To fully grasp the significance of the scandal in Washington, we must look back. When President John F. Kennedy told the residents of West Berlin, surrounded by a wall and barbed wire, "Ich bin ein Berliner!" in 1963, he did not ask if there were rare earth metals, oil, or gold in the divided city's soil. With a single phrase, Kennedy gave the people of West Berlin, and thus West Germans, a promise of protection.

This promise was more valuable than any article on mutual defense in NATO and remained unchanged until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

How much the world has changed was demonstrated by the current U.S. President Donald Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance: they brazenly and mockingly humiliated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in public and sent him home empty-handed — merely because he asked for security guarantees in exchange for access to his country's natural resources.

Trump openly threatened to stop military aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for survival. And now all of Europe is asking itself: Wasn't America our friend just recently?

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