On March 3, only three days after the mugging of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, two foreign policy specialists blamed Zelensky for the confrontation and praised Trump for “restoring” diplomacy. The two specialists are very different individuals in terms of politics and ideology. One was Washington Post editorial writer Marc Thiessen, a right-wing ideologue, who is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Fox News contributor. He is a Trump loyalist.

Jeff Bezos is a supporter of Trump, so Thiessen’s essay was no surprise. He is a favorite of Bezos, the Post’s owner. Thiessen would not have his position if Kathryn Graham or Ben Bradlee were still in control of the paper. The same could be said if Marty Baron, a former editor at the Post, were still at the helm. Last week, Baron wrote that Bezos’s attack on the Post’s editorial focus was a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression.”

However, the other attack on Zelensky was written by a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, a career Foreign Service Officer, who is a leading Sovietologist and a linguist. It was as stunning and surprising as Thiessen’s piece was predictable and foreseeable. I only know Thiessen by reputation, but I’ve shared political roundtables with Matlock and, in 1976, he was my boss when I served in the political section of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. His many writings are well known in both government and academic........

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