Since 2017, Germany has led NATO’s multinational force in Lithuania, with troops from eight other countries rotating in and out to serve alongside German forces. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted Vilnius to seek firmer guarantees that its allies would come to its defense if the Baltic states became the Kremlin’s next target. Berlin responded by committing to permanently station an armored brigade in Lithuania, establishing a combat-ready deterrent on NATO’s northeastern flank. The move is unprecedented for the Bundeswehr: this is its first permanent military deployment abroad since the Second World War. Latvia and Estonia sought similar commitments from Canada and the UK, respectively, but Lithuania alone secured an entire brigade.

Addressing parliament in Vilnius two years ago, Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius promised that German troops would stand shoulder to shoulder with their Lithuanian counterparts, ready to defend the country — part of a wider Alliance commitment to protect every inch of NATO territory. A year later, in May 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz attended the commissioning ceremony of the newly created 45th Panzer Brigade against the backdrop of a grand neoclassical basilica in Vilnius’s Cathedral Square. “The security of Lithuania is also our security”, he declared. “The protection of Vilnius is the protection of Berlin.” 

The brigade has its own coat of arms, worn on every soldier’s uniform. A black Staufer lion, the heraldic emblem of Germany’s medieval Hohenstaufen dynasty, stands next to a sword and Gediminas’s Tower, one of Vilnius’s most famous landmarks. Green, red, black and gold, the colors of the German and Lithuanian flags, tie the design together. 

Germany’s newly formed brigade will be supplied with state-of-the-art equipment designed to repel a potential Russian attack, including kamikaze drones, Leopard 2 A8 main battle tanks, Puma infantry fighting vehicles, and Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzers. It brings together combat battalions from Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, backed by artillery, reconnaissance, armored engineers, logistics and signals units. Next month, more than 700 drones will take to the skies as the 45th Brigade puts new reconnaissance, strike and loitering munition capabilities to the test. 

The arrival of the 45th Brigade marks a major shift in how NATO plans to defend the Baltics. Under the old “tripwire” strategy, a small force would be expected to hold off an attack until allies arrived to push the invaders back. Now, the aim is to stop an invasion from the outset. That means keeping tanks and other heavy equipment in Lithuania, ready to fight, rather than waiting weeks for them to arrive from Germany or other NATO countries.

One of the brigade’s main jobs is protecting the Suwałki Gap, a 40-mile strip of land along the border between Poland and Lithuania — the vital land link between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO. It’s the region’s Achilles Heel or “neuralgic point”, as the German Lieutenant Colonel escorting me puts it. 

We drive through a small village and stop at a level crossing. A freight train rumbles past, heading west from neighboring Belarus towards Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. Perched on the Baltic Sea, it is a Russian island inside the European Union, sandwiched between Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east. The wagons are marked “Sodruzhestvo”, the name of Russia’s top agro-industrial conglomerate. Lithuanian border guards constantly monitor the trains to prevent illegal military equipment from passing through the European Union corridor. 

Western intelligence agencies have long suspected Russia may have nuclear weapons stockpiled in Kaliningrad. Since 2016, Moscow has stationed 9K720 Iskander short-range missiles there, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Yet new research conducted by the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC), a nonprofit policy institute, suggests that the region has been “stripped bare” of ground forces and air defenses because Russia is diverting resources to the war in Ukraine. 

“They may have nuclear warheads,” says Edward Lucas, security expert and director of the BISC, “but they haven’t got anything to launch them on because the missiles are all busy bombarding Ukrainian cities.” He adds that there is no real difference from NATO’s point of view whether a nuclear warhead is launched from Kaliningrad or from a missile on a Sukhoi Su-57 bomber or from a submarine because “in the end, if Russia wants to go nuclear, it’s not going to be the nuclear warheads in Kaliningrad that are decisive”.

However, he stresses that the exclave remains an important hub for hybrid operations such as GPS electronic warfare or propaganda and, crucially, serves as a useful pretext for escalation. In September, Moscow accused NATO of plotting to blockade Kaliningrad and threatened nuclear retaliation. More recently, the Russian military website Voennoye Delo suggested that a hypothetical blockade might require Russia to seize a 100-kilometer swathe of Baltic territory to secure access to the exclave. 

Such sabre rattling, Lucas tells me, has led to a complete overhaul of defense policy in both Poland and the Baltic States. “I can’t quote him by name,” he says, “but a Baltic official once told me, “If a seagull shits in the harbour, we know what it had for breakfast when it last went to Russia, who it dates, where it nests. And what its parents did during the Soviet era”.” In other words, monitoring Kaliningrad is a priority for the Valstybės Saugumo Departamentas (VSD), Lithuania’s counterintelligence agency.

Despite heightened vigilance, Lithuanians feel increasingly exposed. In May, residents of Vilnius received emergency alerts on their phones ordering them to immediately take cover amid suspected drone activity near the Belarusian border. It was the first major alert to send people in an EU and NATO capital scrambling for shelter since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in September, an Italian fighter jet on a NATO mission shot down a drone over Lithuanian airspace. A Ukrainian military source identified the wreckage as belonging to a Geran-2, a long-range attack drone widely used by Russia. 

Across Vilnius, bright yellow signs reading “Priedanga” — “shelter” — sprung up following Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022. But when frightened residents rushed to them in May, some found the doors locked. Others described them as unfit for purpose: dilapidated and covered in cobwebs. The chaos and complaints prompted Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė, who had sheltered with the President in a strategic government bunker, to apologize and promise a review. But many fear their country is woefully unprepared for worst-case scenarios. In 2016, the US think tank RAND war-gamed a Russian attack on the Baltics and reached a chilling conclusion: without more NATO troops on the ground, Russian forces could overrun the Baltic states in just 36 to 60 hours. Lithuania has been a NATO member for more than two decades but that did not prevent an MP from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party publicly questioning Lithuania’s independence in Russia’s State Duma four years ago.

Most Lithuanians know from bitter experience what it means to be controlled by Russia. Memories of the Soviet occupation, which lasted nearly half a century after the Second World War, are still fresh. Almost every family has relatives who were murdered or sent to gulags in Siberia. There’s a dark history with the Germans too. Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North”, home to at least 55,000 Jews and a celebrated tradition of Torah scholarship. Across Lithuania, Jews made up nearly a tenth of the population. But under Nazi occupation, the country suffered one of the highest per-capita rates of Jewish murder in Europe.

Today, though, Lithuanians are grateful for German support. The government has pledged up to €1.7 billion to construct housing, training areas and support facilities while the Germans supply the military hardware and the troops. Bundeswehr soldiers are applauded in the streets and people buy them drinks. Lithuania’s national army has surrendered its new garrison at Rokantiškės to the Bundeswehr; men from its own infantry are sleeping in tents and portacabins until the Germans’ facility is ready. 

Germany’s ambassador to Lithuania recently praised the new modern barracks at Rūdninkai, near the Belarusian border. Each soldier gets a private en-suite room, a queen-size bed and a kitchenette. With gleaming sports facilities and vast windows overlooking the pine forest, the barracks could almost pass for a hotel rather than a military base. For soldiers bringing their families to Lithuania, homes in or near Vilnius are less than an hour away. German schools and kindergartens have opened in both the capital and Kaunas, the country’s second-largest city.

Despite the warm welcome and all the perks on offer, the Bundeswehr is struggling to find enough volunteers for the brigade, which is due to be fully operational by the end of next year. The German defense ministry says around 80% of the brigade’s 5,000 posts are filled, but key roles remain vacant, particularly IT technicians, tank mechanics and medics. These specialists are in short supply across the Bundeswehr, which struggles to compete with civilian employers.

Ambivalent attitudes towards the military may in part explain the Bundeswehr’s recruitment problems. In Berlin, soldiers were once warned for their own safety to change into civvies before going home from work. Germany’s unease with its army was shaped by the atrocities of the Nazi era and decades of anti-militarist sentiment. Now uniformed soldiers get free train tickets, and nobody bats an eyelid. Yet growing respect for the military has not erased divisions over plans to introduce a new form of military service. The prospect of a draft has already fueled protests, particularly after the government introduced mandatory medical checks this January for 18-year-old men. Last month, tens of thousands of students walked out of class in cities across Germany carrying banners with anti-war messages including “conscription means cannon fodder” and “We are peaceful, what about you?” 

All this gives political ammunition to those at the extremes of Germany’s political spectrum who resent government funds spent on Ukraine and who lobby to get sanctions against Russia lifted. Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali, co-leaders of the populist Left-wing BSW, have denounced Merz’s military service reform as “absolute madness” and empty warmongering. On the far-Right, the AfD is divided: while some back conscription for 18- to 25-year-olds, others rally behind the slogan “Keine Wehrpflicht für fremde Kriege” — “No Conscription for Foreign Wars”. They argue that young Germans should not be drafted to fight for “foreign geopolitical or power interests”, a thinly veiled swipe at NATO and German support for Ukraine.

During a coffee break at the Rukla base, I meet Staff Sgt Phil — Bundeswehr protocol insists that the media use only first names — from Hamburg, who trained as tank commander and drone operator. I ask him whether tanks are becoming obsolete in the age of drone warfare. He shakes his head. “They deliver a lot of firepower and can move speedily on the battlefield,” he says. “Plus you still need heavy armor to take and hold ground.” He adds that in Lithuania, German crews are fitting their Leopard tanks with anti-drone cages, electronic jammers and active protection systems to counter incoming threats. 

He says Lithuanians he meets in cafes and shops often tell him they feel safer because of the brigade’s presence. In Germany too, he adds, he is now increasingly thanked for his service. Like many in the Bundeswehr he believes that conscription is needed — the sooner the better — because you cannot create a combat-ready reserve overnight. The war in Ukraine, he says, has forced a change in mindset: “We’re beginning to understand that we can no longer take our liberty for granted.” 

Then Trump turned toward Iran. The Russia-Ukraine war dropped in US foreign policy priority list. Now, because of oil and gas, it’s back at the top again. Trump realized that he cannot be at war with two of the largest oil and gas countries in the world. Iran may only be seventh on the list of the world’s largest oil producers, but by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran indirectly affects some 20% of global oil production.

Russia, however, is the world’s second largest producer of both oil and gas. The Europeans dismissed the recent US-Russia diesel deal as another stunt by Trump, and it’s true that it won’t affect gasoline prices in the US by much. If it had been an isolated deal, I wouldn’t have paid much attention either. But it wasn’t. Trump followed up with actions he had hitherto shied away from.

The first sign came last Wednesday morning. Ukrainian media reported that, overnight, the country’s forces had experienced sudden restrictions on Starshield, the military part of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukrainian drones were losing signal when they traveled faster than 160 kilometers per hour. The sudden throttling of the service disrupted several Ukrainian drone missions.

The presumption within Ukraine was that SpaceX had imposed those restrictions on behalf of the US government. And the next day, Reuters reported that the order came directly from the White House, which had been angered by Ukraine’s continued targeting of Russian refineries. So this was not a technical service disruption, but a ruthless application of the kill switch. All we got from the White House, though, were news leaks. No official statements. Not even a tweet. For the Trump administration, this is not normal.

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Along with the news of the throttling of Starshield came suggestions that the US had ended intelligence sharing. On the night of 12 October, Russia launched a volley of ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Normally, US intelligence would give the Ukrainians a warning. But on this occasion, there was no heads-up — and the results were horrendous.

Until that point, intelligence sharing had been one of the most important components of the defense of Ukraine. The Americans have satellite-based infrared systems that can detect ballistic missile launches, and the Ukrainians could rely on it.

But things had changed. Two days after the attack, it was reported that the White House had discussed ending the sharing of intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wanted to continue sharing intelligence — but others, it seems, didn’t. Trump denied that the US had cut intelligence sharing. Indeed, it is possible that Russia may have used weapons that resisted detection. We should at this point treat the disruption of information flows as suspicious, but unexplained, even if that flow now seems to have definitively resumed.

Then, late on Friday, Trump used an executive order to waive the implementation of sanctions against Russia under the Graham Act, whose goal was to deprive Russia of financial resources that allow it to wage war against Ukraine. Named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump had signed it into law only last month.

The secrecy, the reports of meetings inside the White House, the reports from Ukraine itself, and the suspension of the Graham Act: together these developments give us a coherent picture, even if some of the details are still missing. They tell us that the US is no longer actively engaged in the defense of Ukraine.

That’s different from the situation in late February last year, when Trump and Zelensky clashed in the White House. After that meeting, the US paused weapons deliveries and financial assistance. The White House also cut off intelligence sharing for a week, but then resumed it.

But what the Americans are doing now is far more coordinated. And it presents the Europeans with a conundrum. They will attempt to mitigate the effects of this change in US policy, however, there is not much they can do. They can offer intelligence from their own satellite network, but this will not match the communication quality Ukraine’s fast drones require to function as intended.

Nevertheless, Zelensky turned up at the European Council in Brussels last week, where EU leaders took another opportunity to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader. He is a regular guest there. But beneath the bonhomie, tensions are rising. Ukraine is running out of money faster than the Europeans had expected. Last December, the Belgians vetoed the sequestration of Russian funds that are sitting, frozen, in a Belgian bank. The EU reluctantly agreed a €90bn loan to Ukraine, money they themselves borrowed, pretending that Russia would eventually have to pay back this loan. The loan was supposed to plug Ukraine’s funding gap for this year and next.

As it turns out, Ukraine now needs another €70bn. Marine Le Pen, the front-runner in the French presidential election race, has promised that, if elected, she would cut off all support for Ukraine. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has promised more funding, but this money is not showing up anywhere in his government’s own budgets.

While Zelensky revels in the public admiration of Europe’s leaders, then, the foundations of Western support have been getting shakier. Now it is getting even harder, because the US is actively conspiring against Europe. The deal under which the US buys 4.8 million tons of diesel from Russia looks like an attempt to restart commercial relationships. I expect this will be the first of several natural resources deals between the US and Russia.

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I could, for example, see a deal struck over Russian gas. Envoys have been discussing extending their new commercial partnership to the defunct Nord Stream pipeline that used to carry gas from Russia to Germany. This would be an ironic twist, because it was the first Trump administration that placed sanctions on the German and Russian operators who were building Nord Stream 2, a successor pipeline.

In September 2022, the section of piping that runs below the Baltic Sea was sabotaged. A Ukrainian commando is accused of being behind the explosion. The trial against one of the suspects started in Germany last week, and it promises to give us a lot of details of this operation, including information about the extent of Zelensky’s involvement.

Germans will be watching closely. Like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany is also opposed to Ukraine aid. The AfD has, over the past year, enjoyed a fast rise in the opinion polls. The Ukraine war is one of the themes most central to its campaign, and the trial will be a gift to them that will keep on giving.

Trump’s negotiators recently pressed the Europeans to release parts of the frozen Russian assets: to make them available for a special Ukraine investment fund, rather than directing them toward further fighting. The Europeans rejected this request, because their plan is to fund Ukraine’s war with Russian money. I am reminded of the old Thatcher joke about why socialism does not work: because socialists run out of other people’s money. If the EU got its wish and were able to sequester the Russian money, given how fast Ukraine is spending money, it would not last for long.

Additionally, the EU is exploring the possibility of giving full membership of the bloc to Ukraine, but membership can only help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine if accompanied with large fiscal transfers. Right now, Germany is leading a group of countries that are opposing a plan by the European Commission to increase the size of the next EU budget. The Europeans say one thing, but do another: a classic case of revealed preferences clashing with stated preferences.

Politically, and financially, the room for maneuver by the Europeans is decreasing. The Europeans need the US, but the US, having enthusiastically supported Ukraine under Joe Biden, has become first a reluctant supporter and now a country that no longer pretends to support Ukraine. I doubt very much that, come 2029, even a Democratic president would expend political capital on a war, which by then would have been waged for seven years.

Wars usually end when one side is running out of food, oil, or other critical supplies. It is delusional to think that with an oil price at $110 a barrel, the world’s second-largest oil producer is running out of money. The war will end eventually, most likely with a dirty peace deal that will leave the Europeans in shock.

I suspect that it will happen during the remaining two years and three months of the Trump administration. Trump has been too inconsistent for any such forecasts to be made with complete certainty. But I am confident that last week’s decisions will go down as the turning point in this war.

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines — which had up until then supplied Germany with cheap Russian gas — revealed an aspect of Ukraine’s military defense strategy that had previously been hidden. It became clear that the Ukrainians were seeking to break up the Russian-German relationship, which they saw as a direct threat to their own security.

The first of the Nord Stream criminal trials will start on 26 October in Hamburg. It will expose many unsavory details. The prosecutors might ask questions such as: who ordered the attacks? What did President Volodymyr Zelensky know? When did he know it? The attack left Germany in a perma-energy crisis. And while I don’t think the trial will affect Germany’s support for Ukraine in the short run, it could — depending on what is revealed — make Germany more reluctant to support Ukraine’s membership of the EU and Nato in the future.

The pipeline explosions have a long pre-history. Germany’s energy relationship with Russia dates back to the Seventies. Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor and personal friend of Vladimir Putin, supercharged this relationship when he proposed the Baltic Sea pipeline projects in the early 2000s. The project later became known as Nord Stream. The first pipeline, which became operational in 2011, ran from near St Petersburg in Russia to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream 1 provided Germany with 55% of its gas supplies. Nord Stream 2, which was only completed in 2021, had the capacity to increase the gas flows substantially.

The Germans treated their business dealings with Russia as separate from geopolitics. The standard answer you got from German officials before the war was that the best way to foster democracy in Russia was through trade. They called it Wandel durch Handel — change through trade. If it rhymes, it must be true.

Eastern European countries, notably Poland, treated the Nord Stream pipelines as a security threat. If Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas, Poland would once again be surrounded by a hostile alliance. Later, France joined the group of critics. More importantly, the US Congress passed successive acts, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to impose sanctions on Germans involved in the pipeline project. They did not go after Schröder personally. He was the supervisory board chairman of the project. But they went after Matthias Warnig, the Nord Stream CEO. Warnig was a former East German Stasi officer and another close friend of Putin. The pipeline diplomacy became particularly heated in the two years leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022. I myself criticized the pipelines on the grounds that they made Germany dependent on Russian gas and undermined European solidarity. At that time, virtually nobody in Germany thought about energy in geopolitical terms — but everybody else did.

A few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, the German government agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which by then had been constructed but not yet used. It still needed certification. When Putin invaded, the project died. But Nord Stream 1, the older pipeline, was still operational. Even the Green Party, the only big German party that opposed the construction of Nord Stream 2, favored the continued operation of Nord Stream 1. By that time, the Greens were responsible for energy policy in the German government. As Germany was phasing out nuclear energy and coal, the country had no alternative to gas. Even when most of their energy was coming from renewable sources, they still needed gas to cover periods when there would be no wind and no sun.

There were alternative gas suppliers back then. The US and Qatar, for instance, sold gas in liquefied form (LNG) — but during this period, Germany did not have the infrastructure in place to process it. Russia’s gas, meanwhile, was pumped directly into the gas grid.

Each of the pipelines, the old Nord Stream 1 and the new Nord Stream 2, consisted of two big tubes. On 26 September 2022, three of the four tubes exploded near the Danish island of Bornholm, including the two that made up Nord Stream 1. Initially, everybody suspected the Russians. Then the US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article claiming that the explosion came at the behest of the CIA.

The German prosecutor eventually established that the attack was launched from a sailing yacht chartered in Germany by a group of Ukrainian citizens, with links to the Ukrainian army and secret service. Initially, the Ukrainian government tried to deflect attention from this evidence, arguing that the plot was funded by a wealthy private individual. But that story has since been debunked.

The operatives were highly trained explosives experts and deep-sea divers. The pipelines were located 80 meters below sea level. Diving that deep is not something you learn at your local scuba-diving club. The German prosecutor established that this was a military operation through and through. The estimated physical weight of the C4 explosives used to detonate the pipelines was in the order of 50-100 kilograms. Only governments have explosives on this scale.

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The German prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant for the operatives. The first successful arrest came in August last year, when Italian police detained Serhiy Kuznetsov, the suspected ringleader of the operation, who carelessly went on holiday to Italy. He was extradited to Germany and placed in a high-security prison. His trial is due to start this autumn.

What confuses me is why Kuznetsov thought it safe to go on holiday in the EU. Even more astonishing is the fact that the second suspect, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, whom the Polish authorities previously refused to extradite, also thought it safe to go on holiday abroad. Last week, the Croatian police arrested him. He is now awaiting extradition to Germany. This is one aspect of the story that I find puzzling. These are highly trained operatives with fake passports. Why would they go on holiday in unsafe locations?

So far, this all makes for a gripping spy story. But it may soon become a political one. Details will matter. The Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski claims in his book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian military and intelligence network, and that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, was the most senior officer involved. We don’t know whether Zelensky gave the order or was informed. I don’t think it really matters. As president, he is responsible for the actions of his military and his intelligence service. What matters is that a Ukrainian commando sabotaged the critical energy infrastructure of a friendly country.

The media covered the pipeline explosions and the immediate aftermath half-heartedly. I suspect editors did not want to be accused of disseminating anti-Ukraine propaganda. The media supported Ukraine — and the pipeline story did not sit well with the hero worship of Zelensky. The German government also did not comment on the prosecutor’s action. But it’s worth remembering that both Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz could have stopped the investigation if they had wanted to. The Poles are outraged that they did not. Last week, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said that the bigger crime was the construction of the pipelines, not their destruction. I recall a tweet by the current Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who was an MEP in Brussels at the time of the explosions. “Thank you, USA,” he wrote.

So, was it really a conspiracy? Over the course of my journalistic life, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are many fewer real conspiracies than most people think. What looks like a conspiracy is usually just a series of blunders. I think this was the case here too. A giant miscalculation by the Ukrainians. Back in the summer of 2022, they had pushed back the Russians. The war was going their way. Everybody wanted a photo with Zelensky. The Ukrainians thought it within their power to ensure that the Germans would not revert to their previously cozy relationship with the Russians. But after the Trump administration ended financial and most military support for Ukraine, Germany became Ukraine’s biggest supporter. What were the Ukrainians thinking?

However this story ends, I don’t expect Germany to revert to its old, naive pro-Russian reflexes. Germany will not make itself dependent on Russian gas once again. But I cannot exclude the possibility that Germany may, after the war has ended, reopen at least one of the pipelines. Germany has become reliant on natural gas — and Russia could become one of its several suppliers. We are one cold winter away from an energy crisis in Germany. And when that happens, we’ll remember who bombed the pipelines. Even without a winter crisis, I suspect that Germany’s future support for Ukraine will be less enthusiastic than it might otherwise have been.

