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ukraine war
Ukraine: America's Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Jul 21, 2026
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," and the danger that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era" and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move "not one inch eastward." George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called "the brightest of all redlines" for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump's Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had "no cards," and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon "must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones." In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to "unleash" military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs "most of the targeting" done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the "Brave1 Dataroom" to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to "transfer the war onto Russian territory."
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the "key partner;" and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
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NATO 3.0 Emerges Alive and Dangerous from the Ankara Summit
What was gained—and what did they refuse to admit—when the powerful military bloc held talks in Türkiye?
Jul 13, 2026
Despite its well-advertised tensions and tectonic geopolitical changes, this week’s NATO summit demonstrated that NATO has survived and is resilient. It remains committed to reinforcing US hegemony across Europe and globally. Not a lot has changed since former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that US global dominance relies on controlling the periphery of Eurasia: NATO in the West, in Southwest Asia to the South, as well as its Asia-Pacific allies from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines and Australia. In the 21st century, military planning as well as trade is deeply integrated across these three regions.
The Summit served to reinforce what is emerging as a new bloc system for our yet to be named era. Threatened by the US and NATO, as John Mearsheimer remarked, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea each see the US as a mortal enemy. While each of these nations’ situations and ambitions are vastly different, they share an interest in fending off threats from the US. They are thus increasingly binding themselves to one another economically, militarily, and diplomatically.
There were four major dimensions to the summit: 1) NATO’s survival despite its fault lines, 2) the first day’s focus on expanding and integrating European and US military production infrastructures and weapons sales contracts. 3) The final declaration celebrated and committed to still more European military spending. And 4) support for Ukraine was manifest.
The move to what is termed NATO 3.0, with European nations assuming greater responsibilities for the European theater, reflects the United States relative decline, something which has been glaringly demonstrated in its failed war against Iran. Trump and his coterie understand that US “leadership” is only possible with NATO. Despite his rhetoric, Trump and company value NATO because it allows them to do what they want to do elsewhere, especially in the most economically dynamic part of the world: the Indo-Pacific.
The transatlantic and increasingly global NATO alliance remains strong despite its fault lines due to what the elites understand as overlapping US and European shared interests, if not values.
NATO Secretary General Rutte and his allies insulated the alliance from Trump, from his madness, his dementia, his claim that US ships have been attacked by the Islamic Republic of Japan, demands for Greenland, and his complaints that European nations didn’t deliver all that he wanted in his war on Iran. Toward that end, the summit was convened and adjourned in less than a day, and the final declaration was limited to just six paragraphs, leaving little room for debate.
In fact, although not widely reported, during the war European allies have allowed US warplanes and ships to operate from bases across the continent, and they have provided access to their facilities for repairs and refueling.
As we could read in Carnegie Europe, “…trans-Atlanticism was never only a values project. It was—and remains—a convergence of security, economic, and technological interests between two regions that together account for roughly 43 percent of global GDP and comprise the world’s most capable alliance.”
The best way to understand what transpired in Ankara may be to use the lens of transactional dealmaking among Mafia families. Trump and Colby got what they wanted: European elites signed onto NATO 3.0 with increased European military spending and preparations to militarily contain and press Russia, so that the US can focus on containing China’s ambitions and reinforcing its 21st century Indo-Pacific hegemony. Remember, this has been a US goal that began with Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”
With NATO 3.0, the US intends to gradually reduce its ostensible role in guaranteeing European security. It is worth noting that European NATO members already massively outspending Russia on their militaries. They have conventional military superiority over Russia. And with NATO 3.0 these differentials will only become greater.
In time, the US will provide only what its European allies cannot: nuclear threats and high-tech intelligence. But it is also worth noting is that Trump said nothing in Ankara about pulling more troops out of Europe. The announced 5,000 troop reduction in Germany has yet to begin, and a commitment for increased US troop rotations in Poland was made. The Hegseth-Colby campaign for major US force reductions in Europe has been slowed by the two-month review won by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In the end, Trump, and no one else, is the decision maker. Remember too that despite Trump ranting about NATO’s limited support for his war against Iran, the US would be very limited in its Southwest Asian and North African power projection without it bases still in Europe.
The West wasn’t shattered. In the transactional exchange, the US joined the dominant European narrative forged by the Baltic states and Poland about Russia and signed onto the summit’s final declaration with its commitments to support Ukraine in the war with Russia. This includes blessing Ukrainian debilitating attacks on Russian energy infrastructure deep within Russia. The declaration identified Russia as a long-term threat and reinterred the Treaty’s Article V commitment to come to the aid of any NATO member that is attacked. Ukraine won’t be joining NATO any time soon, but its advanced military technologies and warfighting experience make it an increasingly powerful adjunct to NATO.
In fact, the arms sales announced as the summit began serve as glue for the alliance’s future. Fifty billion dollars in weapons contracts were signed, with commitments made to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, Anduril, Germany’s Rheinmetall, French Airbus, Sweden’s Saab, and Turkey’s Aselsan. Even Denmark, despite Trump’s Greenland threats, will be buying US Hellfire missiles and ships to patrol the Arctic.
NATO 3.0 makes it possible for the US to reinforce its lattice-like military alliance system and its military buildup across the Indo-Pacific. Note that the RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) naval show of force was held at the same time as the NATO summit. It includes the forces of 10 of 30 NATO nations. Almost one-third of all NATO countries sent military forces: land, air, and sea to Hawaii to participate in the RIMPAC 38-day war drills.
The summit also demonstrated Turkey’s increased role in NATO, both in relation to Southwest Asia, but also via its increased weapons production capacity for the alliance. Trump tossed Erdogan what may prove to be only a symbolic military bone with his offer to endorse the sale of F-35s to Turkey. There remain two major obstacles to those sales: Turkey’s S-400 air defense systems which were purchased from Moscow and the need for Congressional authorization for those sales.
On the subject of weapons sales, in his ostensible tilt toward Ukraine, Trump authorized the much-ballyhooed licensing for Ukraine to produce Patriot missile defense systems. This is too little too late to be meaningful. It will take at least a year to get such a complex weapons manufacturing system up and running. And Putin would certainly make these weapons facilities a primary target while they are being built. Moreover, to defend the construction of these facilities the already beleaguered Ukraine would need to divert its very limited missile and drone defenses to protect the construction, leaving the country still more vulnerable.
Reinforcing the global commitments of NATO, at a meeting on the sidelines of the summit the Japanese government called for deeper cooperation between NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand at a meeting on the summit sidelines. Japan, which hosts more than 100 US military bases and installations, and has its most militarist government since 1945, has a security and defense pact with the EU. In recent months, Tokyo has created or deepened strategic partnerships and weapons development agreements with countries including Britain, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
Tokyo is in the process of doubling its military spending. It is moving to trash Article 9, the heart of its Peace Constitution. It has deployed conventional preemptive strike missiles that can reach China and North Korea. And it has declared its readiness to go to war for Taiwan.
Despite the still open wounds of Japanese conquest and colonization of Korea in the last century, the US backed Japanese-ROK alliance is the strongest it has ever been. And there is increasing discussion in South Korea about returning US nuclear weapons to the Peninsula or developing its own nuclear arsenal.
Filling out the network of Indo-Pacific alliances, the US has been deepening military ties with its former colony, the Philippines. Add to this AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the US) and the QUAD (US, Japan, Australia, and India).
Several other points are worth noting. Europe’s massive military spending increases, trending at an annual rate of 20%, have been financed by increasing debt. That can’t continue. As Stop Re/Arm Europe network warns, if this increased spending continues it can only come at the expense of essential social services. Those cuts, and the suffering they cause, will further open the way for far-right wing political gains.
In truth, we are still a long way from an operational NATO 3.0. As the French and German refusal to cooperate on development of the next jet fighter indicates, continuing divisions among the leading European powers remain very real. Issues of command and control and many other concerns will be challenging for NATO to address. And while not widely reported in the US media, US and European national security mandarins have been remarking about the failure to announce a NATO summit in 2027. The absence of a NATO summit next year may serve to prevent a new round of headlines and reports about US-NATO divisions, and it will also allow for more backroom deals.
