Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelensky finds himself stuck without recourse between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand is a mean and bullying American president who wants him to sign a peace deal with Russia no matter the cost, in this way garnering credibility for America’s pay-per-view Board of Peace. On the other side are the European Union and NATO, which support Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but have none of America’s military clout. This would once have been an implausible paradox since it was postwar America that engineered NATO and by doing so helped usher in the EU. All that of course is now but a memory as this president — I have dubbed him Strangelove — has time and again expressed his disdain for “horrible” Europe, a continent he sees as contaminated by migrant Muslims and assorted darkies. This ugly collision helps explain Zelensky’s speech at the Davos summit, which despite his White House humiliation of a year ago, saw him talk as if from Strangelove’s lap. Europe was weak and fractured, he growled. It could never become a true world power. It’s no surprise the remarks came soon after a private session with the American don. Saddest in this sad landscape is that postwar Europe was fashioned for two reasons: to confront the then–Soviet Union and to limit European rearmament to guard against a future new Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So it is that the EU, intended as a federation of economically linked but still sovereign nations, is now mocked for not assuming Nazi-style arrogance. The result, witness the Greenland debacle, is a loss for all involved, a loss that may cost the United Nations its job, just as re-armament and Axis powers fully struck down the League of Nations before it, after which came a detail known as World War II.