The upcoming trial is going to release a lot of juicy information into the public domain. The media will cover it. The Alternative for Germany, the party of the far-Right, is already making a big deal out of the Nord Stream explosions. They are asking: why support a country that bombs our infrastructure? It is a hard question to answer. The German government, for sure, has not answered it.

This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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By Sohrab Ahmari

The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.

The recordings were made by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) — the independent prosecutorial body that oversees and prosecutes NABU’s cases — as part of Operation Midas, a 15-month investigation into corruption within Ukraine’s energy sector, launched in 2024. NABU has implemented an unorthodox communications strategy, revealing information in episodes akin to a drama series like Homeland and giving suspects nicknames like The Surgeon, The Professor, The Rocket and Che Guevara.

As only a section of the transcripts has been published, the full extent of the corruption is still not known. However, the nine suspects named in the recordings so far are uncomfortably close to Zelensky. These include his former chief aide Andriy Yermak; former defense minister Rustem Umerov; former deputy prime minister Oleksii Chernyshov; and Tymur Mindich, the owner of the infamous apartment and the President’s former business partner.

So far, detectives have conducted 70 searches of premises where they seized $4 million in cash, hundreds of documents and mobile phones. Bail has been posted only to two of the nine suspects. “This is deeply regrettable”, said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s representative for Foreign Affairs, as the revelations became public last November. “It is literally the people’s money that should go to the front lines.”

All this has been deeply uncomfortable for Zelensky — who responded by announcing plans to clean up the energy sector. But many of his attempts to distance himself from the scandal have backfired. In July last year, crowds took to the streets holding homemade cardboard signs in protest after the Ukrainian parliament voted to strip NABU of its independent status, widely seen as an attempt to stem further revelations. This “Cardboard Maidan” reemerged last month after Zelensky sacked the popular modernizing defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who had cracked down on corruption by making procurement of weapons more transparent. Zelensky has so far opted not to reinstall Fedorov in spite of the protests.

And there are more revelations to come. One MP, Yaroslav Zhelezniak, has said he possesses more evidence and plans to release more secret recordings confirming suspicions that corruption is endemic in wartime Ukraine. Last year a Gallup poll put Zelensky’s approval ratings at 67% — lower than at the outset of the war, but still incredibly high compared to other world leaders. However, the same poll showed 84% of Ukrainians believed fraud and bribes were widespread throughout the government. And this year, a poll found 54% of Ukrainians citing corruption as the biggest threat to the country — compared to 39% who considered war the greater peril.

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By Mark Hollingsworth

Meanwhile the scandal refuses to go away — indeed, it threatens to destabilize Ukraine at a critical moment. Ukraine’s long-range drones have provided a strategic advantage in the war and its bombing of oil refineries has created a nationwide fuel shortage in Russia. Meanwhile Zelensky’s diplomacy has been starting to bear fruit in Washington, with the Senate recently voting overwhelmingly in favor of sanctions on Russia.

Zelensky was, of course, elected President in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate — a comedian who could portray himself to the Ukrainian people as the anti-establishment outsider. On the international stage, he has been hailed as a hero for standing up for democracy and liberty and projecting Ukraine as the shining antithesis to Vladimir Putin’s mafia-like authoritarianism. All of which makes him uniquely vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy.

While there is no evidence implicating Zelensky himself, several of his former business partners and senior members of his Servant of the People party have escaped corruption charges by fleeing abroad, leading to claims they were tipped off by government insiders.

One of them is Tymur Mindich, the owner of the infamous flat bugged by the state anti-corruption investigators. A former business partner of Zelensky, Mindich is the key protagonist in Operation Midas — indeed, the investigation tends to be referred to as The Mindich Tapes in Ukraine. Mindich fled to Israel just before being charged with masterminding the $100 million scheme that diverted money intended to fortify energy infrastructure against Russian attacks into kickbacks for corrupt officials. He also lobbied the defense minister to award military contracts to Firepoint, a company under his control which produces critical defense equipment. Ukraine has sanctioned Mindich and demanded his extradition from Israel in order that he can face justice; Mindich in turn has attempted to sue his former friend, Zelensky.

Another central figure is Andriy Yermak, the massively influential former chief of staff to Zelensky once regarded as Ukraine’s second most powerful man. “He virtually ran the country”, one Ukrainian businessman told me. Codenamed ‘The Surgeon’, Yermak, an official suspect, has been arrested and last month posted bail of £2.3 million. He dismisses allegations against him as “unfounded”.

The most explosive of the tapes is a conversation between Mindich and a woman named Natalia, who is apparently helping to oversee construction of four luxury villas near Kyiv, apparently built with the proceeds of embezzlement. It appears from the transcripts that one of the villas was intended for Mindich, one for Yermak, and another for the former deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov. At one point, Natalia says that the interior structures of “Andriy’s” (i.e. Yermak’s) house have already been completed. At another, she mentions that a fence now separates Mindich’s villa from “Vova’s” — a common short version of Volodymyr that many have taken to mean Zelensky.

Zelensky has denied all knowledge of Mindich’s schemes and called for any corrupt officials to be jailed. So the most plausible explanation is that the President has shown poor judgment in choosing his closest advisors. To some extent this is understandable. He inherited a legacy of endemic corruption in Ukraine whereby bribes were already institutionalized, the judiciary was compromised and politically connected oligarchs routinely ripped off the people by obtaining valuable state assets for a fraction of their real value. Indeed, the very existence of organizations like NABU; the freedom of Ukrainian media to pursue the revelations; and the street protests that have been allowed to proliferate are in themselves evidence of the strength of Ukraine’s commitment to transparency.

Nevertheless, the charges against his closest friends have made it more difficult for Zelensky to distance himself from the case. This may yet become even harder as the repercussions of one Ukraine’s biggest and unnoticed scandals make their way through the courts.

This affair concerns the state takeover of Sense Bank, one of Ukraine’s biggest, with assets of £2.3 billion. Prior to 2022, it operated as Alfa-Bank Ukraine, part of a group of banks associated with the Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, and owned via the Luxembourg-based, ABH Holdings. Following the Russian invasion, it was sanctioned and then effectively seized by the Ukrainian state — who bought up 100% of its shares for a nominal one hryvnia in 2023. “The deal will help safeguard the interests of the Bank’s depositors and ward off threats to Ukraine’s financial stability,” stated an official announcement.

The Mindich Tapes reveal that another suspect, Oleksandr Tsukerman, was instrumental in appointing new members to Sense Bank’s board. Last May, Tsukerman telephoned a businessman named Vasyl Vesely, apparently on behalf of Zelensky. Vesely, who was described as “a watcher” from the President’s office, named the people he wanted to join the board. “There should be six of our members there in this crowd of nine”, he told Tsukerman. “These are ours and one [director] will do everything if positioned correctly”

A month later, Ukraine’s cabinet appointed those six individuals to the Sense Bank board. When the tapes were released, Vesely’s involvement — apparently as Presidential fixer — cast doubt on the independence of the board of one of Ukraine’s biggest banks. The bank’s chairman, Mykola Hladyshenko, duly suspended himself. “Sense Bank appears to have been captured by domestic criminal networks with access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state”, a Ukrainian banking analyst told me. “The suspicion is this bank has become a vehicle for laundering the proceeds of domestic corruption, including funds that may have originated in Western aid to Ukraine”. Like Mindich, Tsukerman fled to Israel and is now the subject of an extradition request by Ukrainian prosecutors.

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Some central bankers are concerned at the broader implications of the case. “This is not a scandal about individual names [joining the Sense Bank board]”, wrote Kyrylo Shevchenko, former head of the Ukraine National Bank between 2020 and 2022, after the tapes were published. “It concerns a systematically important bank, a state asset and who controls financial institutions in Ukraine during the war.” He described his own tenure at the Ukraine National Bank as being subject to “constant” political interference when it came to appointing personnel.

The involvement of Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Yermak — now under investigation for alleged corruption — in nationalizing Sense Bank is particularly problematic. The state took ownership of the bank in 2023 after passing a special law to nationalize any bank if it was insolvent. But the National Bank of Ukraine had already stated that Sense Bank was solvent.

And so the government passed a new law that enabled a bank to be declared insolvent if some of its shareholders were sanctioned. In the case of Sense Bank, three of its indirect shareholders, notably the Russian billionaire Fridman, were sanctioned and so the bank could be deemed insolvent despite the regulators stating it was financially sound. A month later, Sense Bank was nationalized and its properties, shopping centers and land were seized by the state, with a new CEO and board of directors installed.

In response, ABH Holdings filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Ukraine in the World Bank’s arbitration court. In essence, ABH Holding’s accusation is that individuals close to Zelensky, notably Yermak, used corrupt tactics of state capture to gain control of the bank. The investigative reporting platform, Follow the Money, has interpreted his a different way: as a Russian oligarch exploiting European treaties and US-based courts to sue a country that Russia has declared war on, effectively for behaving like Russia. Should ABH Holdings win, it could open a “Pandora’s box” of oligarchs using lawfare to target Ukraine, warn legal scholars quoted in the article. But noting this uncomfortable irony does not magic the problem away.

When asked about Sense Bank last year, President Zelensky told a Cabinet meeting that it “must be privatized”. But it hasn’t happened yet. The Ukrainian government has meanwhile requested the court hearings to be held in secret. ABH Holdings refuses and insists Ukraine abides by arbitration rules which states “confidentiality is neither agreed nor envisaged”. When the case is heard next year, the role of President Zelensky and his advisors will be revealed. If the Ukraine government loses the lawsuit, the award is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of pounds — a major dent in the war coffers.

But the importance of the Sense Bank case, the “Mindich Tapes”, and the far-reaching corruption investigation is more profound. Ukraine’s greatest strategic asset is not its military capability or territorial location. It is the moral clarity of its cause: that it is a democracy based on the rule of law, freedom and worthy of defending in the face of tyranny and brutality. But corruption is Ukraine’s fatal flaw. Unless Zelensky removes this cancer at the heart of the state, the West may find it increasingly difficult to defend and financially support Ukraine.

So there might be a temptation to cheer the latest crisis at the International Criminal Court, which throughout its short existence has been the prime locus of “internationalist” legal folly. Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, was expelled from office July 24, following a two-year saga shrouded in convoluted bureaucratic mystery. Ostensibly centered on allegations of sexual impropriety, they were always really more like allegations of allegations: the nature of what was even being alleged is still a morass of murk, at least insofar as any scattered details have been publicly disclosed.

The drama has been made all the more inscrutable by the “ad hoc” bureaucratic rigmarole set up to adjudicate these “allegations,” with oversight opaquely passing back and forth between an internal ICC disciplinary unit, an enigmatic ICC administrative body, a hazily affiliated division of the United Nations, an improvised secret judicial panel, back to some non-specific ICC limbo, and then finally to the “Assembly of States Parties” — thought to be the ICC’s supreme governing authority, which proceeded to terminate Khan, albeit based on authorities that hardly anyone could seem to quite ascertain, not least Khan himself.

As his day of preordained reckoning drew near, Khan remarked that “in terms of the procedure” put forth to eradicate his career and reputation, even he was being kept assiduously “in the dark … I mean, it’s amazing.” So here was one of the foremost expositors of “international law” — who had just earned rapturous applause from “international-law” enthusiasts the world over for orchestrating a series of “arrest warrants” against the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin — marveling that even he had no clue what ad hoc methods had been devised to exact punishment on him for offenses he steadfastly denied, and which had only been the most faintly articulated. Khan was only able to learn of the latest developments, he said, “from the media,” and from “speculation.”

The ultimate claimed basis for Khan’s removal? Certainly not any somber acknowledgment of the failures of “international law,” following a sustained period of careful self-examination. Instead, of course, it was some multi-dimensional sexually implicative “adult-grooming” scandal — the core offending conduct of which remains almost indecipherable to the untrained eye, and only made putatively scandalous by the very same blinkered pathologies that have come to pervade liberal-Left NGO culture. 

While Khan’s alleged wrongdoing has been widely referred to in media reports as centering on accusations of “sexual misconduct” or even “sexual assault,” a recent lengthy CNN interview with the central accuser — a putative lawyer in her late 30s named Sarah Hishan — failed to elucidate with any tangibility what, in fact, she was even accusing Khan of doing wrong, beyond transgressing the latest nebulous frontiers of “consent” and “power imbalance” theory — the bleeding edge of which one would expect to find marinating in workforce environments such as the ICC. 

Khan objected, reasonably enough, to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the proceedings that were initiated against him, starting in April 2024, when they were supposedly prompted by the 39-year-old’s unveilment of her sexual-grievance story. One might even say there’s an element of karmic justice in his banishment, as “international law” is nothing if not a thoroughly make-it-up-as-you-go-along enterprise. But with Khan’s ensuing downfall, the tactics brought to bear against him have received an outsized boost of validation — which could mean similar tactics may well soon be coming to an institution near you.

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It’s nearly impossible to circumnavigate the organizational, political, and personal factors that seemingly gave rise to this two-plus year debacle, but one factor that’s been less examined might simply be the most bog-standard of factional workplace resentments, which, as they are increasingly wont to do circa 2026, always find a way to inevitably escalate into vague imputations of sex crime. 

Media leaks in an earlier phase of the saga tried to contextualize the genesis of the “accusations” by reference to Khan’s underlings declaring him “an unpopular boss,” who “ran the office [of the prosecutor] as a top-down operation,” and who imposed what some of them apparently saw as “controversial policies” — such as the “requirement that staff working on a particular case be based in the field.” That is, a requirement that ICC employees charged with investigating “international law” violations in far-flung places like Mali or the Philippines have to actually go and work in those places, rather than “Zooming” in remotely from their comfy work-at-home stations in Bezuidenhout or wherever. That this was apparently so “controversial” to the rising generation of “international law” advocates may speak to the general empirical soundness of “international law” fact-finding, or lack thereof. 

One strangely open question — which, in a way, crystallizes the entire affair — is to what degree the main accuser, Sarah Hishan, can even be correctly described as a “lawyer,” as the CNN headline accompanying her July 16 interview labels her, as have innumerable other media reports. Inasmuch as the word “lawyer” connotes a person professionally accredited to practice law in a particular jurisdiction, there is scant evidence to indicate this label should properly apply to Hishan, who has conspicuously demanded anonymity for her media interviews, which the journalists conducting them have invariably granted without any real explanation.

While an online bio attributed to her states that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales,” Hishan does not appear on the Barrister’s Register or Solicitors Register maintained by the Bar of England and Wales. Her LinkedIn page — which she seems to have recently amended to partially anonymize herself — suggests she was enrolled more than a decade ago in something called a “Bar Professional Training Course,” administered by something called “The University of Law” — a for-profit educational venture located in Britain. 

Other than this, there is no sign she has “completed” any conventional lawyering licensure. An email sent to the ICC public-affairs office, requesting clarification as to whether Sarah Hishan is currently admitted to practice law — in either Britain, Malaysia (her country of origin), the Netherlands (her country of residence as an ICC employee), or any other country — has not been returned. (That she has seemingly drawn a full ICC salary from April 2024 to present, ever since she ignited the ICC’s slow-rolling immolation, only adds another layer of self-defeating irony to the whole ordeal.)   

Hishan does claim various other professional certifications — including a two-day “e-learning” course on “genocide” in 2022, another two-day 2022 “e-learning” course pertaining to “international law and the conflict in Ukraine,” and yet another two-day “workshop,” this one seemingly in-person, held by the Interagency Diversity and Inclusion Network in 2020, from which she was duly certified as completing a “training of trainers,” which thenceforth empowered her to become somebody who could purport to deliver “Gender, Diversity and Inclusion trainings to staff members working for international organizations in The Hague” — with an emphasis on concepts such as “disabilities” and “mental health.” This novel certification, perhaps more than anything else, provides the most clarifying window into her professional background, and her stem-winding odyssey in the field of “international law.”

Some skeptical observers have been keen to emphasize the presumed role of Israeli sabotage in engineering Khan’s defenestration, and there is no doubt the ICC arrest warrants he announced in May 2024 against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant provoked intense animus from Israel’s impassioned supporter network, which was then happy to seize on any perceived Khan vulnerability that may surface. But if there was a “conspiracy” afoot, it lies in plain sight. With or without any Israeli involvement, organs of “international law” such as the ICC, not unlike culturally harmonious organizations such as the Democratic Party, are more than sufficiently susceptible all on their own to these spiraling cycles of shambolic collapse the moment some sexual impropriety can be conjured or alleged, no matter how abstruse the core “allegations.”

Of course, it is true that the Jewish state, at least in the person of Netanyahu, would exploit any “allegation” that could be contrived to cast doubt on the credibility of a prosecutor who had generated enormous worldwide publicity by charging top Israeli officials with crimes — as would any defendant charged with crimes, should their prosecutor have liabilities emerge. So it’s no surprise career Israel backers and Netanyahu emissaries like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham went around whipping up whatever “accusation” whispers they could to undermine the ICC’s prosecution process. Newly released audio and video footage from an unfinished documentary, as reported in The New York Times, reveal Graham strategizing by phone with Netanyahu just before the 2024 presidential election as to how they could best amplify the “sexual-misconduct” rumors, as if Graham and Bibi were deeply concerned for the welfare of Hishan.

Netanyahu even indulged in some strategically inflammatory sex talk himself, telling the website Breitbart in August 2025 that a then-anonymous woman in Khan’s office had accused him of “raping her and sexually assaulting her for over a year.” This turned out to be a total load of hogwash, as the woman herself eventually explained to CNN that she has expressly declined to “put a label” on the conduct she was allegedly victimized by, including when someone once asked her directly if she had been raped — an episode chronicled by UN investigators who took charge of the Khan inquisition in November 2024, and eventually leaked to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The woman’s reasoning, she told Amanpour, was that “I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession” — and so “It’s not my place to label anything.” 

No one has to propose any sprawling clandestine “conspiracy” to note the obvious exploitability of the “ad hoc” adjudicative process concocted to determine Khan’s fate, which rested with a quasi-legislative “international-law” assembly convening in a nondescript chamber in New York City. For one thing, the final expulsion vote was conducted by secret ballot, thanks to an inexplicable provision of the original Rome Statute that established the ICC. 

If the end-result of the cockamamie “international-law” tribunal was influenced by a desire among certain ICC member states to placate their American hosts in the Trump administration, this would only be surprising as cold political reality, whatever the egalitarian-flattening pretensions of the high-minded “international-law” theorists who drafted the ICC’s founding documents. US primacy has certainly remained in full force since the ICC started operations in 2002, as evidenced in miniature by the ICC governing body continuing to be physically housed in the United States, despite steadfast US refusal to join the ICC, and dare surrender any of its sovereignty to “international law.”

Perhaps the current Trump administration’s attitude on the Khan question was a political variable that these “Assembly” members, operating in an expressly political capacity, might have foreseeably taken into account as they pondered the proper recourse for Sarah Hishan’s weighty “allegations.” Khan had already invited a simmering fury for his breach of bipartisan understandings — which he had carefully cultivated with the Biden administration, and even Senate Republicans — with the allegedly “rushed” May 2024 application for arrest warrants he brought against the top Israeli officials. (Three senior Hamas officials were also charged on the same occasion, reflecting Khan’s attunement to political sensitivities, but this had no material effect in terms of dampening the fallout.) 

Then soon came an incoming Republican administration already primed for baseline ideological hostility against the ICC, and which had been given all the more reason to go scorched earth. As he barreled in for his second term, Trump wasted no time imposing maximum reprisals on the ICC and Khan individually, sanctioning him by name as one of his first orders of business on Feb. 6, 2025. Among other things, this sanction appears to have barred Khan from physically attending any of the disciplinary proceedings related to him in New York, not to mention cutting him off from the US-controlled international financial system — “international law” be damned. Bank accounts frozen, no more credit cards, and travel overall severely limited. Other ICC officials were then hit by Trump-backed sanctions several months later. 

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Given this fraught political situation, one could easily see the faction of ICC member-states in the US-supplicating orbit — say, the EU-NATO bloc — having an interest to retain whatever favorable standing they could with the mercurial Trump. As such, these countries could have been particularly peeved with Khan for the wholesale US assault on the ICC his actions seemed to have precipitated — an especially wrenching turn for the countries that had optimistically watched a growing US-ICC truce. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Washington had been turning toward a gradual but non-trivial embrace of the ICC, after decades of scathing antagonism. Suddenly, the US and ICC found themselves happy to set aside old differences and collaborate on going hard after Russia. Even eminent Republican congressional figures such as Graham — who previously would’ve been known as among the ICC’s most boisterous haters — were glad-handing with Karim Khan during the Biden years, a detente clearly stemming in part from the concerted effort undertaken by Khan himself to smooth relations with both Republicans and leery Democrats. 

These efforts had seemingly paid off, as bipartisan 2022 legislation authorized US officials to “render assistance” to the ICC in an anticipated prosecution of Putin, by placing him in the same category of unique evildoers as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Slobodan Milošević, whereby America would allow an exception to the standard prohibition against any US collaboration with the ICC. Long gone were the days when Graham & co. had championed an infamous law that could theoretically authorize a US military invasion of the Netherlands, in the event that any American servicemen were ever scooped up and brought to The Hague.

But in this new Ukraine-heady period, the US presidential administration was being led by reverential devotees of Rules-Based International Order. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken had already seen to it that executive order(s) from Trump’s first term, which even then had slapped the ICC with retributive sanctions, were revoked almost a year before Putin aroused the flames of liberal-internationalist fervor all the more epically by invading Ukraine.

Bolstered by this period of glorious bipartisan unity against Russia, and thus an improbable upsurge in official US-ICC tolerance under Karim Khan’s tutelage, Biden and the Democrats did all they reasonably could to keep the momentum going. In April 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland even dispatched a DOJ prosecutor to The Hague to provide the ICC with “significant resources,” courtesy of the US taxpayer, for use in a multitude of “ad hoc” efforts aimed at activating otherwise-flaccid EU-based instruments of international law which might be utilized to “hold accountable” the war-making Russians, up to and including Putin himself. The prior default flaccidity of these mechanisms suddenly stiffened like magic, thanks to a virile overnight infusion of US hegemonic zeal.

But this moment of glory was soon squandered … and capped off by an “adult grooming” fiasco. 

One theory goes that as the first murmurs of “accusations” emerged against Khan in April 2024, he suddenly switched tactics from steady US-ameliorating to willful US-antagonizing. No question Khan was politically astute enough to know that dropping a Netanyahu arrest bombshell would promptly upend whatever collaborative trajectory might have been in progress with his American partners — even under a Democratic administration, at least one helmed by self-proclaimed Zionists such as Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken. He must also have anticipated the tentative new cohort of ICC-curious Republicans, personified by Graham, would erupt into instant vindictive frenzy. And that the reverberations were destined to extend to the faction of ICC member states that maintain allegiance to Israel, namely the EU-NATO bloc of Germany, Britain, and France (kind of) — which also happen to be outsized contributors to the ICC’s operational budget — as well as miscellaneous others like Poland (kind of), Hungary, the Baltics, etc.