For more than 60 years (1945 – 1980) humanity was plagued by the clash of competing block systems. The Cold War was not always cold, and on several occasions, we were confronted by the specter of nuclear annihilation.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy and his advisors believed the odds were 50-50 that the crisis would end in a thermonuclear exchange.
Computer and human errors were not uncommon. NATO’s 1983 Abel Archer military exercise sparked fears that they were under attack. That same year computer Soviet systems mistook a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds for incoming US nuclear armed missiles. Most of us are alive today because Soviet Colonel Petrov, believed it to be a false alarm, defied his standing orders, dismissed the nuclear alert, and was later reprimanded for his courageous act.
Millions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Greece to Mozambique died in proxy wars between the US and Soviet led blocs. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned, the US military-industrial complex threatened democratic values and practice. And trillions of dollars, rubles, francs and other currencies were wasted on weaponry at the cost of essential medical care, education, housing and more.
One definition of stupidity is doing the same thing twice but expecting different results. With the creation of a new bloc system, the expansion and upgrading of the world’s nuclear arsenals, the climate emergency’s fires and rising seas, and uncertainty over where new high-tech weaponry will lead, it appears that NATO, Russian, and many other elites failed to learn the Cold War’s existential lessons.
But there is still time. It should be obvious that the only way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is with a dirty deal that includes a ceasefire in place, security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia, and a commitment to negotiate the status of currently occupied territories over time. How many more Russian and Ukrainian lives should be sacrificed in the killing fields of Donbass? How long should we tolerate spiraling military spending at the sacrifice of our living standards which in turn opens the way for fascist forces on the right?
There is also the lesson of Common Security diplomacy which thankfully provided the foundation for détente and the end of the Cold War. We can take some hope from off the record Track II discussions and others among elite Europeans, Russians, and US figures that there are increasing references to building on the traditions and surviving resources of the Helsinki process and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to build a post-war Common Security European and transatlantic strategic architecture. Too few among us now remember that three decades ago the Cold War came to an end when NATO and Russian leaders finally came to understand that security cannot be achieved against a nation’s rival, but only through hard won win-win diplomacy that addresses the fears of all parties to a conflict.
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Drone Warfare Turns Oil From a Resource Into a Liability
A Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's largest oil refinery highlights the inherent vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure, especially when compared with renewable alternatives.
Jul 08, 2026
I visited Omsk once, or at least its airport; we were en route from Moscow to Ulan Ade on the Mongolian border, and the Aeroflot flight landed there to refuel. (It was a memorable journey; this was still the Soviet Union, and on boarding for the full-day flight, the stewardess handed each passenger a baggie with a scrawny chicken drumstick). All of which is to say, I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else.
Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil.
Just as US President Donald Trump has proposed building American prosperity on the back of “energy dominance" via “liquid gold,” oil was supposed to be Russia’s strength, the source of its greatest riches. (John McCain memorably called it a “gas station with nukes.”) And indeed in the early days of the war, Russia flexed its hydrocarbon muscle, threatening to cut off Europe’s gas supply. Throughout its invasion of its neighbor, Russia has relied on the often-covert export of oil via its fleet of “shadow tankers” to keep revenue flowing. Trump of course made this easier and more profitable for his buddy by temporarily lifting sanctions in the wake of our own ill-advised attack on Iran.
But if our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended.
Once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack.
One of those is the supertanker—there was one on fire Tuesday in the Gulf, apparently hit by an Iranian missile because it strayed from the Tehran-approved shipping lane. Ukrainian drones attacked another Monday in the Sea of Azov, crippling the vessel. There’s essentially no defense for these slow-moving giant ships if an adversary with a few drones wants to take one out—they are, after all, a floating pool of flammable liquid.
Another vulnerability is the terminal where you load and unload the crude—Ukraine got one of those Monday too, in occupied Crimea:
The facility serves as a major logistics hub for petroleum products on the occupied peninsula, handling the receipt, storage, and transfer of oil between rail infrastructure, storage tanks, and tankers
And a third—and perhaps most exposed—is the refinery. An oil refinery is one of the most specialized pieces of equipment humans have ever built; anyone who’s ever driven by one on the highway will recognize that the tangle of pipes and tanks that makes each so complicated. It’s an industry truism that no two are alike.
That means that they’re highly vulnerable. If you aim your drone well, maybe it will smash, say, the ELOU-AVT-11 Unit, which at Omsk is what they call the thing that does the initial distillation and desalination of the crude. Without it, the secondary units that produce, say, gasoline and jet fuel have nothing to work with. And this is highly complicated equipment not easy to replace—given Western sanctions, the current guess is six months to a year. And it’s not as if Ukraine has hit just that refinery—in fact, it was one of the last squares on a drone pilot’s bingo card. As Illia Kabachynskyi reports:
It's also worth remembering that Ukraine has already hit all 10 of Russia's largest refineries, some of them more than once. That means it's no longer a single plant waiting for repairs—it's effectively all of them at once, which piles additional pressure on repair crews and on the supply of replacement parts that are hard to source under sanctions.
Russia started this energy war, of course—over the years of the conflict it has targeted heating plants and the like, trying to freeze the fighting spirit out of the Ukrainians during their long winters. It’s been effective at producing cold, but not at winning the war; along with the attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets it seems to have helped reinforce the Ukrainian will to resist.
Now—with far more attention to avoiding civilian casualties—the Ukrainians are striking back, at defense plants, and especially at refineries. As Zelensky said Tuesday morning:
The very idea of Russia having a strategic rear is gone. For a long time, Russia believed it had territorial advantage no one else possessed, a deep rear, where it could safely keep everything its war depends on, believing no one could reach them. We have reached them.
But of course what’s at stake here is not just the oil that the Russian war machine runs on. In Russia, as in America, almost everything runs on oil. I remember that the one and only time that I sat down with former President Barack Obama, the first thing he told me was that “the price of gasoline is the most salient fact in American politics.” If that’s even close to the case in Russia, Putin better watch out: in occupied Crimea, gas prices are going above $10 a gallon. The government is desperately trying to import gasoline from as far away as India. As Pjotr Sauer reported Tuesday morning, police are having to draw guns to quell disturbances at gas stations where lines can stretch for kilometers, “fuel tourists” are crossing the borders with China and Kazakhstan to fill their tanks, and as a result:
“Mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst. Even so, he said the shortages were unlikely to trigger widespread protests in Russia’s tightly controlled political system. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation—and the risks associated with trying to do so—make protests unlikely.”
This seems likely to get worse. Here’s a social media post from an Omsk resident watching the drone strikes: "Don't waste any time right now. Anyone with a car who's watching me—head to the gas station! The lines are about to get crazy."
And here’s an account of how Russian horse breeders are reporting a surge in sales because a steed is now cheaper to maintain than a car; check out the video of the equestrian cantering past the endless line at the gas station.
Ukraine has stood up to Russia’s attacks on its energy infrastructure mostly by starting to diversify: as Paul Hockenos reported last winter, the country is undergoing a rapid renewables revolution:
According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025—enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes—and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.
“Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy, and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”
In the most basic terms, a single missile can take out a gas-fired power plant. But as Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor, explains:
“You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.
That’s because sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t choke points like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure. My roof is covered with solar panels, and I suppose a saboteur could put a ladder against the wall and climb up there with a hammer and do some damage. But it wouldn’t shut down the electric grid across New England; it would be a problem, not a crisis. Which in turn is why no rational saboteur would ever bother.
And once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast.
Look, world leaders should be moving quickly to clean energy because it’s the one scaleable weapon in the war against climate change. But I’ll take any motivation—and I’ll count it as a real bonus if a cleaner world is also one where it’s harder to attack your neighbors because they don’t have vulnerable infrastructure. The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.
