Apparently, it was tea and crumpets at the Vlad-and-Donnie showdown. You knew something was up when Our Dear President applauded Putin as he descended the stairs of the Russian presidential airplane—dwarfed next to Air Force One—onto a red carpet, no less.
Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, swaggered while Trump clumped along beside him, both heading to the U.S. presidential limo for a ride to the welcome wagon at U.S. Army and Air Force Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. (Putin’s own limo was left idling on the tarmac at the northern edge of Anchorage, Alaska.)
There was even a B-2 stealth bomber flyover, shadowed by four F-35 jets—bluster Trump proudly pointed out to his counterpart. It was the kind of showmanship the Wizard of Oz perfected.
And as Dorothy discovered, once the curtain was pulled back, the Wizard was just a little man “pretending to be great.” With that, the spell was broken.
Emma Azzopardi explains it this way:
“The great and powerful wizard was exposed. He was simply an ordinary man who could pull off a few clever tricks. The trouble with fantasy is that, for some, the line between delusion and reality blurs. These are people who don’t deal in truth. They carry fantastical perceptions of themselves so grand that, after a while, the fantasies become their reality. Why go to such lengths to claim you are more talented, more skilled, more beautiful, or more accomplished than you really are?”
After three hours of conversation, Putin and Trump appeared before the press. Gone was Trump’s earlier insistence that Russia would face “severe sanctions” if he returned home without a ceasefire agreement. He looked pale and limp as Putin droned on in his ever-so-reasonable voice: Russia’s “security concerns” must be met before any peace treaty.
Those concerns include removing the Volodymyr Zelenskyy government of Ukraine and ceding a quarter of Ukraine’s territory.
Trump nodded along. That’s reasonable, he implied—no ceasefire needed.
Later, he clarified: “Now it’s up to Zelensky.” Translation: the Ukrainian president must surrender to those terms if peace is to be had.
The hunted must now genuflect to the hunter.
No doubt the Zelenskyy government has long regretted signing the 1994 Budapest Agreement, in which Ukraine dismantled its nuclear arsenal—left over from the Soviet Union—in exchange for assurances of sovereignty from the U.S., Western powers, and Russia.
Alas, that check bounced.
As Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz observed two centuries ago, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.” And as I heard South African apartheid leaders say in the late ’80s: “Reconciliation will happen when those on the bottom reconcile themselves to the fact that we are on the top.”
On a 2011 trip up Alaska’s inland passage, I picked up one of those free regional tour guides—90% ads, 10% content. The book profiled several towns in the Alexander Archipelago.
For Sitka, it noted remnants of Russian influence, including Orthodox churches. The summary described the town’s history as “a unique blend of Tlingit (a Native Alaskan nation) culture, Russian imperialism, and, ultimately, American expansionism.”
It’s those “dirty Ruskies” who want empire.
Us? We just expand. It is “manifestly our destiny.”
For us, the spell is yet to be broken.
What a great—if precarious—time to be alive!
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Curator of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action, and author of, most recently, In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions. He was the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.
