Trump will not assist a democracy under invasion by an autocracy. He will not support a friendly nation against a US enemy. He will not observe a nation’s fundamental right under the UN Charter to be free from the use of force against its territorial integrity or political independence.

In sum, he will not defend liberty, even at no risk to the US itself. Because we are not talking about a US military intervention to save Ukraine. No one is advocating that the US go to war against Russia.

We are talking about money. Trump is not even prepared to continue financial support to Ukraine.

When Britain’s Neville Chamberlain notoriously claimed that he’d achieved “peace with honour” by appeasing Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill retorted: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”

Trump isn’t even asked to commit to war. He has a choice between dishonour and giving aid. He chooses dishonour. Not to avoid war, not even to save money. The money is not a genuine concern. We know that because, while he likes to talk like a scrooge about American taxpayers’ money, in office he was a spendthrift, even before COVID.

Under Trump, the US national debt grew by $US8 trillion.

He took national debt as a proportion of the US economy to its highest since World War II. He’s not planning to abandon Ukraine to save American money but to gratify a brutal dictator and avowed American enemy. Vladimir Putin. Trump’s original Boss Bro.

Trump’s preternatural affinity with Putin is well established though poorly grasped. Remember when Putin fired the first volley of cruise missiles into Kyiv, Trump responded by declaring it “genius”. At the same time, Trump has a history of antagonism to Ukraine because he suspected it was concealing some dubious dealings of Joe Biden’s son.

Two of Trump’s former advisers have tried to explain his Boss Bro-mance. “My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” retired US general John Kelly and former chief of staff for Trump postulated in an interview with Jim Sciutto of CNN.

“He looked at Putin and Xi and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”

John Bolton, former national security adviser to Trump, has a similar explanation: “He views himself as a big guy. He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like [President Recep] Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail, and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

Are Americans alert to the fact that their alternative leader is so ready to sell out the very values by which they have defined themselves for generations? Merely to pander to Putin?

In his State of the Union address this week, Joe Biden tried to sound the klaxon as loudly as possible. His opening words: “In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. And he said, ‘I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.’ Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.

“President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.

“Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.”

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Is Biden going over the top by invoking Hitler? There are two relevant comparisons. First is that Putin, like Hitler, is a danger to the security of the continent. If he prevails in Ukraine, there are reasons to expect that he will continue his military drive into Europe. Certainly, Sweden and Finland think so. That’s why they’ve abandoned long traditions of neutrality and joined NATO.

But if Trump is president once more, will NATO still function? Trump said recently that if NATO members didn’t contribute a satisfactory – yet unspecified – amount of military spending, he’d encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want”. John Bolton draws the obvious conclusion: “NATO would be in real jeopardy.”

Second is that Trump himself is said to have invoked Hitler in his pantheon of Boss Bros. According to John Kelly in his Sciutto interview: “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

According to Kelly, Trump also envied Hitler’s hold on senior Nazi officers: “When I pointed out to him the German generals ... in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that. He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal, that we would do anything he wanted us to do.” Trump didn’t deny Kelly’s claims but in 2021 a spokesperson said Trump denied praising Hitler.

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Trump displayed the same set of instincts this week in the American debate about whether to ban TikTok. In office, Trump wanted to ban the Chinese-owned app as a threat to US national security. But now that the US House of Representatives has voted to ban TikTok, Trump has reversed his position.

Why? “Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump says. In other words, he’d rather gratify a foreign rival than allow an American business a chance to expand its market share. Again, why? Because he claims that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to interfere in the 2020 US election in favour of Biden.

Trump loves to invoke American patriotism. “Make America Great Again” and “America First”, for example. But these are just posturings. When it comes to a choice between the US national interest and Trump’s personal interests, America loses.

In truth, he has no conception of an American interest, only one of his own immediate interests. He’d rather aid US enemies than friends so long as it suited his personal fetishes and appetites. This does not make him a “tough guy” or a “big guy”. It makes him weak.

US allies and friends around the world, including Australia, must not expect a weak figure like Trump to defend them. And we can’t vote in American elections. Our only option is to prepare for a world with autocrats rampant and America absent.

Churchill might have counselled: “It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”

Peter Hartcher is international editor.