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Toward Dialogue and Survival in a Perilous Time
Common security lessons for the US and Russia in a world without arms control.
Jul 05, 2026
The following article was initially written at the request of Oleg Bodrov, a Russian physicist with commitments to peace and environmental sustainability and safety. I met Oleg about a decade ago during the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima, and today we both serve on the board of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient organization. In addition to serving on IPB’s board, Oleg is chairman of the Public Council of the South Coast of the Gulf of Finland. He lives outside of St. Petersburg and does what he can given the limits of the possible in Putin’s Russia. When he and I last spoke, Ukrainian drones had devastated a massive Russian oil refinery, spewing toxins into the Baltic Sea and across many Russian communities. With Ukrainian drones flying overhead he hadn’t slept the previous night, making Oleg one more innocent caught in that mutually disastrous war.
In our exchanges, Oleg came up with a proposal to take a small step toward bridging the divisions of the new US-Russian Cold War and building for the time when the missiles, drones, and guns of the Ukraine War have been silenced. His idea: I should write an article that shared US peace movement thinking and named actions that can reduce the increasingly perilous military tensions and serve as foundations for a future era of US-NATO-Russian Common security. Oleg would translate the article and arrange for its publication in a Russian scientific journal. As we corresponded about the article’s publication, it occurred to us that it might also prove helpful for US readers, hence its publication here in Common Dreams. Where this will lead, only time will tell. But the truth is that both the US and Russia are going to be around for a long time, and a just and peaceful Common Security order will be essential for this and future generations.
Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock report warns us that we face Cuban Missile Crisis level danger. Back then, in 1962, senior officials in the Kennedy administration thought the odds of the missile crisis leading to a nuclear war were 50-50. In the aftermath of the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Kennedy nuclear adviser, became so pessimistic about humanity’s future that, not expecting to live to an old age, he ceased paying into his pension fund.
But both President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, along with their ruling circles, were sufficiently sobered by the specter of nuclear annihilation. They moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Their successors built on this foundation, constructing the six-decade-old arms control regime. They negotiated treaties from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the SALT and START agreements. They limited, but failed to erase, the dangers of nuclear annihilation.
The Collapse of the Arms Control Architecture
That arms control regime is now history. First came the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty almost 25 years ago. Then came the expiration of the New START Treaty. Now, President Donald Trump is obsessed with resuming nuclear-weapons testing, and both the US and Russia are moving to deploy new nuclear-capable missile systems.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal.
Adding to nuclear dangers, Beijing is increasing its nuclear arsenal in pursuit of parity with Moscow and Washington. We are becoming three nuclear-armed scorpions in a bottle. This, together with Russian concerns about the French and British nuclear arsenals, complicates any possible future arms reduction diplomacy. The inability of the US, Russia, and China to find common ground—or even to agree on a least common denominator consensus document—was a major factor that dictated the third consecutive failure of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference this past May.
The geopolitical landscape is further complicated by the US-Israeli-Iran war. During that conflict, President Trump speculated about possible low-yield nuclear attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal. Political pressures for nuclear-weapons proliferation are therefore building in threshold nations from Seoul to Stockholm, including Iran, Poland, and Japan, among others.
“Human Beings and Nuclear Weapons Cannot Coexist”
Political realism and the survival of our species point in two complementary directions. As the Japanese A-bomb survivors and their organization Nihon Hidankyo (awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize) warn, it should be obvious: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
We have already had too many close calls with extinction: false nuclear alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and geopolitical miscalculations. And as Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences and the only senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit for reasons of conscience, explained, humanity faces a stark choice. We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, or we will see their proliferation and eventual use. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceives as an unjust and threatening imbalance of power—in this case, the imbalance of nuclear terror.
Even in the best of circumstances, it will take valuable time—possibly more time than we have—to build the trust and to conduct the negotiations needed for a nuclear-weapon-free world. This, in turn, forces us to learn another lesson from US-Russian history: the possibility of Common Security. In crisis, as our Chinese friends remind us, there is opportunity as well as danger.
The Lesson of Common Security and the Palme Commission
In the 1980s humanity faced a similar situation. The two great powers flirted with triggering a catastrophic war that could have caused a nuclear winter. The US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the nuclear brink with the planned deployments of SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II missiles.
The combination of popular movements calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and President Mikhail Gorbachev’s understanding that military spending had to be reduced if the Soviet economy were to be salvaged, led Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to convene the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families.
Georgi Arbatov, the most senior military adviser to Gorbachev, later wrote about the commission’s work and its world-changing recommendations. In meetings with former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and leaders from Austria, Germany, Norway, India, and elsewhere, “a new approach to nuclear arms emerged.” Its essence, in Arbatov’s words, was that “we cannot guarantee our own security at the expense or detriment of someone else’s, but only on the basis of mutual interests.”
To reverse the spiraling arms race, each side needed to name the other’s actions that were most threatening to it and then negotiate agreements that would remove those threats without weakening anyone’s security. Those difficult negotiations led in 1987 to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited the SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II deployments, and functionally ended the Cold War two years before the Berlin Wall fell.
Defining the Contexts of Today’s Crisis
Context is almost everything. Reflecting on the failure of the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Vietnamese Ambassador Do Hung Viet, the conference president, commented that it is a “fair judgment” to conclude that the US-Iran impasse, which “hung over our heads from the beginning,” together with the Ukraine War and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, made consensus impossible. “Political concerns,” he said—including the race for artificial intelligence supremacy—“were overwhelming.”
As generations succeed one another, knowledge and wisdom are inevitably lost as well as gained. After two calamitous world wars that claimed between 75 and 97 million lives, the surviving great powers sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” They attempted to do so while simultaneously securing their imperial powers and privileges. Thus Article 1 of the United Nations Charter committed governments “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace…”
For the most part, this first commitment was honored—with significant exceptions in Indochina, Afghanistan, and interventions in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families. Drunk with arrogance, the US Bush government boasted: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities… We’re history’s actors.”
Washington’s arrogance of power continued into the 1990s with the Bill Clinton Administration. Rather than respect Russian history, political culture, sensitivities, and ordinary Russians’ need for economic security, Clinton and his mandarins imposed another cataclysmic revolutionary change: neoliberal economic shock therapy. The result was massive dislocation, impoverishment, a rising death rate, and the restoration of an authoritarian government in Moscow.
Russia’s political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin’s rule. Despite George Kennan’s warning—Kennan was the architect of Cold War containment—that NATO expansion would lead to disastrous conflict; President Clinton did exactly that in 1999. He initiated NATO enlargement, bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. As “history’s actors,” Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations to NATO in 2004. Then, in 2008, against the advice of his senior adviser Fiona Hill and over the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced an invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO’s summit.
Given Russia’s memories of invasions from the west—Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler—the Kremlin responded as Kennan and Hill had predicted. In an obvious breach of the UN Charter, the ostensibly defensive Russian invasion of Georgia followed. Meanwhile, even without Kiev becoming a formal NATO member, and in response to the alliance’s expanding military presence in Ukraine, President Putin reportedly began planning what became the disastrous “special military operation” as early as 2007. Even before, among the earliest and most egregious Bush-Cheney acts was the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, then a cornerstone of arms control.
The little remaining mutual trust between the West and Russia was among the first casualties of the war. The war also spurred further NATO expansion, with Finland and Sweden joining the alliance and thus doubling the line of contact between NATO and Russia. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties, US-Russian arms control agreements, including New START and Open Skies, became collateral damage. The new Cold War became even more dangerous as the US military-industrial complex and the Kremlin pressed to “modernize” their nuclear forces, and as European nations—fearing what Russian territorial ambitions might become—laid the foundations for a new European military superpower.
