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All around the world, big, strong men with tears in their eyes are coming up to Donald Trump and saying, “Sir, you’re a loser.”

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. A brief update on something that has palpably changed in the world in the last few days.

As regular watchers of Donald Trump and regular readers of mine know, Trump has a thing about insisting that people treat him with immense respect — the big strong men with tears in their eyes thing, “Sir” stories. And in particular about believing that the world despised America under Joe Biden and respects it now under his leadership, which was never true either in the first part or the second.

But it is true that until quite recently, many people in the world at least felt obliged to pretend to respect Trump, felt obliged to flatter him, to stifle the negative feelings that they were having about the course of the United States under current management. And maybe Trump actually took these kind of coerced professions of respect as reality. But in the last few days, suddenly the masks are off.

Volodymyr Zelensky just yesterday tweeted out a part of an interview that he gave in which he said, among other things, “In my view, Russia played the Americans again.”

So it was just saying, basically, that Trump is working with the Russians, which obviously he’s known and has surely thought for a long, long time. But to say it that openly is something new.

Zelensky — not a big strong man — but Zelensky is a tough guy. Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of Britain is, alas, not. But also Starmer just in a statement said that we’re tired of a world in which, I’ll quote, “bills go up or down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump.” Equivalence, Trump and Putin in the same sentence, in the same breath, that’s pretty stiff stuff.

And Starmer has been notable in trying to preserve the special relationship, avoid offending Trump, trying to make him get a few points off the tariff rate, whatever. But now Starmer is pretty much openly saying, you know, you are the problem and we don’t trust you.

What’s this about? Well, obviously, the United States went to war with a fourth rate power, Iran, and lost. Exactly how that plays out, we don’t know. But it was truly impressive how poorly the United States military and US strategic thinking has played out here.

The United States has also proved both temperamental and weak, lashing out at our erstwhile allies and veering between threats of war crimes and then what looks a whole lot like abject surrender.

So the world no longer either fears or trusts us. It turns out that our military might is not what it was cracked up to be, and our reliability is essentially zero at this point. We can’t count on the United States to do anything that it has promised. It’s a world in which the hegemon has basically gone AWOL. So that’s a big thing.

There’s another story which I think is important, which has kind of has been overshadowed by the debacle in Iran: The bigger ongoing war, which is Ukraine-Russia, is not going well for Russia. It is, if anything, tilting increasingly in Ukraine’s favor. Now, what’s interesting about that, why is that relevant?

Trump is basically on the side of Putin. He’s been unwilling and probably unable to just openly support Russia but has effectively pulled all aid from Ukraine, There’s essentially no money no military aid, no economic aid flowing from the US to Ukraine anymore — it’s all on the Europeans. The Europeans have still been buying some U.S. weapons and transferring them on to Ukraine, but that’s been largely choked off. And I think the assumption was that Ukraine would be in grave danger, would perhaps collapse without American support.

Not happening. What’s actually happening is that Ukraine appears to be gaining the upper hand in the drone war, which is what this war is mostly about. And Ukraine’s success in ada