In the UK the received wisdom, long after the pager disappeared, remains that success is defined by the clarity and unity of the message. The imminent electoral failure for any party is invariably signalled by the spectacle of MPs and ministers going off on constituency-courting sprees of their own. Yet new incumbents in Downing Street, buoyed by a fresh mandate, still understand coherence as the route to public respect.

Across the Atlantic, however, Donald Trump has now smashed the tried-and-tested delivery system. In its place comes something much more complex, apparently chaotic and instinctively manipulative: the “multi-message”. In place of details he generates “vibes” and his message is spread by a broad cast of actors, only some of whom have formal political roles or are even nominally accountable to the American public.

All the while, unelected figures from Elon Musk to Joe Rogan keep alive a bubbling, rolling dialogue on X and YouTube, setting the tone for the Trumpian take on any given topic, even before the President himself has officially adopted it. Trump himself is adept at sending out multiple signals, often shifting position or contradicting himself. The perpetual uncertainty generated by this approach, accelerated by its rapid delivery on social media, has a destabilizing, mesmerizing effect on domestic opponents and potential foreign allies alike.

Individual members of Trump’s entourage, particularly Musk, are effectively licensed to crash through all previously accepted boundaries of political protocol and veracity. In January, for instance, the technocrat’s relentless and baseless online attacks on Keir Starmer’s history as director of public prosecutions represented outrageous libels that 10 or even five years ago would have placed the accuser beyond the pale.

Musk — despite wild attacks on friendly heads of state, his energetic support of the far-Right AfD in Germany, or even his admission that “some of the things I say will be incorrect” — remains Trump’s most visible henchman. Yet when the President himself talked about Starmer later that same month, he was warm and emollient. “I get along with him well,” he said. “I like him a lot. He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and he’s done a very good job so far.” In Trump’s world, such a statement is not at all incompatible with his closest political ally’s false accusation that Starmer is guilty of heinous moral crimes for which he should be literally imprisoned.

Such is the nature of the multi-message, which depends on the unbolting of speech from verifiable truth, and the unapologetic liberation of rhetoric from consistency. In America’s new sphere, with Trump at its heart, the primary function of speech is not to build a shared understanding towards a common purpose but rather to produce an effect. The intended effect of Musk’s attacks, pumped out to millions online, was to smear Starmer’s reputation and weaken his popular support. Meanwhile, Trump’s praise was aimed at peeling Starmer away from potential European allies, while dangling the hope that cultivating a warm personal relationship with the President might protect the UK from economic tariffs. While these two messages might appear contradictory, they have a unified logic: a weakened prime minister, who is nonetheless fighting to defend his country’s interests, is more liable to agree to demands which he might otherwise refuse. This logic of dual effect is why Trump never chided Musk for his intemperate comments.

For adherents of the old post-war politics, the newly fluid, multi-message order is proving disorienting. So too is its orchestration and staging. Take, for instance, the recent, acrimonious Oval Office meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his Vice President JD Vance. Despite what some more credulous observers may have believed, it was clearly very far from a spontaneous personality clash which erupted out of nowhere.

For months beforehand, Musk and Donald Trump Jr had laid the groundwork by assiduously promoting contempt for Zelensky online, sharing memes which mocked and belittled him. They presented him as a chancer and supplicant, the Home Alone 2 kid intent on fleecing Trump and the US taxpayer for the defense of a corrupt administration. On his podcast last November, Rogan expressed his furious impatience over Ukraine’s resistance to a Russian invasion. “Fuck you people!” he cried. “You people are about to start World War Three!” Earlier this year, meanwhile, Trump dubbed Zelensky “a dictator without elections” on Truth Social (despite the practical impossibility of holding elections in the midst of war) and suggested that Kyiv “never should have started it” (despite Russia being the invader).

A few days later, though, General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy in Ukraine, met Zelensky and praised him as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war” — something which may have reflected Kellogg’s genuine opinion, but also offered worried European leaders a strand of reassurance. At the same time, Musk called Zelensky “a fraud machine feeding off dead bodies of soldiers”. Yet when Trump was asked about calling Zelensky a “dictator” during Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House, he dissimulated. “Did I say that?” he asked aloud. “I can’t believe I said that.” The head-spinning, multi-message mechanism for smear, distraction and disinformation was in full swing.

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It’s in this context that we come to Trump’s infamous meeting with Zelensky at the White House. It was purportedly arranged to sign a deal with Trump for the extraction of Ukrainian minerals — though, as yet, without any assurances of US protection if Putin reinvaded after a ceasefire. The descent into wider ill humor was triggered by a question over sartorial etiquette. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” one reporter suddenly asked Zelensky. “Do you own a suit?”

This strange interjection can be understood by who that journalist was. Brian Glenn works for the “Real America’s Voice” cable network, and is the partner of the far-Right Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He was a recent addition to the White House press pool after Trump banned the Associated Press, took over control of access from the White House Correspondents’ Association, and hand-picked a number of supportive outlets from outside “legacy media”. It is frankly inconceivable that Glenn would ask such an aggressive question of a foreign dignitary without prior sanction from the very top, a suspicion intensified by the wink which Trump aimed at the reporter after his question.