Nuclear Threats and the Arms Race
There is a mistaken but widespread belief that nuclear weapons have not been used since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This is wrong. As Daniel Ellsberg later wrote, during international crises and wars, US presidents have prepared to initiate nuclear war and have threatened to do so. They have done so in the same way that an armed robber points his gun at his victim’s head: Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but repeatedly during wars and interventions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, the Taiwan Strait, and other crises, the United States has resorted to nuclear extortion. As former US Defense Secretary Harold Brown put it, with the US first-strike capacity and doctrine in place, our conventional forces become “meaningful instruments of military and political power.”
Noam Chomsky put it differently: “That means that under this umbrella of strategic nuclear weapons… we have succeeded in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help protect people we are determined to attack.”
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
The United States is not the only nuclear power that has practiced nuclear blackmail. Every other nuclear-weapons state has done so at least once. As early as 1956, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened London and Paris, hoping that the threat would force their withdrawal from Egypt during the Suez War. More recently, and to considerable effect, President Putin and former President and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev have engaged in nuclear saber-rattling.
Nuclear powers seek to legitimize their arsenals and “modernization” on the basis of deterrence theory—the idea that each new development is necessitated by the need to prevent a nuclear attack by a rival. In reality, the George H.W. Bush administration’s initial “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” gave the game away. As that document stated, “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US national interests” The same applies to all other nuclear-weapons states. And as the history of false alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and ill-conceived aggressions demonstrates, deterrence only works—until it doesn’t.
Even before the New START Treaty’s limit of 1,550 deployed strategic missiles expired, Washington and Moscow were arms racing. The US is spending $1.7 trillion to “modernize” and replace its entire nuclear triad—including its “use-them-or-lose-them” first-strike land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—and is racing to renew warhead pit production.
Seeking to maintain parity, Russia is also developing and moving to deploy a range of new strategic-range weapons. These include a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle carried by the Sarmat “super-heavy” ICBM; an air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile capable of evasive maneuvers; a nuclear-powered cruise missile of “unlimited range”; a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle of “unlimited range”; and a sea-launched hypersonic missile.
President Trump, committed to regaining nuclear and high-tech superiority and to prevailing in the artificial intelligence competition with China, also seeks to spend trillions of dollars on his “Golden Dome” missile defense system. It will never work, but it will be profoundly destabilizing and will bankrupt the United States.
Making matters still more dangerous, US-Russian military-to-military communications are at their nadir. Moscow has made clear that it is disinterested in renewed risk reduction and arms control diplomacy until it is satisfied with the outcome of the Ukraine War.
What Is to Be Done?
Rebuilding trust is essential for any risk and arms reductions, but it will require patience and steadfast commitments on all sides. It seems clear that negotiating a new European security system will only become possible when the post-Ukraine War dust settles over the European strategic landscape. Similarly, greater clarity about Washington’s commitment to NATO, and about the credibility of massive European rearmament, will be critically important factors in approaching any new risk-reduction and strategic-stability negotiations.
In approaching the urgent need to restore stability to US-Russian-European relations, we should reflect on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to arms control diplomacy. We can learn from the Chinese.
The Western approach has been an exclusive focus on negotiations about particular nuclear-weapons systems and doctrines. Chinese diplomats and leaders, on the other hand, wisely think it necessary to identify and address the underlying causes that drive nuclear arms races and potential conflict.
Given that there is no military solution to the Ukraine War, it is past time for a ceasefire, for compromises, and for multidimensional peace negotiations—Ukraine-Russia, EU-Russia, US-Russia. Only then can we begin to address the existential US-Russian nuclear risks with Common Security diplomacy.
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
Resources for Rebuilding Trust
Among these resources is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A post-Ukraine War 21st-century version of that conference could be a constructive way to begin building a new Common Security order. Although its 57 European, North American, and Asian member states have reduced their financial and other commitments to the OSCE—which is mandated to work for stability, peace, and democracy in Europe—it can still serve as a neutral forum for diplomatic engagement and negotiations for a new Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic order.
The OSCE grew out of the 1973 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), “a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between East and West.” Among its initiatives was the Helsinki Process, involving 35 nations that agreed to the inviolability of post-World War II frontiers, reinforced commitments to human rights, and facilitated the institutionalization of the OSCE.
Track II and other discussions among Europeans, Russians, and Americans have continued despite the war, and they have identified numerous traditional paths to nuclear risk reduction and arms control possibilities. A laundry list of sometimes competing proposals has been developed and can be drawn on when the time is ripe.
We can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament.
Alexey Arbatov, of the Center for International Security at the Primakov Institute in Moscow, identified two conditions essential for arms control diplomacy during the Cold War: “a state of mutual nuclear deterrence” and “the emergence of approximate equality (parity) of strategic forces” of the dominant nuclear powers. A new conceptual approach, he argues, requires acknowledging the realities of multilateral deterrence, incorporating the security interests of all nuclear-armed states, and rebuilding strategic stability through inclusive frameworks rather than bilateral bargains. Chinese, French, and British nuclear arsenals, plus the nuclear four outside the NPT regime, must be factored into any negotiations. We are thus challenged by at least a four-dimensional diplomatic puzzle, and finding a solution is an urgent necessity.
There is a third requirement without which there can be no exit from a bellicose and mutually debilitating future: trust. It can only be developed over time, through patient confidence-building measures. These could include continuing to honor New START deployment limits and refraining from uploading additional warheads onto existing missiles. Wolfgang Richter, a former German colonel now associated with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, writes that overcoming the current vicious circle of distrust requires “renewed and credible mutual commitment confirming that the independence and territorial integrity of states will be respected.” This could be achieved by a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War and by trust-building initiatives between Russia and its European neighbors.
Even before the Ukraine War ends and opens the way for risk reduction and arms control negotiations, many on both sides of the US-Russia divide agree that the first priority must be preventing a resumption of nuclear-weapons testing, which President Trump has threatened. Related, and possibly of equal importance, is to honor and sustain the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the wake of the recent failed review conference.
Another limited but encouraging proposal is to convene a US-Russia-China leadership summit, at which a version of the Reagan-Gorbachev warning—that nuclear war can never be won and must not be fought—is reiterated. This would open the way for officials and experts to explore jointly how to reduce nuclear risk.
Unhinged and dangerous as he is, we need to acknowledge that despite his recent nuclear threat to Iran, over the years Trump has been willing to talk with Russia, and he has repeatedly stated that he wants movement toward denuclearization. Not that he has done much to make that happen.
Given the political environment in most European countries, and with Germany and France now competing for European military leadership as confidence in NATO wanes, initiatives for risk reduction and greater strategic stability inevitably lie with Washington and Moscow. If progress can be made by the US and Russia, Europeans could then be brought in.
Military-to-military communication needs to be revitalized, perhaps beginning with crisis communications, especially as drone warfare and wayward Ukrainian and Russian drones increase the danger of miscalculation. Building on the tradition of the Vienna Document, communication could then be expanded regarding troop movements, military exercises, and more. Addressing the growing military competition for control of the Arctic could be one place to begin.
Even though Russia and the United States have functionally withdrawn from the Open Skies verification treaty, 32 member states continue to honor it. A return to Russian and US participation would be a comparatively easy means to signal intentions to improve relations, and an important step toward trust building.
Like cultural exchanges in the past, trust can be built in many ways by renewing cooperative commitments. Low-hanging fruit could include building on the decades-long International Space Station collaboration; renewed scientific cooperation across the Arctic, where thawing permafrost poses increasing climate and health dangers; and, always, people-to-people exchanges.
Magic wands are in short supply. As the biblical proverb advises, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Across the lines and structures that divide us, like the Hibakusha and the men and women who preserved human survival through the worst of the Cold War, we can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament. Naming, dialogue, and debate are essential building blocks to get there.
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Pete Hegseth's D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy
Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis, and he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders. Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Jun 13, 2026
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about US dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.
This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.
Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the US government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.
Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?
It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
No.
Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?
Hardly.
Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far-right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of President Donald Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.
The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.
Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.
