There are three problems America tends to have as a nation trying to understand its adversaries — and this has led to the continuous debasement of American power by recent and successive administrations.

First, in the arc of the past 35 years, we don’t identify adversarial powers or threats properly. We are constantly surprised by enemies, or else devote disproportionate attention to imagined enemies that don’t deserve more than a B-rating.

Second, when we do identify an adversarial force, we do a poor job of seeing them clearly and understanding what it means for us. Since 2007, for example, Russia has been crystal clear about what its objectives are vis a vis America specifically and the West more broadly, and we decided to ignore all the words on the paper to believe our own feelings that if we can just incentivize Moscow to cooperate with us, the benefits are obvious. We lived inside a discordant echo chamber where we believed the Russian smoke and mirrors about their strength, but disbelieved their willingness to use force to achieve political and strategic objectives. We aren’t the ones paying the biggest blood price for this failure. But it’s absolutely naive to believe it hasn’t cost American lives on at least four continents.

Third, we perpetually prefer to forget that our greatest weapon and our mightiest shield is the single most significant accomplishment of our nation (and of what we think of as western civilization): international human rights law.

As a nation, we are most pathetic internally and in the world when we forget that our revolutionary founding documents embodied ideas about human equality and human freedom that, in various forms, have spread out into the world not just as aspirational benchmarks but as rights to be defended and upheld. This is an absolute miracle in the long human story of oppression.

The concept of human rights law is one most Americans take for granted and would struggle to explain and define, so I’ll offer two passages which rattle around in my head about what it means, and a recent reflection on why we should care.

The first is from Sebastian Junger, a generationally important American writer of war, of belonging, of freedom. This is from his monograph, Freedom:

“It was not until the sweeping human rights laws of the twentieth century that freedom stopped being a question of fighting off one’s enemies. International treaties established mechanisms for imposing sanctions or even taking military action against regimes that committed gross human rights violations, and that made freedom a concern of virtually the entire world. Enshrining human rights as the apex of international law is one of the greatest achievements of Western society—perhaps greater than landing on the moon or decoding the human genome—but depends entirely on maintaining a delicate balance between national sovereignty and collective action. All it takes to destroy that balance is for one powerful nation—Hitler’s Germany, for example—to decide they’re better off doing whatever they want and suffering the consequences than abiding by the treaties. In the case of Germany, it almost worked.”

I probably reread this at least once a week, in looking for better words to describe what we are letting slip away without lament — better words to describe the warning we have missed. That freedom stopped being a question of fighting off one’s enemies — that freedom stopped being a small place defined by boundaries, but became the limitless physical and mental spaces that have allowed human ingenuity to flourish.

There can be no better description of modern freedom, why we must cherish it, and why it necessitates collective agreements and specifically collective defense. There can be no better understanding of why wars of aggression fail to produce durable solutions than in knowing powerful nations diminish freedom for themselves and others when they decide might makes right. Why? Because when the high of the violence wears thin, you are in a smaller, harder space, surrounded by enemies. Existence becomes the permanent struggle, choices limited, walls to keep us in as well as others out. It’s an illusion of freedom only.

The second passage is from the opening statement of the United States at the Nuremberg trials, delivered by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who served as a US prosecutor of Nazi war criminals.

“Wars are started only on the theory and in the confidence that they can be won. Personal punishment, to be suffered only in the event the war is lost, will probably not be a sufficient deterrent to prevent a war where the war-makers feel the chances of defeat to be negligible. But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.”

Until and unless we defend the rights we enjoy as the rights of our neighbors, we are all at risk of having our liberties taken from us. This truth that freedoms at home and abroad are connected, and that when the American shield is more expansive abroad, we feel greater freedom and possibility at home — I don’t think many Americans can quite define this, but we feel the truth of it in the times when we are living it. As a nation, we are underserved by American news — which does not speak of the world — and alternatively told we do not need to care about much by the current generation of politicians who think reading polls is governing, and whom we reward with re-election for never challenging us on anything.

But we feel this echo. The smallness and contraction of the current America chafes.

