This past week I found myself, for the first time in my life, ashamed to be an American. The United States has, in a very visible and ugly way, aligned itself with Russia and rejected the democratic Western alliance — an alliance that we led for decades. And let’s call a club a club: the Russian Federation is a brutal dictatorship which tramples all over the fundamental human rights that the United States has historically championed. But the values that we have sought to uphold since the end of the Second World War are clearly not the values of the Trump-Vance administration.
This carefully choreographed realignment of American foreign policy began the previous week, but became clear on Monday (2/24), when ninety-three members of the United Nations voted once again to condemn Russia for its invasion of neighboring Ukraine — in an explicit violation of international law. Monday was the third anniversary of a brutal attack that has not been, and cannot be, justified. But Monday was also the first time, in an embarrassing reversal of course, that the U.S. sided with the aggressor.
Ukraine may not be a model democracy, and yes, it has a history of antisemitism. But so does Russia — and unlike its Ukrainian counterpart, the Russian government is far from repentent about its history. That should come as no surprise, given the bloodstains on the hands of Russian…
