Hearing President Donald Trump speak about his designs for the Panama Canal prompted me to look up the classic “Firing Line” debate over the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty back in 1978, an intramural battle of wits between eight of the staunchest anti-communist public figures in America at the time. It was possibly the single greatest dialectical exchange between conservatives on foreign policy ever recorded. William F. Buckley, chair of the “for” side, delivered, in my judgement, one of the most polemically and rhetorically erudite closings in the history of debate.

Much of it resonates strikingly in today’s contentions regarding Ukraine and America’s role in the world, particularly after that ridiculous debacle in the White House last week. I highly recommend watching the whole thing, or reading it if you are lucky enough to own a copy of Buckley’s literary autobiography, “Miles Gone By” in which he records it. A few snippets in particular are useful in informing the current situation:  

“I think that Governor Reagan put his finger on it when he said the reason this treaty is unpopular is because we’re tired of being pushed around. We were pushed out of Vietnam because we didn’t have the guts to go in there and do it right.”

(One could substitute “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” and not miss a beat.)

“We’re prepared… to desert Taiwan because three-and-a-half Harvard professors think that we ought to normalize our relations with Red China.”

(That hasn’t changed much.)

“We are prepared to allow sixteen semisavage countries to cartelize the oil that is indispensable to the industrial might of the West because we don’t have a diplomacy that’s firm enough to do something about it, and, therefore, how do we get our kicks? By saying ‘no’ to the people of Panama.”

Sound familiar? That pretty much sums up what President Trump and Vice President JD Vance did to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and also nicely sums up the reason.

Now, Zelensky certainly did neither himself nor his country any favors in that devil’s carnival of a meeting. I mean, what exactly was he thinking? He knew with whom he was dealing and the rhetorical history, and he surely knew the stakes for his beleaguered nation. So why let himself get set up in such a foolish, unnecessary way? It is beside the fact the point he was trying, rather inelegantly, to make was true — Putin has ignored or broken every other negotiated agreement — but in his tactless delivery he provided the excuse Vance was looking for. There were no adults in the room during that mess, at least none of consequence, at a time when adults were desperately needed.

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Buckley went on:

“When I am in a mood to say ‘no’, representing the United States, I want to be looking the Soviet Union in the face and say ‘no’ the next time they want to send tanks running over students who want a little freedom in Czechoslovakia. I want to say ‘no’ to China when it subsidizes genocide in Cambodia on a scale that has not been known in this century…”

Or for that matter, in their own country. It is easy to berate someone like Zelensky; easy and fun to berate someone like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; but it is quite another to stand up with that sort of acerbity against Vladimir Putin or Xi Xiaoping, two barbaric cretins who deserve the wrath of the leader of the free world. I would be among the first to cheer the president and VP if they directed that same vitriol toward Kim Jong Un. To do so against a pro-Western ally is a sign of weakness, not strength. Forty, 20, even 10 years ago, it would be nearly as inconceivable for a Republican president to express foreign policy in this manner as it would be to imagine the United States would vote with Russia, China, and North Korea in the United Nations against the free world.

“We are allowing ourselves to be beguiled, not by our minds, not by any hard empirical analysis, certainly not by those ideals to which we profess allegiance when we meditate on the Declaration of Independence.”

Indeed. It is difficult to discern a viable endgame to Trump’s strategy, one which puts America and the West in a stronger position. Does he simply want “peace” at any cost, like a modern-day George McGovern? Or does he not believe his own words, spoken rather eloquently at the end of his speech to Congress Tuesday, and so doubt America’s strength and potential he has to cut a deal with Russia and China to carve up the world, and then slinker back and hunker down hoping no one notices?

Well, if so, then to update Buckley:

“Let’s recognize that we are so impoverished militarily as a result of so many lamentable decisions that we need” (the Ukrainians) “who understand themselves as joined with us in a common enterprise, because when they look at the leaders of the United States they can recognize that, not as a result of our attempt to curry favor with anybody, but as a result of our concern for our own self esteem, we were big enough to grant to little people that which we ourselves fought for two hundred” (and 50) “years ago.”

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.