As JD Vance escalated the argument, accusing Zelensky of disrespect and ingratitude, Trump weighed in with the same language as Rogan: “You’re gambling with World War Three!” The US president’s subsequent remark — “this is going to be great television” — was a pat on the back for his own orchestrated reality, casting a dignified Zelensky, attempting in a second language to correct untruths, in the role of a grifting ingrate. But a staged row, followed by a peremptory dismissal, is territory in which Trump feels comfortable: his long-running role in The Apprentice was his bridge to his first successful run at the presidency.

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There’s another parallel, too, with the way in which the Trump administration advances its aims: the coercive control of the domestic abuser. Such people are masters of the shifting multi-message: first charming, then cruel; gaslighting, insulting and complimenting; denying things they said, and keeping the more vulnerable person invested with promises of a future together, while chipping away at their external friendships and sense of self. This is not a comparison that should offend the administration, since members of Trump’s circle apparently helped facilitate the flight to the US from Romania of the misogynist online influencer Andrew Tate, who has often boasted about pimping and abusing women, and is being investigated in the UK for rape and human trafficking. The action has sparked outrage from the Republican governor of Florida, where Tate arrived.

An idea common to many victims of abuse, at least for a time, is that if you only play the abusers’ tightening game very carefully, you will be all right where others aren’t. Keep smiling, give him all the things he likes, speak softly, don’t wind him up. Something of this can be spotted in commentary about Zelensky: he should have humored Trump and Vance, critics say, instead of trying to correct their false assertions. But to argue this is to miss the point. Starmer’s visit went well largely because the Trump team wanted it to, and Zelensky’s imploded for the same reason.

The supposed offense given by Zelensky will be used as an excuse to further sideline Ukraine from a future US-Russia deal. Trump’s performative exasperation — “America will not put up with it for much longer!” — has already been used to suspend US military arms to Ukraine, and to press Zelensky into a minerals deal without a security guarantee. It should not go unnoticed that Musk’s new demand is that the US should leave NATO.

There is a warning here for Britain. It is time to wake up from the last woozy traces of anesthetic concerning the historic “special relationship” with a clear-eyed understanding of the malign profundity of the change in Washington. Even as the UK’s survival strategy is under construction, it really needs to start reading the multi-message.

Even the most ardent supporters of the maximalist victory-at-all-costs narrative are now starting to admit that the Nato-backed counteroffensive has failed. Despite billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of casualties, Ukraine has barely made any territorial gains, while Russia continues to make significant advances, mostly in the north-east.

In a repeat of its year-long campaign to capture the town of Bakhmut, Russia is now doubling down on its efforts to capture the eastern city of Avdiivka, which has been a symbol of Ukrainian resistance since 2014. According to Oleksiy Arestovych, Zelenskyy’s presidential advisor until January 2023 and now a staunch opponent, the fall of Avdiivka, which would be the seventh city in a row lost by Ukraine, is almost certain. “Everyone in the military knows that troops from the southern front have been transferred to Avdiivka; this means goodbye to the southern offensive,” he further noted.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Arestovych also called the counteroffensive a “disaster” and directly accused Zelenskyy of making several strategic mistakes: “There will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future,” he said. Even the US’s much-vaunted provision of long-range ATACMS missiles — which have allowed Ukraine to strike at several targets in Crimea — appear to be falling short of expectations: Russia’s military recently claimed that it had shot down two of them, showing that it is rapidly adapting to new military circumstances.

This reality — which many had predicted — is now starting to dawn even on Western pro-war pundits. As Max Hastings, a long-time believer in military support for Ukraine, put it, “whatever hawkish blowhards may say, the liberation of Crimea and the eastern Donbas is unlikely to happen”.

The real shocker, however, is that this is now being acknowledged, if in slightly more nuanced terms, by Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny. Last week, in a surprisingly frank interview with The Economist, Zaluzhny said that “just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough”. This would require some major military-technological innovation — but “there is no sign that this is around the corner”, he added.

Zaluzhny made several other striking admissions. According to the general, Russia lost at least 150,000 troops — a much lower estimate than the numbers previously circulated by Ukrainian and Western sources. If that is true, it means that Russia has lost almost as many troops as Ukraine, despite having a much larger population; US and European estimates put the Ukrainian death toll at well above 100,000. Not only has this undercut Ukraine’s assumption that it could stop Russia by bleeding its troops, as Zaluzhny admits, but it reveals that, in fact, it is Ukraine that has been bled of troops, in large part as a result of the counteroffensive itself. As the general put it: “Sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.” The Government, in response, has reacted by enacting harsher conscription policies, but these are already showing their limits. As the Deputy Minister of Defence Natalia Kalmykova recently admitted in a television interview, “hundreds of thousands of citizens are currently trying to avoid mobilisation”.

