When did we decide that grown adults were supposed to be surprised by a breakup they had been negotiating for a decade? I watched the Munich Security Conference footage last night with my friend Eliza, who spent twenty years at State and now consults for a think tank whose name changes every eighteen months, and she said, without looking up from her phone, “Well, he said the quiet part loud, but the quiet part has been extremely loud for a while now.” Then she asked if the roast had rosemary in it, because Eliza will critique a foreign policy realignment and a side dish in the same breath. That is the kind of friend you want on Valentine’s Day, and that is the kind of friend you want on a day the Vice President of the United States flies to Munich to serve divorce papers to a continent.
I am old enough to remember when the Munich Security Conference was the event where American officials went to reassure everyone that we still believed in the arrangement. You know the arrangement. The one where we underwrote the security of half the planet and in exchange received the warm feeling of being indispensable, plus access to a lot of very good chocolate. JD Vance did not fly to Munich to reassure anybody. He flew to Munich to inform a roomful of foreign ministers and defense officials and the President of Ukraine that the check is no longer in the mail, the check was never in the mail, and by the way, have you considered that the real threat to Europe is Europe.
I have watched a lot of Vice Presidents do a lot of diplomacy, and I can tell you that the tradition in Munich is to speak in the careful dialect of the transatlantic alliance — a language invented specifically so that nobody ever has to say what they mean. Vance said what he meant. He told Europe, in so many words, that their democracies were fragile not because of Russian tanks but because of their own speech codes. He told Zelenskyy, in effect, to start thinking about what he could live with. He did this on February 14, which is a holiday about conditional love, and I do not think the timing was accidental, though I do think giving him credit for the symbolism is probably generous.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the wary affect of a woman who has spent her career watching documents travel in the wrong direction, called me while I was roasting the chicken. “It’s a policy,” she said. “It’s not a gaffe. People keep waiting for someone to say it was a gaffe.” Judy is right. It is not a gaffe. A gaffe is what we called it when a Vice President mispronounced the capital of a small Baltic nation. This is the policy. The policy is that the people who spent seventy years believing we were a partner should have read the fine print, which we are now publishing in very large type from the stage of a German hotel.
I brought this up last night at a small dinner — six of us, a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, a former ambassador to a country whose government has since changed twice, Eliza, Judy on speaker from her kitchen, my husband, and me — and I watched something I have been watching a lot lately. Nobody disagreed. Nobody defended the speech. Nobody said it was a bold realignment or a necessary correction or any of the phrases the cable panels were trying on for size. They just ate. The ambassador said the asparagus was perfect. The lobbyist asked where I got the wine. This is what civic conversation looks like in Washington in 2025: a table full of people who know exactly what just happened, declining, as a group, to say it.
I want to be careful here, because I am not one of those columnists who thinks the old arrangement was sacred. It wasn’t. It was an arrangement. It cost money and it cost lives and it came with a list of hypocrisies as long as my arm. You could make an honest case that the United States has been subsidizing the defense budgets of wealthy democracies for too long and that the bill has come due. Vance could have made that case. He did not make that case. He stood in Munich and told the Europeans they were losing their souls, and then he sat down with Zelenskyy to discuss the terms under which a country being actively invaded might consider negotiating with its invader. That is not a policy argument. That is a mood.
There is a version of this administration’s foreign policy that its defenders will describe to you as “realism,” and I would encourage you, the next time someone uses that word in your presence, to ask them what they mean. Realism used to mean clear-eyed assessment of interests. Now it appears to mean whatever the Vice President said on the plane. Realism used to be the thing you invoked against sentimentalists. Now it is the name we give to a worldview that treats alliances as a form of codependency and treats the countries being shelled as the ones with unrealistic expectations.
Zelenskyy, for his part, sat through the meeting and came out looking like a man who had been invited to brunch and served the bill. He has been doing this for three years — putting on the coat, flying to the capital, thanking the room, asking for the weapons, getting some of them, watching his cities be rearranged into rubble. I do not have a great deal of patience for the American commentators who have decided, at this late date, that Zelenskyy’s real failing is that he is insufficiently grateful. He has been nothing but grateful. Gratitude was in the job description. He was just told on Valentine’s Day that the job description has changed.
My friend Caroline, who teaches at a university I will not name because she would like to keep teaching there, texted me after the speech and said, “I think the word for this is vibes-based abandonment.” I have been turning that phrase over all morning. Vibes-based abandonment. It describes something I have been struggling to describe for weeks now — the sense that our foreign policy is no longer driven by interests or even by ideology but by the tonal preferences of the people giving the speeches. They do not like the Europeans. They do not find Zelenskyy charismatic. They find Viktor Orbán relatable. These are not strategic positions. These are seating preferences.
The thing I keep coming back to, and the thing I could not quite say at the dinner table last night because the lobbyist was there and you learn, after thirty years, when the table is not a table for saying things, is this: an alliance is a habit. It is a thing you do until you stop doing it, and when you stop doing it, you cannot start doing it again just because you have changed your mind. The Europeans watching that speech are already adjusting. They are already having quiet conversations about what comes next. They are already assuming we are not in the room. And we will not be in the room, not in the way we used to be, and the people who did this will, in a few years, express surprise and blame someone else.
I asked Eliza, as she was putting on her coat, whether she thought any of it was recoverable. She said, “The alliance, maybe. The credibility, no.” Then she said the roast had been a little dry, which was unkind but accurate. That is Eliza. That is also, increasingly, the rest of us — perfectly willing to tell you the truth about the meat, perfectly unwilling to tell you the truth about the meeting.
Happy Valentine’s Day. The engagement, such as it was, has been called off. The ring is going back in the box. And the rest of us, the ones who are going to have to live in the house that was built on that engagement, are at the table passing the asparagus and waiting for someone else to say it first.