We don’t elect presidents for foreign policy but we abandon them for foreign failures.

Our sense of ourselves has always been bigger than a nationstate or our geography. It doesn’t make us perfect global actors. But it gives us a magnetic north.

And that’s the third and final thing I want to reference — as I think about freedom, and the next Nuremberg, and the war in Ukraine. The righteous war Ukraine fights to defend the world we helped build, which we have left them to carry the burden of while we pursue lesser conquests.

Living in the black-and-white days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — nearing 1500 days under daily Russian bombardment of Ukrainian civilians, cities, and cultural heritage; 1500 days building a file of evidence of Russia’s attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people; 1500 days of relentless decision-making and forward action without alternative for Ukrainians military and civilians alike — Ukrainians have perfected a unique gift for cutting through Western uncertainty with praise meant to bolster our own spiritual resources — our will to fight the war we face.

At a security conference this past month in Vilnius, Major Yevhen Karas, commander of a Ukrainian unmanned systems forces regiment, offered this quiet reminder of what is at stake with his summary remarks for his panel.

“As a military and as the civilian people of Ukraine, we are very proud to be a part of Europe, and proud to have your help in helping to save our lives. We understand that we are protecting Europe because the next victim could be any other country neighboring Russia... But remember that the main weapon — in a drone conference, and talking about AI technologies, modern technologies — your main weapon is your moral level, your ideology, your readiness to protect your country, your life.”

Our beliefs are what set us apart from Russia and the way Russia fights its wars, he reminded — they are both what we fight with, and what we fight for.

It is an important reminder. Because we just need to constantly remind ourselves that the source of America’s greatest, most unstoppable, most asymmetric power is its defense of the idea of human freedom.

* * * * *

In the last few months of 2025 and the first few months of 2026, Americans and our allies have been buried by an avalanche of words from the US administration, a discordant amalgam of revisionist history, abandonment of ideals, and the abdication of power and responsibility — all hidden behind the language of aggression.

These wars of incidental liberation speak poorly of an American president and cabinet who are afraid to articulate their theory of power to the American people, and they speak poorly of the American people who cheer them for the two-bit explanations offered.

While there are plenty of times in history when our language of liberation to justify foreign intervention fell short of its goals or was really just reflexive geopolitics, the embrace of the cynicism — “At least Trump is honest that it’s all bullshit and we never cared at all” — is a reflection of our eroding belief in the founding ideas of our republic. It is a reflection of the exceptionally poor leadership that currently fills the ranks of public and private posts on America, in elected and appointed office, in institutions of education and civic life, in posts of moral, financial, corporate, and scientific authority. No one can be bothered to convince anyone of anything. Polls are designed to capture the laziest and most detached definition of citizen responsibility, and our leaders rely on them to absolve themselves of doing anything hard. The metrics by which we judge our lives are wrong, and the money is rewarded to those who stand for nothing and are the least willing to give any consideration to the people around them.

The generosity of spirit that once defined our nation — generosity of shared freedom, generosity of opportunity, generosity of possibility, generosity of common aspiration — is tangibly absent now, a dream that was so desperate and sweet that you did not want to wake from it and reach out your sleepy fingers to brush the wisps as they dispel.

Wars of incidental liberation — or not. Mostly not.

The quick deal with the deputy dictator of Venezuela left no possibility for illusions outside of the flex. The deal was done before the strike. As the president said himself this past week: “Venezuela was so incredible because we did the attack and we kept the government totally in tact.” No illusions of liberation, then. And in that instance, the leader of the supposed opposition forces was removed before the action by American security contractors — sent out to receive her Nobel peace prize in what can now be understood as a deliberate attempt to ensure the possibility of that movement was cutoff and discredited. The American choice was the deputy dictator — please deposit our share of the oil revenue in this bank account in Qatar. Good luck to you, freedom-aspiring people of Venezuela — btw we revoked your legal status to live in the US, pack those bags and make plans to self-deport.