So much for that brief, shining moment of Ukraine-inspired harmony! 

One thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, it’s July 13, 2026 — 11 days before the scheduled vote to oust Khan — and there’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, striding forth on behalf of the Trump administration to announce a “sweeping campaign to dismantle” what he declared was the “intolerable threat” the ICC posed to American sovereignty. (As if all those gender-diverse folx on temporary Dutch visas were getting ready to storm down Pennsylvania Avenue.) Rubio vowed “no diplomatic option will be off-limits” in this invigorated anti-ICC campaign. Meaning, it would presumably not be “off-limits” to politely encourage the ICC member states and their New York-based diplomatic reps to please consider voting to remove Karim Khan the following week. For added laughs, they could even tearfully act like they were doing it to honor “grooming” survivors.

Now, the queue is back, and this time the commodity is gas. In some regions, fuel for ambulances is running out; elsewhere the garbage trucks have stopped running; and, across the grain belt, farmers are heading into harvest without enough diesel for their combine harvesters. Russia now being a land of capitalism, a small-service economy has sprung up around the queues, with professional paid place-holders and crowdsourced maps showing which stations still have fuel. Yandex searches for “how to siphon fuel” are up more than tenfold. In one viral video, a man slowly pours gasoline into his lawnmower from a jerry can and deadpans: “What riches. Who can afford this now?”

Everyone knows the immediate cause: Ukrainian drones have spent months methodically pummeling Russian refineries.  The 10 largest have been hit this year, the latest attack coming only this week. Perhaps 40% of the country’s refining capacity is offline.

So the debate is not about the causes of the shortage but its consequences. What does this mean for the Russian regime? The optimistic reading is that this is the worst energy crisis of Vladimir Putin’s reign — and thus the beginning of the end. More cautious commentators point out that Russia has had similar gas shortages before, and that the whole thing remains, in macroeconomic terms, manageable.

Still, more revealing than the shortage itself is how the Kremlin has chosen to respond. Russian fuel prices are kept down by an elaborate subsidy apparatus, which pays refineries to sell domestically below market value. This costs the government a lot: two-and-half-trillion rubles last year (approximately £23 billion), roughly half the federal deficit.

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Why Ukrainian liberals love conscription

By Marta Havryshko

When you keep gasoline artificially cheap in the middle of a fuel shortage, obviously you will get huge lines at the pump. So why not loosen the prices, let them float upwards a bit to dampen demand?

The answer, until recently, is that while fuel shortages can be blamed on Ukrainian drones, higher gas prices will only be blamed on the regime itself. The Kremlin had faced a choice between higher prices or long lines — and has chosen the latter. Prices have generally crept up, but by less than cumulative inflation.

But that’s no longer a feasible choice. You learn a regime’s real priorities by what it clings to when it can no longer afford to — and the government held the price cap well past the point where it made sense. But over recent months, the strategy has begun to come apart: Russian retail petrol prices have jumped 20% in a year. In Crimean Sevastopol at the start of July, prices rose 30% in a week. Wholesale gasoline in European Russia is selling for roughly 1.5 times the official retail price.

So the regime did not, in the end, get long lines instead of higher prices. It got both. This was likely unavoidable, since past a certain point no subsidy conjures back a missing chunk of your fuel. But it highlights the difficult spot the regime has found itself in, with rising prices on top of the queue.

Neither higher prices nor long lines are popular. But of the two, the long line is the one that should keep Putin up at night, because of its dreaded public aesthetics. The Kremlin has spent years constructing a war that’s real but distant. Moscow life has proceeded as normal, and nearly all information about the war arrives pre-filtered. But this carefully managed veneer cracks a little more with every intrusion of the war into everyday life, whether it’s a refinery burning in Moscow’s outskirts or a long line of frustrated drivers on its roads.

Unpopular autocratic regimes survive by preference falsification; private doubts stay that way because every skeptic has to assume they’re alone, so they keep quiet. But the gas line is the opposite: a very public assembly of everyone privately doubting their government’s capacity to provide basic necessities. When RFE/RL reports that the shortage is “the only thing they’re talking about”, that should worry the Kremlin more than any capacity statistic, and surely explains why a ban on fuel exports has now been extended into 2027.

In a poll conducted this spring, even before the worst of the shortage, 60% of Russians said economic conditions were worsening. That’s a 20-year record. Trust in the military, in the government, and in election integrity all saw the largest annual declines ever recorded. The fuel crisis has arrived in a country already more anxious than at any point since the three-day “special military operation” began.

The US had its own fuel shocks in the Seventies, and it saw similar line-ups of frustrated drivers. Those too were a policy choice: President Nixon’s price caps turned the embargo shock into a shortage, following the same electoral logic. But an American waiting for gas in 1974 was suffering something new. A Russian in 2026 is watching a rerun of the bad old days, with all the visual markers of shortages and hoarding that Putin promised would never return. This was the deal he offered to Russians exhausted by the Yeltsin years: “stay out of politics, and I will keep the shelves stocked and your savings intact”. But the promise of predictability in exchange for a free hand, already damaged by the invasion, is now dissolving.

Even beyond the Soviet Union, Russia has been here before, with local gasoline crises made worse by peak summer driving seasons. Each faded by autumn. But this is different. The drones are getting through because Russia’s air defenses are being hollowed out by a methodical Ukrainian campaign against the radars and interceptors that once protected Russian refineries. The numbers are hard to confirm from the outside, but a careful look suggests Russia has been using up its interceptors faster than it can replace them, partly because it’s repurposing them into offensive missiles aimed at Ukrainian cities.

The American oil shocks of the Seventies had political consequences, sinking Jimmy Carter and helping give Ronald Reagan his victory in 1980. That queue’s political frustration had somewhere to go. But in Russia, Putin has spent a quarter of a century welding the release valves shut. That’s why the regime appears so worried about the September Duma elections. Senior officials floated postponing the elections due to the drone campaign, and one Duma deputy has warned that the fuel crisis will cost the ruling party seats.

“No remote e-voting or three days voting periods will save certain people,” she concluded gloomily. Despite all the carefully stage-managed results, there is only so much you can do to cover up spreading public dissatisfaction. You can falsify a ballot. But you cannot falsify the queue.

We have been here before. At regular intervals since Putin’s invasion, the Western political-media complex has worked to convince the public that victory for Ukraine was just around the corner, and that Russia itself was on the verge of collapse. In 2023, for instance, Western journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which was going to “turn the tide” in Kyiv’s favor. The campaign was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia — reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow — targeting logistics, fuel depots, refineries and supply lines. Several civilian targets have also been hit, causing numerous casualties. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Zelensky has now announced a 40-day operation against Russian targets to “influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war”, which is likely to mean many more such attacks. These measures coincide with the EU’s disbursement of the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

The timing is not coincidental. On Tuesday, a crucial Nato summit began in Ankara, where the pro-war lobby — both in Europe and in Washington — is desperate to make the case that Ukraine is winning. It’s a narrative that Trump himself appears happy to indulge, probably to compensate for the Iran fiasco: he even signed the G7 leaders’ recent statement committing to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities”; to consider extending production licenses to Ukraine; and to “strengthen our sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors”.

It is also, in all likelihood, a response to mounting war fatigue in the West, confirmed by the refusal of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to finance the aforementioned loan — an opt-out that Hungary’s new pro-EU government has strikingly not reversed so far — followed by the new Bulgarian government’s decision to prohibit arms supplies to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby. But these attacks are unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. Indeed, citing higher oil prices, largely a consequence of the Iran war, the International Monetary Fund in April raised its forecast for Russia’s 2026 GDP growth by 0.3 points, to 1.1%. Meanwhile, it revised the forecast downward for the EU’s top three economies — Germany, France and Italy — to 0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2% respectively.

More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. The city was one of the last strongholds on the road to important Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbass. Russian troops are also advancing around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, making gains in urban fighting and on elevated positions, and continue to advance around Lyman and Rai-Oleksandrivka. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

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Nato is a dangerous grift

By Thomas Fazi

If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fueling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and Nato have decided to “bring the war to Russia”. Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people.

How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable: for all the dramatic visuals of burning refineries and queues at petrol stations, most Russians have seen worse in their lifetimes, and the vast majority still enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the poorer EU countries — a far cry from what they endured throughout the bad old days in the Nineties.

The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response. After all, history suggests that when Russians feel pinned against the wall, they do not capitulate; they harden. Thus, the greater the pressure on Russia becomes, the more likely it is that Putin will find himself compelled to escalate the war.

Regardless of the short-term effects, Ukraine’s drone campaign is a textbook example of how drones are rewriting the rules of warfare in real time. Strategic deep strikes — the ability to reach the enemy’s cities, industries and leadership far behind the front — were until recently the privilege of countries with powerful air forces and missile arsenals. But low-cost, mass-produced drones have democratized it. A country losing the attritional contest on the ground — as Ukraine, on paper vastly inferior to Russia in material and manpower terms, plainly is — can now inflict vast damage deep inside the stronger power’s territory. And once the weaker side exercises that option, whatever incentive the stronger side may have had to exercise restraint collapses.

It is, after all, a matter of historical record that so far Russia has refrained from inflicting mass destruction on Kyiv and other major cities far from the front line, and throughout most of the war has conspicuously spared government decision-making centers — despite having the means to do so. For the first eight months of the conflict, Moscow also left Ukraine’s energy grid untouched; strikes began only after the Kerch Bridge attack of October 2022. In this sense, drone warfare does level the playing field, but it also invites escalation, by stripping the weaker side of the indirect protection that asymmetry itself — its inability to inflict mass damage on the enemy — once afforded it.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. A nuclear superpower is being subjected to a sustained campaign of strikes against its principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities.

As Matthew Blackburn of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs recently has warned, if Moscow decides its restraint within Ukraine is being exploited to impose humiliating damage on the Russian heartland, it may abandon strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in favor of the European supply hubs and manufacturing sites that make Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign possible in the first place, thereby correcting the asymmetry and restoring deterrence on its own terms. Indeed, Moscow has repeatedly signaled that its patience is not unlimited; voices within the Russian establishment increasingly speak of restoring deterrence by striking targets in Europe itself. The reason Russia has so far refused to do so is obvious: such an attack could easily spiral into an all-out war that Russia has no interest in fighting — as even General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the alliance’s top military commander, recently noted. Simply put, the cost of retaliation has thus far exceeded the cost of tolerance. But if the latter keeps increasing, Russia’s calculus could very well change.

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Why Europe keeps losing

By Wolfgang Munchau

The essential fact is that nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie — and indeed Western policy seems to proceed on the assumption that they do not exist at all. Meanwhile, the Europeans keep arguing that there is no alternative to continuing to support Ukraine indefinitely because “Russia refuses to negotiate”. But as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote, it is the EU — not Russia — that has so far refused to negotiate. While Moscow has spent the past year in sustained talks with Washington and progressively abandoned several of its core demands, the Europeans have made negotiations conditional on an unconditional ceasefire that Russia cannot accept without surrendering its only leverage, and have wrapped this precondition in “principles” that amount to a demand for Russian capitulation.

The main victim of this posture has been Ukraine itself, condemned to a grinding war of attrition it cannot win militarily. Should exhaustion eventually produce a ceasefire without a settlement, meanwhile, it could lead to a Kashmir-style condition of permanent insecurity. It is in Ukraine’s interest — and in Europe’s interest as a whole — to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement instead. We know in broad terms what any realistic settlement would entail: territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees (short of Nato membership and Western troop deployments). Whether such an offer would suffice for Putin to claim his measure of victory and end the war, nobody can yet know. But what we do know is the cost of the status quo.

When Russia invaded four years ago, Ukraine was without a navy that could plausibly contest control of the Black Sea, and the Russian military was able to threaten it with amphibious landings behind its lines. Today, Ukraine’s fleet dominates the Black Sea and is almost entirely autonomous (unmanned). In four years, Ukraine has driven the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, sunk roughly a dozen warships, crippled the same number, and broken Russian command of this strategically vital body of water.

Elsewhere, a Russian liquid- natural- gas (LNG) carrier, the Arctic Metagaz, was hit near Malta in March by Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles controlled from Libya. The ship then spent two months as a floating burnt wreck, drifting through Italian and Maltese waters, before recently being secured off the Libyan coast.

All of this was achieved on a shoestring budget, without the need to build or man a conventional crewed Navy. Meanwhile, in order to close the Strait of Hormuz and restrict Iranian shipping, Team Trump puts multibillion-dollar US Navy vessels at risk. Using these ships and crews to reopen the strait to American and allied shipping remains too potentially costly, and so Hormuz remains closed except for the few commercial ships daring enough to run the blockades. 

Chaos on the seas is rising, and unmanned naval warfare is transforming everything we thought we knew about maritime military strategy. Global shipping and global geopolitics are already being affected. How America adapts — or fails to adapt — to this technological threat will have implications for years to come. 

Learning from the West’s Ukrainian allies is essential.      

The pace of change has been extremely rapid. In 2022, Ukraine’s unmanned surface vehicles, or USVs, were single-use, ran fewer than 200 miles, and had very limited autonomy. The 2025 generation is much more capable: Ukraine’s Sea Baby drone can run almost 1,000 miles at nearly 50 knots on satellite comms (using satellite guidance) and carries up to two tons of payload, which can be rockets, guns, sensors, or explosives. The Ukrainian ministry of defense is beginning to operate such drones in coordinated swarms and has integrated autonomous targeting, allowing operations in communications-denied environments. The ministry’s Magura V7 USV has even used missiles to shoot down two Russian Su-30 fighter jets.

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Ground war in Iran would be hell

By Brandan Buck

The central innovation is the USV. Unmanned naval surface weapons have a long history, from fireships, employed as early as the siege of Tyre in 332 BC, to Israeli inventions in the modern era. In 1948, Israel sunk the Emir Farouk, the flagship vessel of the Egyptian navy, by piloting small speedboats loaded with explosives into the hull, with the operators jumping out at the last minute. But the ability for modern USVs to operate autonomously, over thousands of miles of range, is new and revolutionary.

Throughout history, denying sea access to an enemy required one of two things: either a chokepoint, with mines or coastal batteries, which allowed a land power to dominate a small area of sea; or a blue-water navy, recently including submarines. This is why great naval powers have secured island fortresses near critical straits, in order to project power in the places where other powers might contest freedom of navigation: Singapore, Gibraltar, and Penang in Malaysia, for example. 

Furthermore, as Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American naval strategist, pointed out, a navy rests on a merchant service (commercial shipping traffic) and the maritime commercial society that supports both. Historically, it has been the case that without a commercial maritime society, a country’s claim to projecting power at sea was tenuous at best. Germany, for instance, tried to project sea power in both world wars, leveraging submarines, and failed both times. France tried during the Napoleonic Wars, and was largely unsuccessful. Examples of this abound.

With autonomous drones, maritime power projection no longer requires a chokepoint or a navy. Sea denial is now open to non-maritime powers, which will have serious commercial as well as military implications, thus undermining Mahan’s second condition for naval dominance. This is the most fundamental change in sea power strategy in centuries.

America’s current strategy of relying on aerial drones and cruise missiles can certainly sink ships, but effective anti-ship missiles are expensive and hard to build: a Naval Strike Missile, or NSM,  is very capable and has stealth capabilities but costs about $2 million per missile, and delivers a 500-plus-pound payload with perhaps 180 miles of range. A new Tomahawk missile costs around $3 million, carries a heavier payload, and has a longer (1,500-mile) range but requires a large ship with vertical tubes for launch and lacks some of the stealth features of the NSM. By contrast, a modern autonomous drone boat costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars, delivers thousands of pounds of payload, and has perhaps a thousand miles of range, with range and payload being easy to trade off against each other. Plus, the drone boat can be launched by dropping it off the side of any merchant ship or launching it from any beach using a cargo trailer; the NSM and Tomahawk both require special launchers, which are in short supply.  

Buoyancy is free. Lift is expensive.  

Unmanned surface vehicles have another advantage as well. Sinking a large merchant ship is easiest with an explosive payload at the waterline, where seawater finishes the job; thus, the cheapest way to put a large shaped charge of explosive on target is from another surface vessel. To do the same work from the air costs orders of magnitude more. Even where defenders intercept most USV attacks — as in the Red Sea — the cost ratio still favors the attacker, especially when striking at large merchant ships.  

And commercial shipping is especially vulnerable. Unlike naval vessels, which have weapons systems that can intercept surface vehicles, merchant ships generally don’t carry the systems that would be required to intercept even a single incoming drone boat. They are forbidden from being armed by international law and settled convention, and most ports will not let them dock, if they are armed. Their only defense, in effect, is speed, or an armed escort.

Washington, however, has been slow to adapt. The US naval blockade of the Islamic Republic since April 13, paired with the Project Freedom safe-passage operation launched May 4, illustrates the gap between Ukraine’s economics and Washington’s. Central Command has more than a dozen manned warships and “multi-domain unmanned platforms” deployed across the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. By May 1, US forces had turned back 45 vessels bound for Iranian ports, some from as far away as the Bay of Bengal. The work is being done in large part by guided-missile destroyers at roughly $2.5 billion per hull. An Arleigh Burke destroyer, the workhorse of the US fleet, costs perhaps $80 million a year to operate.

There are cheaper, less risky ways to close the straits to adversaries and open them to allies, by leveraging unmanned vehicles much more heavily as pickets to protect specific stretches of water, and as escorts for merchant ships. This is the sort of thing that the Ukrainians can teach us.

For 80 years, the global merchant fleet has sailed under the protection of the US Navy. Yet countries that conducted commerce freely on that guarantee for decades are now building the cheap autonomous weapons that dissolve it. The proof is on the water: a Houthi drone boat struck the bulk goods carrier MV Tutor, a Liberian-flagged ship, in the Red Sea in June 2024, the first successful modern USV strike on a commercial ship. 

The effects on commerce will be systemic. The supertanker and the ultra-large container vessel exist because the seas were assumed safe; now such vessels have become concentrated, slow, defenseless targets. Supertankers move at about 16 knots or 17 knots, and carry cargoes worth $200 million or more. Their turn radius measures in miles. Ultra-large container vessels often carry cargoes of more than 24,000 standard containers, with a value of around $1 billion. These are soft targets, ferrying cargoes around the world with tiny, unarmed crews of only around 20 people. Their ability to fight fires or repair damage is extremely limited. 

War-risk premiums have begun to adjust, and are now pegged to identity, not just route: Dominick Donald, an advisor to the Lloyd’s maritime insurance market, told UnHerd that underwriters now look beyond a vessel’s hull and waterway to its flag, owner, and operator — because the Houthis and Iranians do the same. Insurance for ships is now, in effect, priced by their politics.

The merchant fleet is now compelled to relearn habits that the safety and security once guaranteed by the US Navy has allowed it to forget. Convoys — last seen at scale in the late 1980s, when the US Navy provided escorts for Kuwaiti tankers, and later increasingly formed as part of the counter-piracy effort off the Horn of Africa — will proliferate. Shipping lines will need to deploy autonomous escorts of their own — USV escorts running ahead of tankers through contested chokepoints and aerial drones on the bridge wing for over-the-horizon awareness. Owners will be forced to install defensive systems and will press port states to permit them. The 18th-century pattern — privateers, armed merchantmen, convoys, prize courts — is returning, with 21st-century tools.

Washington has a choice: embrace the transition and frame it as reinforcing freedom of the seas, or be surprised by it. Framing would mean clearer authorization for armed escort vessels under the US flag, activation of war-risk insurance by the US Maritime Administration on routes the Navy can no longer guarantee, and legal authorization for private vessels to operate against designated belligerents on those dangerous routes. This would be a modernized analog of the letters of marque the United States issued before 1815, and would involve establishing a US prize court to dispose of ships and their cargoes taken by private vessels. 

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Against the Mad King

By Sohrab Ahmari

Washington already has these capabilities, if only it would use them. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution empowers Uncle Sam to issue letters of marque, as was standard practice from the Quasi-War (1798–1800) with the French through the War of 1812. The customary-law standard reflected in Hague Convention VII (1907), requires state-licensed armed vessels to be commanded by commissioned officers under military discipline, but it was never ratified by the United States and is clearly inadequate for modern threats. 

The Lee-Burchett bill, the most serious modern privateering bill, proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) in 2025, was aimed at authorizing private firms to attack cartels. But it was not designed or intended to deal with these global threats, and anyway, the bill hasn’t passed.  

The alternative to Uncle Sam taking the lead is private maritime security building itself ad hoc, ship by ship, under flags of convenience and armed civilians without rules of engagement. That will virtually guarantee capricious port-seizures, varying by country, and chaotic insurance markets.

At the moment, thousands of merchant ships are trapped in the Persian Gulf with their crews.  Every day they sit idle is a day that someone — an owner, an insurance company, a lessor — is facing depreciation on the hull, losing money on the cargo, and paying the crew. With a few exceptions who are willing to risk being sanctioned by the United States, their owners can’t pay passage fees to the Iranians, and mostly don’t have the will or armaments to run the strait. The European and American navies aren’t prepared to provide escorts. The Iranians are winning this fight, as they have been planning for decades. 

Naval warfare strategist Mahan argued that commerce raiding — the guerre de course — could never decide a war by itself; only concentrated battle fleets could win command of the sea. Nevertheless, interfering with commerce can be decisive in the long run in shaping the outcome of a war and reshaping the geo-economic balance of power. And maritime denial is a huge cost to endure for maritime commercial powers like the United States, or even an amphibious power like China. 

Mahan assumed that only maritime powers could field the sort of navies that win wars. Cheap autonomous craft are already falsifying that assumption in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea. The instruments of disruption are now vastly cheaper than the instruments of commerce and order, and they will proliferate. The United States cannot prevent that. What it can decide is whether the next century of merchant traffic moves under American rules — or under no rules at all.

Europe’s leaders chose forever war. They labeled Vladimir Putin the new Hitler. Once they had done so, it was impossible to envision any agreement with him. Like Donald Trump, who had hoped that shock-and-awe over Tehran would trigger an internal coup or rebellion that might topple the Islamic Republic, European leaders placed their bets on the prospect that the combination of tough sanctions on Russia and arms for Ukraine would topple Putin. It didn’t.

