftly passé all that early coverage proves but three days after Trump returned to Washington and Putin to Moscow. As of follow-on talks at the White House Monday with Zelensky and a swarm of European leaders, Trump seems to have rendered a ceasefire utterly beside the point in favor of an agreement he is fashioning with Putin that, if it comes to be — and we must stay with “if” for now — will prove stunningly concrete. Trump is after an enduring peace now — this as a subset of a new era in U.S.–Russian relations. Pull this off and he will improve his place in the history texts by magnitudes.

We do not know, and may never know, precisely what the two leaders said to one another behind closed doors as their interpreters and their foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio, sat beside them. But it did not take long for Trump to start unpacking the plan he and Putin began to fashion during their talks. In post-summit interviews and social media posts, and in his encounters with Zelensky and his European sponsors at the White House Monday, Trump has made it plain as rain that an awful lot of something was discussed at a summit where nothing was reported to get done.

Within hours of the summit, Trump said in an interview with Fox News that he and Putin were near an agreement on an exchange of territories between Russia and Ukraine and that there would be security guarantees for the latter after the cessation of hostilities. “There are points that we negotiated and those points that we largely have agreed on,” Trump told Sean Hannity.

There is no telling how close or far Washington, Moscow, Kiev and (to the extent they matter) may be from a comprehensive settlement. “Largely” covers an infinitude of near misses and failures, and Donald Trump is, after all, Donald Trump. But I read in this quick pencil-sketch a suggestion of the give-and-take dynamic between Trump and Putin: Russia will get some of the land is has fought for these past three years, which, if you look at a map, amounts to a security guarantee against the aggressions of viscerally Russophobic Ukrainians; the United States and the Western powers will cease arming the Kiev regime — another kind of guarantee. The Ukrainians will give up land but get security guarantees of their own.

Does this strike you as an unbalanced proposition? It should. Implicit in it is something Trump understands but Ukraine, the Europeans and the hawks in Washington simply refuse to accept: However long the fighting may drag pointlessly on, Ukraine is the vanquished in this war; Russia the victor.

We have had a slow roll of revelations since the Fox News interview. Reuters reported a day after the summit that Trump told Zelensky during a post-summit telephone call that it was time to “make a deal” with Moscow, which must include ceding some land to Russian sovereignty. “Russia is a very big power, and you’re not,” Trump reportedly told the Ukrainian president. Reuters said it reflected Putin’s demand in Anchorage that the Kiev regime recognize Russian sovereignty over all of the Donbas, the eastern regions of Ukraine that Russia formally annexed in September 2022 and parts of which, but not all, are under Russian military control.

Later Saturday came the big one, or a big one, as the post-summit situation is nothing if not kinetic. “It was determined by all,” Trump declared on his Truth Social platform, “that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which oftentimes do not hold up.”

“A mere ceasefire.” Wow. So much for that. A peace agreement instead of a ceasefire, cap “P” and cap “A,” if you please. Wow times 10. This is a major, major departure from the demands long advanced by all of the Western powers and Ukraine — an implicit rejection, this is to say, of the prevalent anti–Russian orthodoxy. No Western leader, if you have not noticed, has ever called for an end to the war. None among them has ever mentioned a peace accord for the simple reason the Western powers do not want peace with Russia. It is with this statement, then, that Trump signaled his determination to chart new territory.

Zelensky’s intent as he made plans to see Trump Monday was to persuade him to pull him back from the frightening idea of a peace agreement and reinvest in the demand for a ceasefire. This was also what the crew from across the Atlantic had in mind. Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz: The British, French and German leaders were there. So were Mark Rutte, the NATO sec-gen, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. Hawks all, this crowd. They arrived, as news reports indicated, in a state somewhere between alarm and panic.

Trump appears to have heard these people out on the ceasefire question, as was to be expected. But there is no indication that the thought went much beyond hypothetical notions of what might be discussed in an also hypothetical summit between Zelensky and Putin. And there is every indication Trump holds to his early post-summit disclosures, of which there is now more yet-to-be-confirmed detail, notably in the land-for-guarantees line and what Trump has meant in his mentions of “land swaps.”

After holding referendums three years ago, Russia formally annexed four regions of eastern Ukraine, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The first two of these comprise the Donbas and are the most strategically important to the Russians — who hold more or less all of Luhansk but only part of Donetsk. It now appears that Russia may be willing to give up its claims to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty over the whole of the Donbas. Steve Witkoff, who serves as Trump’s special envoy, hinted at this in an interview with CNN on Sunday.

No clarity on the lend question came out of the White House Monday. But Trump gave Zelensky one bit of reassurance that has raised many eyebrows in many places.