The US is not the sole actor in current operations in the Middle East — but amidst the shotgunned explanations of why and what now is again a clear preference for finding a strongman to stick in the chair. Again, there has been some effort to identify a democratic alternative to Iran’s repressive regime — nods to the street protests and the tremendous efforts of Iranian women to stand up to oppression; nods to the “baby Shah” and the long fanfic of his potential to return and reset Iran; calls to some amorphous “people of Iran” to rise up while a generally bombing campaign is underway and oil sludge rains down on Tehran. But this has very much been presented as — and if you don’t succeed in seizing power on your own, you missed your only chance, oh well. This intentionally ignores the profound structural differences with how power works in a nation like Iran versus a nation like Venezuela. It seems designed to discredit those forces — again. It again ignores that a democratic Iran would be a boon for regional stability and for American security — if not necessarily beloved by the Gulf monarchies that are deeply involved in whatever is going on.

Listening to the fervid press conferences of the secretary of defense and reading the rage-bait social media posts of the Commander in Chief, the only certainty is the lust for selling the necessity of absolute destruction. SECDEF pushes the new ideal of America as a bully, a “Christian war” of punching those who are weaker than us because we can. They believe they are the men who will do the violence others won’t as a necessity of the world they want to live in — where freedom is for those who do violence, and where tearing things down is the point. They are deep in the high of the game play and have no idea what day it is or whether it’s day or night outside.

Blowing advanced munition stockpiles might leave us in a twist? Who cares, just declare we have infinity ordnance. Americans might die? Of course they will. Russia is giving Iran intelligence to kill American forces? So what, they did the same with the Taliban and this president didn’t care about that either.

So — or not, it seems.

But the adrenalin is flowing. Don’t even finish the sentence on Iran. Cuba next. Venezuela who?

What’s meant to sound big stick is actually just small dick.

They slaver and heave over pronouncements of maiming and gore and destruction. To anyone who understands that great power is not defined by destructive kinetic excellence but by what we build with our moral weapons, the bloodlust and crusader-speak is a pathetic mimicry of what we might actually achieve by directing our operational might toward the necessary fields of battle.

Venezuela, Iran, Cuba — odious regimes close to the nations that call America enemy. But as I wrote in advance of our operations in Venezuela, these operations are counterintuitively designed to create space for cohabitation and cooperation with our adversaries — Russia and China — rather than confrontation. It’s messy on the page, but the questions of what Russia and China are learning from our actions are becoming more clear.

Oil sanctions against Russia are weakened to ease the price crisis of the Iran bombing. Less American weapons will be available for our allies in Europe and Asia who have paid for them — and certainly less will be available for Ukraine. Russia uses this moment to launch what is likely a new offensive in Ukraine. Ukraine gritted through a cold winter of mass Russian bombing and little power and heat to arrive in the spring, where they are expected to give the US and Gulf nations the ability to defend themselves against Iranian attack drones. China pays for the Russian war. The three global powers are on a collaborative bender of tearing it all down, and Europe isn’t sure yet if it wants to be the fourth real power in this spectrum.

We blew up this and that and decapitated some head of a regime that is a regenerative hydra — so what?

Accomplishments are defined by strategic victory — which cannot be achieved when there is no strategy beyond the volume of bombing, precise or otherwise. The living case study of this is the inability of Russian forces to achieve any strategic objectives against a morally-superior peer Ukrainian force.

It’s a debasement of American power, to render its tally sheet in blood.

But the blood sport ring is even now being built on the White House lawn to commemorate our independence — built just on the spot where the president turned an insurrectionist mob toward our capitol. It never happened, we are now told, but is a tangible reminder that we are not the nation we think we are. A culture of violence takes root in our nation, championed from the top, capturing the elements of state violence, standing singly in a space absent any leadership at all.

Boys playing games long after they were supposed to be tucked up in bed, leering at the naughty pin-up girls on the back of the door. They explain American sacrifice is for the blood of the enemy — and not for any greater purpose at all. After decades of whining about how we would win everything if we would abandon our rules of engagement and “jihad the jihadis,” the jingoists have convinced themselves that an orientation defined only by violence and emulating the tactics of the enemy is righteousness.

