Over America’s long history, Americans have often hesitated to support foreign wars and international machinations. George Washington’s Farewell Address warning against entangling alliances cast a long shadow. But from the nation’s beginnings, Americans have usually known whom to root for — those who seek freedom — and whom to condemn — those who try to crush liberty.

Across the United States, you will find statues honoring people such as the 18th-century Polish patriot Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the 19th-century Hungarian freedom fighter Lajos Kossuth, who sought liberation for their people from the Russian and Habsburg empires — and who found enthusiastic support in an America that was still a young and weak nation.

When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, even though it initially stayed out of the war, America organized what was then the largest food aid effort in history to help the victim of aggression. During the Cold War, though it could not help militarily, Washington refused to recognize the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic republics, which are now proud and independent nations. America as a superpower sometimes acted unwisely — in places such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — but even in those cases, it saw its involvement as the protection of freedom and democracy.

Not anymore. The strangest aspect of the past few weeks of American diplomacy — which culminated in the disaster at the White House on Friday — is that the president of the United States has seemed utterly unwilling to say plainly that he supports the victim of aggression against the aggressor who started the war.

Or that he admires Ukrainian democracy more than Russian dictatorship. Instead, he and Vice President JD Vance spent Friday’s photo op at the White House publicly scolding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, telling him to say thank you (which he has repeatedly) and accusing him of being disrespectful. Zelensky’s fault was simply to point out that Ukraine had in fact signed a ceasefire deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2015 but that Putin had continually violated it. President Donald Trump used the occasion to remind all that he felt a special bond with Putin.

Zelensky did not handle himself well. He got emotional, responded too often and took the bait that Vance laid for him. He should have studied how French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer handled Trump: constant flattery and deference. Churchill said of his relationship with his American counterpart, “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”

But Zelensky is leading a nation at war that has lost tens of thousands of people. He is fighting for his survival. And he and his nation are fighting for the values of freedom and democracy that America has supported since its founding — against a rapacious dictatorship that actively seeks to undermine the United States, its interests and its allies at every turn. It should not be hard to figure out where your sympathies lie.

Friday’s turn of events took place after weeks of diplomacy in which the Trump administration has bullied it neighbors, asked Canada to cease to exist as a country, pressured Denmark to sell Greenland and Panama to hand over the Panama Canal. It has threatened to impose higher tariffs on its allies than its foes. And it has shuttered almost all the food and medicine programs it promised to the poorest people in the world.

Conservative former British cabinet minister Rory Stewart asks on X, “Was it for this that the US spent 80 years building power and alliances? Not to be a force for good. But instead to impoverish neighbours, threaten those it protected, rob minerals from war-torn countries, and break its promises to 100s of millions of the poorest in the world?”

Trump is not just changing American foreign policy. He is reorienting America’s moral compass, a compass that has been firmly set since the country’s founding almost 250 years ago.

Fareed Zakaria is a Washington Post columnist.