European leaders, still reeling from vice-president JD Vance’s frank but cautionary speech at the Munich Security Conference, seemed stunned by last week’s White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. But even before he was re-elected, Trump had made it clear that some old certainties of trans-Atlantic relations no longer hold.

Most obviously, Americans are less willing to subsidize Western Europe’s low defense spending while they go into increasing debt pursuing impossible green energy targets and maintaining unsustainable social benefits. Europeans appear surprised that Trump is holding them more accountable for their own policy priorities while putting American interests first. Yet that’s what he said he’d do.

But this is about more than differences on matters of policy. Many have read Trump’s best-selling Art of the Deal for insight into his unique negotiating style. To help understand what really happened during the Trump-Zelensky dust-up, however, there is another book they should read: JD Vance’s autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy.

“Hillbilly” is slang for the people who settled in and around the southern Appalachian mountains. Many descended from the Protestant Scots who were sent to “settle” Ireland after Oliver Cromwell ruthlessly pacified it. These Scots-Irish were of necessity a tough people, and violent when provoked.

>>> Hard Truths in Munich

In a time when no one shuts up about their “trauma”, reading Vance plainly discuss a childhood that truly qualifies as traumatic, while drawing lessons from it and emerging stronger, is a model of American stoicism. Vance’s sympathetic but honest portrayal of his origins shows he’s proud of his culture, yet has been able to overcome its limiting aspects.

Vance’s father was out of the picture for much of his life. His mother was afflicted by drug addiction and poor relationships. The strongest figures in young JD’s life were his maternal grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw. Mamaw was a singular Appalachian matriarch: profane, tough as nails, armed to the teeth, and ready to go through hell for her family.

Hillbillies are known to be fiercely loyal to family and suspicious of strangers. Their inhospitable mountains, foothills, valleys, and “hollers” (hollows), once peopled, were not then re-settled by later waves of migrants like the rest of the United States.

Hillbillies’ propensity for generational strife is exemplified by the Hatfields and McCoys, a legendary 19th century family feud that is still part of American folklore. As Vance describes it, in hillbilly culture, no perceived slight to family honor is easily let go.

One American president who would have understood this is Andrew Jackson (1828-1836), who grew up in the Carolina foothills, and to whom Trump is sometimes compared. As a 13-year-old, Jackson was beaten by a British soldier during the American Revolution, an insult he never forgot.

Jackson was later a successful general in the War of 1812, where he led the United States to victory in the Battle of New Orleans. He once killed a man in a duel to protect his reputation and that of his beloved wife, Rachel.

Like Jackson, Vance took the best from his upbringing and overcame the worst. Barely 40, Vance has had a meteoric career from the Marines, to Yale Law School, the Senate, and now the vice-presidency.

Watching his irritation when Zelensky aired grievances inside the Oval Office was a reminder of America’s, and particularly Appalachia’s, honor culture and what happens when guests are judged to breach the code. Zelensky failed to read the room, as CNN’s Scott Jennings explained. His hosts felt insulted.

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There are some hard truths about Ukraine that Americans instinctively understand, but our elites, and European elites, seem determined not to get.

Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia or Cuba or Vietnam. It is a unique 21st century conflict that requires a tailored solution and not tired appeals to support Zelensky “for as long as it takes”, which as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has written, “hardly amounted to a real strategy”.

No one thinks that Ukraine can reclaim all of the land that Russia took since 2014. Other than outright defeat, then, the only option remaining is a truce like that which froze the Korean War, leaving no one happy but ending the fighting before Ukraine runs out of men, weapons, and allies.

As Heritage’s Victoria Coates recently explained on Fox News, after two years we’re now in “a math situation” where Putin simply has more soldiers and material, “so we need to get to a negotiated settlement before we’re fighting to the last Ukrainian”.

To make this a moral question is pointless. Putin was wrong to invade, but he did. If Europe expected the U.S. to keep footing the bill with no plausible end in sight, they must think again.

Unless the Europeans are willing to put up the means and men to keep him tilting at the windmill, a deal has to be struck with Russia. And Zelensky’s public intemperance cost his country some bargaining capital.