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Zaluzhny doesn’t go as far as saying that the offensive should be abandoned, but this is one conclusion that could be drawn from his assessment that the war has reached a stalemate. Given Zaluzhny’s rank — and the fact that he went on record with this extremely bleak analysis — it’s not surprising to learn that this assessment is shared by most people in Zelenskyy’s entourage. In last week’s Time magazine cover story, Simon Shuster claimed that “Zelenskyy’s associates themselves are extremely skeptical about the [current] policy”.

The one person who seems unwilling to face reality, however, is Zelenskyy himself. In a recent interview with NBC, the Ukrainian president rebuked the notion that the war is in a stalemate — and indeed his office publicly chastised Zaluzhny for his claims, suggesting that his comments would help the Russian invasion. As The New York Times notes, this “signal[s] an emerging rift between the military and civilian leadership at an already challenging time for Ukraine”, as testified by the recent dismissal of Ukraine’s head of special operations forces. In the aforementioned interview, Zelenskyy reiterated his long-standing position: that Ukraine will not negotiate with Russia until it entirely withdraws from Ukrainian territories, concluding that Ukraine is not ready to concede its freedom to the “fucking terrorist Putin”.

As Shuster noted, however, “Zelenskyy’s belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers”, who described Zelenskyy’s conviction as “immovable, verging on the messianic”. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides told Shuster in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

Such pessimism, and distrust in the country’s civilian leadership, is palpable even on the frontlines. “We’re not moving forward,” the aide said. Some frontline commanders, he continued, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the president. He further noted that, even if the US and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, Ukraine doesn’t have enough troops to use them.

The image of Zelenskyy that emerges is thus a truly desperate one: an increasingly isolated and delusional leader, pacing up and down his bunker, demanding a total military victory that everyone knows to be impossible. What’s tragic is that many of the claims now being aired by Zelenskyy’s own people have been made by critics of Nato strategy in Ukraine for over a year — only to be dismissed as “Putin talking points”. How many lives were sacrificed in the pursuit of an impossible military aim? And how many could have been saved if the West had been more willing to tolerate an open discussion about the limitations of Ukraine’s, and Nato’s, stated aims?

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Just 10 months ago, after all, Shuster himself was among those lionising Zelenskyy, writing the article in which the Ukrainian president was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, helping to forge the Hollywood-esque character he now can’t escape. Back then, the Western media had its own talking points, but they now appear to have changed. Shuster’s latest article, and others along the same lines, don’t just signal a rift among Ukrainian ranks — but among Western ranks as well. The message to Zelenskyy from certain quarters seems to be: “It’s time to fall in line.”

So, what comes next? Given the situation, there aren’t many options left for Ukraine. One is to hunker down and prepare for a long war of attrition — one in which Russia has the advantage, as Zaluzhny himself notes. But this would require a constant supply of weapons from the West, in even greater quantities than now, for which there is declining political support, especially in the US. Just before Hamas’s attack, Congress had frozen US aid to Ukraine.

Biden hoped to overcome Republican resistance to sending more money to Ukraine by linking aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel (for which there is overwhelming bipartisan support) into a single bill worth a whopping $100 billion. To further drive the message home, the President drew a direct link between Putin and Hamas: “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy.” He also reiterated the claim that “if we don’t stop Putin’s appetite for power and control in Ukraine, he won’t limit himself just to Ukraine”.

Such excitable arguments, however, increasingly carry less weight in Washington. Indeed, the new GOP House speaker, Mike Johnson, spurned Biden’s request and demanded a vote on Israel aid alone, in a testament to just how toxic the issue of funding for Ukraine has become among Republicans. The US announced a new $425 million security package last Friday, but fell way short of the $60 billion requested by the White House. It’s likely that a new round of aid for Ukraine will be approved in the end, but it’s clear that US support for Ukraine is nearing its expiry date.

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Once that happens, given the EU is neither able nor willing to plug the gap left by the US, Ukraine will be left with no other choice but to negotiate a truce, if not an actual peace deal, which will necessarily involve some kind of territorial compromise with Russia. According to NBC, the West has already begun secret talks with the Ukrainian government about what peace negotiations with Russia might entail. Publicly, however, the topic is still taboo — not only because it would be a de facto admission of defeat for Nato, but also because it would have to explain why it prohibited Kyiv from conducting peace negotiations with Moscow in March 2022, when Ukraine had a chance to end the conflict on better terms than it could ever hope for today.

This situation has been further complicated in the past month. For the wars in Israel-Gaza and Ukraine are more closely related than one may think — not in the simplistic good-versus-evil terms used by Biden, but because they effectively represent two fronts of a global proxy war in which the West is pitted against a growing front encompassing Russia, China and Iran. This is why the West can’t accept a public defeat in Ukraine at the moment. What happens in the Middle East has direct implications for the conflict in Ukraine and vice versa, and both sides know it.

Ultimately, however, just as in Ukraine, it is hard to see how the West can win in Gaza. Even if Israel succeeds in completely eradicating Hamas, the high civilian death count will only harden anti-Western sentiments in the region, and beyond. If the West believed encouraging war would rekindle its waning influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, on both fronts, it seems we are fighting a losing battle.