It is not. It is the pathway to American defeat — where America accomplishes the goal of our enemies by erasing itself as a threat to the authoritarian notion that human freedom should not exist.

How do you like the performance? the president asks. Official communiques splice war footage with video game reel. Let’s sink a boat with a torpedo — because. A dangerous Iranian boat carrying the Iranian military band. Please like or follow this channel so we can keep producing content.

The whole way we train soldiers involves a process of breaking them down and building them back up as individuals in a team psychologically able to bear the consequences of doing things — killing, burning, bombing — that are illegal and wrong outside of the context of war. We give them structures of orders and carefully defined frameworks of rules as part of that education, to insulate them from carrying the full weight of following orders and delivering “tactical and operational excellence.” We do this because our soldiers are not “cannon meat” like Russian conscripts, but are men and women who are regular citizens who need to be able to move between the life of a law-abiding citizen and the life of an active duty fighter as seamlessly as possible. The violence stays in a compartment. It is an unspoken tool that you do not bring home.

When the secretary of defense extols that violence as the higher purpose, those barriers come down. The violence is the soldier and the soldier comes home. The rules of engagement that are meant to ensure our own troops are protected if wounded or captured evaporate when we do not observe them for the enemy. When the point is the violence and not justice — not freedom — our concept of citizen-soldier heroes is erased. We don’t talk about their sacrifice but their kills. And then who the fuck are we really. We have killers too, this president once famously said of our military. This is what he wants them to be. Not all those other things we thank for their service.

* * * * *

Americans have forgotten that our defense of human freedom as a non-finite resource is the greatest thing we have — our sword, our shield, our beacon on the hill, our magnetic north, our moral weapon, our spiritual resource.

Without this we are nothing but what Putin wants us to be — an anomaly in the long arc of human history defined by human oppression under strongman rule.

We walk with swagger when we know we are righteous. We are rubbish when we lose our way on the real meaning and purpose of American greatness — which is inherently in the defense of the freedom of others, and in so doing ensuring the longevity and founding genius of our republic for ourselves.

Decisive action is necessary in the face of lawlessness and aggression — to return to the system of order where freedom is more than the ability to fight off enemies.

There will always be more enemies until we invest in building a world where freedom is about more than fighting them off. We understood this after WWII, when we won the war on the battlefield, and won the peace with tribunals and the Marshall plan. Freedom is changing the system so the enemy’s theory of victory fails. It is assuredly not in embracing the enemy’s rules of war and conducting ourselves as the bringers of death.

— MM

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A year ago, just after returning to the Oval Office, President Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release water from two California reservoirs. It wasn’t for any reason. He could, so he did. He was conducting an operation to populate the propaganda narrative with content. The Army Corps of Engineers complied.

This should have been the moment when it was clear what we were facing.

That this would not be a warmed-over Trump v1 reboot, but a deliberate acceleration of constitutional deconstruction via monarchic assumptions of executive power and abuse of the role of commander in chief.

That there would be constant small blitzkriegs beyond legal and constitutional boundaries in such rapid succession that no one had time to map them and calculate the losses.

That many, many bad men representing many dangerous ideologies would ride the Trump pony far and fast and foaming toward whatever dark fantasy they perceived was now possible.

The compass was spinning. The poles were reversed. The (literal) floodgates had been opened.

In the lead up to the 2025 inauguration, many people asked what me what the warning sign would be that Americans had lost control of their democracy. I said there were a lot of things, but when the president issued an unlawful order and the military complied, we were f-ed — in particular if this was connected to the use of the military as a tool of internal control against American civilians.

The opening of the dams became the point I referenced for how worried I was about Trump’s second term and the lack of preparation by any systems to contain his wanton damage — in this instance for the sake of a piece of performance art meant to act as the truth of a lie.

It wasn’t an unlawful order — but it was a nonsense one.

