I arrived in Brussels at dawn, trailing the scent of duty-free bourbon and whatever questionable chemicals I’d ingested somewhere over the Atlantic. The city had the feel of an overgrown bank lobby, marble and bureaucracy stretching endlessly in every direction, occupied by men who had long since traded their souls for mid-tier diplomatic immunity. It was here, deep in the corridors of power, that I planned to do my best thinking—or, failing that, my best hallucinating.

I wandered the halls of the European Commission, watching the ghostly figures of diplomats float past, their voices blending into a multilingual dirge of policy jargon and quiet despair. I tried to listen, but everything sounded like a negotiation between androids. One man, some grizzled bureaucrat with a Luxembourg lapel pin, was explaining the finer points of transatlantic security policy to an intern with dead eyes and a clipboard. I leaned in, my brain firing at double speed, trying to follow the logic—but it was like listening to an opium-addled Jesuit debate the shape of the Earth with a broken radio.

Somewhere between the second espresso and the third paranoia spike, I realized I was late for my meeting with JD Vance—the Vice President himself, emissary of America’s latest schizophrenic rebranding effort. I buttoned up my coat, wiped the cold sweat from my forehead, and staggered toward the rendezvous point, ready to witness the latest chapter in the grand tradition of power and delusion.

I had wormed my way into the meeting under false pretenses, armed with a press badge that hadn’t been valid since the Obama administration and a duffel bag full of hastily acquired Belgian pharmaceuticals. Somewhere in the guts of the building, beneath the gold-leafed ceilings and the smell of old men’s cologne, JD Vance—the Vice President of these United States—was performing a delicate diplomatic maneuver: telling the Europeans to go [expletive] themselves while demanding their unwavering loyalty.

The room was packed with Eurocrats—pale, twitching men in suits that cost more than my rent, nodding in solemn horror as Vance leaned forward, grinning like a man about to explain the finer points of a Ponzi scheme.

“You Europeans need to start thinking for yourselves,” he said, punctuating the words with a triumphant slap of the table. “Stop being such obedient little lapdogs. It’s embarrassing.”

The Europeans exchanged glances, confused. These were men who had spent decades perfecting the art of servility—bowing to Washington, nodding along to whatever new scheme the Pentagon cooked up, grumbling only when the bill came due. One brave soul, some grim-faced technocrat from Berlin, cleared his throat.

“But we have been doing what you want us to do.”

Vance wagged a finger. “No, no, no, that wasn’t us. That was them. I mean, it was us, but it wasn’t really us. It was them, you understand?” He paused to take a sip of water, staring at the assembled diplomats like a televangelist waiting for his congregation to nod along.

“We are the real us. That was the impostor us. The confused us. The us that didn’t understand itself. It looked like us, it sounded like us, but deep down, it was a not us. A shadow us.” He waved his hand, as if dispelling some malignant ghost. “But now—you have the real us! The true us! Understand? So yes, it was wrong to follow us before, but it is right to follow us now, because this us—the current us—is the correct us. And if, in the future, a new us appears and says something different, you must never follow us, because that us will be the wrong us. Unless, of course, that us wins, in which case it will become the real us, and you’ll have to pretend this us never existed.”

There was a silence that seemed to stretch across the Atlantic. A Frenchman, pale and sweating, reached for his wine glass and drained it in one gulp. A Dutch official muttered something that sounded vaguely like a prayer.

A diplomat from London, the poor bastard, tried to find solid ground. “So… just to clarify…”

The Europeans stared at him, their diplomatic instincts short-circuiting. A German delegate, face pinched with concentration, tentatively repeated:

“So… the previous you was the not-you, but the not-you at the time believed it was you—even though, in reality, it was a shadow-you?”

Vance nodded furiously. “Exactly! A hollow us! An imposter us! A bastardized, off-brand, beta-version us! A conceptual us that lacked true us-ness!”

A French minister, sweating now, tried again. “But now, this you—your you—is the real you?”

Vance beamed. “The truest us! The fully self-actualized us! The post-larval, fully-formed, big-boy-pants-wearing us! This us is authenticated! Certified! Triple-distilled! ISO-compliant! This is us with a capital U! The us that knows it is us!”

A Dutch official, rubbing his temples, ventured: “But what if, in the future, a new us comes along, claiming that your us was actually another shadow-us?”

Vance’s eyes bulged. His hands flailed in the air like a televangelist fighting off invisible demons. “That us would be the false us—unless it becomes the winning us! Because history only remembers the victorious us as the real us! If a future us overwrites this us, then this us—this precious, noble, God-fearing us—will never have existed! It will be an un-personed us! A phantom us! A Mandela Effect us! And you will have to believe it, because belief itself will be rewritten! Do you see? Do you grasp the magnitude of us?!”

The room fell into stunned silence. A Finnish delegate, who had quietly been writing things down, put down his pen, nodded once, and walked out the door—never to be seen again.

“No time!” Vance barked, standing up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Now, here’s a list of things you need to improve on—Presto!”

He tossed it onto the table like a magician revealing the punchline to a bad trick.

I leaned over to catch a glimpse—bullet points in thick, blocky handwriting:

• Stop whining about trade.

• Buy more weapons.

• Be less German.

• Figure out what the hell is wrong with France.

• No more ‘strategic autonomy’—it makes us nervous.

• Love Israel more.

• Love China less.

• Stop calling it ‘neoliberalism,’ it makes us look bad.

• Smile more.

The Europeans looked down at the list, then back up at the Vice President, who was beaming.

“Any questions?”

Silence.

Vance grinned. “Perfect.”

And with that, he turned on his heel and marched out of the room, leaving the Europeans to stare at one another in quiet, dawning horror.

I drained the last of my contraband whiskey and slipped out the back, already halfway to the airport. The Atlantic alliance was fine, I decided. It had survived worse.