Embarrassment and Sorrow
Project Fortress, March 3, 2025
Dear President Zelensky:
It has been more than two weeks since you traveled from your war-battered country to meet with the president and vice president of my country—two long, troubling and revealing weeks.
Like many Americans, I watched in disbelief as you were ambushed in the Oval Office by America’s president and vice president. As they patronized you, lectured you about the war visited upon your people, slurred your efforts to rally international support as “propaganda,” and suggested that it was your responsibility “to end the destruction of your country” through groveling diplomacy—but not the aggressor’s responsibility to stop the bombing—my disbelief turned into embarrassment and sorrow.
I am embarrassed and sorry the president and vice president used you as a prop in a manufactured, made-for-television charade. In a downward spiral of outrageous behavior, this is yet another low.
I am embarrassed and sorry you were treated in such a way, put on the defensive and made to feel alone. I hope you know that 55 percent of Americans support sending military aid to your country.
I am embarrassed and sorry that, after the Oval Office ambush, the administration announced it was “pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution.” I am embarrassed and sorry the president is unable to understand that the cause of this war is Russian aggression, that the solution must entail reversing or at least deterring Russian aggression, and that less military assistance for Ukraine means more Russian aggression.
I am embarrassed and sorry America’s president and vice president don’t understand that your army has tied down and whittled down Putin’s military machine—and that your people are fighting our common enemy. Eighty percent of Americans recognize Putin’s Russia for what it is: an adversary. Inexplicably, the men who berated you in the Oval Office do not seem to share that commonsense view.
It’s a commonsense view not because Americans want or need an enemy, but because Putin’s Russia behaves like an enemy. The ever-growing list of Russian aggression and provocation during Putin’s reign includes: invading and dismembering your country and the country of Georgia; violating the Budapest Memorandum, CFE Treaty and INF Treaty; countenancing and/or conducting cyberattacks against America’s energy infrastructure and food supply; launching paralyzing cyberattacks against Estonia; attempting a violent coup in Montenegro; deploying agents to carry out sabotage and terror operations across NATO’s footprint, including U.S. targets; hacking the U.S. political system; interfering in elections in the U.S., Netherlands, Estonia, Romania, Germany, Macedonia, Montenegro, France and Britain; repeatedly threatening use of nuclear weapons; militarizing the Arctic; using banned chemical nerve agents against targets in Britain; providing targeting data to aid Houthi attacks against U.S. and allied ships operating in the Red Sea; moving nuclear weapons into Belarus; and sharing advanced weapons with Iran and North Korea.
I am embarrassed and sorry the president has no sense of history. Hence, he doesn’t understand the lessons of Munich and how they apply to this moment: how Putin getting away with his assault on Georgia in 2008 led to his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, how Putin getting away with that act of aggression led to his second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and how Putin gaining from his 2022 invasion will only whet his appetite for continued reconstruction of the Russian Empire.
I am embarrassed and sorry the president refused to listen as you tried to explain that “during 2014, nobody stopped him” (Putin), that earlier ceasefires and deals forced upon your country didn’t end the killing or the aggression, that we will all “feel” the consequences of appeasement and Putin’s aggression “in the future.” As you tried to explain in the Oval Office, the pattern—in Ukraine and throughout history—is clear: Unchecked aggression leads to more aggression. I am embarrassed and sorry the president doesn’t grasp this. I am embarrassed and sorry the president has never pondered the searing words Czech Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta shared in 1938, as his country was sacrificed to secure “peace for our time”—a peace that lasted less than a year: “Today it is our turn,” Krofta gasped. “Tomorrow it will be the turn of others.”
Krofta was right, and so are you. The lesson of Munich shaped American foreign policy for the better part of eight decades. Munich at once had nothing and yet everything to do with how America responded to Stalin and his successors and imitators—from West Berlin to South Korea, from Cuba to Kuwait. I am sorry the president has abandoned that tradition of foreign policy consensus and clarity—and replaced it with a poisonous mix of transactionalism and moral relativism.
I am embarrassed and sorry the president has slandered you—a tenacious defender of the free world—with the label “dictator.” I cannot explain, understand, or justify why he scolds, bullies, belittles, and threatens democratic allies and partners, while he praises dictators in Russia, China, and North Korea.
I am sorry the president—as a son, as a husband, as a father, as a grandfather—seems to have no empathy for what Ukrainian sons and husbands and fathers and grandfathers are enduring. And I am sorry he has turned on its head the injunction “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act.”
You and your country deserve much better than this from my country.