The Army Corp of Engineers knew it. Everyone knew it. Water from the northern reservoirs would flow down to other storage or evaporate off, possibly diminishing agricultural and other supplies during the summer. The water wouldn’t go anywhere near where the fires, now mostly contained anyway, were. Despite the immediate and future dangers of opening the dams with no preparation and opening them for no reason, the decision was made to comply-ish with the order to avoid ending up in the target. They opened the dams, took the photos, and then slowly turned down the dials.

The military has gotten plenty of nonsense orders in its day. But this wasn’t “fly my nephew over the Grand Canyon in a Blackhawk” but “pull a lever that might injure people or American food production just for the lulz.” To sidestep the issue of what to do with the nonsense order that has real life consequences just raises the cost of tolerating the next one.

All through the 2024 campaign, Trump returned to a favored theme from his first term — weird statements about forest fires that decoupled natural disasters from the reality of climate change and devolved federal accountability to anyone around he could point toward. A new variant became a story about how California was refusing to “send water” to put out forest fires that were raging across the state. California tried to rebut his fabulism, but Trump ordered the dams open anyway when he could — to the dismay and confusion of farmers, engineers, and local officials.

Growing up in the mountain west — most of the summers under the kind of drought where everyone peers down into the reservoir on the drive past and shakes their head — we were constantly, subconsciously measuring water. How deep is the snow pack, how fast is the spring run off, what hours for the watering restrictions, which agricultural water priorities won out, how far out of their ranges were animals moving looking for forage, how many miles from the house are the fires, how many days had it been since it rained, was the level of the reservoir below the giant measuring bar that ran up the side. Water was art, science, engineering, necessity, magic. It was a relationship between the natural world, the people, the government. It was a reminder that all around you in the mountain west, the federal government still owns most of the land, and can manage it in wise or completely arbitrary ways depending on what whims that day. Wasting water was unconscionable. Fire season gets longer every year.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which silently maintains and operates much of the nation’s mass water management infrastructure, detailed the timeline of actions and communications related to the opening of the California dams in a memo that essentially explained they were following a request from the White House to open the dams and send pictures of the water — pictures which the president posted on social media. An unconscionable action on every level by a man who cannot imagine life in America’s less concrete and manicured spaces.

It was a blip of a story then and after — the succession of tiny blitzkriegs erased it from memory, outrage feasting upon outrage until the the numbness is as deep as the insulated silence of the deep forest during a heavy snowfall.

But complicity with the nonsense order greased the gears for a year-long battle of eroded states rights and expanded executive authority, executive order after executive order issued by the White House recentralizing control of previously and traditionally federalized authorities. California’s “misuse and mishandling of resources” is one measure of a narrative cadence of actions against blue states. Of a new America where the assumption of unequal rights among citizens has been accepted with merely a whisper.

So many of the most powerful voices of Soviet dissidents wrote precisely of this prison. That participating in the lie of the system, even in the smallest and seemingly most meaningless ways, is how a system of oppression survives. In some of the most important periods of American history, brave individuals and then groups challenged the lie to break it apart and expand true rights and freedoms for all Americans. These periods were typically uncomfortable and turbulent and few living through them wanted them to be that way. The current administration has — with great ease — done more to erase and repress those brave Americans and their stories and voices than any real American wants to admit. Slowly they grind down the meaning of “American” to a repulsive nub of limp violence that is the smallest possible vision of what America ever was or could ever be.

And the problem is, of course, that this grotesque masquerade has been placed upon the power of the United States of America. Its military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural power. Its narrative and connective power.

In the strangest way imaginable, allies and enemies alike must now participate in this dance. Be complicit in the lie in their own ways.

As I highlighted in part 1 — “The resolve of our adversaries — and their desire to surprise us — remains unchanged and relentless.” We must reflect on what this means. Trump admires American adversaries. This statement is as true of him as Putin or Xi.

People are stuck thinking — hoping — that Trump v2 mirrors the chaotic, unfocused incompetence of v1 — and it doesn’t. This idea is becoming similar to the “the Russian economy is about to collapse” narrative — which is to say, Russia is constantly beset by weakness but still able to cause mayhem across the globe without significant consequences (though Ukraine is changing that equation, thankfully). Trump is constantly chaos but now has the focused capacity to damage the most critical architecture that protects human freedom.