But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.
“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
The Immigration Obsession
The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: Other parties are on the ascendant. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.
Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and European Union bodies.
What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”
So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far-right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.
The Real Threats
It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Although Russian President Vladimir Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.
Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: None of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.
Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia; Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic; and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.
Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.
This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.
European Response
Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.
Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the US line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.
European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore US Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.
Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the US military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on US fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.
“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity, and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”
Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on US technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future US presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.
Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.
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Crushing Defeat for Hungary's Orban Puts Europe's Far-Right on Its Heals
The results are a rebuke of US President Donald Trump and a reflection of his waning prestige abroad.
Apr 13, 2026
After holding power for 16 years, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party suffered a crushing defeat in Sunday’s parliamentary election.
The Tisza party is on course for a two-thirds super-majority in the incoming parliament, with its leader Peter Magyar as the new prime minister. With more than 80% of the votes counted, Tisza has won 137 of the 199 seats in a voter turnout of more than 77% — a record for post-communist Hungary.
This result vindicates the polls that consistently showed Tisza with a strong lead among voters. The margin of victory clearly swept away the pro-incumbent electoral reforms that Fidesz had enacted to make such a resounding defeat improbable and to potentially keep Orbán in office.
A setback for Europe's populist nationalists
As dean and standard bearer of the populist right in Europe, Viktor Orbán’s defeat sets back prospects for coming contests in France, Poland, and elsewhere between populist right and mainstream parties.
It is also arguably a rebuke of President Donald Trump and a reflection of his waning prestige, even among conservative nationalist constituencies in Europe. The visit by Vice President JD Vance last week in support of Orbán seems to have had no impact on the clear dissatisfaction of much of the electorate and the anti-incumbent landslide.
Moreover, populist nationalist leaders such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Alice Weidel have opposed the US war against Iran, a clear indication that their former close alignment with the Trump Administration has become a potential liability.
Bread and butter triumphs
Orbán’s early concession was unexpected and could point to some relaxation in the polarized atmosphere of the bitterly contested campaign. Orban said “the responsibility and opportunity to govern “were not given to us,” but pledged to his voters “never to give up.”
Orbán staked his campaign on foreign and security policy, attempting to portray Magyar as a creature of the allegedly hostile EU leadership, above all Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and as someone risking Hungary’s security by pandering to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky. Magyar was accused of having conspired with Ukraine in closing off Hungary’s supply of Russian oil.
Magyar’s strategy was to avoid confrontation directly on these issues, and instead to focus his critique of Orbán on the popular themes of corruption, cronyism, and a weak economy. This has proven to be even more effective than the opinion polls had predicted in producing a decisive rebuke of Orbán’s leadership.
Magyar promised better relations with the EU, and it is likely that the EU will quickly unblock some, if not all, of the several billion euros withheld from Hungary because of failure to comply with EU standards on human rights, press freedoms and democratic governance.
However, Magyar did not promise to reverse Orbán’s opposition to arming or funding Ukraine. He did agree to gradually reduce Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil delivered by the Druzhba pipeline and Russian gas delivered by pipeline through Turkey. While Magyar can be expected quickly to reverse Orbán’s opposition to the disbursement of the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine, it is not clear whether Magyar will acquiesce in the permanent elimination of Hungary’s oil supply through the Druzhba pipeline.
Magyar has also given no indication that he will support Ukraine’s early accession to the EU.
Even so, his campaign apparently struck a sympathetic chord among voters who deplored Orbán’s friendly stance toward Russia. This may be the sole clear advantage of Magyar’s campaign against Orbán in the strategic or diplomatic field.
What happens next?
A former senior diplomat and official of Fidesz, Magyar was able to attract votes from Hungary’s liberal, urban, and younger voters without differing very markedly from Orbán on many issues of substance. He made the election about Orbán’s probity and competence and not about Orbán’s conservative nationalist worldview.
In fact, Magyar was a member of Fidesz until 2024 when he left to build Tisza, which is part of the center-right European People’s Party grouping in the European Parliament, occupying the place formerly held by Fidesz.
After a deeply acrimonious campaign, the fact that Orbán conceded his defeat earlier than expected means that risks to social peace and security are not as great as might have been feared in the case of a closer race. However, in claiming to have “liberated” the country from Orbán’s rule, Magyar hints at prosecutions of Fidesz officials, possibly to include Orbán himself.
With a commanding majority in the parliament, Magyar plans to launch a major overhaul of the institutions, laws, and norms that have supported Orbán’s rule. The challenges from Fidesz loyalists entrenched in positions outside of parliament may place obstacles in his way. It is far from clear that Orbán will fade into retirement or obscurity, since he has pledged to make the most of Fidesz’s new role as principal parliamentary opposition to Magyar and Tisza.
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The Only True Nuclear Protective Shield Is Global Disarmament
Politicians and the media use deliberately confusing terms that downplay the dangers of a military and nuclear arms race to the general population.
Feb 26, 2026
The use of key security policy terms in public discourse is intended to suggest facts that serve to calm people down. However, there are many reasons for concern that could also trigger peace forces.
The Illusion of a Nuclear Protective Shield
Political scientist and historian Herfried Münkler called for a European atomic bomb as early as 2023. There is currently an increasingly heated debate about whether Germany should seek refuge under France's nuclear protective shield in view of Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Katarina Barley, also raised the issue of acquiring nuclear bombs as part of European armament in 2024. The German and French heads of government, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron, are also paving the way for talks on European nuclear armament and the extension of France's nuclear umbrella, according to Merz in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early 2026.
There is repeated talk of a nuclear umbrella. The problem is already clear in this choice of words. Such a protective shield, which one would only have to deploy to be protected, does not exist. This term suggests that Germany or even Europe would be protected from attacking missiles with nuclear warheads if the nuclear protective shield were installed. However, there is no protection against dozens of hypersonic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads attacking simultaneously. The few minutes of reaction time are not enough for a successful counterattack.
Anyone who promises a nuclear protective shield in this sense is trying to deceive people about the real danger of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their actual military-strategic goals.
So-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those who are more knowledgeable know that the term “nuclear protective shield” refers more to the nuclear deterrence of a potential attacker. This deterrence would result from the nuclear second-strike capability if a nuclear first strike is underway or has already taken place. The question here, of course, is whether a nuclear second strike is still possible if the first strike with nuclear weapons could not be repelled. Here, too, the talk of a nuclear protective shield is problematic.
Lowering the Nuclear Threshold Through ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Weapons
The distinction between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons also poses a semantic problem. Here, technological language suggests that there is a clear distinction between the two. Tactical nuclear weapons are weapons that are intended for limited use due to their lower explosive power, shorter range, and deployment. However, the boundaries are fluid, and Russia also considers tactical weapons to be strategic. If this distinction is nevertheless used, the use of more limited (tactical) nuclear weapons could then be viewed fundamentally differently from the use of larger and longer-range nuclear weapons in terms of explosive power.
The conceptual problem is further exacerbated by so-called “mini-nukes.” Thus, the gradation and differentiation of nuclear weapons pretends that a nuclear war could be confined to a regional or local level. This merely lowers the nuclear threshold and thus downplays the risk of nuclear escalation. Incidentally, so-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is therefore also a linguistic distortion and trivialization of a terrible weapon.
Putin's Special Military Operation as a Crude Semantic Deception
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a clear act of war, albeit without a declaration of war. Russia's war against Ukraine, which has now been going on for over four years, has been disguised as a “special military operation.” To this day, the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge the conceptual truth of its war. In doing so, it attempts to downplay the illegality and barbarity of its aggression to its own population and to the world. "Special military operation" sounds more like a clean, technical intervention. Language could not be used in a more manipulative way, considering that hundreds of thousands of people have already fallen victim to this war, millions have fled, and Ukraine's vital infrastructure and ecology have been destroyed.
When people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them.
