You got my upvote! If there's one good thing that comes out of Trump's position on Ukraine, it's Europe stepping up its own security and strength. This will be good for Europe and America in long run.

I watched the Trump Zelensky show today. I dunno about you, but I detected a possible calculated confrontation. I don't think Vance is a good actor. He took it to 11 too quickly.

These days the media demands wartime strategy be played out in real time detail. How is that beneficial for actual strategy? To counter this, Trump may be leaning into the media circus by playing some sort of ambiguous good cop bad cop card. Smacking Zalensky while buttering Putin's muffins and arguing against world leaders, might be what's needed to penetrate Putin's emotional bubble. A kind of Trumpian trojan horse. Fascinating stuff. I know many here wouldn't give Trump such tactical credit, but if he were short on tactics he wouldn't have won two presidential elections.

That's funny, I thought Zelensky was the one who came in calculating. He had already agreed to the "deal", but (a) insisted on not signing it remotely, but instead flying all the way to the US; (b) waited until he was on camera with Bush and Vance; (c) changed his tack and tried to get Trump and Vance to agree to more than what had been previously discussed, thus baiting them into confrontation; (d) hopped on a plane within 2 hours, when Trump had stated publicly "all he needs to do is come back and say 'I want peace'"; (e) headed straight to the UK where almost all the EU leaders were already waiting and had a photo op done.

It really looks like a carefully crafted narrative was planned and carried out to intentionally smear the current US administration.

Everything up to your last bit about smearing the US is not wrong. As you said, Zalensky insisted on flying in to make the deal, then stepped over the line relative to the original deal they were meant to be doing.

I don't think there's any smearing attempt on Zalesky's part though. Contrary to Vance and Trump's assertion, Zalensky has thanked the US a lot of times. He wouldn't be wanting to smear the US. Trump did begin the meeting diplomatically, it was going fine, he even complemented Zalensky's outfit. Then JD opened his mouth!

It's hard to know for sure what's going on, which may be the point. The theatrics of argy-bargy is like a smokescreen.

From my perspective most of Europe believed in the "end of history", i.e. a world where armed conflicts would no longer be relevant. They thought local wars were only instigated by "medieval barbarians" in remote geographic locations or by neocons and the military-industrial complex for the hope of increasing US influence (and profit). Many Europeans associated NATO with wars they did not fully support and were not at all convinced that the money there was well spent. One could argue that Europeans indeed overlooked the growing threat of another imperialist force and its military-industrial complex, Russia, and that at least after the invasion of Crimea in 2014 should have started taking NATO as their life insurance policy more seriously.