After watching the shocking Oval Office contretemps between Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelensky and the U.S. President and Vice President, I left to join a group of friends for a party in a Budapest pub. Everyone there had seen the clash. It was all anybody could talk about.

“Maybe that had to happen,” I said to an expatriate friend who is from an EU country, “but I wish it had not happened in front of the cameras.”

“No, it had to happen that way,” he responded. “That’s the only way European leaders will learn. Trump has been trying to bring them to reality, but they won’t listen.”

Later, a shell-shocked group of top European leaders tweeted a joint statement pledging support for Zelensky and Ukraine. “You are never alone, dear President @Zelenskyyua,” they said. 

Well, yes he is—and this is the reality with which Donald Trump and JD Vance brutally smacked Europe. That is, European countries may stand with Ukraine in words, but absent American money, arms, and hard power, what do they have to offer?