When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to the U.S. Congress in Washington recently — delivering an urgent, important, masterfully crafted and expertly delivered address on the wartime needs and endless resolve of his nation — I think he put an exclamation point on his role as 2022’s international person of the year.
A comic actor thrust into the role of this century’s Winston Churchill and playing it near perfectly, the small country he leads standing up against all odds against an all-out attack from an authoritarian superpower, rallying the world’s democracies to his side. Showing the liberals in the comfortable West not only what remains worth fighting for, but that it remains possible to win.
When Russia attacked earlier this year while I was reporting from Washington, many experts were measuring the war’s projected timeline in weeks — Russia was just too strong for Ukraine to have any hope of repelling an attack, Vladimir Putin too vicious an evil mastermind to stand up to.
That’s the defining aspect of the Emperor in the story of the New Clothes — that he’s so convinced of the story of his own finery that he proudly parades it around for all to see.
When Zelenskyy appeared in Washington this month, we might have also have been reminded of how his visit to the White House was something he’s been seeking for some time. His request to Trump for a visit in 2019 led Trump to make some demands of his own — which through an impeachment trial unmasked the former president as a street-level grifter using the presidency as a political extortion racket.
Zelenskyy, it appears, has been calling our attention to the nakedness of these figures for some time. It’s just this year, the power of his own principles and resolve — truly glorious robes for a leader to wear — stood in ever starker contrast.
Elon and SBF suck, Zelenskyy great....