Whether you think of the current US administration as an overt adversary or not, what is terribly stark is their embrace of the thinking of the adversary and their decision to help realign the board toward the advantage of not only THE adversary but a wide range of midling and mediocre adversaries of human freedom, as well. Or, you know, whoever will pay the highest price into the account in the Qatari bank.

Like Russia, Trump and his ideologues crave disruption as some kind of sacred right, and they think they can manage the outcomes to their advantage. Tech bros and venture capitalist backers of the engine of imaginary money worship the same god of bold disruption, and this would inevitably put them at odds with the preservation of the architecture of the free world.

And it has.

A year ago, two dams were opened to spill something vital out into a meaningless void. And now it seems America is also spilling out into a void, evaporating away for absolutely no reason and nothing at all.

Of course this administration was going to yoink a foreign leader and put him on trial for alleged crimes against America in a regular American court, maintaining a system of repression in another nation in so doing.

Of course they would issue nonsensical imperial demands against sovereign nations, peoples, and allies.

Of course the military was going to be sent into American cities as nonsensical window dressing to the deployment of a paramilitary force operating outside American law, constitutional principles, and the very ideas that fueled our independence as a nation.

Of course the media would be purchased and controlled.

Of course the White House would be destroyed.

Of course the 250th birthday of our nation would be celebrated with bloodsport.

Of course the operation will be conducted to populate the propaganda narrative with content.

Of course, of course, of course.

Because the floodgates were open, and no one who could do so said no.

Well, for my part: No.

No to making America small. No to nonsense orders. No to living in the lie. No to thinking freedom is something only some people can have. No to preserving what is left and not fighting for the rest.

But more about that in part 3.

— MM

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Since 2009, most of what I’ve tried to do in my professional — and personal — life is get more people to better understand the nature of the adversaries of the free world (starting with Russia), and how the artistry of using our own systems against us combines with our own unwillingness to see what that exploitation is costing us to have far more extensive impacts than we are prepared to admit. Sometimes I honestly don’t understand why we deny what is right before our eyes.

Looking only at Russia, the steady drumbeat of ignored warnings — the Bronze Night events in Estonia in 2007, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Georgian election in 2012, the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the influence campaigns during Brexit and the US elections in 2016, the expansion of hybrid means across much of the globe, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — doesn’t speak well of our ability to assess and respond to security threats.

For anyone in the proliferating group chats of security and foreign policy professionals on any connected topics, hardly a week goes by when serious people don’t seem to deny the facts of what has happened even while accepting the general nature of the adversary. This bizarre discordance has many points of origin — but it points toward our failures to grapple with this timeline, and toward our deep failures of imagination about how we got here and what to do.

A short piece from Mick Ryan, written as a reflection on the recent Bondi beach attack in Australia, was a sharp reminder of many points on which I think we could all use a refresher (and I encourage you to read it in its entirety). The central theme of the piece is that “surprise remains a central feature of the security environment” and occurs when we fail to challenge our own core assumptions about our security. Ryan references key recent and historical examples of surprise, including the October 6th attack by Hamas, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. He includes this quotation from a 1962 book on Pearl Harbor by Rebecca Wohlstetter:

The possibility of surprise at any time lies in the conditions of human perception and stems from uncertainties so basic that they are not likely to be eliminated, though they might be reduced.

This has been rattling around in my head since I read it, amplified by the disheartening awareness that lessons from 80 years ago are as apt today as then.

For any nation, its concept of security is about perception. Perceptions of its allies, perceptions of its enemies, perceptions of its strengths, perceptions of its weaknesses, perceptions of its interests, perceptions of its values. The accelerating technological toolkit to hack, exploit, and manipulate perception — to alter our ability to perceive security — should elevate our efforts to counter cognitive warfare near the top of the list.

But in America, at least, we have done anything but. The American information environment — and thus the global adjacent English-language information environment — is a toxic sludge of semi-reality fueled by billionaires and politicians who believe it confers an element of control they can exploit, foreign and domestic campaigns of information manipulation, and an array of grifters and “influencers” buoyed by the easy money of spreading coercive information on the internet.