Equally problematic is the term "Russian world" (Russkij Mir), which Russian President Vladimir Putin uses repeatedly. A Russian world as such does not even exist in Russia, as it is a multiethnic state created by coercion and military force, with very different cultural characteristics among its peoples. Thus, talk of the "Russkij Mir" serves to justify military aggression against other states with the argument that the Russian world and the Russian-speaking people there are under threat.
This ethnically charged term is also the central ideological construct used to restrict the state independence of countries such as Belarus and Ukraine.
Deception Through the Term ‘Nuclear Sharing’
Since Germany is not permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the 2+4 Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NATO has agreed on the principle of "nuclear sharing." However, this term also serves to obscure harsh security policy realities. According to reports, up to 20 US B61-3/4 nuclear bombs are stored in Büchel (Rhineland-Palatinate), combined with German Air Force Tornadoes capable of delivering nuclear warheads to an enemy target.
However, the American nuclear capabilities stored there—and also in other European NATO countries—do not allow for participation by the German federal government. Participation implies the possibility of having a say. But the US government repeatedly makes it clear that the possible use of these nuclear weapons is exclusively subject to the respective US government. This undermines and circumvents the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear sharing among NATO countries, while at the same time obscuring the fact that these weapons are controlled by a foreign power.
Misuse of the Term ‘Modernization’ of Nuclear Weapons
The potential dangers of the "modernization" of nuclear weapons are also being downplayed. The term "modernization" as used in security policy also implies a positive development of nuclear weapons—after all, "modern" represents a positive innovation in language usage—and obscures the increasing danger of these weapon systems.
A particularly problematic aspect of this modernization is the integration of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its functionality within the framework of nuclear strategies. However, AI works on the principle of probability calculation and is extremely prone to error. The information from hundreds of sensors, which an AI uses to make a statement in a very short time, e.g., about attacking nuclear missile swarms, cannot be reliably verified by those responsible in the few minutes of time available. However, this development could make an accidental nuclear war more likely.
War Readiness Versus Defense Capability—the Importance of Conceptual Usage
When German Defense Minister Pistorius says that Germany must become “war ready,” this contradicts the defense mandate of the Basic Law and the prohibition of wars of aggression (GG Art. 26 (1) and 115a). The concept of war includes both defense and attack. Therefore, if the federal government adheres to the Basic Law, it should only talk about and take appropriate measures to become defensible.
War readiness is based on the postulate of military strength through deterrence. Since no state wants to voluntarily face the military superiority of an enemy state or military alliance, that state will devote an increasing share of its national budget to further armament measures in order to surpass its opponent in military strength. This leads to an arms race and—as World War I shows, for example—ultimately to war.
Defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties.
Defense capability means prioritizing military defense capabilities, e.g., with regard to defending against drone attacks, in conjunction with improved “resilience” of critical infrastructure. Even this kind of resilience is currently unachievable for any state. Today's industrialized nations in the digital age are virtually impossible to protect against hybrid attacks, especially hacking of power and heating networks. Anyone who suggests that this is entirely possible creates a false sense of security.
But when people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them. They are deprived of the civil society power to resist their government's risky course. This also characterizes the dilemma of the current peace movement. Although it clearly addresses the dangers of military escalation and nuclear war in its appeals, it does not find the resonance that would actually be expected in the current crisis situation.
Deployment of US Missiles in 2026 as a ‘Security Policy’ of Deterrence
The deployment of three different missile systems, including hypersonic weapons, planned for November 2026, follows the verdict of strength through deterrence. These weapon systems will be stationed in Germany under US command. This was agreed upon between former US President Joe Biden and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the sidelines of the NATO summit in New York in the summer of 2024, without any debate in the Bundestag. The deployment will take place without any accompanying offer of negotiation to Russia. These are so-called "decapitation weapons," i.e., weapons that are not primarily intended for defense, as stipulated in the Basic Law.
In this case, too, it is problematic to speak of "security policy" in relation to the US missile deployment. It could well be that this deployment could increase uncertainty and the risk of escalation for Germany. These weapon systems, which certainly pose a threat to Russia, could become targets for Russian missile attacks, which in turn would trigger a corresponding spiral of retaliation, possibly even nuclear.
But defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties. In this context, building up military defenses and attempting to secure critical infrastructure is entirely necessary and legitimate. However, the planned US missile deployment undermines this defense policy objective. What will Russia do in this case? It should not be forgotten that Russia has already deployed Zircon and Kinschal hypersonic missiles, for example in Kaliningrad, and has already used the Oreschnik hypersonic weapon, which is virtually impossible to defend against, at least twice in the war in Ukraine. If NATO's Western allies are not prepared to renegotiate the disarmament and control treaties, Russia will certainly attempt to expand and upgrade its own arsenal once the US missiles are deployed at the end of 2026.
Conclusion
Disclosing the dangers implied in security policy language in connection with nuclear weapons does not mean defeatism or resignation in the face of an opponent armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons.
However, if people allow themselves to be deceived by appeasing terminology and its use in public discourse on security policy, this leads to a dangerous lulling of these people into a false sense of security. The security policy promises behind this terminology give them a feeling of security that does not correspond to the actual risk when states focus on military armament, in particular the further development of nuclear weapons systems, and military escalation. The disclosure of real dangers is not intended to cause anxiety about security policy and paralysis, but rather to raise awareness of actual dangers as the basis for the priority need for improved defense capabilities, in particular through negotiations and diplomacy.
Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict.
In summary, it can therefore be said that the security policy goal must be defense capability. This also includes a disarmament proposal that has already been mentioned several times, within a framework controlled by the United Nations, that the two major military powers, the US and Russia, should gradually disarm all weapons systems, including nuclear weapons, to the level of the People's Republic of China. In a next step, under the transparent supervision of international institutions such as the UN and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, these three states would have to disarm to the level of smaller states until, for example, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is fully implemented.
This would be an effective and sensible security policy worthy of the name. Even though there are currently major geopolitical obstacles standing in the way of such controlled and transparent international disarmament, this peace-bringing disarmament strategy must not be lost sight of. The trillions that would be saved by all participating states as a result of disarmament and the elimination of further armament could also be a compelling argument for such an internationally coordinated and balanced disarmament strategy, at least in the medium term.
Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict. A security policy that is oriented toward defense capability rather than war capability would also have to use different language. Obscuring terms that are embedded in a context of meaning and semantically designed to conceal rather than reveal military risks are part of a media-mediated military strategy that will not lead to peace.
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There Can Be No Peace With Marco Rubio Around
If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, Trump had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late.
Dec 08, 2025
Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America.
The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting US foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.
The eight wars Trump claims he has ended include non-existent wars between Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo, and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended in 2023, after Azerbaijan invaded and ethnically cleansed the ancient Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh. Trump stole credit for peace between Thailand and Cambodia, which was actually mediated by Malaysia, while India insists that it ended its war with Pakistan without help from Trump.
Trump recently invited the presidents of Rwanda and the DRC to Washington to sign a peace deal, but it’s only the latest of many agreements that have failed to end decades of war and proxy war that rage on in the eastern Congo.
Trump even claims to have brought peace to Iran, which was not at war until he and Netanyahu plotted to attack it. Now diplomacy with Iran is dead—torpedoed by Trump’s treacherous use of negotiations as cover for the US-Israeli surprise attack in June, an illegal war right out of Rubio’s neocon playbook.
Rubio has undermined diplomacy with Iran for years. As a senator, he worked to kill the JCPOA nuclear agreement, framed negotiations as appeasement, and repeatedly demanded harsher sanctions or military action. He defended the US and Israeli attacks in June, which confirmed the claims of Iranian hardliners that the United States cannot be trusted. He makes meaningful talks with Iran impossible by insisting that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and long-range missile development. By aligning US policy with Israel’s, Rubio closed off the only path that has ever reduced tensions with Iran: sustained, good-faith diplomacy.
