VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: 10 bad takeaways from the Zelenskyy blow-up

Victor Davis Hanson lays out 10 takeaways from Friday's extraordinary Oval Office meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Dying Citizen." 

2. Zelenskyy acts as if his agenda and ours are identical. So, he keeps insisting that he is fighting for us despite our two-ocean-distance that he mocks. We do have many shared interests with Ukraine, but not all by any means: Trump wants to "reset" with Russia and triangulate it against China. He seeks to avoid a 1962 DEFCON 2-like crisis over a proxy showdown in proximity to a nuclear rival. And he sincerely wants to end the deadlocked Stalingrad slaughterhouse for everyone’s sake.

3. The Europeans (and Canada) are now talking loudly of a new muscular antithesis, independent of the U.S. Promises, promises—given that would require Europeans to prune back their social welfare state, frack, use nuclear, stop the green obsession, and spend 3-5% of their GDP on defense. The U.S. does not just pay 16% of NATO’s budget, but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop, patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogue states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.