Truth has been atomized. Reality has been atomized. Everyone perceives their quest for truth is the real one and everyone else has yet to see the light.

This will define the coming time of darkness — unless we reverse course.

In America and globally in the free world, 2025 has been a year of taking refuge in smaller communities. Smaller information environments, smaller circles of allies, smaller definitions of what we think of as being like us.

Left or right, conservative or liberal, we think of this contraction the same way. Preservation. Survival. Defending what can still be defended.

This perception of where we are leaves a lot of open space for the adversaries of human freedom — who do not perceive themselves as on the defensive, but riding the winds of good fortune.

Hamas put Israel to sleep. Russia put the West to sleep. China hopes absolutely everyone stays asleep. Once in the state of sleep, it is comfortable to believe a state of repose will never change. Things are happening somewhere — but they won’t impact us.

Part of this simply comes from being human. We cannot live permanently in a state of physiological dread/stress, so we choose not to.

Back in the late ‘90s, there was some very interesting scholarship on how our brains evolved to enhance our survival — including the completely improbable advantage of believing in things we can’t see. You can interpret this as manifesting as religion or other systems of belief that structure human beings into more ordered, collaborative, and productive systems. But said another way, this is perception — a state of becoming aware through assembled sensations and interpretations, rather than what is direct and actual.

Everything is about perception and how the human brain evolved perception. The ability to believe in things that aren’t there insulated us from the proto-human reality that things were trying to eat us and the more pre-modern reality that life can be really terrible. It’s kind of become the default setting — to live in a perception that makes us feel better psychologically but may or may not at all reflect the reality that will allow us as individuals to survive. We’re aware that crisis may come and we’re convinced that our innovative monkey brains will figure something out. But not always. We know those panic moments are defined by a lot of us getting eaten by whatever modern tiger — but we hope it won’t be us. We perceive that others will be eaten first.

But this takes us back to Ryan’s reflections on Bondi beach, surprise, and confronting modern adversaries:

“The key responsibility of state and federal governments in Australia now, beyond ensuring the safety of all citizens, is challenging the existing ideas or conceptzia about our domestic and national notions of resilience, cohesion, prosperity and security. The resolve of our adversaries – and their desire to surprise us – remains unchanged and relentless. Preparing for this, and ensuring we have the time, resources and will to respond when we are surprised in the future, begins with open and honest conversations on hard topics between government and citizens. And the ability to tackle hard truths about ourselves.”

“The resolve of our adversaries — and their desire to surprise us — remains unchanged and relentless.” And judging by our inability to correctly perceive the threat of Russia even after countless direct confrontations and surprises, we remain at a disadvantage and without imagination. We perceive that what is directly around us is kinda ok, and we fail to imagine its collapse.

It’s time to confront that our perception of security isn’t enhancing our survival odds as citizens of the free world anymore. We need to see what is actually there. And we need to imagine better ways ahead.

Americans have failed to imagine a country that serves us all and serves us all better — a country where being the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history translates into better opportunity,

better education, better governance, and better health for everyone. We have always been an insular nation, and many Americans simply do not know how much worse Americans live than our peers in wealthy democratic nations while believing we live better and more freely. In the past half-century, we’ve fallen behind.

The American dream is a great and worthy one — and it has been weaponized to take things away from the vast majority of us while funneling unthinkable wealth to those who understand how to exploit our concepts of freedom to oppress and control us. We don’t like to see how that aligns them with our adversaries. We make laws to protect and advantage those very few because we’re all supposed to believe we could be the next one of them. Aspiring to be the next oppressor of others isn’t much of a dream.

Our imagination has failed us, and we live worse because of it, and our zealotry is now exporting ideas abroad that inspire not enhanced liberty but sharper tools of oppression. The connection between the failure of imagination internally and externally is accelerating the corrosion of everything we believe in as a nation, and it’s bringing the rest of the free world down with us.