Trump’s eighth claimed peace agreement was his Gaza “peace plan,” under which Israel still kills and maims Palestinians every day and allows only 200 truckloads per day of food, water, medicine, and relief supplies into Gaza. With Israeli forces still occupying most of Gaza, no country is sending troops to join Trump’s “stabilization force,” nor will Hamas disarm and leave its people defenseless. Israel still calls the shots, and will only allow rebuilding in Israeli-occupied areas.
As secretary of state, it was Marco Rubio’s job to negotiate peace and an end to the occupation of Palestine. But Rubio’s entire political career has been defined by unwavering support for Israel and corrupted by over a million dollars from pro-Israel donor groups like AIPAC. He refuses to speak to Hamas, insisting on its total isolation and destruction.
Rubio even refuses to negotiate with the weakest, most compromised, but still internationally recognized, Palestinian Authority. In the Senate, he worked to defund and delegitimize the PA, and now he insists it should play no role in Gaza’s future, but he offers no alternative. Contrast this with China, which recently convened fourteen Palestinian factions for dialogue. With a US secretary of state who won’t talk to any Palestinian actors, the United States is only supporting endless war and occupation.
Ukraine is not on Trump’s list of “eight wars,” but it is the conflict he most loudly promised to end on day one. Trump took his first steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine with phone calls with Putin and Zelenskyy on February 12, 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of America’s NATO allies in Brussels that the US was taking Ukraine’s long-promised NATO membership off the table, and that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
Zelenskyy and his European backers are still trying to persuade Trump that, with his support, they can win back at the negotiating table what Ukraine and its western allies lost by their tragic decision to reject a negotiated peace in April 2022. Russia was ready to withdraw from all the land it had just occupied, but the US and UK persuaded NATO and Ukraine to instead embark on this long war of attrition, in which their negotiating position only grows weaker as Ukraine’s losses mount.
On November 21st, Trump unveiled a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that was built around the policy Trump and Hegseth had announced in February: no NATO membership, and no return to pre-2014 borders. But once Rubio arrived to lead the US negotiating team in talks in Geneva, he let Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the Europeans put NATO membership and Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders back on the table.
War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the US pretexts for war are fabricated and false.
This was a poison pill to deliberately undermine the basic concept of Ukrainian neutrality that Russia insists is the only way to resolve the security dilemma facing both NATO and Russia and ensure a stable and lasting peace. As a European official crowed to Politico, “Things went in the right direction in Geneva. Still a work in progress, but looking much better now… Rubio is a pro who knows his stuff.”
Andriy Yermak, who led Ukraine’s negotiating team in Geneva, has now been fired in a corruption scandal, reportedly at Trump’s behest, as has Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, Keith Kellogg, who apparently leaked Trump’s plan to the press.
Trump is facing a schism in his foreign policy team that echoes his first term, when he appointed a revolving door of neocons, retired generals, and arms industry insiders to top jobs. This time, he has already fired his first National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, several NSC staff, and now General Kellogg,
Trump’s team on Ukraine now includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Andy Baker and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who all seem to be on board with the basic policy that Trump and Hegseth announced in February.
But Rubio is keeping alive European hopes of a ceasefire that postpones negotiations over NATO membership and Ukraine’s borders for a later date, to allow NATO to once again build, arm and train Ukrainian forces to retake its lost territories by force, as it did from 2015 to 2022 under cover of the MInsk Accords.
This raises the questions: Does Rubio, like the Europeans and the neocons in Congress, still back the Biden-era strategy of fighting a long proxy war to the last Ukrainian? And if so, is he now in fact working to undermine Trump’s peace efforts?
Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, thinks so, writing “...we are at the threshold on Ukraine, at the beginning of a consequential battle between the neocons and Europeans on one side, and Donald Trump and the realists on the other. Will Trump show the fortitude to see this through and overcome his secretary of state?”
But it’s perhaps in Latin America where Rubio is playing the most aggressive role. Rubio has always promoted regime-change policies, economic strangulation, and US interference targeting left-leaning governments in Latin America. Coming from a conservative Cuban familiy, he has long been one of the most hard-line voices in Washington on Cuba, championing sanctions, opposing any easing of the embargo, and working to reverse Obama-era diplomatic openings.
His position on Venezuela is similar. He was a leading architect of the Trump administration’s failed “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, promoting crippling sanctions that devastated civilians, while openly endorsing failed coups and military threats.
Now Rubio is pushing Trump into a catastrophic, criminal war with Venezuela. In early 2025, Trump’s administration briefly pursued a diplomatic track with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spearheaded by envoy Richard Grenell. But Marco Rubio’s hard-line, pressure-first approach gradually overtook the negotiation channel: Trump suspended talks in October 2025, and US policy shifted toward intensified sanctions and military posturing.
Rubio’s hostility extends across the region: he has attacked progressive leaders in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil, while supporting authoritarians aligned with US and Israeli interests. While Trump has warmed to Brazil’s president Lula and craves access to its reserves of rare earth elements, the second largest after China’s, Lula has no illusions about Rubio’s hostility and has refused to even meet with him.
Rubio’s approach is the opposite of diplomacy. He refuses engagement with governments he dislikes, undermines regional institutions, and encourages Washington to isolate and punish rather than negotiate. Instead of supporting peace agreements—such as Colombia’s fragile accords or regional efforts to stabilize Haiti—he treats Latin America as a battleground for ideological crusades.
Rubio’s influence has helped block humanitarian relief, deepen polarization, and shatter openings for regional dialogue. A Secretary of State committed to peace would work with Latin American partners to resolve conflicts, strengthen democracy, and reduce US militarization in the hemisphere. Rubio does the reverse: he inflames tensions, sabotages diplomacy, and pushes US policy back toward the dark era of coups, blockades, proxy wars, and death squads.
So why is Trump betraying his most loyal MAGA supporters, who take his promises to “end the era of endless wars” at face value? Why is his administration supporting the same out-of-control American war machine that has run rampant around the world since the rise of neocons like Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s?
Is Trump simply unable to resist the lure of destructive military power that seduces every American president? Trump’s MAGA true believers would like to think that he and they represent a rejection of American imperialism and a new “America First” policy that prioritizes national sovereignty and shared domestic prosperity. But MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Green can see that is not what Trump is delivering.
US secretaries of state wield considerable power, and Trump is not the first president to be led astray by his secretary of state. President Eisenhower is remembered as a champion of peace, for quickly ending the Korean War—then slashing the military budget—and for two defining speeches at the beginning and end of his presidency: his “Chance for Peace” speech after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin in 1953; and his Farewell Address in 1960, in which he warned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”
For most of his presidency though, Eisenhower gave his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, free rein to manage US foreign policy. By the time Eisenhower fully grasped the dangers of Dulles’ brinksmanship with the USSR and China, the Cold War arms race was running wild. Then Eisenhower’s belated outreach to the Soviets was interrupted by his own ill-health and the U-2 crisis. Hillary Clinton had a similarly destructive and destabilizing impact on Obama’s first-term foreign policy, in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and Honduras.
These should be cautionary tales for Trump. If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, he had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late. War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the US pretexts for war are fabricated and false. Rubio has stoked the underlying tensions and led this escalating campaign of lies, threats and murders, so Trump would be wise to replace him before his march to war crosses the point of no return.
This would allow Trump and Rubio’s successor to start rebuilding relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to finally change longstanding US policies that keep the Middle East, and now Ukraine, trapped in endless war.
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Comparing the Ukraine and Gaza Peace Deals
Both what is similar and what is different about the agreements orchestrated by the Trump administration have lessons to teach us about these conflicts.
Dec 01, 2025
In the span of a week, the Trump administration succeeded in passing a United Nations Security Council resolution on Gaza (based on its earlier 20-point plan to end the conflict) and also released a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine. Commentators and critics have noted some similarities between the two initiatives. There are also profound differences that are important to note.