Four years of sanctions and war have achieved the opposite result. They rebalanced Russia’s current account, energized factories that lay dormant since the end of the Soviet Union, transferred foreign-owned companies to Russian oligarchs and kept oligarchic profits within Russia. Thus, the sanctions combined with military Keynesianism to stabilize Putin’s reign. Meanwhile, despite its impressive resistance on the battlefields, Ukraine’s economy is being steadily weakened while Europe is trapped in a geostrategic conundrum of its own making and the new oil crisis engineered by Israel and the United States.

Lacking both a strategy for winning the war and an interest in suing for peace, European leaders have ended up struggling to find increasingly scarce means of prolonging the war a little more in the vain hope that some miracle may deliver them from their strategic void or that their tenure will have ended by the time their folly has been exposed for all to see. Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in Ukraine’s killing fields and Europe’s social economies are hemorrhaging.

With Europe’s strategic defeat a near certainty, there are only two ways it will play out. One is that President Trump puts on the table a take-it-or-leave-it peace plan that President Zelensky and the European Union must accept, or else the United States ceases to share intelligence and to sell weapons to the Europeans to pass on to Ukraine. Exhausted by their energy crisis, fiscally stressed, and unable even to maintain the current level of support to Ukraine, German, Italian and French politicians will acquiesce to Trump’s plan. A Europe that has left them high and dry will leave Ukrainians feeling abandoned, unsafe and disillusioned. The ignominy will be complete when Russian natural gas begins to flow again into Germany, Italy and the rest of the European Union through pipelines that are, now, partly US-owned, with Washington retaining a share of the proceeds, while the European Union foots Ukraine’s reconstruction costs in their entirety.

The other possibility, one that will obtain if Donald Trump remains distracted for the rest of his tenure by his Iran war folly, is even less appetizing. Russia’s juggernaut, boosted by the windfall from high oil and gas prices, ekes out the rest of the Donbas slowly, painfully, devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision until, at a moment of his choosing, Vladimir Putin declares victory and announces a unilateral ceasefire. Then, any leverage the European Union might have had to shape a peace and security agenda for its neighborhood withers to nothing.

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Putin can’t survive without war

By Ian Garner

What if Europe were to ditch forever war in favor of its second option, the path never taken? What if it were to offer Russia a sensible peace and security pact that extends beyond settling the Ukraine war? Just posing the question will, undoubtedly, trigger howls of betrayal, charges of appeasing the new Hitler, accusations of reciting Moscow’s speaking points. These are the natural responses of having made, initially, the forever war choice which, as already argued, leads to a bitter betrayal of Ukraine and a miserable outcome for Europe.

To envisage this second option, a European offer of a peace and security pact, there are three prerequisites. First, the abandonment of the delusion that the offered pact should contain nothing that Putin can present as a victory. All pacts, agreements, peace deals, etc., must offer each signatory things they can present as great gains to their own constituency. Is there something that Putin can present to the Russians as worthy of their sacrifices during this awful war which Europe, including Ukraine, can live with? I think so. How about that, in the same way the United States can say an emphatic “No!” to the right of Mexico to deploy Chinese weaponry in Tijuana, Russia also has the right to seek security by demanding, as it has done for three decades, that Nato stay out of Georgia and Ukraine? A provision in the proposed European Peace and Security Pact that recognizes this Russian concern is not just a particularly small price to pay but also one that Europe should desire, in view of the dangerous tensions that a face-off between Russian and Nato troops within a postwar Ukraine, or indeed in Georgia, would generate.

The second prerequisite for a genuine peace and security pact is the rejection of the notion that it will have to involve an Anglo-European “coalition of the willing”; that is an army of British, German, French soldiers facing off their Russian counterparts along whatever line of control is agreed to. To insist on such an army is to state that Europe is not even attempting a genuine détente, assuming it to be impossible. The United States did exactly that on the Korean peninsula, leaving behind an ironclad, nuclear armed, huge army to police an impenetrable line of control. Europe cannot and should not want to do likewise in Ukraine. The best Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” can deliver is a sad outfit facing the fate of UN peacekeepers in South Lebanon. It takes no more than a few moments of clarity to recognize that a functional peace and security pact must involve full de-militarization of the contested territory and its surrounding areas. In turn, this requires a spirit of détente based on the recognition that Europe must provide both sides, Ukraine and Russia, with security guarantees.

Finally, the third prerequisite is a readiness to be creative with issues of sovereignty and governance over disputed territories with a view to preventing the type of airtight partition left behind by the British Empire in India, Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, guaranteeing permanent conflict. Speaking of Ireland, the Good Friday agreement, a worthy effort to part ways both with the logic of strict partition and Westphalian sovereignty, is a splendid example of how the Donbas and other contested areas can be governed after the cessation of hostilities as part of a comprehensive peace and security pact.

Having stated the three prerequisites for a European pivot from forever war to offering Russia a peace and security pact, and before delving into what such a proposal might contain, the importance of rebuilding channels of communication with Russian society cannot be overestimated. The European Union’s policy of frowning upon, even sanctioning, anyone who dares maintain communication channels with Russian civil society is a form of self harm. This is why I accepted an invitation to address an investment conference in Moscow last week, one that involved no government representatives but did engage a large audience of financiers, technologists, students and journalists. If channels of communication are to be rebuilt, this is the type of audience that needs to get involved.

My visit to Moscow did not come out of the blue. In April 2022, two months after the war’s commencement, the movement that I helped co-found, DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), canvassed a five-point solution which I subsequently campaigned for, leading to the Athens Declaration on behalf of the Progressive International which called for a solution to the Ukrainian tragedy within the broader framework of a new Non-Aligned Movement. That was the background to my recent Moscow visit. Naturally, a Moscow visit by a former finance minister who failed spectacularly to alter Europe’s course a decade ago is not any kind of breakthrough, at least not in itself. However, what it can do is to demonstrate how Europeans can begin to mend fences with Russian civil society.

Turning to the actual proposal for a comprehensive European peace and security agenda, which I went to Moscow to canvas for, it consists of six parts.

First, Ukraine becomes in the 21st century what Austria used to be during the Cold War: a neutral but armed European country with its territorial integrity and political sovereignty jointly guaranteed by all European countries, plus Russia, under the auspices and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Second, the signatories of this Peace and Security Agenda shall agree on the gradual elimination across Europe of certain categories of weapons (including nuclear, chemical, and AI-powered drones). Within this context of deescalation, Russian and Ukrainian troops shall withdraw fully 300 kilometers on either side of the agreed border or line of control.

Third, all war refugees will have the right to return to their pre-2014 homes, with all sides committing to aid their return in practice.

Fourth, the Donbas and other disputed territories that come under Russian control shall be demilitarized and governed in the same manner as Northern Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement. Just as London retained sovereignty on paper but, in practice, shares it with Dublin, while the two communities share power equally on every governing body (from local government to Stormont), the idea here is that sovereignty of the areas that Russia is granted will remain formally within Russia, but free movement within and outside these regions will be guaranteed, and each municipality as well as every Oblast will be governed on the basis of equal representation of Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers. Anyone who says that this is impossible must be reminded that, not long ago, it seemed similarly impossible to envision Sinn Féin and Ulster Unionists power-sharing.

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Fifth, the European Union unfreezes Russia’s assets and removes all sanctions. Meanwhile Russian energy begins to flow again to Europe, with a portion of all proceeds dedicated to a Ukraine reconstruction fund.

Sixth, modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established after the fall of apartheid to offer an opportunity to air grievances and to be heard by the opposite side, a similar council shall be convened by the UN, led by judges with experience in restorative justice from South Africa and other countries.

As wars and the fear of war expand their domain, an international push for peace is more pertinent than ever. An inability to imagine what a comprehensive European peace and security agenda would look like is perhaps the worst impediment to its emergence. The above six-point proposal is meant as an example of how to overcome this obstacle, outlining concrete steps Europe could take to break the deadlock and give itself a chance to become relevant again.

Many will ask: how would the Russian government, Vladimir Putin in particular, respond to such a proposal? While no one knows until it is on the table, my recent experience in Moscow tells me that Russian civil society is not only ready to welcome it enthusiastically but also to pressurize its government to take it seriously. Eager to reconnect with the West, but repulsed by the clear signs EU leaders want to see Russia torn apart by centrifugal forces, Russian public opinion is keen to enter into a fruitful dialog on the basis of such a plan — including opponents as well as supporters of Putin’s government.

Last but not least, many of the Russian technocrats, students and journalists I met in Moscow last Saturday told me there was a reason they were more amenable to this particular proposal for a European peace and security agenda: it was put to them by someone whose stance on the Ukraine war four years ago (“Stand with Ukraine but not with Nato’s expansion”) was attacked with equal venom by the Russian government’s supporters and Nato stalwarts. This may help explain the impromptu party atmosphere, following the proposal’s presentation, to which I surrendered happily. Mending fences in the cause of peace takes a variety of small, human steps.

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

Right now, Trump has three choices. In scenario one, he sticks to his four-to-five week timetable, flattens the place, declares victory and gets out without destroying the Islamic Republic. The Strait of Hormuz would at this point not be truly secured. Scenario two is that he continues his campaign until the Strait is open, and he’s assured it’ll stay that way. That might involve using a limited number of ground troops to secure the Iranian coastline abutting the Strait. There would be no regime change in this scenario — but at least Washington would have reopened the Persian Gulf.

There’s also a third scenario: Trump concludes that, for as long as the existing Iranian regime is in power, the Strait cannot be secured. To get the job done, he must launch a full-scale invasion. Yet as Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor and later secretary of state under President Bush just reminded us, it took his administration a full year to prepare for the occupation of Iraq. There are currently no signs that an equivalent operation is being planned for Iran.

Scenario one would be the ultimate defeat, on the scale of Vietnam. It would stand as the greatest political and military misjudgment of our time — and for that reason alone, I would rule it out.

We are currently in the midst of scenario two. The difficulty commentators have during wars is that they’re not privy to classified information. Trump may have information that gives him the confidence to think America can totally destroy the Iranian regime’s military capabilities. I therefore can’t exclude the possibility that he is right, and that his critics are wrong.

History, however, would suggest otherwise. During the build up to the Iraq War, George W. Bush and Tony Blair wanted to believe the briefings they received from officials. Officials, for their part, delivered the briefings their political masters wanted to hear. I was a newspaper editor in Germany at the time, and attended one such high-level briefing. Unfortunately, the information I heard turned out to be completely wrong. The big conclusion I drew then is that privileged information doesn’t necessarily mean leaders make wise decisions.

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And certainly, based on what’s happening so far in Iran, it’s clear that the Trump administration misjudged the power of asymmetric warfare. It also misjudged the changed nature of military supply chains. Twenty years ago, military power was all about weapons of mass destruction, missiles, warplanes and tanks. And, to that extent, I do believe that the US has indeed succeeded in destroying a large portion of Iran’s conventional military infrastructure.

But the regime’s most potent weapons are mines and kamikaze drones, each costing just a few tens of thousands of dollars. If one of these were to hit an oil tanker, and cause an oil spill in the Strait of Hormuz, the effect would be devastating. No ship would be able to pass until the waters are cleared. And even if the US were somehow able to reopen the Strait, it would still have to protect every single ship — whereas the Iranians only need a single successful hit to close the Strait once more.

That’s asymmetric warfare: and the Iranians are leveraging their one and only strategic advantage for all it’s worth. They have already carried out drone and missile attacks on ships on oil installations in the Gulf states, and may also have laid mines in the Strait. The strategic objective of the Revolutionary Guards is very similar to strategies employed by both Russia and Ukraine: to come out on top in a prolonged war of attrition. The Iranian calculation is that the US will ultimately fold under economic and political pressure.

That may be the best strategy available to them, but it is not guaranteed to succeed. Scenario three, a full ground invasion, still looms in the background. If chickening out is politically catastrophic for Trump, and the current air campaign fails, what else can he do but prepare for scenario three? It is not what he wanted. But at the point when he finally makes the decision, it may be the obvious thing to do. If you have no other options left, the impossible becomes the inevitable.

Clearly, this would clash with what Trump long promised: no more wars in distant lands. Nor do I doubt that he meant it when he said it. But when you’re in the hot seat in the White House, your job is to manage conflicting objectives. When faced with a choice to unseat the Revolutionary Guards in a six-months ground war, or suffer a humiliating defeat, we should not automatically assume that Trump would choose the latter.

We should also not underestimate the role of Israel. I know that many inside the Israeli government expected Trump to force regime change in Iran at some point during his second term. And now, if Trump were to chicken out without getting the job done, he’d leave Israel humiliated and exposed. To be clear, the US is clearly the senior partner in the relationship, but Israel had at least some influence in Trump’s decision to go to war. Why, then, wouldn’t Netanyahu exert similar influence in how to end the conflict?

Of course, I am not predicting anything here. Unexpected events intrude. They already have. But based on what is publicly known, and on conversations I had ahead of the invasion, I would want to keep an open mind on any of those options. And since few people expect scenario three, I would call it the “underpriced” option. It is not necessarily likely, but a lot more probable than many think. Besides, an extended air campaign and boots on the ground are hardly mutually exclusive, and could overlap for a time.

Another factor here is how the Iran war interacts with Ukraine. For Europe, the rise in oil prices that resulted from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a geopolitical disaster. Why? Because it destroys the continent’s strategy to starve Russia of its oil revenues. The price of Urals oil, the benchmark for the oil sold by Russia, has risen from under $40 per barrel to almost $90 — and lately peaked at over $100. In February, before the Iran war started, Russian oil tax revenues had fallen to around $4 billion per month, after oscillating between $6-10 billion per month since 2022. If Urals oil stays at this price, meanwhile, Russian oil tax revenues would jump to around $10 billion a month: enough to fund Putin’s war.

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It’s obvious, then, that Europe’s strategy rested far too much on oil prices staying low, something I always thought was naive. Even before this month’s shock, Russia wasn’t running out of money, and now it definitely won’t. The truth is that Europe has no strategy for a Ukrainian victory — and never did. It’s just that now, this reality is becoming impossible to ignore.

As for the future, the oil markets are ominous. After initially taking a relatively optimistic view, they now expect a longer war. The Russians themselves believe that the oil prices will remain elevated for another year. And if Trump were to pursue his war for a longer period, he would really need to force Ukraine and Russia to cut some kind of deal. No wonder he’s already piling up pressure on the beleaguered Kyiv government. As Trump told NBC: “I’m surprised that Zelensky doesn’t want to make a deal. Tell Zelensky to make a deal because Putin’s willing to make a deal.”

Certainly, I don’t think it is possible for the West to fight two wars at once: against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran. The US is already running low on some supplies, while Ukraine itself is facing an acute shortage of air defense missiles. One war has to end for the other to proceed. And for Trump, Iran is the priority.

It would be comforting to know that a strategic operator is pulling the strings in the background, someone like Colin Powell, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. Trump, unfortunately, has surrounded himself with sycophants. The image of Marco Rubio, secretary of state and national security advisor, being forced by Trump to wear shoes that are too big for him, tells us all we need to know. All I can say, then, is that the logic of war has taken over — and it’s driving America on.

He is us, an equal creation of the Left and the Right, and our leaders will all be Trumps from now on — unless we do something. Gavin Newsom, the democratic frontrunner for 2028 has explicitly styled himself after Trump. And a new crop of politicians from Republican James Fishback in Florida to Democrat Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago have adopted his divisive, confrontation-all-the-time style.   

I first noticed the total-hatred phenomenon while living in Moscow in 2004, in the months leading up to the Orange Revolution. At that time, a corrupt outgoing president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, widely seen as a Kremlin puppet, had anointed his corrupt, Russian-leaning prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a representative of the oligarchic crime syndicate from the Donbas, as a successor. Yanukovych was facing a stiff challenge from the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who was campaigning against corruption and who had been spectacularly disfigured by an attempted assassination with the poison dioxin. 

To Americans in Moscow, already high on blue passports and cultural superiority, and to the Western-leaning Ukrainians among us, this was a clear battle of democracy against autocracy, and good against evil, with Yushchenko’s scarred face as a banner to elicit passionate feelings of outrage and righteousness. It was easy to dismiss the more pragmatic Russian opinion: that Yushchenko was merely the representative of a different crime syndicate; and that Russia and Ukraine were neighbors with mixed populations and deeply intertwined trade and military relationships, and they had to get along.

Prior to this point, at least in the United States, politics had been the business of politicians and a niche interest among wonks and lobbyists. To the extent that anyone got angry at their friends over dinner over the issues of the day, it was a foible. We lambasted our presidents — Reagan was an evil representative of wealth and greed, Clinton a liar with bad morals, George W. legendarily stupid. But personally, passionately, hating them, and delegitimizing them through the intensity of our hatred, that was still in its infancy.

Yanukovych — who appeared to deserve it — was the first politician I saw receive this kind of total character annihilation. 

He was a criminal and a rapist, Ukrainian friends told me, a person so tarred by savagery that any means were necessary to prevent his ascendency. One young Ukrainian woman, married to an American banker, trembled with rage when she discussed him over drinks. Her anger seemed so justified that it was easy not to notice that it shut down consideration of the issues. Frankly, there didn’t seem to be any issues — always a warning sign.

According to the website of the now-shuttered, reformist English-language daily The Moscow Times, Yanukovych was convicted for robbery as a teenager, served time three years later for severely beating someone, and was accused of large-scale theft, tearing earrings from people’s ears, and an attempted rape, all prior to being appointed Kuchma’s prime minister as a representative of the Donetsk oligarchy. Records of these crimes were missing from the local police stations that handled the crimes. 

In the event, Yanukovych won the election, which was swiftly condemned as rigged by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell. My Ukrainian friends decamped Moscow for Maidan Square and, along with many others, overturned the election through sheer force of rage, and the rest was a beautiful Orange victory for democracy. 

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Except, from this early, larval form of total-virtue politics, sprung the hideous insect of total-hatred politics that afflicts us today. 

Total hatred, on the Left, is the belief that our political opponents are not just people with reasonable disagreements about how to achieve the common good, or different beliefs about what the common good should be — but that they are, personally, bad people, who want something bad, and their leaders are really bad people. To demonstrate your hatred of these bad people, in the most explicit and grotesque terms possible, becomes the highest good. You #Resist, nevermind that you’re resisting the results of a free and fair election in your own country. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, is the flower of total-hatred politics; as is cancel culture, and the split between Twitter and Bluesky, and all the broken families and broken friendships that have come in the wake of polarization. The arts have fallen victim, with satire and rage becoming the dominant mode of production. The Netanyahus, a satirical, fictionalized version of Bibi’s family’s visit to Harold Bloom at Cornell in 1960, by Joshua Cohen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022. Satirist laureate George Saunders, once a good writer, has turned full-time to Trump-parody dreck. Since when has it been a virtue to make each other appear worse than we are? Performances demeaning the American president — he’s a giant inflatable toddler, wearing a crown! — have become so routine that even The New York Times is bored. 

The hatred has never felt quite so personal coming from the Right, but it’s equally destructive, taking the form of pointless norm-breaking, aggression, and rebellion against perceived injustices from the Left. One of the most insightful comments I’ve seen about Trump was that he had a seven-letter platform that starts in F and ends in U. Decisive pluralities of Americans voted for this — and relished doing so. And now we’re seeing the fruits. 

F-U to the Gulf of Mexico, to Europe, to Greenland, to Venezuela, to Iran. F-U to the illegal immigrants, and to the blue states that want to shield them, and to the many Americans who will be distressed by seeing long-standing neighbors ripped from their homes and deported.

Neither form of hatred has respect for American institutions or the rule of law. Democrats turned the mainstream media into organs of overt activism, discriminated based on race, passed off a vegetative president, and engaged in frivolous impeachments. Republicans are attacking free speech and academic freedom, and breaking norms on a massive scale. 

The emotional manifestation of total hatred is an urge toward murder and death, as we can see on social media, where calls for people to die have become their own form of parody. Trump should die. Netanyahu should die. A departing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books thinks that the upper management — of a nonprofit book review — should die (for failing to pay staff and contributors). And of course, people are actually killing each other or trying to: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, three people in an Austin bar on Sunday. 

The political manifestation is what we have today: a politics that is increasingly incoherent, illiberal, and anti-democratic, and which makes no effort to fulfill its core function of negotiating a shared settlement. When the Democrats are in power, they illegally throw open the borders. When the Republicans take their place, they pursue the legitimate end of deporting people by cruel means. They kill people.  “Fuck Trump” and “Fuck ICE” the other side responds, and surges onto the streets to carry out its agenda by force.  

When we discuss this kind of dynamic, the usual culprit is social media. As the writer Freddie DeBoer once said, “the human mind was not meant to be constantly rubbing up against other human minds.” 

And surely that’s been an accelerant, but I’d place the moment we gave up on each other many years earlier, during the transition that, paradoxically, occurred with the triumph of Western liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era. 

Which brings us back to my first brush with Ukrainian hate politics. The fall of the Soviet Union was perceived as a victory for the West, chalked up to Ronald Reagan’s commitment to the arms race and his promotion of democracy and American values. Reagan’s foreign policy was a pivot for Republicans, who had previously stuck to a Kissinger doctrine of realpolitik — the idea that politicians should seek stability, rather than pursue a foreign policy that promoted ideology. Arguably, realpolitik worked — at least, it was inclusive, in the form of Nixon bringing both China and Russian into political relation — but it was easy to brand as both amoral and soft, and we’ve abandoned it. With Reagan, it became impermissible to demand anything less than Total Victory Over Evil in foreign policy.

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The moral high produced by winning the Cold War has been long-lasting. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a deeply influential and treacly good television show about exporting liberal democracy to the entire galaxy aired from 1987 to 1994. The West Wing, a similar idealization of the liberal project, ran from 1999 to 2006. The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, a deeply influential show that formed the moral architecture of most of today’s educated Left, was a grittier version of the same good-versus-evil narrative. These shows ran through the presidencies of George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush to Obama, all offering different flavors of the same virtue. A virtue that criticizes America, to be sure, but in the deep grounding of each human soul, a prideful, crusading one, that tells us we’re the good guys.  

This has rendered us unable to face reality and grapple with opposition. If Evil Russia has interests in Ukraine, we erase them. If Muslim theocrats wouldn’t actually be nice people to live with, and that contradicts our tolerant self-image, we deny it (Queers for Palestine, folks. Hands off Iran). If people in our own country aren’t totally with the program, we bully them into submission. And it’s that slippery spot where we can’t see our own pride that has shifted the political ground from reason to emotion, and from negotiation to sheer rage.

 Democracy is better than autocracy; Viktor Yanukovych stole an election and was a bad guy; Ukraine should be allowed to govern itself — none of these things is wrong. But promoting these goals in a complex world requires a foundation in the older, more rigorous Judeo-Christian values, which caution against pride, and promote self-sacrifice, and don’t ever allow us to view the other as all-bad. 

