Can Americans Still Be Convinced That Principle Is Worth Fighting For?

In gaming, a metric called “ping” measures the time it takes for information to travel from your console to the network and back again. If you’re playing online soccer and you press the button that makes your striker shoot, the ping is how long it takes for the shot to register onscreen. The more ping, the less responsive the game feels. At very high pings, the delay can cause “input-lag sickness,” an unmoored sensation that the world on the screen no longer quite matches up with what your thumbs are telling it to do. In these moments, an intense, nearly existential bewilderment sets in, usually followed by rage.

American politicians who work on foreign policy seem to be experiencing a version of input-lag sickness. They’re hitting buttons that once inspired the public, but they’re not getting the response they expect. When politicians say, for example, that we must defend the rights and freedoms of a sovereign nation like Ukraine, do those words still carry enough emotive power to persuade Americans to supply years of funding for the Ukrainian Army?

The answers are not so clear. In 2022, at the start of the war, only seven per cent of Americans thought that the U.S. was providing too much support to Ukraine. By late February, just a week before the Trump-Vance-Zelensky reverse détente, that number had risen to thirty per cent. These are still remarkably robust polling numbers for anything in America, let alone for supporting an armed conflict. But there does seem to be a shift, one that’s not limited to the mostly Republican voters who have switched their stance on Ukraine and Zelensky. For the first time in decades, a President is not only questioning why we’re involved in specific armed conflicts but also the fundamental role of America as the world’s policeman. How many Americans, frustrated by inflation and what many see as rampant government corruption, will wonder why their tax dollars are being sent overseas?

Since the debacle of Iraq, Americans have grown understandably wary of prolonged military conflicts, even those with no U.S. boots on the ground. As conflicts grind on, politicians sometimes try to rally the public with rhetoric about democracy, freedom, and the American way. Joe Biden made such concerns the theme of his 2024 State of the Union address. “History is watching,” he said. “If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk, emboldening others who wish to do us harm.” There are moments when such rhetoric has worked. In 1990, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was enough to spark an American incursion in the Persian Gulf. President George H. W. Bush, announcing the operation, said that it was justified by aggression against a sovereign state: “Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation, no threat to his own.” But he promised that, with America’s help, “Kuwait will once again be free.” The war was popular, at least at the time. It helped that American television coverage had been sanitized into abstract images: grainy shots capturing the streaks of Patriot missiles in flight against the black night sky. It also helped that the war ended in six weeks, before input lag could set in.

Ukraine enjoyed mass popularity among the American public after the Russian invasion, but it has had to battle through far more pain and time. Part of the public’s exhaustion might come from Biden’s incompetence as a communicator. If America was to send billions of dollars to Ukraine, he should have sat the public down once a year and given an intelligent and thorough defense of the war. The easy, and true, earlier justifications about who attacked whom, and about whether Vladimir Putin should be allowed free rein of Europe, faded into cliché. The more arguably realist justifications, such as the rationale that a prolonged conflict in Ukraine weakens the Russian military, sounded too cynical to make for good politics—especially regarding a potential nuclear conflict. But is this shift in thinking about Ukraine simply the product of attrition and Trump’s personal campaign to diminish Zelensky? Or does it suggest that the public is more isolationist than hawkish politicians had imagined?

On Tuesday night, Trump delivered a rambling address to Congress, and Senator Elissa Slotkin, of Michigan, delivered the Democratic Party’s rebuttal. She introduced herself as a former C.I.A. agent who “did three tours in Iraq,” and said she was glad that Ronald Reagan, rather than Trump, had been President during her childhood, because “Trump would have lost us the Cold War.” She also talked about how our “security and our prosperity” as well as “our democracy” had been “the aspiration of the world.” As I watched, I wondered who the intended audience was. Can faith in American exceptionalism still inspire people to action? Do the spectres of Russia, China, and North Korea actually frighten people in the United States? Most Americans understand that those three countries are our adversaries, but do they know why, apart from some vague missives about democracy and freedom from dictators?

Trump seems to understand that wild stakes, uncertainty, and interpersonal conflict are what keeps the audience engaged. As Slotkin and many others have pointed out, this Administration has turned into Season 2 of a reality show, with Trump as the star and executive producer, and the world’s richest man brought in to keep the audience on its toes. None of us know whether Trump actually means what he says—about tariffs, or trying to turn Gaza into a beachside resort, or withdrawing support from Ukraine and leaving NATO on the street.

After last week’s Oval Office meeting with Zelensky turned into a shouting match, Trump turned to the news cameras and said, “This is going to be great television.” He was right. While more sober commentators worried about the risks of blowing up eighty years of careful diplomacy, commenters online fixated on the spectacle. Was the meeting staged? Had the reporter who asked Zelensky if he owned a suit been fed those lines? Was Vice-President J. D. Vance supposed to get mad for the cameras? Why were the cameras there in the first place? The only difference between these pundits and “America’s Next Top Model” recappers from the twenty-tens is that the recappers could land a joke.

Typically, the argument goes that all Trump’s lying and disinformation, met with righteous scolding from liberals, has led to mass desensitization, over everything from Trump’s thirty-four felony convictions to his racist rhetoric. I don’t think it’s really desensitization—people care desperately about Trump, one way or another—but, rather, a collective case of input-lag sickness. If people don’t know whether what they’re seeing is real, the ideas associated with the images feel abstract. What does a word like “sovereignty” mean to someone who can’t be sure if the conflict in the Oval Office is real or if it’s what pro-wrestling fans call a “work”—a scripted conflict to push along a story line?

When Zelensky asked Vance if he had been to Ukraine to witness the war in person, Vance answered, haltingly, “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories.” The American public is in the same position: we watch and see the stories. We receive them not as part of a unified narrative but as abstract bits of media that must be shared and commented upon. As I wrote in late 2023, we rely now on cellphone and surveillance-camera footage to show us reality. This footage is typically seen as “authentic” and immediate—just as live streamers are seen as more “authentic” than news broadcasts. Ukraine had a few early successes in the fight for attention online; the snippet of a Ukrainian soldier on Snake Island telling a Russian invader to fuck off was as viral, and as widely disputed, as the end to any Marvel movie. Since then, though, Ukraine has not produced the same volume of arresting video. When most Americans think of the Israeli conflict—of October 7th and Gaza—they picture carnage and dead children. When they think of the war in Ukraine, the most familiar image is of Zelensky, the former actor. No matter how much people in Ukraine have suffered, the American perception of them is mostly determined by the algorithms that dictate social media.

When I was in grade school, in the early nineties, geopolitics could be reduced to simple stories: communism and the authoritarian Soviets were bad, and American democracy was good. After the U.S.S.R. fell, the map in my fifth-grade classroom broke up the empire into dozens of new countries, whose capitals we now had to memorize; we all learned to pronounce “Kiev,” improperly. I recall feeling a great deal of happiness, because all those people behind the Iron Curtain were free. If you had asked me what “free” meant, I would likely have said something about bread lines and ugly buildings. But, in that post-Cold War period, it seemed as if everyone agreed that we were freer than the Communists had been, and that it was our job to bring that freedom to whomever we could. America’s stable vision of the world relied on the belief that good and evil are clearly delineated—a belief that was easier to maintain in the absence of complicating information. Today, any hope of such collective narratives has been ripped apart by the internet and its explosive democratization. What chance do words like “sovereignty,” “democracy,” and “freedom” have under such conditions? ♦