Almost 200 years ago, in 1826, British Foreign Secretary George Canning famously declared, "I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." Canning was explaining to the House of Commons his strategy of granting recognition to Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, and blocking further colonization by Britain’s great-power rivals, Spain and France.

Two centuries later, the current British prime minister, Keir Starmer, is working with Old World allies to redress a far more menacing imbalance—an alliance between a New World commandeered by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

It is a startling scrambling of the postwar system and of American values. Europe’s leadership shames Trump and his Republican toadies. It is urgent that democratic Europe succeed.

In the three days since Friday’s Oval Office ambush of Zelensky by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Republican spinmeisters have tried to portray what occurred as Zelensky impudently lecturing a president who had invited the Ukrainian leader to Washington in good faith to broker a peace agreement. In the spin, it was Zelensky who wrecked the deal.

This is total horseshit. What actually occurred, of course, was that Trump and his henchmen made Zelensky a Mafia-style offer he couldn’t refuse. Give the U.S. rights to Ukraine’s minerals, and maybe the U.S. would guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty, but maybe not. Zelensky was lured to Washington on the pretense that he was coming to negotiate the final details.

But that was a ruse. Instead, Trump put Zelensky in front of the cameras, the better to humiliate him. (When were delicate agreements ever negotiated in front of the media?) When Zelensky wouldn’t play, Trump and Vance accused him of disrespect.

As an earlier Don put it: "Now you come and say, ‘Don Corleone, give me justice.’ But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship."

Does the current Don appreciate who he is channeling? Maybe so.

What is appalling is that Republicans who just a week or two ago were attacking Trump’s alliance with Putin are conspicuously silent. Are they afraid of waking up with a horse head on their pillow?

Two weeks ago, outraged by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comments pulling back the U.S. from protecting Ukraine, Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said in a February 18 interview with CNN’s Manu Raju that Putin "is a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed."

Wicker’s comments on Putin, Trump, and Ukraine lately? Crickets.

On February 20, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina took the Senate floor to declare: "Whoever believes that there is any space for Vladimir Putin and the future of a stable globe, better go to Ukraine, they better go to Europe, they better invest the time to understand that this man is a cancer and the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime."

Tillis lately? Silence.

It fell to Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to speak the truth. On Saturday, she wrote in a post on X, "I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values around the world."

"This week started with administration officials refusing to acknowledge that Russia started the war in Ukraine," Murkowski added. "It ends with a tense, shocking conversation in the Oval Office and whispers from the White House that they may try to end all U.S. support for Ukraine."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, of all places, said what hardly any Republicans had the nerve to say: "It is bewildering to see Mr. Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength."

Even worse than Republican complicity was coverage in the mainstream press that treated the Trump ambush as a Zelensky blunder.

Rachael Bade in Politico wrote a piece taking the White House spin as fact. She quoted one unnamed White House official saying of Trump: "He’s trying to help [Zelinsky] and he’s getting snide remarks in his own house?" She quoted another official, "who like the others was granted anonymity to candidly describe the reaction inside the administration," as saying that "everyone in the building—from the president on down—felt completely disrespected."

Candid, right? Trump was trying to help Zelensky?

And Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman wrote in The New York Times on Saturday that "three people with knowledge of what took place beforehand said neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Vance had been looking to blow up a deal for Ukraine’s mineral rights, which Mr. Zelensky had been expected to sign in Washington. Instead, they said, Mr. Zelensky seemingly triggered the two American leaders by not sufficiently thanking the United States for trying to end the war."

Are you kidding? Could these three knowledgeable insiders perhaps have been White House spin doctors? How low will Maggie Haberman sink to preserve her access? When Politico and the Times write this garbage, Trump doesn’t even need Jeff Bezos to sell out The Washington Post.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Starmer met with Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron at a London summit to work on a peace plan. Nearly every major European leader has supported Zelensky. But the Anglo-French unity quickly fractured when Macron went public with his own plan for a 30-day cease-fire, which Starmer rejected.

Canning’s old rivalry between Britain and France lives on. For unity, postwar Europeans have relied on U.S. leadership, which is now upside down. For the sake of the world, Europe had better develop a record learning curve.