Without this kind of tempering, we get total virtue, and its corollary, total hatred. 

The pitiful fact is that unlike most political problems, the power to end total hatred really does rest in the hands the individual haters — in their personal relationships (stop canceling your friends and family), in how they behave online (stop telling people to die), and in how they consider their politics (consider the other side; give more than you’d like to). Given the state of world and domestic affairs, it would be impossible not to be angry; everyone is angry. But the first step toward healing the body politic and ourselves would be to consider that a vice. 

On the surface, the explanation appears straightforward: Russia and Ukraine remain deadlocked over territory. Moscow insists on full control of the eastern Donbas region — of which it holds only a portion — as well as of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. On both counts, Zelensky has refused to budge, despite Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s dwindling power grid.

But framing the impasse as a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia obscures a deeper reality: this has always been, at its core, a proxy war between Russia and the United States — one which can only be resolved through an agreement between the two powers. The Ukrainian military, after all, is effectively kept on life support by Washington, particularly through the satellite intelligence that has become indispensable to modern drone warfare. Both Moscow and Washington are aware of this, which is why over the past year they have repeatedly privileged bilateral talks from which Ukraine and Nato allies were excluded.

Last August’s summit between Putin and Trump in Anchorage marked the high point of the new US-Russia détente. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the US and Russian presidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed, but the symbolism was unmistakable. From the red-carpet welcome, to Trump calling Putin warmly by his first name, everything was choreographed to signal a turning point in relations, which, since 2022, had sunk to levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

Since then, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

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Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

In a recent article, Sergey Karaganov, who heads the influential Council for Foreign and Defense Policy think tank, openly criticized the Kremlin’s “muffled responses to open aggression” by the West: especially the Europeans. Karaganov argues that Russia’s excessive restraint to date — its refusal to retaliate against Nato for Western-backed attacks on Russian territory, or to launch decapitation strikes against Kyiv’s political and military command centers — has in fact increased the risk of all-out war between Russia and Nato, by emboldening the West to keep escalating, in both practical and rhetorical terms.

Karaganov’s prescription is stark. Europe, he argues, is preparing for a future confrontation with Russia, and will likely deploy the reconstituted remnants of the Ukrainian army to prosecute it. The only way to stop this, in his view, is for Russia to demonstrate a genuine willingness to strike the command centers, infrastructure and military bases of those European countries most actively involved in operations against Russia. Should conventional strikes prove insufficient, he argues, Russia must be prepared to escalate to strategic nuclear weapons. His conclusion pulls no punches: “At present, [the Europeans] only give the appearance of fearing us, so as to build up their military strength. But they should actually fear us. They should be in terror of us. They should understand that escalating or even continuing the conflict risks their immediate physical destruction, and that a military buildup is pointless, as it will entail an obliterating nuclear response”.

One might dismiss this as mere sabre-rattling — and it is quite possible that such options would never be seriously entertained by the Kremlin — but the mere fact that these scenarios are being openly debated in Russia ought to send a shiver down the spine of every European. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine war, fringe ideas have a way of becoming mainstream when conflicts drag on and frustration mounts; the longer this one continues without end, the louder and more influential radical voices are likely to become.

There is, moreover, a deeper danger that operates independently of any deliberate choice Russia might make. By allowing tensions with Moscow to keep rising, we are constructing a situation whereby a single miscalculation — an errant strike, a misread signal, an escalatory move that spirals beyond anyone’s intentions — could set off a chain of events that no single actor would be able to arrest. How long, for instance, before the Russian Navy starts providing armed escorts to its oil fleets, and treating any seizure of its tankers as an act of war? Or taking similar action against Western tankers? The gravest wars in history have not always begun with conscious decisions; they have begun with incidents that spun out of control. That possibility grows more real with every week the conflict remains unresolved.

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Yet if that’s partly true of Russia itself — what with the hawkish language of its outriders, and its continued assaults on Ukrainian soil — European leaders appear reckless themselves. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the assembled Brussels elites and their attendant apparatchiks took turns stoking the drumbeat of war, ramping up their own hawkish rhetoric while offering little in the way of serious strategic reflection. Politico captured the prevailing mood with uncomfortable precision. “Western countries see World War III coming”, it said, a headline that glossed over the inconvenient fact that many of those sounding the alarm are themselves among the most vigorous advocates for continued escalation. As Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte recently put it, Europeans “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”. There is something deeply troubling about a European political class that cultivates war hysteria while remaining seemingly indifferent to where that hysteria might lead.

The situation is particularly disconcerting when set against the backdrop of Europe’s ongoing industrial decline. One might expect a weakening continent to seek accommodation and de-escalation; instead, European leaders continue to think in rigidly unipolar terms, dismissing Russia’s security concerns as illegitimate while remaining blind to the material reality of a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar — a shift that is already translating into Europe’s own economic and geopolitical marginalization. In this, however, they are simply mirroring Washington’s broader posture.

As the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan recently argued in Foreign Affairs, we are living through a hybrid and deeply unstable geopolitical moment: one marked by growing multipolarity in economic terms, yet remaining largely unipolar in military terms, with the United States still uniquely capable of projecting force across the globe with impunity. The consequences of this asymmetry, Mohan suggests, have been paradoxical. Rather than ushering in a more balanced international order, the rise of economic multipolarity has, if anything, emboldened Washington to shed the constraints that once tempered its behavior and to project its power ever more aggressively — a dynamic that the Trump administration has made more explicit than ever.

This raises difficult questions. Can a world in which the US remains free to engage in repeated acts of military and economic aggression — unchecked by other powers — truly be called multipolar in any meaningful sense? And can a transition to a genuine multipolar order, one in which unrestrained US military primacy gives way to a world based on sovereign equality for all, occur without the world first passing through a period of acute and potentially catastrophic confrontation? These are not abstract theoretical puzzles. Given the trajectory of events in Ukraine and beyond, they are among the most urgent questions of our time.

Two centuries on, Vladimir Putin has framed his crusade against Ukraine as the path to recovering Russian vitality once more. Putin has repeatedly invoked memories of the Westernizing 18th-century Tsar Peter the Great, and of the Soviet Union, to equate expansion with renewal — and war as a method of national rejuvenation. Through its battle against Ukraine, Putin promised, Russia would reshape the international order, overturn Western dominance, and forge itself as a stronger, more unified society. A new, vibrant Russia could emerge from a conflict in which its army has slaughtered thousands of Ukrainians and faced death and destruction itself.

For years, state propaganda has ceaselessly pushed this vision. Occupied cities such as Mariupol are presented as showcases of a coming “new Russia”: rebuilt, modernized, and cleansed of European influence. A rash of new school textbooks describe a rising power reclaiming its historical destiny. Official imagery projects motion born of war: construction sites, patriotic festivals, soldiers as founders of a renewed nation. Even diplomatic theater — including the Russian media reception of Putin’s red-carpet welcome in Alaska — reinforces the impression of restored prestige, of a country returning to its rightful place at the center of global affairs. The war serves as the engine of historical revival; it is the catalyst for life renewed.

Exactly four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, of course, Russia’s war has failed. Endless casualties have bought barely a fifth of Ukrainian territory. The world has not reorganized itself around Russian power, while the promised internal renewal has failed to materialize. Behind the spectacle of official optimism, meanwhile, death has moved to the demographic, economic and cultural heart of public life. The mechanisms meant to restore national strength are instead consuming the human and institutional resources on which that strength depends. Russia’s leaders set out to escape the Necropolis. Now, though, the country is addicted to war, and entrenching itself as a land of the dead.

Wherever Russians live, death has found a burrow. Each month, some 30,000 new recruits depart from country towns and industrial outskirts, and another stream of wounded traipses back the other way. Official promises of rehabilitation, employment, and social prestige often dissolve into bureaucratic delay and indifference. Despite promises of grand new veteran support centers, complaints rumble on social and even state media about the difficulty of actually accessing them. Still, the wounded are the lucky ones. As many as 325,000 soldiers have been killed since the full-scale invasion began. The life expectancy of a Russian soldier in some places may be as low as 12 minutes. No major power has sustained losses on this scale in a single conflict since the Second World War, yet on and on the cycle of recruitment and casualty is repeated.

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The consequences are already visible far from the battlefield. Across provincial Russia, amputees hobble over icy streets; families reorganize themselves around absence; cemeteries spill over their old boundaries as the dead are put to rest. In one tiny village in far-flung Kamchatka, almost all the young men are gone: of 39 who signed contracts to fight in Ukraine, 12 are missing or dead already. Life is more brutal in other ways too. Domestic violence is up and veterans, accustomed to the amorality of the front, have committed a spate of murders. Just this week Rustam Nogmov, a former soldier, was jailed for the apparently motiveless murder of an 86-year-old woman.

Russia’s leadership makes no attempt to conceal this creeping presence of the funereal. A Kremlin-approved blend of Orthodox Christianity is today bound up with worship of the fallen from the Second World War and the casualties of the present struggle. Death in Ukraine, the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has claimed, “washes away all sin.” Images of fallen soldiers proliferate across everyday space, as if imitating icons of Orthodox saints. Roadside billboards bear uniformed portraits; official websites praise the young dead; memorial plaques fixed to school walls hang over children who sit at “heroes’ desks” commemorating the dead. Enrolled in state-sponsored youth organizations that teach military skills and the inevitability of battle, Russia’s youth are being fed into the same pipeline that is killing their elders.

Older Russians are roped in too. In carefully staged media stories, parents declare pride at their children’s death at the front. One mother from Stavropol claimed that, after her son died, she had dedicated herself even more fully to patriotic activities. “I focus,” she said, “on teaching lessons about bravery in schools, visiting museums, and attending exhibitions related to the special military operation.” The state’s commemorative machinery absorbs individual tragedies into a pantheon of sacrifice, where ordinary citizens, through death, can be elevated into symbols of national heroism — even as their living relatives are obliged to prostrate themselves before the very machinery that brought annihilation. The boundary between the living and the dead has begun to erode; participation in national life is parsed through the language of sacrifice and loss.

Thanks to the war, meanwhile, household finances across Russia’s shabby provinces now too contend with death. Enlistment, for all its risks, has become one of the few reliable paths to economic stability available to young men outside major cities. Recruitment bonuses, combat salaries, compensation payments to families of the dead — some of these bonuses, if the sometimes-reluctant state bothers to pay them, reach figures of $60,000 and more — have funneled vast sums into pockets after years of stagnation. Provincial towns that struggled to sustain small businesses now see new cafés, gyms, dog groomers, and other big-city amenities.

This influx of money creates the impression of renewal, but the new prosperity depends on citizens turning themselves into “human capital” out there on the western steppe. Without the war, there would be no boom. This is, as one analyst has put it, “deathonomics”. And where local economies go, so too the federal government has created a wartime overheating effect. Yet as the economist Alexandra Prokopenko starkly put it, the economy is destroying itself in its pursuit of war by “metabolizing its own muscle tissue.” Military expenditure absorbs an ever larger share of state resources, sustaining defense industries while weakening civilian sectors that depend on long-term investment. Factories linked to arms production operate at full capacity, but labor shortages intensify elsewhere as workers enlist, migrate, or are redirected toward wartime production. State spending — as much as 40% of it is now linked to the war effort — desperately prioritizes military needs over infrastructure, healthcare, and education, narrowing the foundations from which future development might come.

Output rises in sectors connected to the war effort, but the money is running out. All that is left is consuming more human capital — flesh-and-blood boys from Buryatia and Belgorod and Tatarstan. Skilled workers vanish from local economies. Younger cohorts face increasing incentives to exchange long-term prospects for short-term financial security at the front. Deprived regions in the provinces have become increasingly dependent on transfers that cannot exist without continued fighting: even as their men perish in the so-called “meat grinder,” the system demands ever more sacrifice. Economic stability begins to rely on conditions that steadily erode the society meant to benefit from it. And at the bottom of it all, “deathonomics” draws individuals into sacrificing themselves in the name of war.

Peace, under such circumstances, is all-but impossible. Demobilization would remove income streams that can sustain entire communities, while returning veterans would require medical care, employment, and social reintegration on a scale the state has rarely managed. Indeed, the history of Russia’s modern wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya suggests that this latest venture will not see troops integrated peacefully into society. Ending the conflict would expose weaknesses that wartime spending conceals — a paradox that the Kremlin has no plan to avoid. Death has not just become central to Russia as a visible category and a political religion. Today, it’s at the very heart of the Kremlin’s self-destructive economic program.

All the while, Russian culture, which has given birth to some of the greatest works in human history, has slipped into a coma. The Kremlin’s wars have often produced music and books of genuine import, their authors forcing Russians to confront what violence does to a society. Tolstoy’s early sketches from Sevastopol repudiated the bombastic heroism of official propaganda; Isaak Babel turned the Civil War into a record of cruelty, racism, and moral disintegration; Vasily Grossman produced the great tragedy of the Second World War in Life and Fate.

Each of these works bears witness to the ways that leaders justify their wars through sacrifice — and how, for ordinary people, morality can be corrupted by the temptations of death. Yet this distinguished tradition of war writing depended on the ethical insights of an intelligentsia willing to frankly confront corrosive wartime violence. Today, though, Russia’s most popular and insightful artists have mostly fled the country. Alla Pugacheva, perhaps the country’s most beloved singer and a familiar face for half a century, has been an outspoken critic from abroad, slamming the war as “terrible” and declaring that “to tell your homeland that it is wrong, that is patriotism”. But voices like these are barely heard in the motherland. Most of those that remain acquiesce to a state that now uses culture to promote its cult of death.

Russia in 2026 certainly doesn’t want for cultural production. Indeed, it produces a great deal. Unfortunately, what passes for culture here is increasingly administered with bureaucratic tedium. Patriotic grants, competitions, publishing initiatives, and a constant stream of “heroic” content optimized for online circulation — all comprises the most visible output. What the state’s organs desire, above all, are odes to soldiering and sacrifice. “Fan art” competitions and children’s poetry contests fill social media with images of soldiers in battle and death. Soldiers crop up on light entertainment shows on television. The state hands out awards to aging producers and writers who beat the drum of war most loudly.

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A constant stream of identikit, state-funded (and mostly ignored) Second World War movies clog up movie theater screens. The greatest state praise today is reserved for the purveyors of so-called “Z Literature”: the war veterans who write of their own experiences in Ukraine, meditating as they go on the necessity of bloodshed in crude and gruesome doggerel. A line in a poem by Alexander Pelevin, a veteran in his thirties whose writing has been awarded and praised by state media, sums up the genre: “‘Alive’ means only ‘not yet dead’. / I am the abyss; the one that reigns supreme.” Defined by the moment of death, the soldier’s life exists in limbo. He is morally empty — an abyss — yet by fighting and dying, he can become “supreme”. State commissions seek out such writers and lavish them with prizes.

But in a bitter twist, the state breaks even those it praises. Pelevin recently posted on Telegram about his own poverty: “Your Russian writer is broke, ruined, and in debt.” He begged for financial help from subscribers. The same state that fills public spaces with heroic portraits, sanctified language, and everyday rituals of death — this state struggles to provide stable support even for the poets who reinforce its narrative. Individuals, whether soldiers or writers, remain instruments in the hands of the state. Their cultural value lies only in what can be extracted from them: death.

The state insists that war generates new life. The longer the war continues, however, the more the Kremlin and society as a whole cannot escape its clutches without economic and social collapse. Yet all the while, the war itself is a burden, dragging Russia into an economic and cultural morass. This country stuck in its own moral stagnation, just like the Russia of the 1820s, is the inescapable necropolis of late Putinism.

A decade from now, Moscow may continue to glitter, sustained by media spectacle, distance from the front, and economic support from China. But elsewhere, the necropolis will surely have taken hold. Imagine a typical small town. The war memorial has been renovated again, its granite polished and its list of names extended. Across the street, the roof of the school — now named after a local dead military “hero” — still leaks. A café opened during the wartime boom stands all but abandoned, its prices beyond what most residents can afford. Recruitment notices take up space on a bulletin board alongside funeral announcements and pleas for money for wounded veterans. The faces of the dead look down from the local church. The living cling to the hopes of a new war to inject more money into their ailing town and empty bank accounts, even as they know it will take yet more sons and brothers from them. More war — more death — is the only way out of the catastrophe. In attempting to destroy Ukraine, Russia has not revived itself: it has turned itself into the land of the dead.

Such is the disconnect between the rhetoric surrounding the British military and its true condition that it is tempting to simply dismiss the strategy documents and high-stakes summits as diplomatic bluster. But the disintegration of global order may well produce scenarios in which politicians and officials, prisoners to their own commitments, are sucked into a shooting war. At that moment, the danger of a tragic and ruinous fiasco will become very real. In his recent book The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, retired brigadier Ben Barry warns of this very outcome, albeit in the understated language of the military analyst. Unless “capability weaknesses are rectified”, he writes, “deploying British Army units and formations to fight carries increased risk of avoidable casualties and mission failure”.

British strategy is like a man riding multiple horses whose paths are gradually diverging, and some of which are biting each other. With US commitment to Nato in doubt, Britain finds itself with greater responsibility for countering the Russian threat in Europe. At the same time, to maintain its own American alliance — not least in the interests of moderating Donald Trump’s claims on the Danish territory of Greenland — the Government will feel compelled to serve as a junior partner in some of the US President’s ongoing military adventures, as it already did with the seizure of the oil tanker (the ship had evaded a US blockade of Venezuela). Since 2021, Britain has also pledged to follow the United States in supporting a coalition of Asian and Pacific states ranged against China, while remaining active in the Middle East, where British interests are bound up with issues of terrorism, migration and trade.

Since 2010, when the Coalition government took office against a background of financial crisis and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British response to these challenges has been shaped, above all, by spending cuts to the armed forces. Barry writes that by 2012, Britain’s deployable combat power was already down by a third compared to 2009. Aircraft carriers and jets were retired early, experienced officers were made redundant, and personnel were slashed across the navy, airforce and army. In 2014, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that Britain would soon lack “the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past”.

Britain has since regained its military ambition, but not the budgets to match. It has signed up to develop nuclear submarines with Australia and the US, and a new fighter jet with Italy and Japan. It has played a prominent role in boosting Nato defenses in Eastern Europe and the Baltics — just short of 1,000 troops remain stationed in Estonia today — while focusing resources on the murky realm of “hybrid” activities such as intelligence, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare. It plans to build a new generation of nuclear warheads as well as an AI-enabled “digital backbone” to coordinate its forces.

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All the while, conventional capabilities have continued to wither. Britain has drastically reduced its numbers of tanks, planes, ships, armored vehicles and airlift helicopters. Its missile defenses are inadequate to defend its own territory from attack. It has abandoned its major landing craft, meaning that an operation like that to retake the Falkland Islands in the Eighties would now be extremely difficult. It has donated a large quantity of weapons and equipment to Ukraine, without replenishing its own stocks. It lacks the engineering, medical and logistical abilities to support its soldiers in the field. Army troop numbers, which stood at 109,000 in 2010, are now down to 72,500, their lowest since the early 1800s.

The mood music accompanying this decline, and still audible in last year’s Strategic Defense Review, is the hope that new forms of fighting with hi-tech systems will allow British forces to do more with less in the way of traditional platforms and manpower. Drones, cyber and precision strikes will cripple the enemy before the soldiers and sailors arrive. This theory is highly suspect in its own right — because we do not yet know what the demands of modern warfare will be outside the specific contexts where it is happening now, because new technologies will be subject to failure and contestation, and because many of the lost capabilities just cannot be performed by newer ones. More to the point, military chiefs and politicians are now contemplating precisely the kind of mission that will require large numbers of soldiers equipped with a wide range of hardware, namely the deployment of a ground force to Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia, where they will risk war with Russia itself. Should this actually come to pass, the army could, in extremis, deploy a division of 25,000-30,000 troops, which would soon seize up for lack of ammunition and other resources, while leaving Britain unable to fight elsewhere. For comparison, Russia currently has around 700,000 troops in Ukraine.

The frailty of British forces is now common knowledge, but plans to strengthen them are far from convincing. Starmer last year promised to raise defense spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, while pledging 3% at some point in the 2030s “if economic and fiscal conditions allow”. A further 1.5% will be earmarked for defense industries and protecting critical infrastructure. Even with such vague timelines, it is questionable whether any of Britain’s parties can persuade the electorate to make the sacrifices required to meet these targets. Public finances are already overstretched, the economy is suffering from years of underinvestment, and the bills for pensions, health and welfare continue to grow. The hope is that defense spending will act as an “engine for growth”, by rebuilding the manufacturing industries that disappeared along with the military reductions of recent years. There are signs that this is starting to happen, but greater certainty will be needed to bring companies into the supply chain, and contracts have so far been slow to appear.

Money is one thing, but Britain is also struggling to find people willing and able to serve in uniform. The Army and Navy have missed their recruitment targets every year since 2010. I recently had a sobering conversation with Mark Maguire, an anthropologist at Maynooth University who has been investigating the erosion of the people and cultures that once underpinned Britain’s military. The forces which have transformed British society in recent decades, from deindustrialization and immigration to falling birth rates, are also being felt in traditional recruiting grounds. “If you go to these military towns, there is no evidence of the people that used to populate the British Army,” Maguire said. “They’re just not there anymore.” He told me of army units which are now recruiting over the phone from Commonwealth countries, their traditional streams of working-class men having dried up.

Attitudes have changed too. Maguire describes focus groups with young people where “the negativity towards the armed forces was stunning, frankly”, the military now being associated with “bombing poor counties and murdering kids”. One young man signed up in secret to avoid the stigma. Recruitment is further hampered by high rates of drug use, obesity, general unfitness and physical and mental disability. In 2024, it was revealed that more than a fifth of regular British forces was not “fully deployable” or deployable at all due to health conditions.

Scarcely less troubling is the MoD’s abysmal record on planning and procurement. The current budget shortfall is anything but unusual. Since 2010, when the department revealed it was £36 billion in the red, defense spending has been marked by, in the words of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a “consistent pattern of planned overspend”, “serious organizational failings” and “a dangerous culture of optimism”. This has led to important programs being cut while others spiral into expensive failures. The new Ajax range of armored vehicles, for instance, was originally due for 2017, but has repeatedly been delayed due to design flaws causing illness and hearing problems in soldiers. Consequently, the army still lacks a replacement for its Scimitar and Scorpion vehicles, which entered service more than 50 years ago.

Considering the mismatch between Britain’s posture and its military resources, many will naturally conclude that the former should change. Why must Britain do so much? Surely, the bloody disaster of the Iraq war showed us where blind fealty to the United States leads, and under Trump, we are potentially allying ourselves to a rogue state. And why would we put British lives at risk more than 1,000 miles away in Ukraine, when other European states, with the exception of France, feel no need to? Britain is a declining, middle-ranking nation; what business does it have trying to operate in distant corners of the globe, as though it were still a great imperial power?

