Many years ago, I lived next to a man named Smart Polite. Most people in the area called him by his initials, SP. The neighborhood was extremely violent so almost all of the residents there owned guns, which they used to protect themselves and their families. There was one mean guy in particular that everyone steered clear of. He was widely known to be armed to the teeth and he constantly threatened people.

After a while, everyone realized that the status quo was unsustainable. The neighborhood had become so saturated with guns that no one felt safe. The violence even started to spill over into some nearby counties. The local sheriff’s office offered the community’s members a deal. His force would beef up its presence and offer round-the-clock security in exchange for people handing over their weapons. SP, who had a large cache of guns, reluctantly took the deal and surrendered his weapons to the sheriff’s staff. Nearly everyone else followed suit.

I had already moved to a different part of the country when this arrangement between law enforcement and the residents occurred. But I learned through some of my contacts there that it didn’t take long for SP to realize the terrible mistake he had made by relinquishing his guns. The sheriff had somehow made a side deal with the neighborhood bully that allowed him to keep his ammunition. Realizing that everyone was defenseless, the tyrant’s threatening behavior quickly escalated. He had always had a particular antipathy toward SP and he began to terrorize him relentlessly.

Naturally, SP turned to the sheriff’s office for relief. To his horror, he mostly received tepid responses. Adding insult to injury, the sheriff soon began asking him to pay even for the ineffective security his office was providing. Part of the compensation demanded was going to be in the form of surrender of some personal assets, since the small business SP ran had almost collapsed due to lack of patronage.

SP is a fictional character that I concocted. His names, “Smart” and “Polite,” symbolize the Ukrainians that I got to know quite well during my time in the country as a student. Ukrainians are some of the most intellectually gifted and courteous people I have ever been associated with. The sheriff’s broken promise to SP exactly mirrors the situation that Ukraine finds itself in today.

Once upon a time, there existed something called an international community. The sheriff in that world, the U.S., together with some of its close allies, persuaded Ukraine and a couple of other countries to give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances. The promise was that if they came under attack at any point in future, “officers” would be sent to help defend and protect them. The agreement, known as the Budapest Memorandum, was part of the broader nuclear nonproliferation effort that was supposed to keep the world safe. Actually, this was a worse deal than the one SP was offered because in Ukraine’s case, it was coerced into handing over its arsenal to the neighborhood bully, Russia.

As happened in the fictional neighborhood, Russia soon attacked the newly vulnerable Ukraine. When it eventually tried to completely subjugate Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. did provide some assistance to help Ukraine defend itself. But in the three years that it has been raging, the war has been broadly described as a proxy conflict between democracy and autocracy. It has never been about the explicit obligation that the U.S. and its allies assumed to help protect Ukraine, when necessary, as stipulated in the Budapest Memorandum.

That vagueness, in my view, has been quite deliberate. It is a way for the U.S. to avoid taking direct responsibility for Ukraine’s protection. That has created a vacuum, which has been filled with all kinds of erroneous information about America spending too much money on a country in which it has no national interests.

Quite astonishingly, the Ukrainians themselves, for whatever reason, have not put a lot of emphasis on that security assurance they were given three decades ago. They largely make the same case about fighting to preserve democracy to safeguard the security of the wider Europe and, by extension, America. Those expressed high ideals have mostly fallen on deaf ears in the streets of America and elsewhere.

I think the Ukrainians have been way too polite when it comes to demanding what they were promised. If I were in their position, I would be shouting from the rooftops, day and night, reminding everyone about the agreement that led to the disposal of their nuclear arsenal. Instead, the Ukrainians have simply gone about their business of self-defense with unparalleled gallantry and tremendous dignity.

In his recent Wall Street Journal article, Casey Michel warned against the continued dismissal of Ukrainian concerns about Russian revanchism. He recalled how one former White House national security adviser characterized Ukrainians as “whiners” for constantly worrying about their security in that violent neighborhood. The official is said to have even claimed that the U.S. knew what was in Ukraine’s “long-term interest” better than the Ukrainians themselves did. That arrogance has been on full display in the last three years not only here in America, but globally. There are tens of thousands of armchair pundits across the world who seem to know what is better for Ukraine, and call the Ukrainians foolish for not submitting to Putin’s demands to avoid getting killed. The right to self-determination appears not to matter at all to these all-knowing characters.

Michel cautioned in his article that the Trump administration’s current policy on the war could lead to a re-nuclearization of Ukraine. He is saying exactly the same thing that I have been thinking these past few weeks as I have listened to President Trump and his top officials blame President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his people for starting the war with Russia. That blatantly false assertion and utter disrespect clearly demonstrate that in the current global environment, wealth and military power, in the form of possession of the deadliest of weapons, are the only things that can guarantee any nation’s sovereignty. North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world but no one will touch it because it has nuclear weapons.

I would be shocked if, behind the scenes, the Ukrainians were not already beginning the process of nuclearizing. Michel cited a poll that shows three-quarters of Ukrainians supporting acquisition of nuclear weapons. He went on to say that “It wouldn’t take much for Kyiv to jump-start its program, returning to nuclear status in a few months.” I fully agree with his assessment.

If anyone can build nuclear weapons quickly, it is the Ukrainians. When I was a student at Donetsk National Technical University, I had a Ukrainian classmate called Kyrmayev. I have sat in many classrooms in different continents and I can say without hesitation that Kyrmayev’s mind is the sharpest I have ever encountered. He liked going toe-to-toe with professors. We had one highly esteemed electrical engineering professor who was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He taught such high-level stuff that half the time, the entire class, with the exception of Kyrmayev, had no clue what he was talking about. Kyrmayev not only understood everything he said, but he frequently challenged him. Sometimes they argued for several minutes about obscure scientific theories while the rest of us, including the Soviet students, just sat back and enjoyed the show. Of course we had no idea what the banter was about, but we loved it nevertheless.

While Kyrmayev’s intellect may have been off-the-charts, the Ukrainians, in general, are supremely intelligent people. The ingenuity they have displayed during the past three years, building all kinds of sophisticated drones and other home-made weapons to defend themselves against the armed-to-the-teeth bully, is testament to that fact. It was a great privilege to have that opportunity to sit alongside them in various classrooms in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Donetsk for six years.

A world filled with many nuclear-armed countries is obviously not good for anyone. But in life, sometimes people have to do what they have to do. The sheriff failed SP rather badly. The U.S. is doing even worse. It is blaming the victim and insulting him on top of it. Can anyone blame Ukraine if it decides to reacquire nuclear weapons?