We’re not in Kansas anymore, as Dorothy said, and someone should tell Volodymyr Zelensky. Times have changed. After three years of savage, meat-grinding war the Ukraine cannot repel an ever-encroaching Russia, millions are dead or maimed or have fled, and the Ukraine’s critical ally, the US, grows war-weary and hungry for peace. Zelensky’s recent belligerent performance in the White House is reminiscent of Monty Python’s infamous Black Knight skit, where the defeated warrior, armless and legless, yells out to his victorious foe to come back and fight. It’s over bar the shouting, and the Ukraine cannot win.

Whether the White House debacle presages a wider shake-up among the Nato allies remains to be seen. Certainly many Europeans feel entitled to demand US blood and treasure as their right, an attitude epitomised by Zelensky in an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, when he said, ‘Your people have to save my people.’

Actually, they don’t, and that’s the point. The US has decided that charity begins at home, and who can blame them, 80 years after the second world war and the creation of Nato, for deciding to let Europeans mind their own security, and spend their manpower and billions on the homeland instead. The Ukraine was never a strategic interest for the US, but a regional conflict that became a Deep State proxy war and armaments bonanza aimed at hemming in Russia.

About now the cries invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ will begin. What about principles, the rule of law, international unity against aggression? Anyone who thinks preaching moral virtue will prevail over countries pursuing their own interests needs to read a bit more history. I happen to think the post-1990 eastward expansion of Nato, combined with the CIA-run overthrow of the Yanukovych government in 2014 and Kiev’s attacks on Russian speakers in the Donbas undermine any Western claims to moral virtue. Poke the bear and yes, regrettably, the bear will fight back. Moreover, it was always the US which did the heavy lifting and not the paper tigers of the EU, who have grown fat and self-satisfied as they rode the American gravy train. Now the US is backing off, and either the EU steps up, which is unlikely as well as impractical, or Ukraine sues for peace on the best conditions it can muster – or the slaughter continues.

That EU leaders chimed in like a virtuous choir to back Zelensky in his Trump-Vance stoush only demonstrates their empty-headed clinging to outdated, romantic visions of world power. The post-second world war order is over, much as they refuse to admit it, and a new multipolar world is coalescing. You can be on Team Reality here, or Team Fantasy. Europe can pontificate all it likes but words matter little if not matched by action, and no one would bet on Europe to safeguard their freedom.

A couple of anecdotes seem to me to nail the new US approach. There was J.D. Vance famously refusing to be emotionally blackmailed over unvetted refugees, and telling CBS’s Margaret Brennan, ‘I don’t really care, Margaret, I don’t want that person in my country.’ In the Boomer era one always had to care and emote equally about everyone and everything, otherwise you were a ‘bad person’. It has been a Boomer legacy to prioritise feelings above all, to be idealistic and utopian; by contrast Gen X-ers are practical, and not seeking the moral high ground.

The second sign of this new attitude is the virally popular acronym FAFO, which means ‘F… around and find out’. Zelensky now joins the victims of Doge cuts, deported illegal migrants, and all those on the receiving end of the consequential new regime in Washington.

In truth, the unworldly illusions of the Boomer generation have had horrific results in the West.

The melting pot dream of multiculturalism has led to stabbing sprees across Europe, grooming gangs in England, African and Hispanic crime gangs in places like Melbourne and the US, ethnic ghettoes in capital cities, a diluted sense of community, not to mention rising antisemitism and strident Islamic extremism. Diversity has turned out to be a weakness, not a strength. Associated sky-high levels of immigration have priced our kids out of owning houses in the places they grew up, and made family formation much less affordable.

The climate change fantasy has jeopardised our power supply with erratic, unreliable and expensive renewable energy, making heating and cooling unaffordable, threatening nutritious foods such as meat, undermining lifestyle choices such as easy, cheap travel, all for the supposed 100-year dream of a minuscule change in temperature, that is of course entirely hypothetical. Suffer a lot now, for a supposed bit of nirvana then.

None of this would surprise Blackstone adviser and generational theorist Neil Howe, who argued in his 2023 book The Fourth Turning Is Here, that we are ‘in the winter of our social order, when decaying institutions, political polarisation, financial failure and rising social discord reach a rupturing climax, which will sweep away an old era and birth a new’, to quote my previous Speccie piece.

‘These Turnings created four generational archetypes: … Baby Boomers are self-indulgent and moralistic, Gen X children are underprotected and pragmatic, Millennials are protected, team workers, while Gen Z, growing up in dangerous times, are overprotected and oversensitive – think safe spaces.’

While Trump is obviously an early boomer, his team are Gen X-ers and Millennials, and they are dealing with the colossal failures of my own, often silly boomer cohort. A friend once delivered what I regard as the all-time boomer cop-out, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ As the Musks and Vances of the world clean up the boomer mess, they are discarding the precious virtue-signalling of the old era in favour of looking after those for whom they are responsible. They are focused not on abstract ideals like saving the planet, but on caring for their families and communities.

While many boomer voices will argue that Trump and Vance are out of step for failing to support plucky little Ukraine, the tide of history will tell a different tale.

Zelensky’s missteps will strengthen his rivals at home, and may well lead to his ouster, or worse, if he doesn’t find a way to peace. Sooner or later, realpolitik will prevail.