These questions are always worth asking, insofar as they pressure our leaders to set aside their vainglory and think carefully about which military endeavors are truly vital to Britain’s interests. It may well be, for instance, that the Navy’s Pacific ventures are not sustainable in a world where Britain has to help compensate for less American involvement on the European continent. But Europe’s humiliation at the hands of Trump, who has imposed one-sided tariffs on it and tried to exclude it from negotiations over its own future, has put paid to the notion that military weakness is a symptom of an enlightened society. Hard power is vital for being taken seriously by friends and enemies alike, especially as the global system fragments. Nothing else is as effective in discouraging aggressors or in reassuring allies.

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This logic is especially compelling for Britain, and especially after Brexit. An island nation whose prosperity depends on connections with other parts of the world, Britain has, since the 18th century, pursued a policy of forward defense, recognizing that threats are best met at a distance from its own coastlines, and that its interests must sometimes be protected far from home. Britain needs good relations with other nations, and security cooperation is a very concrete form of assistance to offer. Being a loyal partner to the US can be a thankless and demeaning role, but America remains the world’s greatest military power and one that is crucial for British intelligence, nuclear assets and weapons programs. If we are to stand any chance of influencing Trump, it will be in situations where it can offer material assistance. Starmer has got very little right in his first 18 months as Prime Minister, but he has been wise to insist on not choosing between Europe and America for as long as possible.

Regardless, this is all moot if Britain cannot find the resources to recruit, train and equip its armed forces to adequate levels. And ultimately, those resources are social and cultural as well as material. After decades under the American security umbrella, western European nations like Britain are not only reluctant to make economic sacrifices in order to defend themselves; they have become totally estranged from the reality that societies sometimes have to fight in order to survive. The clearest evidence of this is that the British state makes no real effort to provide young people with a positive vision of the nation as something to which we owe loyalty and a sense of duty. Nor does it give any account of the role of the Armed Forces in protecting our way of life. The numbers of 18-27-year-olds who are proud to be British and who are willing to fight for the country has plummeted over the past 20 years.

But the problem goes deeper. Maguire argues that “every developed economy now has a problem with self-sacrifice”, meaning that they struggle to produce people who are “willing to run towards danger”. Few of us now have jobs which involve any degree of physical risk, and we are more likely to worry about safety than to celebrate physical bravery. We have little acquaintance with violence beyond films and news stories, while the harsh realities of death are carefully quarantined in medical buildings. Much of this is good, but it leaves us unable to fathom what warfare actually entails. Fighting, Maguire points out, is “pretty gruesome work”, a fact that is now routinely repressed even among those responsible for managing it. He calls the UK’s latest, tech-centered Strategic Defense Review “the most bloodless document I’ve ever read”.

In a recent interview, the historian Stephen Kotkin put Europe’s defense dilemma succinctly: “You need to build really large armies, navies and air forces, of killers — of soldiers who can kill, not build homes, or roads, or sing songs… there are many brave people in Europe, but they’re just not interested in war.” The question in coming years will be whether firmer foundations can be established before they are truly tested, or whether the country’s goals will be revised downwards to match its means. The third course, our current one, is that it will stumble into a fight it is not ready for.

 JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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JD Vance: My message to Europe

By Sohrab Ahmari

SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programs is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretizes your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilizations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilizations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighborhood. Russia and China, also rich civilizations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a nonprofit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

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The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighborhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighborhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply skeptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

While Putin has not yet achieved the fast-moving operational breakthrough that has eluded him since the war’s first hours, the acceleration of Ukraine’s territorial losses on the eastern and southern sectors of its frontline paint a grim picture of the coming months. Now the situation is such that, as America’s army secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly told his Ukrainian counterparts last week, Kyiv’s military position can only worsen, and Moscow’s can only improve. America’s skepticism of Ukraine’s chances is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: in these circumstances, it is hard to argue against Driscoll’s reported warning to Kyiv that “you are losing… and you need to accept the deal”.

The war’s outcome will now be decided by Russia and the United States, over the heads of both Ukraine and Europe. If this is a defeat for the European Atlanticists who are most determinedly hawkish against Moscow, it is also the end result of the worldview they embody. So enmeshed are European nations within America’s defense structures, that it is impossible for Europe to sustain a major war without US support: and which only a fool could now believe is guaranteed. The Ukraine war was an opportunity for Europe’s leaders to radically transform our continent’s security framework towards a vision of strategic autonomy — in which, by taking responsibility for our own defense, we Europeans could assert our own interests and shape our own futures. Yet as the Russia analyst Jade McGlynn, a Ukraine hawk, observes: Europe “has chosen paralysis while others determine the fate of our continent” — a fate which is “the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long”, not least the “bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy as somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history”.

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As the war’s early days revealed, Putin is no strategic genius. But with Europe’s current leadership, he does not need to be. If it is Emmanuel Macron’s tragedy to be a great man of history, trapped in the role of a 21st-century European leader, it is our far greater misfortune to be ruled by his peers. Europe failed at the historic task with which it was presented, settling back into its comfort zone of demanding a satisfactory outcome to the war it is not in a position to impose. Veering between a hawkishness that it cannot sustain — see Kaja Kallas this week demanding Russia’s demilitarization — and humiliating tributary missions to our Washington overlord which reflect our true situation, Europe’s bellicose rhetoric on the Ukraine war has become increasingly detached from reality.

The simple facts of the matter are that the United States, on whom Europe’s defense depends, is keener to end the war than Russia, which scents total military victory. Ukraine’s overriding interest, in preserving the Kyiv government’s independence from Moscow, increasingly diverges from Europe’s, which is for the Ukrainian armed forces to distract and degrade Russia’s military power long enough for Europe to effectively re-arm, or for some, so far unknown, deus ex machina appear to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner. From its earlier heady expectations of total victory, and resultant disastrous overreach, Kyiv must now find a path to negotiating the least painful defeat the circumstances offer: Europe’s political discourse is yet to catch up with this harsh reality.

Yet even still, for Britain, losing a proxy war is a better outcome than losing a war in which we are ourselves engaged. Due to the Army’s prolonged mismanagement, Britain cannot field artillery or air defense to speak of. Nor can it cobble together the armored brigade that is its Nato responsibility, nor sustain the munitions expenditure of a high-intensity war for more than a few days. The next prime minister will find themself at the helm of a country that has simultaneously enmeshed itself to an alarming degree in a losing war while bulldozing, through sheer incompetence, its own ability to field an army. Having entirely failed to rebuild its deterrent power in the nearly four years since the beginning of the greatest land war in Europe since 1945, it would take great optimism in Whitehall’s wisdom and ability to assume that matters would suddenly improve if Britain were itself forced to fight. This is not a reassuring position to be in, and Washington enforcing a peace settlement that extracts us from this worrying bind should be accepted, even if its terms are no cause for celebration.

Yet dragging Britain’s political class to hard reality is not an easy task. Though no doubt well-meaning, the pundit hawkishness that undermined previous attempts at peace negotiations has not served Ukraine well. It would have been better for Ukraine, and Europe, to have negotiated peace from a position of relative advantage, as the country possessed in 2022 or 2023. Yet those chances were squandered, with those urging negotiations condemned as Putinist appeasers by a commentariat which apparently believed that Ukraine was destined to liberate Crimea, topple Putin, and carve Russia into a constellation of weak ethnic statelets. Discounting the possibility of Zack Polanski hypnotizing Putin into shrinking his munitions stockpiles, we are perhaps fortunate that the likeliest next prime minister will be either Nigel Farage, leading a Reform government with a mandate for total change, or an intervening Labour reformer. Shabana Mahmood has already set out her stall as a purveyor of uncomfortable truths and hard-nosed realism, while another likely contender for a Labour coup, the defence secretary John Healey, possesses the credibility to recalibrate Britain’s rhetoric to its diminished capability.

Britain’s next leader will be forced by events to construct a new and cautious vision for British security managing four separate poles: the United States, whose will and ability to defend Europe is clearly waning; Europe itself, which has proved itself disunited and incapable of sustained and concerted action; Russia, whose assertive foreign policy will have been bloodily vindicated by the war’s conclusion; and the greatest industrial power in world history, China.

In our current circumstances of military and economic weakness, and near-revolutionary domestic political discontent, a continuation of Britain’s hawkish stance on world affairs is simply not viable. Even if an interventionist foreign policy were wise — which it is not — or electorally popular — which it is not — it is simply now beyond our ability. It is unfortunate, then, that in his choice of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society’s Alan Mendoza as foreign policy adviser, Farage has settled on an advocate of total, ideological war against rivals great and small at which even Washington balks. It is, indeed, worryingly plausible that the domestic demands of neutering claims that he is a Russian asset, a Brexit-era liberal fantasy entirely downstream of the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate conspiracy theory, will force Farage into reckless hawkishness to win the approval of the commentariat which will never come.

If Ukraine manages to retain its functional independence from Russia, obtain meaningful security guarantees from the United States, and join the European Union, then the cession of territory it currently does not hold and will not soon recapture is hardly the worst outcome. Certainly, it is a better than the looming loss of territory currently in its possession, and an even worse peace deal in the future. The Trump administration, proposing lucrative joint economic projects with Moscow, openly covets a stable future diplomatic relationship with Russia. Whether this is feasible may be doubtful, but so is Europe’s current stance of simultaneous subordination to the former and hostility just short of open war with the latter.

Like Ukraine, Europe and Britain are forced by military and political disadvantage to take their orders from their imperial patron: America has decided that the war must end, and is now persuading Russia to agree. If this damages European pride, then it should: the continent will now pay the price for the weakness our leaders chose for us. Absorbing a bruised and shell-shocked postwar Ukraine, whose economy has been wrecked, a quarter of whose population has already fled to the EU into European political structures will be a generational challenge in itself. So, too, will be stemming the illicit westward flow of weapons, once the shooting stops.

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Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for a peace deal has already passed. If the war is over by Christmas, it will be a miracle. Yet its likely unsatisfactory conclusion, and the narrow escape it may grant us from a far worse outcome, require a measure of sober reflection alien to Westminster’s political culture. The Ukrainians, rightly, now place little faith in Europe’s empty assurances. As Zelensky this week warned his nation, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.” If only our own leaders were so frank with us. Britain’s rivals are growing in power, and our allies are demonstrably unreliable: yet as the Commons Defense Select Committee warned this week, Britain’s ability to defend even the homeland itself is doubtful in the extreme. Farage is perhaps fortunate that the burden of defeat will fall on a Labour prime minister, and that Reform’s foreign policy is so far little more than an empty page on a website: with his current foreign policy adviser, it is better that this is remains so. Losing a war is, historically, one of the greatest spurs to serious projects of national reform. In preparing for government, Farage must make use of what may only be a lull in hostilities to chart a swift and viable path towards guaranteeing the nation’s basic security, and ensuring that Britain is never again left so dangerously exposed between its commitments and its capabilities.

This time, however, there was only silence until the full 28-point plan appeared. The effect was compounded by the extremely tight deadline. Volodymyr Zelensky and his government were allowed a mere seven days — until 27 November — to accept or refuse the proposal: just one of whose requirements, Ukraine’s withdrawal from active battlefields where its troops are even now fighting the Russian advance, would justify prolonged deliberations to say the least.

The very first official European reaction to Trump’s plan only made matters worse. Taking time out of a pointless G20 summit in failing South Africa — without American, Chinese, or Russian leaders present — Ursula von der Leyen reminded the US that since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now 1,000 days ago, Europe had donated a total of €181 billion, including grossly over-priced weapons, to help Ukraine. That happens to amount to less than 1% of the €19.99 trillion that makes up the combined annual GDP of the European Union.

As against that, the US has spent a combined total of $175 billion on Ukraine since the start of the war, while concurrently devoting a great deal to defend China’s Asian neighbors — from Japan and Taiwan, to scattered island republics in the Pacific — from non-stop provocations. These include everything from the 500-boat intrusions of Chinese “fishing militias” to outright aggressions by Beijing’s rapidly expanding armed forces.

The Europeans constantly forget, just as the Americans constantly remember, that the world does not start or end in Europe, and that China not only presents a direct military threat to US allies — recall those frequent naval intrusions — but is also the opportunistic hotel burglar of our age. It does not smash its way into countries, but tries to open every door as it goes down the corridors of the world, with promises, gifts, loans, or bribes, before suddenly presenting the geopolitical bill. Consider what happened in Sri Lanka, where Beijing tried to convert a harbor-construction loan into a Chinese naval base, sited to threaten both Indian coasts.

To understand Trump’s abrupt 20 November announcement, alongside that shockingly sudden 27 November ultimatum, it is also necessary to invoke yet another date: 6 May, 2025. This was the day when the President, returning from the Persian Gulf, received a full US Navy briefing about the fight with the Shi’a Houthi rebels in Yemen, which he promptly called off, once he heard the essential facts.

Funded by Iran and armed with many anti-ship drones — as well as anti-ship and ballistic missiles sent by Iran — the Houthis quickly joined Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel: attacking ships in the Red Sea, coming or going to the Suez Canal.

In theory, the Houthis were supposed to attack Israeli ships, or ships sailing to Israel, but in practice Israel receives very little sea freight via the Red Sea, and sends even less: almost all its exports consist of high-end electronics, pharmaceuticals and polished diamonds, all much too valuable to be sent by anything slower than air freight. Israel’s only bulk import — oil from its ally Azerbaijan — comes via the Mediterranean. So the Houthis used their Iranian drones and missiles to attack other ships, damaging many and sinking some.

Because the world’s shipping insurance companies promptly raised their rates, shipping via the Red Sea and Suez Canal fell steeply, as more and more ships to and from Asia avoided the danger by going all the way round the Cape of Good Hope and the great bulge of West Africa. Thus the most important of commercial routes, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, was extended by some 4,900 nautical miles, adding roughly 12 extra days to the average journey.

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How the West can beat the rest

By Edward Luttwak

For some trades, the extra costs were easily absorbed, and for others they were fatal. But the losses to Europe’s Mediterranean ports and the cities that depend on them — Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa and Gioia Tauro among others — caused by the loss of traffic was absolute: Europe’s freight now arrived in Rotterdam or Antwerp and continued to French, Italian and Spanish cities by rail, leaving the Mediterranean ports bereft of Asian traffic.

By then, Trump had heard that the fight with the Houthis was extremely expensive for the US Navy. Its destroyers, built to defend its multi-billion aircraft carriers from Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles, only had $2.5-million “standard missiles” to attack Iran’s cheap drones and crude anti-ship missiles, themselves copied from older Chinese designs.

It was at that point in the US Navy briefing that Trump asked about European navies and their role in fighting the Houthis.  When he heard that just the Mediterranean navies of France, Italy and Spain — had some 200 combat vessels including aircraft carriers, he naturally asked how many of their ships were fighting the Houthis. And he was genuinely shocked by the answer: almost none.

All three countries had refused to join the suggestively named Anglo-American “Prosperity Guardian” mission because it involved some air attacks against Houthi weapon depots. This reticence disregarded the fact that the Houthis were not Yemen’s government but merely rebels. Either way, after doing nothing, the EU navies stationed two small ships in the upper Red Sea under the hugely over-publicized “Aspides” mission, which intercepted a total of four Houthi ballistic missiles, alongside 18 drones. Compare this to the 400 drones and missiles intercepted by the US Navy, all at 100 times the cost.

Upon receiving this information, Trump did not ask his National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, who is also the Secretary of State, to convene a meeting to discuss US options: he simply ordered the US Navy to immediately abandon the Prosperity Guardian fight against the Houthis, supposedly employing some choice language about the idiocy of exhausting US naval missile stocks to safeguard the commercial freight of Nato Mediterranean countries: whose own warships lolled idly by instead of defending their commerce.

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Europe needs a new Great Power

By Edward Luttwak

All this set the stage for Trump’s new approach to the Ukraine war. America had just helped Israel defeat Iran — as well as its proxies, the Assad regime of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas — with a total military aid budget of $3.8 billion: or less than 0.5% of total US military spending. The Israelis, for their part, had immediately mobilized 700,000 active-duty troops and reservists after the war started on October 7, out of a total of  7.7 million Israeli Jews and Druze subject to military service.

As for Ukraine, its population still exceeds 36 million. Yet its army has never exceeded a million soldiers. Millions of Ukrainians of military age have not served a day in uniform, with some having bought exemptions and others having fled to Poland, Germany or as far afield as Thailand. Yet all this pales in comparison with Ukraine’s EU allies. Despite including 450 million inhabitants, or 5.5% of the world’s population, it has just 1.5 million men in uniform. That number reaches 1.9 million counting paramilitary forces, every one of whom eats three meals a day in their camps, barracks, bases and ships at sea — but none of whom are available to fight.

And the number of EU troops sent to Ukraine? Zero. That is ultimately why the Trump plan has made its concessions to Putin. It is not a pretty spectacle to see Washington replacing unconditional support for Ukraine with an ultimatum to end the war or else. But it really must focus on the global Chinese threat, especially when the Europeans have proved such unreliable partners.

Besides the EU, or more likely a compact of major European countries, could easily take full control of the situation if they wished: by simply sending troops to help Ukraine, if only for logistical support and equipment repair well behind the front. This would pose very little risk to themselves, while releasing Ukrainians for combat roles and immediately changing attitudes to the EU — or at least to the contributing nations — in the White House and in the US Congress.

If even that is too much, the EU’s entire machinery of pretended military strength will be exposed as a fraud, and so will its claim to challenge White House priorities, shaped by global rather than just European realities.

Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognize Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.

Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.

The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.

Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies. 

Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.

The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.

Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.

This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests. 

At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.

Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalized security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.  

America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.

While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilizational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.” 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.

That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.

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A Ukraine deal is still possible

By Heather Penatzer

Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.

Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.  

Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.

The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.

In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.

Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe.  US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium. 

The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalized Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.

Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.

Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.

The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilizing, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.

Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.  

If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritize the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.

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Then there is the Asia-Pacific region.  Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific. 

At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasized the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.

Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base. 

Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.

The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalization of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.

While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.

Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon. 

Antagonizing allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.

Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard. 

Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity. 

Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.

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Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilize local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.  

The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.

Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.

Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganization. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics. 

The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.

Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.  

After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.

It’s tempting to blame these disruptions on Trump’s famously capricious style — but that would be a mistake. For the real shift of recent times came not from the Commander in Chief himself, but from a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which finally led White House officials to realize that Russia’s position on Ukraine remains as unyielding and uncompromising as ever. First in Alaska, and now ahead of Budapest, Trump has twice learned a truth that Ukrainians have always known — that Putin is not interested in concessions so long as the price of continuing the war is lower than the cost of ending it.

As a result, the Trump administration duly announced sanctions against Russian oil firms Lukoil and Rosneft, the first against Russia during his second term in office. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see this face-saving move as the end of his efforts to force a solution to the conflict that he can put his name on. After all, the energy giants have already been under American sanctions since 2014, and though some key buyers have started to back off from Russian oil and gas, the long-term efficacy of such sanctions largely depends on how aggressively the Trump administration enforces them.

That’s especially true when it comes to taking robust measures against secondary countries. And certainly, Trump’s record of upholding Biden-era sanctions against Russia leaves a lot to be desired. What all this means is that Trump’s latest moves won’t be nearly enough to sway Putin — and unless he is willing to go all-in on support for Ukraine, which is unlikely, the White House will eventually join forces with Putin to end the war on his terms, leaving Ukraine with only the hapless Europeans for solace.

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Despite his on-off embrace of Ukraine, what is easily and repeatedly observable is that, sooner or later, Trump always comes crawling back to Putin’s kennel, and after years of habit, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Though he understands that he has once again been played by his Russian counterpart, Trump also knows that he may be reaching the end of his window to bag his long-coveted peace deal — his ninth, apparently — which would open the door to the trade deals and investments he has discussed with Putin almost since his inauguration.

He may levy sanctions today, in short, but as his bile-filled meeting with Zelensky implies, Trump is ultimately likely to return to his default approach and force the Ukrainians to abandon the last battlefield advantages they have. Jaded by his own peace process, yet still driven by his ego, Trump’s move against Russia is best understood as a façade, a reaction that belies a much deeper, more cynical awareness: that only by forcing Ukraine to capitulate will Trump get what he wants.

What exactly is that? Beyond the prospect of a long-term economic bargain with Moscow, Trump stressed after his meeting with Zelensky that the best-case scenario would be a quick deal to end the fighting. That would allow him to parade a personal triumph, while leaving it to Putin, Zelensky, and the Europeans to figure out the details of a proper lasting peace. “Let it be cut the way it is,” he said aboard Air Force One, referring to Donetsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine that Russia currently occupies. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.” Now that Putin has made it clear this isn’t an option, Trump has found himself trapped — unable to secure a quick ceasefire, but still determined to secure Russian wealth.

In hindsight, Trump’s entire Russia-Ukraine saga has been leading up to this moment. Following the dud that was the Alaska summit in August, Trump tried on an all-in-for-Ukraine approach for size, offering Kyiv perhaps the most valuable asset in his toolkit — American intelligence support for long-range drone strikes against Russian energy sites. Though Trump’s threats to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine garnered much of the headlines, it was these strikes, which reduced Russia’s oil refining capabilities by 20% by September and slashed its oil export revenues, that ultimately played a larger role in pushing Putin to indulge the Budapest summit. For all its bluster, Russia would have likely weathered the limited Tomahawk strikes that Ukraine could have sent its way — but another few months of near-daily drone strikes might have been economically fatal.

Trump’s pro-Ukraine gambit was enough to bring Putin back to the negotiating table, but not enough to get him to actually negotiate. For that reason alone, the Commander-in-Chief is unlikely to “waste” more time on trying to meaningfully change Putin’s calculus in the long run. It may take another cycle of fruitlessly trying to get Putin to negotiate, but Trump will eventually return to what was always in his eyes a much more effective method for securing his goals: strong-arming Ukraine. Zelensky already got a taste of this during his meeting with Trump on Friday, when the US President told him that he should give in to Putin’s demands or get “destroyed”.

While Trump settled on advocating for a ceasefire along the current frontlines, there’s no guarantee he still sees this as a viable position, especially following the collapse of the Budapest summit. If he truly believes he can get Zelensky to surrender the Donbas, which could well be the case with Steve Witkoff constantly in his ear, the President may let his impulses get the better of him and embrace it as the fastest path to victory. Once he does, he will almost certainly cut off the intelligence support that has been so instrumental in Ukraine’s success against Russia’s energy sector, and possibly cancel Ukraine-destined arms shipments to Nato allies, leaving the country fully at the mercy of Putin’s war machine.

