A lot of ink has been spilled trying to make sense of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calamitous Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance. The meeting was supposed to finalize a deal giving the United States rights to Ukraine’s rare minerals in return for more military aid. The deal fell through, at least temporarily, when Vance determined that Zelensky had disrespected Trump by not thanking him sufficiently for his largesse. Vance’s good faith as a facilitator of the discussion between the two presidents was doubtful, however, since he once famously said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”

Things quickly devolved into a tense standoff, with Trump telling Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards right now,” and insisting that Zelensky was “gambling with World War III” by refusing to yield to Russian demands. Essentially, Trump and Vance embraced the Russian version of the conflict. When not indulging in flights of fancy, Trump delights in playing the steely-eyed realist who accepts the unignorable facts on the ground and wants “to make a deal.” His understanding of how the world works is unclouded by lofty concerns such as protecting democracy or resisting tyranny. Trump became especially agitated when Zelensky argued that Russian aggression would not stop with Ukraine, and that the Atlantic would not always protect the United States from Russia’s imperial ambitions. “You have a nice ocean and don’t feel it now, but you will feel it in the future,” Zelensky said. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” Trump responded indignantly.

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Second Thoughts on James Burnham.” Burnham (1905–1982) was an American political philosopher and author of two influential books, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). Burnham began the 1930s as a Marxist and Trotskyite but ended up—after a brief stop at the CIA—as a founding editor of William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review. Orwell was objecting to what he detected to be Burnham’s “instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment.” Burnham had initially predicted that totalitarian Germany would defeat Europe’s liberal democracies and, together with an authoritarian Russia and Japan and an autocratic United States, would emerge as one of the three great powers after World War II. (Orwell made use of Burnham’s speculations about this three-part global realignment in his novel 1984.) Capitalism and socialism, Burnham theorized, would eventually disappear, replaced by an oligarchic managerial class of experts and bureaucrats. The masses would be pacified, while elites ruled. In Burnham’s writings about Stalin’s historical significance, Orwell finds that “the idea of ‘greatness’ is inextricably mixed up with the idea of cruelty and dishonesty.” Trump’s admiration for Putin displays the same kind of conflation. Orwell described Burnham’s attitude to Stalin as an “act of homage, and even self-abasement.” You can hear this same attitude in Trump’s claims that Putin “respects” him.

Orwell thought Burnham got politics wrong by not recognizing the inherent instability of fascism. Why? Because he was constantly “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening.” That intellectual failing, Orwell writes, is “a major mental disease, and its root lies partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” He attributed Burnham’s willingness to accept the supposed inevitability of Nazi and Soviet triumph at least partially to the fact that he was an American. “Most Americans who think of the matter at all would prefer to see the world divided between two or three monster states which had reached their natural boundaries and could bargain with one another on economic issues without being troubled by ideological differences,” he wrote with remarkable prescience. How better to describe Trump’s desire to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal? “Such a world picture fits in with the American tendency to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification,” Orwell wrote. Burnham’s cynical approach to politics, Orwell shrewdly observed, was a marriage of the seemingly contradictory, but actually complementary, views of American imperialists and American isolationists. The parallels with Trump’s outlandish territorial provocations are uncanny. “It is a ‘tough’ or ‘realistic’ world view which fits in with the American form of wish-thinking. The almost open admiration for Nazi methods which Burnham shows in the earlier of his two books, and which would seem shocking to almost any English reader, depends ultimately on the fact that the Atlantic is wider than the Channel.” 

Trump and Vance share with Burnham a profound failure to understand the hidden strengths of democracies and the weaknesses of the authoritarian regimes they hope to emulate. As Orwell notes, no one with a healthy respect for reality and human nature should have thought the Third Reich would ultimately prevail. Hitler’s decision to fight all his enemies simultaneously was delusional, while the brutal German occupation of Europe only created a fearless and indomitable resistance. Hitler’s rule was possible only in a country where “public opinion has no power” and state power subsequently goes unchecked, at least in the short term. Burnham was “unable to see that the crimes and follies of the Nazi regime must lead by one route or another to disaster,” Orwell wrote. But of course the ability to see the Nazis for what they were required a moral effort, not just an analytical one. Or, as Zelensky pointed out in response to Trump’s claim that the Ukrainians held “no cards”: “I’m not playing cards.” 

Orwell concluded that Burnham’s eagerness to bow down before the conqueror of the moment “shows what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism.’” The same is true of Trump now. Having survived the almost total destruction of their continent at the hands of German fascists and Soviet communism, European leaders have rallied to Zelensky’s side after the Oval Office meeting. They’ve seen this movie before. Despite Burnham and Trump’s cynicism, there is such a thing as morality in politics. And as the stumblebum crew now ascendant in Washington is demonstrating, the worship of power carries the seeds of its own destruction.