There was a lot of teeth grinding last week as Americans, and people around the world, watched the arrival of Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Here was a war criminal and mass murderer getting the red carpet treatment from an American president on American soil. There was a military honor guard, warm handshakes, and a ride in the presidential limo nicknamed "The Beast."
It was a hard pill to swallow, but given the backdrop of a war that has killed and wounded more than a million people, well, you just have to do what you have to do. And President Trump had to do.
The president deserves credit for his peace efforts though what he envisages as a final and just settlement of the war waged by Russia against Ukraine is not entirely clear. President Trump's mind is apt to change, hour to hour, and even less than that.
The meeting with Putin ended and the Russian leader flew back to his Moscow lair. It seemed, in the meeting's aftermath, that Putin had gotten into Trump's head and that Trump was now, once again, leaning in favor of the Russian position on what should happen now and in the future.
Then came the meeting Monday at the White House with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There were fears that the Ukrainian might be in receipt of the kind of bullying treatment directed at him during the Oval Office meeting earlier this year. But no, the mood in the room was very different. President Trump was in a good mood, almost jovial. And President Zelenskyy wore a suit. On such trivial things the world doth turn.
Perhaps it helped that elsewhere in the White House a posse of European leaders and officials was waiting to sit down with President Trump for a "where do we go from here" tete a tete.
Certainly the presence of French President Emanuel Macron was of considerable importance. Macron sat to Trump's immediate right during the meeting. Trump seems to take the French leader's views seriously. You could easily argue that, right now, Macron is co-leader of the Free World.
George F. Will, writing in his Washington Post column this week put it succinctly: "Eighty-five summers ago, the United States, which began as an emanation of Europe, was saluted by Britain’s prime minister in the House of Commons. On a dark day (June 4, 1940) he anticipated the day when “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
"Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States. It needs to be liberated from the chimera that it has no substantial stake in the outcome of high-intensity, state-on-state violence inflicted by a nuclear power obedient to a man who has actual beliefs: crackpot, but real, and menacing."
By way of confirmation of this the non-free world responded to the gatherings in the White House. Russia launched renewed massive attacks on Ukraine.
This was a reminder, if we needed to be reminded, that whatever is on Vladimir's Putin's priorities list, peace for its own sake isn't one of them.
