Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger remarked in 2018, “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.”

That general first-term comment might as well be marching orders for Trump’s second-term foreign policy. From policy and speeches to Friday’s blowup in the Oval Office with the president of Ukraine, everything Trump is doing and saying, and everything his vice president is saying and doing, is ruthlessly stripping away pretenses around the United States, its alliances and the situation in the world.

A pretense: The United States is capable of playing the hegemonic role it played 20 years ago, fully supporting democratic allies in every region, standing ready to fight wars across multiple theaters, refusing any compromise with authoritarianism. The reality: America is overstretched, a more multipolar world requires making deals with unpleasant regimes, and we need to recalibrate and retrench in ways that will require much more of our allies.

A pretense: Our European allies are strong nations and equal partners in protecting the security of the world. The reality: Europe has been badly misgoverned by its establishment, once-lionized figures like Angela Merkel above all. Its economic position is parlous, its demographic situation is miserable and its military capacities have atrophied, and most of the chest-thumping about a revival of European power is empty talk and fantasy politics.

A pretense: With enough military aid and moral support, the Ukrainians can roll back the Russians, secure their prewar borders and eventually join NATO. The reality: The war is stalemated, there is no path to Ukrainian victory short of a direct American intervention, some kind of negotiated settlement is inevitable, and NATO membership was never realistically in the cards.

Many of these realities have been understood by American policymakers in both parties for some time. It’s why Barack Obama sought a “pivot to Asia” and proceeded cautiously when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea. It’s why Joe Biden pulled out of Afghanistan. And it’s why the Biden team supported Ukraine but with limits, and why it was clashing with Volodymyr Zelensky behind the scenes even in the first year of war.

And there is value in speaking more openly about uncomfortable realities. People need to know that the world is not what it was in 2000 or 2012. They need to understand the kind of issues that JD Vance raised in his controversial speech in Munich criticizing Europe’s failed approach to immigration, its traducements of free speech, its deficit of democratic legitimacy.

They need to understand that the armistice that the Trump administration seems to want to negotiate with Russia may not look all that different from the endgame that would have developed under a Democratic president.

And they need to grasp why, exactly, Vance snapped at Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday after the Ukrainian president began lecturing his hosts on why it’s impossible to negotiate with Putin — because the world is what it is, and right now negotiating with untrustworthy rivals is a necessity that can’t be wished away.

However: Pretense in foreign policy is not always the same thing as self-deception. It’s also just a form of politesse, of circling uncomfortable subjects and making countries that are in your debt or whom you need to strong-arm feel like they’re friends and not just subjects. It’s a way to give foreign leaders space to do what you want while also handling their own domestic audiences, making sure that you aren’t accidentally empowering parties hostile to your policies (as may happen in our northern neighbor if Trump’s war of words with Justin Trudeau saves the Liberal Party in the next election), and generally draping power politics in the garments of idealism.

Most of the foreign policy team around Trump, so far as I can tell, imagines itself doing what realist Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon have done in the past — matching means and ends, accepting lesser evils to avoid greater ones, and delivering necessary shock therapy for a system of alliances that needs it.

But those realist presidents were also extremely fluent in the language of diplomacy — they could wax idealistic when the situation called for it, speak smoothly even when they were acting ruthlessly, and settle allies down as well as trigger them.

Trump doesn’t speak diplomatically and never will. But his first-term foreign policy succeeded with the president playing the heavy while his appointees offered normalcy, and his second term to date needs more of that balance — someone to twist arms and someone to smooth feathers, someone to speak frankly and someone to keep the frankest truth-telling off-camera.

And someone — and this applies to the administration’s domestic policy as well — to make sure that when you’re doing shock therapy, there’s a quick way to turn the electricity back down.