With a shaken Europe at his back, Nato chief Mark Rutte jetted off to Washington to meet with Trump this week, and though he downplayed concerns about the US President’s position on Ukraine, it’s clear the trip was an attempt at damage control. Europe, Kyiv, and Nato are now trying their best to band together and leverage the Trump-whispering techniques they’ve honed over the last eight months. Moving forward, they may try to sway Trump with economic and trade incentives of their own. Yet having already handed much of their bargaining power over to America during previous charm offensives, in the form of mineral deals, trade agreements, and security investment kickbacks, they will have few bones left for him to gnaw on.

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Moreover, European Nato leaders are aware that they must pick their battles carefully — and with a new era of gray-zone Russian drone incursions, provocations, and acts of sabotage already upon them, they may well choose to cut their losses and place their bets on American support for Europe rather than continuing to stick their necks out for Ukraine. And with Russia increasingly casting Europe as the spoilers of Trump’s grand plans, including the Budapest summit, they may soon find their influence in an increasingly pro-Russian White House dropping precipitously.

What of the future? The prospect of bilateral trade with Russia in rare earths and oil would certainly make Trump happy. But the price of such a deal would involve more than dollars: what Putin wants most from America is not just a free hand to impose his will on Ukraine, but an opportunity to halt and even roll back Nato’s expansion in Eastern Europe, refashion Russia’s old neo-imperial sphere of influence, and reach a new compact with the US on what our looming multipolar world might look like.

Whether Trump goes along with this plan remains to be seen, but imposing a dubious peace now opens the door for a whole range of geopolitical scenarios that at present seem unthinkable. As for Europe, which has spent an enormous amount of energy flattering Trump to get him onside, the President’s eventual turn to the Kremlin will force them into their own generational reckoning. And while they may initially redouble their efforts to support Ukraine, and win Trump back once more, it’s likely that, caught between Russia and the US, Europe may just cast Ukraine aside, as they scramble to find a place in this new, Machiavellian world order.

In the meantime, Zelensky is hoping that Trump’s ego won’t let him fall back into Putin’s lap. Ukraine has just conducted several successful strikes against a Russian gas processing plant, likely with American support, and he and the Europeans are doing their best to project calm, buoyed by the sanctions announcement. But as this chaotic week draws to a close, he and the Europeans will be dreading what comes next. Trumpology is an art, not a science, and a move in one direction is hardly ever a sure-fire bet for what comes next. Though the President may feel his self-worth bruised by Putin today, it is only a matter of time before his deeper self-interest wins out once more. Despite the wishful thinking of Europe and Ukraine’s supporters, The Art of the Deal has no chapter on righteous empathy.

In real life, though, it was so much worse. The highly leveraged bets placed were in the billions, not millions, and the banks turned them into products which they would then sell on to naive investors. From the outside, these products looked just like a safe government bond. But, in reality, they were toxic — just like the three-day-old seafood stew metaphor that Anthony Bourdain cooks up in another scene from the movie.

If there is one thing that everybody should remember about the global financial crisis, it is this: complex financial products, especially the three-letter acronym ones, serve one purpose — to defraud. The only financial advice I ever dished out during my previous career as a financial journalist was that when you meet a three-letter acronym, run fast.

You might have thought that the calamity of that relatively recent crisis would have put an end to these scams. And in one respect it did: banks no longer use them. The problem is, governments do. And the three-letter acronyms are back. We saw this only last week, in Brussels, where EU leaders were on the brink of agreeing on a €150bn loan to Ukraine. That the plan fell through was because Bart De Wever, the Belgian Prime Minister, looked at the small print of the agreement. When he discovered that his country would be most exposed by the loan, he asked the others to share the risk. They said “No”. So he said “No”.

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I am sure the EU will find a way to change De Wever’s mind. And if it is good at one thing, it is at getting people to agree to something they don’t want to agree to. Certain readers might think this would be a good outcome: Ukraine needs the money to defend itself against an evil aggressor. But let’s first take a closer look at the small print of this special purpose vehicle — also known by the three-letter acronym SPV — or “reparations loan”.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU froze some €200bn worth of its assets. Most of that money is sitting in Belgium, with a financial company called Euroclear. This is not an ordinary bank, but a depository, where governments and central banks around the world hold their assets.

Originally, some member states wanted the EU to sequester the Russian money outright — to literary take the money and give it to Ukraine. But this would have been a big legal and financial risk. Foreign courts would have declared the confiscation illegal and forced Euroclear, which has offices around the world, to compensate Russia. And since Euroclear is headquartered in Belgium, the Belgian government would have been the ultimate guarantor. So the EU devised a scheme very similar to the subprime scam 20 years ago — a scheme with the sole purpose of hiding the risk, to make it impossible for foreign law courts to get their fingers on the money. No wonder De Weever was antsy.

Here’s the small print. Step one, the EU creates an SPV — a special purpose vehicle — essentially a reparations loan to Ukraine based on the Russian assets. This means that the frozen Russian money is not physically moved; it stays in the frozen bank account at Euroclear. But the SPV holds a claim on those funds. In step two, the European Commission would issue the debt, which would be guaranteed by the member states. This money is then put into the SPV. In step three, the SPV then gives out a loan with this European money to Ukraine.

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Ukraine gets the money. But can’t afford to pay it back. Everyone knows this. A bank would call this bad-faith lending. It is exactly what happened during the subprime crisis, which started with teaser rates on mortgages. The banks knew that once those rates reset, people could no longer afford them. Under the cover of the SPV, the idea is that Ukraine would repay the loan after receiving war reparations from Russia, which, as we know, is never going to happen.

Let’s return to our movie scene and consider the people in the audience who placed their side bets on Gomez winning her game of Blackjack. In the jargon of finance, their side bets would be called a derivative — something which derives its value from an underlying bet — in this case a Blackjack game. Back in the real world, Europe’s gamble with the Ukraine loan is just as risky. Essentially, the success of the EU’s bet lies on the outcome of a future legal case — that an international court will commit Russia to war reparations, while also declaring our SPV scheme to be legal. So we are betting on the outcome of a legally unprecedented case at an uncertain point in the future. It’s no different from placing money on the outcome of a Blackjack game. Remember all these expert opinions that told us the subprime mortgages were safe? Beware!

But in many respects, this is much worse than the subprime crisis. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, governments bailed out the banking system, and central banks printed vast quantities of money to keep the world economy afloat. This time, though, it’s the governments themselves who are engaging in these dodgy transactions. They want to dish out a loan of some €150 billion without having to get approval from anybody. And if it fails, who is going to bail them out?

Inevitably, if the EU loses the legal bet, they will have to pay out themselves — with member states first in line. They are the guarantors of the loan. As a result, when the Russians “default” and fail to pay war damages, the losses will fall to the European taxpayer — another parallel with the subprime crisis. But back then, the banks concealed the risk from the investors. Here, the politicians are attempting to conceal the risk from the voters.

They are doing so because they have run out of political support at home. The former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said German voters would never finance Ukraine if it meant they had to sacrifice domestic spending. I think this is probably true of France and the UK as well — not that they would admit it.

France, hovering on the verge of a debt crisis, spends almost nothing on Ukraine. The UK and Germany are the biggest contributors, but even together they can’t begin to fill the gap left by Donald Trump’s decision to cut America’s support for Ukraine to the minimum. Trump will supply weapons only for as long as the cash-strapped Europeans pay for it. But as the latest statistics from the Kiel Institute Ukraine Support Tracker attest, there has been a sharp fall in Western military support for Ukraine. It has fallen from an average monthly spend of just under €4 billion in the first half of the year to a little over €2 billion in July and August. This is entirely due to lower spending by Europe. Essentially, to keep the war going, the Europeans need to implement their dodgy scheme. Their €150 billion loan to Ukraine should keep the show on the road for another year.

But then what?

The Europeans still have no strategy for ending the war, yet Vladimir Putin has good reason to believe he can achieve his military goal of occupying the entirety of the Donbas region. He outspends the West, he has a lot more troops, and he has made some progress recently. Given Ukraine’s formidable defenses, it might still take him another year or two, but the odds are in his favor.

If, then, Putin prevails, the peace talks will not only be about the land and the post-war security arrangements. The Russians will want their confiscated assets back. I don’t think for a moment that the Europeans would blow a peace deal by refusing them. So Putin will get his money. And the European taxpayer, who never approved these loans in the first place, will have to pay out.

The EU’s too-clever-by-half scheme will end up like all those other dodgy three-letter financial schemes — with voters being forced to eat Brussels’ toxic seafood stew.

It’s true that the two leaders do get on quite well on a personal level. Donald Tusk, Poland’s premier, is probably the most pro-German politician you can find in Poland. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a more pro-Polish German chancellor in recent times than Friedrich Merz. The two are members of the same party in the European Parliament, and yet they both keep messing it up.

Tusk has a reputation for making serial misjudgments. In the UK, he is best known for his unhelpful interventions in the Brexit referendum while president of the European Council. Misunderstanding Britain’s internal political dynamics when making the case for Europe back in 2016, he ended up driving doubting Remain voters into the Brexit camp.

Last week, we had another one of those Tusk blunders — in the form of a tweet about Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea gas pipelines which were blown up by Ukrainian commandos in 2021. Responding to Germany’s request to extradite one of the men allegedly involved, Tusk wrote: “The problem with Nord Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built.”

In one respect he is right. Poland has long argued that the pipelines made Europe too dependent on Russian energy. Germany massively damaged Europe’s security interests by seeking private commercial deals with Russia back then, even after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

But to condone such violent destruction is an act of political madness. Imagine someone had said: “The problem is not that President X got assassinated. The problem is that he or she was elected in the first place.” You would presumably be appalled, regardless of your political position in respect to the president in question. Mercifully, nobody was killed when the explosions ended the gas supplies to Germany overnight. And luckily the sabotage didn’t leave Germany without power — it was a mild winter and the government did a good job managing the transition to new suppliers.

But the destruction was unequivocally a criminal act. The pipelines had been legally constructed and commissioned. They were private property. And we now know, thanks to the German prosecutor, that a group of operatives with links to the Ukrainian military and secret service are suspected of carrying out the sabotage. It was, without a doubt, the military operation of a state. From Tusk’s comment, then, you would think that Poland now officially condones an act of terrorism.

But Tusk wasn’t the first Polish politician to support the violent destruction of the pipelines. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current foreign minister, was an MEP at the time of the explosion, and he tweeted: “Thank you, USA”, in what turned out to be a mistaken reference to the US as the force behind the explosions. Given such comments, and given what we now know about the explosions, it is politically impossible for Germany to adopt pro-Polish positions.

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The Germans, though, are as much at fault when it comes to provoking its neighbor. Despite his emollient diplomacy towards Poland, Merz’s first political act after being elected chancellor in May was to erect border controls to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acting unilaterally, the premier ditched the rules of the Schengen passport-free travel zone by invoking emergency clauses over immigration, causing chaos in Poland. His reasons for doing so were barely credible, and some would say even risked breaking EU asylum law. After all, the last big wave of immigrants came from Ukraine in 2022, after Russia’s invasion. The numbers had stabilized. For now, Poland and Germany both have one million Ukrainian immigrants. But this is a far bigger load for Poland, which has only half the population, and a fifth of Germany’s economic output. To close the German-Polish border to stem the flow of immigrants constitutes a naked act of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

But, then, this is the same mindset which caused Nord Stream to be built in the first place — it’s Merkel’s mindset. She and Gerhard Schröder both masterminded the deal and after leaving office, Schröder even became the head of the consortium that built it.

Merkel, meanwhile, might no longer be politically active, but she has reappeared on the scene to defend her record and stoke internal discord within the EU. In an interview with the Hungarian media company Partizán last week she inflamed the Poles by blaming them for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “In June 2021, I felt that the Minsk Agreement was no longer being taken seriously by Putin, and this is why I wanted a new format in which we, as the European Union, would speak directly with Putin,” she said. “This was not supported by some. These were mainly the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it.”

There were good reasons why Poland and the Baltic Republics did not support another Merkel-led diplomatic initiative. They saw it as another way for Germany to maintain its toxic relationship with Russia to the detriment of Eastern Europe. I thought at the time that Poland’s objections to Merkel’s suggestion were reasonable.

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But virtually all of Merkel’s later foreign policy initiatives were failures. She will go down in history both as one of the architects of the Russian-German political romance, and as a leader who failed to arrest Germany’s still ongoing economic decline. I criticized her often over her refusal to resolve the eurozone’s crisis for reasons of political expediency. I see this failure as the quintessential cause behind the EU’s political weakness today.

These growing fractures in key relationships binding the EU together will have an unavoidable and significant effect on national politics. The current investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage is a case in point. As Poland deliberates over Germany’s extradition request for Volodymyr Z, one of the suspected Ukrainian perpetrators, Tusk’s comments appeared to exonerate him. This has enormous potential for blowing up in the faces of the German and Polish leaders, and it plays straight into the hands of the AfD, which is currently outpolling Merz’s CDU/CSU. For the Right-wing nationalists, deeply critical of Ukraine, it is a story that will keep on giving. The German court trial will reveal a lot of unpleasant details of the operation. There will be a lot of emphasis on the links between the perpetrators and the powers that were behind it. I don’t for a moment believe the story that this was a privately funded operation. This trial could have a profound impact on German public opinion.

As things escalate, we will inevitably see the rise of bilateral tensions over Ukraine’s EU accession. Germany’s current coalition supports it, but on one condition: the EU budget has to be reformed first. Germany does not want to have to bankroll the reconstruction of Ukraine by itself. If the Germans get their way, this would invariably be at Poland’s expense. Right now, Poland is the biggest net recipient of the EU budget, and Germany the biggest net contributor.

For the EU to continue to function as a serious geopolitical force, then, a repair in the German-Polish relationship is a minimal requirement. But the way both sides are behaving at the moment suggests this is not going to happen. If they remain unresolved, though, these current political squabbles could prove explosive.

I can say safely that nobody understands the economic and political consequences of Donald Trump. I am not likening his policies to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. But what the two have in common is radical unpredictability. In quantum mechanics, unpredictability arises at the time of measurement. Economists have the same problem with Trump. We cannot look at the current slew of economic data to see where this is going. If you are an anti-Trump economic evangelist, you are very likely to get things wrong, just as economists did with Brexit or Trump’s first term.

I expect that the US economy will probably be fine. Before you jump to the conclusion that I am a Trump supporter, I can assure you that I am not. Nor was I a Brexit supporter, though I was critical of the self-defeating arguments of the Remain campaign. I see similar dynamics at work in the US right now. Trump’s critics, both in the US and Europe, keep on underestimating him with predictions of imminent gloom.

They predicted that his tariffs would raise inflation. So far that has not happened. I don’t think it will. Some also predicted that the US stock market would soon crash. In fact, Europeans celebrated the collapse in the S&P 500 that followed the Liberation Day tariffs. They erroneously relied on the markets as a corrective mechanism to frustrate Trump’s tariffs. That did not happen. The markets recovered and never looked back. The overall level of tariffs today is at least as high as those announced by Trump on 2 April. They are bound to get higher still, now that he has slapped a 100% tariff on branded pharmaceutical products and a 50% tariff on Ikea furniture.

It does not look like the stock market will do us the favor of crashing during the Trump presidency. It is quite possible that the S&P 500 will rise from its current level of around 6,400 to 10,000. Market valuations could rise from the stratospheric to the mesospheric to the exospheric. Prices will crash eventually. But that might not happen until the next Democratic president.

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The economic success I expect to see is that of a last hurrah of a declining power. It will be a hell of a party, with the fake glitter of a Mar-a-Lago ballroom: lights, music and attention-deflecting smoke and mirrors.

John Maynard Keynes once said all politicians were under the influence of long-defunct economists. We can safely say that Trump is not. The Left hates him, of course. But so does the old Right. Monetarists would have been aghast at his assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve. Virtually every school of conservative economic thought, from the ancient to modern, would have rejected his tariffs. Or his unfunded tax cuts. Or the stablecoins through which he wants to attract investment in the US debt markets. You can’t even caricature his policies as “businessman economics” either. Businesspeople tend to be fiscally conservative.

The reason I chose not to underestimate him is that his big tax cuts, extreme deregulation and tariffs will turn the US into a super-competitive economy at the expense of other Western countries. We Europeans still live in the technological Stone Age, but at least we used to have competitive industries. We are now being squeezed by the US and China both in innovation and competitiveness.

China’s economic policies could not more different than Trump’s, but they share one important trait: they both ignore the advice of mainstream macroeconomics. President Xi Jinping is an old-fashioned mercantilist. He maximizes exports and minimizes imports. He does not care what this does to the rest of the world. China has not freed up its capital markets. The Chinese renminbi is locked in a semi-fixed exchange rate against the dollar. China unashamedly picks winners. Were we not told that government should never, ever do this? China’s central planners picked the electric car, the entire battery supply chain behind it, and solar panels. The problem with picking winners is not the act of picking. It is about what you pick. We Westerners should perhaps not pick winners. China did better.

Trump is picking fossil fuels. If your time horizon is four years, this is going to be fine. Cheap oil and gas fuel the fire of American entrepreneurialism. But China’s energy policy is much more sophisticated. They still burn coal, but they invest into renewable energies like nobody else. One of the water dams being planned will have a capacity as large as the entire energy consumption of countries such as Greece.

To use Trump’s own words: China has all the cards. It has more people; it has a work ethic that has been lost in the West; it has industrial supply chains; and it is willing to shift resources from one part to another in our economy with a ruthlessness that our democracies cannot replicate. I would rather live in Europe or the US than in China. But I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the West.

I have no doubt that Trump’s economics will fail in the end. It will not become the foundation of a new economic era; he will not match Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in influencing economic policy in the West for decades after they left the stage. They both failed before they succeeded. With Trump, it is more likely to be the other way round.

What I am sure of, however, that he will fail in his foreign policies even in the short run. The reason is a complete lack of interest in strategic alliances, and in strategic action in general. The only chance the democratic West has against the rise of China and its global partners-in-crime is as a well-managed team.

I am not just talking about his delusional announcements: that it would take him 24 hours to cut a peace in deal in Ukraine. Or his claim at the end of last week that we are about to have a peace deal in Gaza. He claims to have ended seven wars. He has not. Nor has he saved millions of lives. His “America First” agenda is by definition not one of foreign policy. His only foreign policy objective is to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s delusions are easy to dismiss, but they have will have serious effects. The first casualty of Trump’s foreign policy is Europe. Europe must be very careful about Trump’s latest policy u-turn on Ukraine. This looks like a setup to me. Don’t fall for the “Ukraine is winning” narrative that has recently popped up out of nowhere. Nothing substantive has changed on the ground. I think Trump is setting Europe up for failure by insisting that Ukraine can win the war, and that Europe should pay for it. If it fails, as I believe it will, he can blame Europe.

There is no way that Europe can make itself independent of Russian oil with the speed that Trump demands. He knows that, of course. Europe is financially too weak and politically too divided to be able to fund the Ukraine war on its own. This is still true if the EU commission ends up sequestering €200 billion in Russian reserve assets currently frozen in EU bank accounts. I concluded a long time ago that, because they all think in national terms, European political elites are incapable of strategic geopolitical thought. A Franco-German fighter project is on the rocks right now, because the two countries cannot agree on the work share. Pettiness has a habit of intruding all the time in European politics, even during emergencies.

Japan is as weak as Europe. It too has an outdated industrial base and a declining population. Under Trump, the West will fragment into a disparate collection of failed states. An inward-looking US will remain its most formidable power, but not a leader. The US will look like the Norma Desmond character from Sunset Boulevard, who thought that she was still big, and that it was the movies that got smaller.

Movie directors know about turning points — the peripeteia in classical Greek drama — where events shift, either in the positive or the negative direction. To his supporters, Trump may well the person who arrests the decline of civilization. They will end up disappointed. So may his detractors who see his presidency as a phase of comic relief, a moment that will eventually pass before the final happy ending sets in.

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My guess is that America will not be great at the end of the MAGA episode. But America will be OK, if not great, whereas Europe will be neither. What we would really need is a reboot, but we are afraid. There was a tradition in European intellectual thought that started with the acknowledgment that you don’t know. Scio nescio, Plato wrote. Feynman’s comment about quantum mechanics is in that spirit too. That state of mind is a precondition for success. You start at zero. It is where the Age of Enlightenment began. It is where China started too.

Trump is the very opposite of this. The real tragedy is that his detractors, are too.

In the end, Iryna, who spoke to UnHerd using a pseudonym, survived her ordeal. Yet the 53-year-old’s experience is far from unique. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, some 4,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed by unexploded ordnance. Like Iryna, 1,000 more have been wounded, hardly surprising when so many threats lurk amid the undergrowth. After nearly three years of war, the UN estimates that almost 140,000 square kilometers of Ukraine have been contaminated, roughly 20% of its territory.

From shells and hand grenades, much of this haul appeared more or less accidentally, fired and forgotten until the next Iryna appears. Yet from landmines to booby traps, many weapons were placed deliberately, by Russian troops eager to murder, maim or otherwise demoralize their Ukrainian foes. Taken together, it means tracts of Ukraine will stay dangerous long after the fighting finally ends — perhaps for tens or even hundreds of years. All the while, the machinery of death is becoming more vicious, with vast consequences far beyond the Donbas.

Traditional landmines are fairly straight-forward. Consisting of a simple explosive, triggered to explode after being stepped on, many are tailor-made to damage flesh. Weighing up to nine kilos, with dimensions ranging from the size of a hockey puck to a shoebox, Russia alone has laid perhaps two million anti-personnel mines on Ukrainian territory since 2022.

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Land mines are victim-operated. To quote Paul Heslop, an expert at the UN, the device just “sits there” until it’s activated. What happens next is often grim: firing lethal fragments up to 25 meters, they’re more than able to amputate limbs. Some models are even more cynical. During their doomed campaign in Afghanistan, for instance, Soviet forces used small butterfly-shaped explosives, which still today maim the children who naively pick them up. In recent times, similar devices have also been found in Ukraine.

Beyond anti-personnel mines, there are bigger pressure-plate mines, designed to target military vehicles. These contain far more explosives than their man-maiming cousins, sometimes as much as 10 kilos, and can easily disable a tank.

Civilian vehicles clearly stand little chance here, as Liudmyla Mykhailivna learnt to her cost. A farmworker from Kherson, the 53-year-old’s hometown was captured by Russia in March 2022. But after several months of grueling occupation — Mykhailivna was often so frightened, she couldn’t even leave her home — enemy troops began to withdraw that November.

