It’s Debatable: The Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford and the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig debate pressing issues for policymakers.

Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt, did you have a good weekend? I assume you’ve been glued to the TV following all the drama to see who will replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canadian politics? Funny—I thought once U.S. President Donald Trump made them the 51st state, they wouldn’t need elections anymore.

Matt Kroenig: Well, the 51st state still needs a governor, right? Speaking of Trump, did you watch his looooong speech last week?

Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt, did you have a good weekend? I assume you’ve been glued to the TV following all the drama to see who will replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canadian politics? Funny—I thought once U.S. President Donald Trump made them the 51st state, they wouldn’t need elections anymore.

Matt Kroenig: Well, the 51st state still needs a governor, right? Speaking of Trump, did you watch his looooong speech last week?

EA: I watched some of it; it definitely went past my bedtime. Did you hear it broke the record for longest State of the Union address? Over an hour and a half!

MK: Yes, longer than former President Bill Clinton, and he covered a lot of ground. Most of it was on domestic policy priorities, but he did get to several foreign-policy issues, including Ukraine, Greenland, the Panama Canal, trade and tariffs, and several other issues.

Did you like the parts of the speech for which you managed to stay awake?

EA: It was a strange speech, honestly. More a victory lap for his first month in office than anything else. And a number of the things he cited as foreign-policy successes early in the speech—withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, renaming the Gulf of Mexico—are not things your average administration might consider successes. As always with Trump, there were some things I quite agree on—Ukraine, for instance, or critical minerals—and some things that are just totally nuts.

Any big takeaways on your end?

MK: Well, one big takeaway from the past several days is that Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) is definitely back. Take the Oval Office fiasco with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for example. Democrats, the media, and Europeans all freaked out that Trump and Zelensky would never be able to work together again, that Trump was siding with Russia over traditional allies, and on and on.

And then in his big speech only a few days later, Trump announced that Zelensky was ready for peace and had agreed to sign the critical minerals deal.

I think everyone needs to take a breath and stop overreacting to the rhetorical and symbolic outrages (some real, but many invented) of the day and focus on real-world outcomes.

If, in the next six to 18 months, NATO allies are spending more and there is peace in Ukraine—which seems like a plausible outcome—that will be a significant foreign-policy success and a meaningful improvement for European security.

EA: Putting aside the inflammatory TDS term, there was a lot of this overreaction in the first Trump term, particularly from the media. What happened in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 was shocking and undiplomatic, but having watched the whole thing, I can’t say it was unreasonable. One reason world leaders typically don’t have their in-depth conversations in front of the cameras is because they do disagree. Zelensky kept pushing back on Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s policy preferences, and they eventually pushed back as well; the language barrier didn’t........

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