In the first place, the intention of both plans appears to be driven by the simple and commendable goal of ending the ongoing violence in Gaza and Ukraine. While trying to do this, however, critics note that aggressors have been given undo deference. In the case of Ukraine, it was deemed that the way forward was in awarding Russia’s land grab in eastern and southern Ukraine. In the case of Gaza, no attention was paid to Israel’s genocidal crimes against Palestinians with the assumption that the victims should make do with aid and some form of recovery—even though it appears from the plan that their future remains indeterminate and subject to the will of others.
The problems with both plans owe to the fact that they were initially drafted without the input of either the Palestinians or Ukrainians. The exact origins of the Gaza plan remain somewhat murky, but what’s clear is the absence of Palestinian participation. The UN resolution’s only mention of the Palestinian Authority is a reference to their possible future involvement should they meet unspecified reforms, at which point the PA “may” be allowed to assume a role in Gaza on terms approved by Israel and the international bodies the resolution has established to govern Gaza controlling the funds and making the plans to help Gaza recover.
The Ukraine plan’s origins have been a subject of some controversy. At first the US claimed it had been developed with the Russians, based on a Russian draft. Then they denied any US involvement, only later to “clarify” that it had been a joint US-Russian effort. After push back from Europeans and some Republican senators, the US engaged with the Ukrainians, making some changes which may or may not be acceptable to the Russian side.
Herein lies one of the differences between the two plans. Ukraine is recognized as a sovereign entity, despite the draft plan’s allowing for violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty. The plan for Gaza, on the other hand, not only doesn’t acknowledge Palestinian sovereignty, but also goes to great lengths to erase it. It subjects Palestinians to the whims of Israel and the international bodies—led by the US—which will be positioned to serve as sovereigns over decisions that will shape the future of the Palestinian people.
There are, to be sure, what appear to be feints toward Palestinian sovereignty—a “tip of the hat” to the Saudi-French Proposal, references to a Palestinian police force, and the idea that a reformed PA “may” be involved in the future. But these are conditioned on terms established by others, rather than as rights. All of this seems to pour cold water on the giddiness accompanying the Special Session on Palestine that preceded the opening of this year’s General Assembly when a number of states recognized Palestinian statehood.
Especially concerning in this slighting of the PA is the lack of acknowledgement or understanding by the Gaza plan’s architects that Israel has, for three decades, done its best to ensure the PA’s failure. From the first years after Oslo, Israel denied Palestinians the freedom to develop an independent economy, guaranteeing the Palestinians would remain dependent on Israel. Israel circumscribed the areas in which the PA could govern, frequently violating even that by invading areas nominally under PA control. Israel also continued to build Jewish-only settlements and infrastructure, and played games with Hamas in Gaza, often elevating their stature at the expense of the PA. Today, the PA, while still conceptually representing the promise of Palestinian statehood, is increasingly seen in the West Bank more as a subordinate acting on behalf of Israel than as an independent self-governing entity representing Palestinian aspirations.
While it’s clear that Hamas has fallen into great disfavor among Palestinians in Gaza, the PA polls well behind Hamas in the West Bank. So when the Gaza plan insists that the PA reform, the questions that must be asked are: “What exactly are these reforms?” “Can the PA implement reforms under continuing Israeli domination of the West Bank?” and “With Israel as one of the parties designated to establish the metrics of reform, after meeting Israel’s criteria, will the PA have the credibility it needs to govern or will it be seen as the agent of the true sovereign, Israel?”
Finally, while the initial version of the Ukraine plan does include some constraints on Russia—even before recent reports of still unseen Ukrainian modifications—there are no such constraints imposed on Israel in the UN Gaza plan. Even the agreed-upon “ceasefire” remains elusive, with Israel acting with impunity as the ceasefire’s sole enforcer. Since Israel still controls access and egress to the less than half of Gaza from which they have withdrawn, Palestinians remain largely without adequate shelter, food, and medical services as winter approaches.
Months remain before the UN plan for Gaza can begin to be fully implemented. Most likely it will not be, as Israel and the US are obsessive about the unrealistic precondition that Hamas be fully disarmed and dismantled before any forward movement can occur. What appears to be in the offing is a US-Israel plan to develop housing projects for Palestinians in the Gaza areas under Israeli control. This effort to lure some desperate Palestinians to move into the Israeli region would mean abandoning those who remain under Hamas control to an uncertain future. This actually meets the definition of genocidal intent.
One decisive difference in the development of the two plans has been the roles played by external forces. Ukraine has the backing of a near-unified European bloc, coupled with support from Republicans driven by anti-Russian animus. This tempered even the initial US 28-point plan. While the Gaza plan had its origins in an Arab draft, and while Arab states and others were able to insert some language in the UN resolution on Gaza, by the time the US and Israel had finished stripping it down and President Trump had put his imprimatur on it bullying it through the UN process, Palestinian rights were gone.
It’s not too late for Arabs to demand better terms, for Palestinians to put their house in order creating a unified national plan of governance for the West Bank and Gaza, and for Arabs and Palestinians to insist that those nations who have recognized Palestinian statehood call for reopening the debate on Palestine’s future. If changes aren’t made, in short order, we will tragically be right back where we started.
Led by US, Revenue of Major Weapons Makers Hit All-Time High in 2024
"Last year global arms revenues reached the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI as producers capitalized on high demand," said researcher behind annual report.
Dec 01, 2025
An annual report out Monday that tracks global arms sales shows that weapons makers in 2024 generated more revenue than at any time since the group behind the research began tracking the data over 35 years ago.
The annual report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that the top 100 weapons makers in the world—led by those in the United States—brought in a record-setting $679 billion over the course of the year, fueled mainly by the war in Ukraine, Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, and spending on nuclear weaponry.
"Last year global arms revenues reached the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI as producers capitalized on high demand," said Lorenzo Scarazzato, a researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme, which has been tracking global arms sales since 1989.
"In 2024," the report explains, "the growing demand for military equipment around the world, primarily linked to rising geopolitical tensions, accelerated the increase in total Top 100 arms revenues seen in 2023. More than three-quarters of companies in the Top 100 (77 companies) increased their arms revenues in 2024, with 42 reporting at least double-digit percentage growth."
In 2024, SIPRI noted, "all of the five largest arms companies increased their arms revenues," the first time that has happened since 2018. According to the report, those five companies alone—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrup Grumman, BAE Systems, and General Dynamics—accounted for an estimated $215 billion of the total arms sales tabulated in the report. Of those five, four are US companies while BAE is based in the United Kingdom.
In the sixth spot overall was Boeing, another US company, which generated nearly $31 billion in revenue.
According to SIPRI's summary of the report:
Although the bulk of the global rise was due to companies based in Europe and the United States, there were year-on-year increases in all of the world regions featured in the Top 100. The only exception was Asia and Oceania, where issues within the Chinese arms industry drove down the regional total.
The surge in revenues and new orders prompted many arms companies to expand production lines, enlarge facilities, establish new subsidiaries or conduct acquisitions.
With the genocide in Gaza, Israel's largest weapons makers also had surging revenue in 2024 as bombs, missiles, and tank shells were fired on the besieged enclave, killing and maiming large numbers of Palestinian civilians, including children. As Al-Jazeera notes:
The three Israeli arms companies in the ranking increased their combined arms revenues by 16 percent to $16.2 billion amid the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 70,000 Palestinians and destroyed most of the besieged enclave.
Elbit Systems pocketed $6.28 billion in profits, followed by Israel Aerospace Industries with $5.19 billion and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems with $4.7 billion.
In the United States, where nearly half of the global revenue for weapons makers was generated, another notable development in 2024 was SpaceX, owned by right-wing libertarian Elon Musk, landing in the Top 100 for the first time.
SpaceX's arms revenue more than doubled compared with figures from 2023, reaching $1.8 billion.
Musk is a close ally of US President Donald Trump and a major GOP donor in 2024. According to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending, the mega-billionaire donated more than $291 million to Republican candidates, including Trump, during the 2024 cycle.
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