Taking her chance, Mykhailivna fled by car, alongside her four children. She wouldn’t get far: hitting a landmine on the road outside town, two of her children were killed on the spot. “I lost consciousness, and my youngest daughter was severely injured,” Mykhailivna tells me. “My 14-year-old son, Mykhailo, sustained a concussion, but he dragged us out of the vehicle.” The traumatized survivors only reached safety after a seven-kilometer trek to the next village.

At the same time, traditional landmines are shadowed by more ad hoc dangers. As Ukrainian troops gradually liberated territory occupied in 2022, the retreating Russians started leaving booby traps in their wake. “They put grenades under a sofa or in a fridge,” Heslop says, “or might rig up the electric circuit so when somebody fires the switch, a grenade or a mine goes off.”

Like with regular mines, the results can be brutal, especially when some reports suggest that the Russians have sometimes hidden bombs in toys, or even in the corpses of comrades killed in action. And if that means clearing booby-trapped areas can be remarkably complex, that still leaves the swathes of Ukraine inadvertently defiled by the detritus of war, from tank shells and mortars to the scattered remains of unexploded cluster bombs.

As Heslop explains, the scale here is truly biblical. Imagine, he says, that 1,000 shells are fired each day for 1,000 days. That’s a million shells, and while most will obviously detonate on impact, perhaps 40% malfunction, leaving a deadly harvest for innocents like Iryna.

With the war entering its fourth year, meanwhile, landmines are increasingly being replaced by drones. In July alone, Russia targeted Ukraine with over 6,000 drones, a 1,378% jump on the same period last year. On a single night in July, it launched a barrage of around 700 drones and missiles. Beyond their payloads, these drones are themselves unsafe. Whether they run out of fuel before they reach their targets, or else fail to detonate on impact, woe betide the first Iryna to come across them.

Unexploded munitions are increasingly causing second-order problems too: starting with the food chain. According to a recent UN assessment, Ukrainian agriculture has suffered over $80 billion worth of losses as a direct result of mine contamination, with the country’s wheat fields too dangerous to plow.

Given that this black-soiled land has long been known as Europe’s breadbasket — in 2021, Ukraine was the world’s seventh largest wheat producer and exported over $27 billion of agricultural produce — what happens here echoes far beyond its borders. “The decrease in the amount of agricultural land in Ukraine in 2022 pushed global food and energy prices up,” Hesop warns, adding that consumers are being affected from New York to Kabul.

Considering what’s at stake, what will it take to clear Ukraine of mines and other explosives? According to Globsec, a European security think tank, with current resources it could take an eye-watering 747 years. Heslop is more optimistic, but even his 50-year estimate feels sluggish, not least when Russia targets de-miners. Earlier this month, a strike near the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv killed two such workers, members of a Danish-sponsored humanitarian mission.

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Then there’s the question of costs. According to the World Bank, de-mining a single meter of Ukrainian soil costs between $2 and $8. Taken together, making the whole country safe could come in at $37 billion over the next decade — and that’s if the war miraculously ended tomorrow.

And if Heslop insists the expense would be worth it — “spending $100 million in Ukraine saves $1 billion in food prices” — there are some signs that other parts of Europe may yet suffer a similar blight.

Over the last few months, several European states, including Poland, Estonia and Finland, have withdrawn from the Ottawa Treaty, the UN’s anti-personnel mine convention. Though these countries have yet to mine their borders, Warsaw lately announced that it had resumed production of anti-personnel devices, while Helsinki and Tallinn both plan to follow suit.

That reflects a broader understanding that, as nasty as they can be to civilians, such devices are militarily valuable. In 2024, for instance, Poland announced a defense initiative called “Tarcza Wschod”. Translated as Eastern Shield, it’s aimed at protecting the country’s borders from Russian forces — whether in the form of hybrid warfare or more traditional infantry assaults. Either way, mines are obviously key to this strategy, with one minister stating Poland may eventually need up to a million mines.

That’s mirrored by even more pernicious forms of mine technology. Consider, for example, the latest generation of drones — which can disperse explosives even further into civilian territory. One example is Russia’s Medalyon POM-3 system, an AI-powered landmine that can not only be activated remotely, but can also shoot metal fragments in a 360-degree arc.

Defense firms are equally busy developing the drones of tomorrow. One ominous development here is the so-called “mothership” drone, which can, in turn, deploy dozens of smaller bombs. With even nine-kilo machines capable of carrying explosives, many more forests could soon be infected with the artifacts of death. That’s bad news for mushroom pickers, and for the rest of us.

A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.

Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.

While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signaling for the better part of a year.

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“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-skeptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.

Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defense has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defense systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.

That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defense architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.

Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.

The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realize: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.

With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.

Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbors to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.

Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.

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The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defense is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.

Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-skeptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.

Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defense or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbors will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarization, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbors.

And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.

Ukraine’s political leaders and population remain, understandably, far more cautious. Zelensky cannot easily accept a settlement that might cement the loss of vast swathes of his country in exchange for little more than a temporary reprieve from Russian attack. Europe’s leaders are likewise treading carefully. But the greatest hold-out remains Putin. If anyone thought that the spectacle of Putin’s welcome in Alaska, which brought the leader out from several years in the political cold, would persuade the Russian President to agree to peace, they may be in for disappointment. Putin appears set on pursuing the war against Ukraine and playing diplomatic hardball.

Compared to the excitable commentary that has resounded across the West, the Kremlin’s public response to the weekend’s events has been remarkably muted. Scoring an invitation to Alaska was certainly a coup, and pictures of American soldiers rolling out the red carpet for Putin were received with delight on pro-Kremlin social media channels. However, a bland statement released by the Kremlin on 19 August mentioned only that Russia was “continuing to make progress on a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis”. While Trump seems to think one grand photo-op with the leaders of Kyiv and Moscow will conjure peace, Putin is committing, as ever, to almost nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Putin’s mouthpieces are working hard to dampen expectations at home of a quick and easy deal. Where the White House speaks of a trilateral summit, Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s most senior foreign policy advisers, mentioned only the possibility of “raising the level of representatives of the parties”. This would mean that more rounds of lower-level talks, akin to earlier gatherings in Istanbul or Saudi Arabia that saw few concrete changes, would have to precede any grand summit.

Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s veteran foreign minister, who always chooses his words carefully, used a television appearance yesterday to remind viewers that: “the Ukrainian Constitution retains the obligation of the state to fully ensure the rights of Russians.” An official Kremlin statement said much the same: “without respect for the security of Russia and the full rights of Russians in Ukraine, there can be no talk of any long-term agreements.” These comments, which are being repeated across dozens of television channels and hundreds of social media feeds, echo the justifications Putin offered when he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By repeating them now, Lavrov and his diplomatic peers are making clear that the Kremlin is not on the verge of compromise. Russia will not be hurried by Trump, Zelensky, or anyone else.

These noises are being echoed in the massive, state-controlled Russian media landscape, where unlike on Trump’s feeds, the emphasis is on complexity. On Tuesday, Izvestiya, Russia’s newspaper of record, ran a lengthy explainer that twisted Trump’s statement that the remaining issues aren’t “overly complex” to suggest that the issues are “complex” — a way of shifting attention away from the excitement in Washington and back towards the grinding reality of diplomacy.

These complex issues — questions of language, minority rights, Nato, and EU membership — will not, Russians are told, be resolved in multilateral forums with Zelensky and European leaders. The Russians remember all too well the failed Minsk agreements, which aimed to halt fighting in the east of Ukraine in 2014-15. Laboriously negotiated by Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany over months, two separate agreements failed to stop the fighting. The Minsk process became — in Moscow’s eyes — a cause of the current invasion: the West, goes the Russian narrative, was only ever interested in helping Ukraine continue to attack “Russians” on its own territory.

The Russian media has a lowly opinion of Europe’s leaders, who are seen to be obsessing over irrelevant details and making impossible demands. Aleksandr Kots, one of Russia’s leading war correspondents, described Monday’s Washington DC meeting bluntly: “The Europeans have proven their absolute uselessness.” Zelensky fares no better. He remains, in Russian state media, the illegitimate head of a “Kiev regime” who has put off elections in Ukraine and only holds power due to what is portrayed as the illegal Maidan “coup”. Dmitry Medvedev, ever one for a fiery turn of phrase, dismisses him on social media as a “buffoon”; others declare that he is trapped in a diplomatic “dead end”. These comments rocket between social and traditional media and vice versa, filling Russians’ minds with the same idea.

The only dealmaker Russian commentators are interested in is Trump. He has been cast as a decisive leader who can talk straight with Putin and put Europe in its place. State outlets reveled in reports that the American President had “harshly rebuffed” European leaders’ ceasefire proposals during their meetings in Washington. For Russia’s commentators, Monday’s meeting was a distraction from the real action: negotiations between Trump and Putin.

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Yet any admiration for Trump is tempered by the widespread belief that he will easily be outwitted by Putin. Pro-Kremlin journalist Aleksandr Yunashev warned on Telegram that a Putin-Zelensky summit “on any terms does not correspond to our interests, but we do not plan to close this window of opportunity”. Trump, he reminded readers, still wants to sell weapons to Ukraine and has a record of flip-flops and about-turns. Yunashev thus suggests that Moscow is wary of Trump, but will string him along — because, unlike Europe’s divided, ineffectual, and indecisive leaders, Trump can supposedly deliver what Putin wants.

Scroll through Russian Telegram channels and the message is clear: Putin is masterminding the entire negotiation process. He is outfoxing Trump, running circles around the hapless Europeans, and reducing Zelensky to an illegitimate spectator. Little surprise that some Russian social media users believe that Putin is “laughing at the plans of all the people who might try to make a fool of him”.

The propagandists insist that Russia is making great gains in its offensive in Eastern Ukraine. Breakthroughs, whether real or exaggerated, are trumpeted as proof that Moscow has the upper hand, even as the Russian economy stutters and army recruitment barely keeps pace with casualties. The more land Putin holds when a summit with Zelensky eventually happens, the more he can claim in any territorial deal. In fact, he’s used this tactic before, back in 2015, when Russian forces pushed to seize the Ukrainian settlement of Debaltseve even as the Minsk II ceasefire was being finalized — and briefly continued that push even after the deal was struck. In recent weeks, Russian officials have repeatedly reiterated their maximalist war goals, which would leave Ukraine not controlled by Moscow but in a quasi-dismembered state ripe for the economic and political taking. There is no sign of a sea change after the weekend’s public diplomacy.

The Kremlin, in short, is telling two stories to two different audiences. Putin tells Trump that the peace negotiations are serious, that the Kremlin is ready to make progress, and that Russia may even agree to Trump’s grand peacemaking summit with Zelensky. Meanwhile, Russian media is telling citizens to trust the President’s plan: if the Russian people endure further conflict, then the Kremlin will deliver them territory, protection, self-respect, and a seat at the global top table. Most of all, though, the Kremlin is promising that Zelensky will be brought to a summit with Putin not to negotiate but to submit to a humiliating peace deal.

Monday’s summit earned Trump praise even from usually critical mainstream outlets. “It was the best day Ukraine has had in a very long time… President Donald Trump offered tantalizing glimpses of how he could approach presidential greatness by saving Ukraine, securing Europe and genuinely deserving the Nobel Peace Prize,” CNN enthused. Yet the meeting would not have occurred had it not been for Trump’s summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, just two days earlier — which instead drew near unanimous criticism from Ukraine supporters for “legitimizing” Putin. But this carefully staged “de-demonization” of Putin injected a much-needed dose of realism and pragmatism into the discussion.

The Alaska meeting formally reestablished direct dialogue between the world’s two largest military and nuclear powers. It marked the first face-to-face meeting between a US and Russian president since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. It also marked a turning point in US-Russia relations which, since 2022, had reached levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

The symbolism was carefully staged: from the red-carpet reception and the ceremonial ride in the American presidential limousine to Trump’s informal reference to “Vladimir”. It was all intended to signal a new chapter in US-Russia relations. But for Moscow, it meant even more. The summit was a political victory. The sight of Trump hosting Putin exposed the failure of the Western strategy of “isolating Russia” and “crippling its economy”. Far from being marginalized, Russia has emerged stronger: it has deepened its strategic relationship with China, expanded its influence among Global South states, and weathered the sanctions regime that was supposed to destroy its economy. Simply by shaking Putin’s hand, Trump acknowledged that Russia remains a power to be reckoned with, not a pariah state.

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More importantly, the summit amounted to an indirect acknowledgment that the West has effectively lost this war. Ukrainian forces cannot retake the territories annexed by Russia. On the contrary, Moscow continues to make incremental advances on the battlefield. This reality makes a negotiated settlement the only possible exit from the conflict — one that would necessarily involve territorial concessions: Crimea, plus the four annexed eastern and southern oblasts.

This perhaps explains why Trump quietly backtracked on the various threats he has leveraged at Russia over the past weeks. In July, he announced a 50-day deadline for Russia to halt the war or face “severe economic consequences”. Putin ignored it. Trump shortened the deadline to 12 days. Putin did not respond. Even on the eve of the Alaskan summit, Trump was still insisting on a ceasefire as a minimum outcome. Yet Putin had been clear: Russia has no interest in a ceasefire that would allow Ukraine to rearm and bolster its defenses with Western support.

Moreover, Moscow’s demands have always extended well beyond the question of territorial recognition, seeking a comprehensive settlement that addresses the “primary roots of the conflict”, as he repeated in Anchorage: that Ukraine will never join Nato, that the West will not transform it into a de facto military outpost on Russia’s border, and that a broader “balance of security in Europe” be restored. As even the hawkish New York Times recently acknowledged: “The Russian leader’s overarching goal is primarily to secure a peace deal that achieves his geopolitical aims — and not necessarily to conquer a certain amount of territory on the battlefield.”

In an effort to strong-arm Putin, Trump also threatened to impose secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil — including China and India. Yet both countries swiftly dismissed the threat, making it clear such measures would be ineffective. Far from isolating Moscow, the sanctions would only have pushed Beijing and New Delhi even closer to Russia.

After Anchorage, Trump abandoned both of his original positions. He said that a peace deal was preferable to a ceasefire, and that secondary sanctions were off the table. For Putin, this was a major win. For the US, it was an implicit admission that Washington lacks the leverage to impose terms. In Trump’s words, it simply “doesn’t have the cards”. This was a blunt recognition of the diminished military and economic clout of the United States and the collective West.

A comprehensive peace deal, however, remains elusive. No terms were agreed in Alaska, largely because Europe — and Zelensky himself — remain opposed to any settlement on Russian terms. European leaders are so heavily invested in the narrative of “victory” that conceding even part of Russia’s demands would be suicidal. Having spent two years assuring their citizens that Ukraine was winning the war, they cannot suddenly pivot without facing public outrage — especially given the dramatic economic repercussion of the war on European economies.

But the deeper issue is structural: European leaders have come to rely on the specter of a permanent Russian threat to justify their ongoing erosion of democracy — from expanding online censorship to persecuting dissenting voices, and even canceling elections, all under the pretext of combating “Russian interference”. Zelensky, too, has reasons to resist peace. Ending the war would mean lifting martial law in Ukraine, exposing his government to pent-up discontent over corruption, repression and the catastrophic handling of the war. Indeed, a recent poll revealed that Ukrainians themselves increasingly favor negotiations over endless fighting. No wonder the Alaska summit triggered panic in European capitals as well as in Kyiv.

Perhaps this explains why Monday’s discussion carefully sidestepped the most sensitive question — territorial concessions — with Zelensky and the Europeans instead pressing for “Article 5-style” security guarantees for Ukraine, effectively treating Ukraine as a Nato member even if it is not formally one. While Russia has signaled general openness to the concept of Western security guarantees, the devil lies in the details. European leaders demanded legally binding US participation and backing — something neither Moscow nor Washington is likely to provide, given the risk of being drawn into direct confrontation with each other. Even less acceptable to Russia is any arrangement involving a Nato military presence in Ukraine, as floated by Britain and France. It seems European leaders have adopted a strategy of expressing openness to a settlement while ensuring, through their conditions, that no such agreement can realistically materialize.

More fundamentally, though, it’s unlikely that Trump himself is prepared to concede to Putin’s demand for a wholesale reconfiguration of the global security order — one that would reduce Nato’s role, end US supremacy, and acknowledge a multipolar world in which other powers can rise without Western interference. For all his rhetoric about ending “forever wars”, Trump continues to embrace a fundamentally supremacist vision of America’s role in the world — albeit a more pragmatic one than that of the liberal-imperialist establishment. His administration continues to support Nato rearmament and even the redeployment of US nuclear weapons along multiple fronts, from the UK to the Pacific. Trump’s policies toward China, Iran and the broader Middle East confirm that Washington still sees itself as an empire whose global dominance must be preserved at all costs — not only through economic pressure, but also through military confrontation when deemed necessary.

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Within this framework, Russia remains a central challenge. As a pivotal ally of both China and Iran, it is embedded in the architecture of the emerging multipolar order that threatens US hegemony. For Washington, Moscow is not simply a regional actor but a key node in a broader strategic realignment.

Trump, however, appears willing — at least temporarily — to put the “Russia problem” on hold, focusing instead on the larger confrontation with China. But this indicates a shift in priorities rather than principles: the logic of American supremacy ensures that Russia will remain on the list of adversaries, even if the spotlight briefly shifts elsewhere.

In this sense, Trump would probably be content with a scenario in which the US extricates itself from the Ukrainian debacle while leaving Europe to shoulder the burden a while longer — possibly until conditions on the ground deteriorate so severely that a settlement on Russian terms becomes unavoidable. Indeed, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth said as much, arguing that the US will stop funding the war, but Europe can continue if it wishes — buying American weapons in the process. This “division of labor” would allow Washington to reallocate resources to the coming confrontation with China, while leaving Europeans stuck in an unwinnable war.

The Russians are well aware of all this. They likely harbor no illusions about the real objectives of the US imperial establishment. And they know full well that any deal struck with Trump could be overturned at any moment. However, Putin’s short-term goals align with Trump’s. one could say that Russia and the United States are strategic adversaries whose leaders nonetheless share a tactical interest in cooperation.

Seen in this light, one might postulate that the purpose of the Alaska summit was never to secure a final peace agreement. Both Trump and Putin doubtless understand that such a deal is currently impossible. Rather, the meeting was about allowing the US to step back from Ukraine without admitting defeat, while Russia continues to advance. For Washington, this creates political cover: Trump can claim he tried diplomacy, while offloading the burden of war onto Europe. For Moscow, the advantage lies in Ukraine’s gradual weakening as US logistical support fades. Indeed, in order to encourage an American exit, Russia might even agree to a temporary ceasefire and possibly also to vague US “security guarantees” — with Russia and the US presenting these as significant concessions and victories, respectively — though such a truce is unlikely to hold.

The most likely outcome will be a temporary thaw in US-Russia relations, though the broader geopolitical struggle will go on. And the real losers will be Ukraine and Europe. Ukrainians will continue dying in a war they cannot win, while Europeans will continue to foot the bill. Eventually, they too will be forced to accept a deal on Russian terms — but only after further suffering. Even then, Europe will remain trapped in a hostile and militarized relationship with Russia, with the potential for renewed conflict at any time. At best, the Alaska summit and its aftermath signals a temporary relaxation in an ongoing confrontation between the West and the emerging multipolar order. At worst, it ensures that Europe and Ukraine continue to pay the price for a war that the US has already chosen to leave behind.

What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.

Since it is now unlikely that Trump will change his mind and revert to the Biden-era policy of unconditional, if hesitant, support for Ukraine, we are now left with two possible scenarios for how the war plays out.

In the first, Ukraine and Russia will agree to a peace deal, and the US and Europe will try their best to make the post-war security arrangement work. It is our baseline scenario, but it will be hard to pull off since the question of land is a particularly difficult one. The starting point of the talks would have to be the existing military situation — not Russia’s or Ukraine’s maximal demands — and would then need to be followed by detailed negotiations.

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In the second scenario, the peace talks will go ahead but fail. Trump will then blame Zelensky and actively disengage from supporting Ukraine. Beware of extrapolating yesterday’s show of support: the smiles are deceptive. Trump wants to get out. Like the real estate developer he once was, who has first put a deposit down, Trump has invested political capital into a peace process and he is not going to back down. This scenario would be very bad for Ukraine and for Europe. America would withdraw — for real this time. The Europeans would be left having to support Ukraine and build a new security infrastructure without US support.

This is not really a viable financial or military option for European leaders. After all, their engagement would have to be major. The Ukraine-Russia frontline is, at the moment, about 1,200 kilometers — around the length of the Cold War-era inner German border. Nor does this include the rest of Ukraine’s de jure border to the north and east with Russia, and with Belarus. There have been some comparisons with the situation in Korea — but the demilitarized zone there is barely 250 kilometers in length.

Adequately securing such a large border on the Ukrainian side would take a huge amount of troops — one estimate suggests as many as 150,000 European soldiers. This is a far larger deployment than anyone else has envisaged; Emmanuel Macron mentioned troop numbers in the thousands earlier in the year similar to the so-called tripwire troop deployments in the Baltic States.

And even if they wanted to, European leaders don’t have the troops needed to provide genuine assurances to Kyiv. Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, recently admitted that Germany probably wouldn’t have the capacity to send troops to Ukraine. And while the UK might be keen to voice its political commitment to the country, it’s doubtful that it can meaningfully back this up. A RUSI piece last year indicated that Britain does not have enough equipment to sustain a proper three-brigade armored division. Even deploying a single brigade would use up 70-80% of the British Army’s total combat engineering capabilities.

There are other challenges too. At this stage, the easiest way to blow a deal, by either side, would be to refuse concessions on land. The Russian claim for the entirety of the Donbas region, including the parts they don’t occupy, is a maximalist one, from which Russia would have to retreat if the negotiations were to succeed. There are some commercial assets in the region of interest to Moscow — mines and industrial companies based in the Russian-occupied parts — but it has military significance for Ukraine. In any case, there is a long history of European regions being split. Karelia split into Finnish and Russian parts after the Winter War of 1939-40, and parts of the old Prussia are now in Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Germany. Negotiations, though, will be fraught.

But the big difficulty European leaders will face is how to deal with their war-crazed supporters back home. There has been a great deal of cheerleading and regime-change fanaticism in the European political and media space, with many recent headlines insisting that Russia must not be rewarded for its aggression. None of these authors, of course, has a military strategy for victory, because strategic thinking is not what educated Europeans do. They use the passive tense when they speak or write: something must be done, they intone. Rarely, if ever, do they say: “we will do this and are ready to make sacrifices to do so.”

But we do know the rest of the world does not look at Russia the way Europe does. This Eurocentric perspective no longer dominates global discourse — except, of course, in Europe. It is clear that we are living in one of those dangerous moments in history where fate could flip either way. Yet for all his arrogance, at least Trump has a strategy, whereas the Europeans do not.