The past two weeks, and probably the next few months, are going to feature a great deal of emotional spasms from the political class. Why? Because policy leaders are grieving their two decades of Ukraine policy, which has led exactly to the disaster its critics predicted. We are seeing that in the hysteria that has greeted JD Vance’s speech in Munich and the blowup at the White House today during a press conference that had been relatively short on news for the first 40 minutes.

The foreign policy blob is currently in the stage of denial. And they are projecting their anger onto Donald Trump, JD Vance, and anyone else who merely calls attention to the actual state of things in Ukraine.

In the past three years of war, Europe has reversed most of its material promises of military assistance, and even military re-building. America’s limited ability to resupply shells and other essential matériel has been tested. Trump has asked European countries which of them are willing to send peacekeepers. He’s not getting many eager takers. And yet, many Europeans and Americans are lashing wildly at Trump because he does not participate in their Tinkerbell foreign policy of hoping to revive Ukraine’s fortunes by simply offering it endless applause.

If Putin accepts some kind of cease-fire or settlement where Ukraine is excluded from NATO, and Russia remains in some of the territory it claimed to annex and gets recognition of Crimea or limits on the size of military Ukraine can build in the aftermath, it will have achieved several of its war ends. It will also have inadvertently exposed the unserious frippery of those who claimed that “it was never about NATO.”  And that should lead to serious questions about whether the West was a good steward of Ukraine’s interests since it began taking ownership of them in 2007. Of course it won’t; we’ll just get the usual epithets, “Putinist,” “chicken.” Whatever.

While I don’t think Zelensky is likely to lead Ukraine long after the war ends, the Russians will not succeed in their aim at “denazifying” the government of Ukraine, which is their euphemism for removing all anti-Russian nationalist Ukrainians from influence.

I’ll put my marker here. In 30 years, nobody is going to be talking about JD Vance interrupting Zelensky at a press conference. They’ll look back on this time and wonder why the United States made such extravagant implicit promises to Ukraine that it could not keep.