Ukraine’s president needs to win American hearts and minds for a war that stems from America’s failure to win hearts and minds.

(Originally published Dec. 21 in “What in the World“) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is reportedly going to pay a surprise visit today to Washington, D.C.

The visit comes as Zelensky warns Russia is poised to launch a fresh invasion force from Belarus. Zelensky is coming to thank the U.S. for $20 billion in weapons the U.S. has given Ukraine and the $45 billion in aid to Ukraine Congress is due to pass this week, but also to ask for more. “We are grateful,” he said from the besieged city of Bakhmut, “but it is not enough. It is a hint — it is not enough.” (Congress is earmarking $1 billion, by comparison, to help poor countries cope with climate change. U.S. President Joe Biden had pledged almost $12 billion.)

Zelensky needs to deliver a rousing speech that convinces the American public to ignore growing Republican threats to curtail U.S. support and instead keep enabling his hard-line position not to negotiate away an inch of Ukrainian territory to Russia, including Crimea, even at the risk of nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West. It’s a position that jibes with Washington’s decision to ignore Russia’s historic paranoia about invasion from the West (and the South and the East, for that matter) and to avoid the kind of humiliation since the fall of the Soviet Union that has fed the revanchism of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, Washington has pursued a winner-takes-all, our-way-or-the-highway, all-sticks-few-carrots approach to foreign policy since 9/11—and even since 1991—that has alienated its allies, emboldened its enemies and sowed resentment and mistrust about American intentions around the globe.

For a discussion of the consequences of Washington’s over-reliance on military force at the expense of diplomacy and soft power, read former CIA Clandestine Service Senior Operations Officer Douglas London’s latest piece in Foreign Affairs. While its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks across the Arab world have cost it a generation of goodwill, Washington’s neglect of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the absence of a direct military challenge have enabled China to steal a march in both regions that Washington is only now belatedly trying to redress. More damaging still is the hypocrisy of a foreign policy that professes to oppose autocrats like China’s Xi Jinping by cozying up to others like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

As London concludes:

During the early years of the Cold War, U.S. leaders’ claims about American exceptionalism were widely tolerated, even respected. But U.S. solipsism has deepened since the end of the Cold War, and the effective soft-power programs that the United States established during those years have been drastically cut back. The goodwill Washington built through educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, and other forms of public diplomacy was cost effective, especially compared with billion-dollar military programs. Moreover, that kind of slowly nurtured goodwill endures for decades. But it has been wearing thin in much of the world, and there is no longer enough of it to outweigh the kinds of grievances that can be easily fanned to fuel terrorist movements or great-power rivalries.