WSJ: Ukraine Holds a Weak Hand

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” was the first of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. That meant international agreements should be produced by transparent diplomacy that the public could follow. Last week’s fire and fury between President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tested that Wilsonian model of negotiations to the breaking point. Except for Mr. Vance, who turned a bit part into a starring role, nobody was happy with how things turned out.

For Mr. Zelensky, the meeting was a disaster. He came to Washington hoping that a show of unity with Mr. Trump would reassure Ukrainians about their future and intensify the pressure on Russia to make a fair peace. He left having exposed a massive rift between Kyiv and its patrons in Washington, and with his relationship with Mr. Trump apparently in tatters.

For Mr. Trump, the meeting was also a failure. The U.S. president genuinely hates the war and everything about it. His bitterness about having to engage with it is palpable. It isn’t just that what he sees as a common-sense effort to mediate a solution based on American interests exposes him to denunciation as a pro-Putin Manchurian Candidate. The war tests his coalition. The Ukrainian cause remains broadly popular among Republican voters and lawmakers, and there is a political cost in alienating them. But for many of the MAGA hard-liners at the core of the president’s base, the belief that you can flip Russia by dumping Ukraine is an article of faith.