“If you didn’t have our military equipment,” Trump says, leaning back, fingers interlocked, “if you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks.” Smirking. Amused. A cat playing with a half-dead mouse, wondering if it’s even worth the kill. The truth, hard and cold, spills onto the carpet like spilled blood: Ukraine doesn’t matter. Ukraine is a pawn. America deals in interests, not charity.

JD Vance, the golden boy of the Rust Belt, stands beside him, eyes like steel, mouth set in that grim way men have when they know they hold the bigger gun. “Peace,” he says, “is the only path forward.” Zelensky bristles — no, he snarls. Like a cornered hyena. He wants war, because without war, he is nothing. Without war, he fades into the trash heap of forgotten revolutionaries, another puppet left out in the rain.

Trump lets him squirm. He loves it. “You’re gambling with World War Three,” he says, voice thick with knowing. This isn’t a game of ideals. This isn’t good versus evil. This is a numbers game, and Ukraine’s debt is mounting. No more blank checks. No more free weapons. No more bending over for a man who thinks he can lecture the master of the deal.

Carl Schmitt grins from the grave. The sovereign is he who decides the exception. And here is Trump, drawing the line. No more eternal war, no more forced loyalties. America is sovereign, and Ukraine? Ukraine is just another problem to be solved. Friend? Foe? The difference is paper-thin, a contract waiting to be signed or shredded. Zelensky, for all his screaming about democracy and morality, doesn’t understand the game. Doesn’t understand that power is the only truth.

The decision is the event that defines the sovereign. In the clash of nations, there is no morality, only the friend and the enemy. Trump, standing as the sovereign, names the enemy not by ideology but by necessity. Zelensky is the supplicant who mistakes patronage for loyalty, who believes war can be eternal if the right pockets are lined. But the exception has been declared. America retracts its indulgence, and in that moment, Ukraine’s fate is no longer its own. Power is not in pleading but in the ability to decide, to cut, to sever. The world does not belong to those who beg. It belongs to those who dictate the terms.

The meeting doesn’t end — it implodes. No press conference. No handshakes. Just silence, the void of unspoken war. Trump wipes his hands of it. “Come back when you’re ready for peace,” he says. Dismisses him like a bad debt, like a spurned courtesan. Zelensky scurries away, the smell of failure clinging to him.

And the empire moves on.

Vance stands tall. He sees the future. He sees a nation breaking free from its endless self-inflicted wounds. He knows the war machine is a scam, a churn of dollars and dead bodies. He knows America’s strength isn’t in saving broken nations but in protecting its own.

Zelensky? He’ll run back to Europe, plead like a dethroned vassal, gnaw at whatever scraps the EU throws him. Maybe he’ll realize, in the dark corners of his sleepless nights, that the world never owed him anything. Maybe he’ll understand that gratitude and power are the only currencies that matter.

And Trump, still smiling, still towering, still in control, has made the decision. Sovereignty. Power. The exception.

The war, his war, America’s war, will end on his terms.

Or not at all.