Europeans as a collective have failed to imagine what Europe can be as a necessary fourth great power in the world — a bastion of economic might and democratic freedom that is newly enhanced with phard power assets that secure their own ideals and ensure the legacy of democracy and the enlightenment when the American beacon is shrouded and dim. Europeans have failed to imagine themselves a definer of power instead of a place in between powers. They have failed to overcome historical hobbles and assumptions to embrace what modern Europe can become.

The collective west, including our Asian and Pacific democratic allies, has failed to imagine a free world that includes and encourages more nations. Our fear of losing what we have has helped define an era where things must be taken and held by force. Since the Iraq war, we have chosen to leave more people behind in systems of oppression and control. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy delineates this in the starkest possible terms — but it is at least honest in its cynicism and abandonment of the idea of human liberty.

These are just a few examples.

So far, there is a vast failure to imagine a different century ahead for collective human advancement and accelerated human freedom.

We can do better. We must do better.

But more in that in part 2…

— MM

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The justification for the military action in the Caribbean is based on a false narrative that is contradicted by our own intelligence. The threat we’re allegedly confronting isn’t any more real. The outcome we are being told to anticipate can’t be any more truthful. If this conflict is pursued, we will be left a weaker nation with closer relationships with our chief adversaries, having made choices that move us further from the nation that we think we are.

Venezuela is not about drugs. Venezuela is not about oil. Venezuela is not about democracy.

Venezuela is about redefining American power.

This Great Power long-read, which looks at the parallel lines of effort pushing us toward conflict with Venezuela, is split into 7 sections, posted as 2 parts [or subscribers can listen to the audio version here — https://www.greatpower.us/p/the-war-on-venezuela-is-a-war-for-1cc ]:

Part 1:

Introduction — All the president’s spiders

Narrative 1 — “Narco-terrorism”

Narrative 2 — Oil boom in Essequibo

Part 2:

Narrative 3 — Winning a “theater war”

Narrative 4 — “The only free hemisphere”

Narrative 5 — “Homeland” realignment

Conclusion — “Americas first” creates space for cooperation with Russia and China

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[continued from part 1]

PART TWO

Narrative 3 — Winning a “theater war”

Before we get to Marco Rubio’s place in the story, we must visit SECDEF Pete Hegseth. This does not require much of a deep dive. It’s a very strange thing to have an American Secretary of Defense strutting around lecturing about wanting the US to be engaged in a massive, theater-wide war so we can break some “restrictive rules” and “win it” with “enhanced lethality” — but needless to say it would take about five seconds and a ball of yarn to convince Pete Hegseth that a war in Venezuela, based around some kind of targeted bombing campaign and special operations activities, is a good idea. Kill them all or don’t let the door hit you on the way out. “We have killers too,” Trump once answered about Putin being a murderer. Seems he finally gets his wish. The ball of yarn is probably optional.

It’s truly unfortunate that Hegseth’s tough guy posturing will scratch the itch of dissatisfaction among a certain kind of military leader frustrated with the lessons of the past 20 years, getting some of them to hitch their wagons to a guy who became defense secretary by arguing war criminals are heroes and who resigned from the National Guard after fellow service members raised concerns about whether his views made him an “insider threat”. It’s clear Hegseth is shopping for brass that agrees with how this administration wants to get things done, and no accident that the two COCOM commanders directly overseeing military action in the Caribbean have been replaced.

There are many, many things to discuss about how the use of American hard power assets overseas has evolved since 9/11. Our undefined end states; our over-reliance on special operations capabilities as an easy button for strategic problem solving — which means the misuse of some of our most potent operators and capabilities on tasks where they are wasted, and the underdevelopment of more conventional assets to accomplish these tasks; our very conception of what war will look like in this modern era, and how our military is recruiting, training, and retaining the expertise we need to fight those wars — there is a lot we need to sharpen given the perilous state of the world and the critical role the United States has played in global security during the last century.

Until recently, we agreed on what the threats were and debated how best to prioritize them, address them, and balance those needs with other priorities, as any democratic nation does. Now we’re veering quite far away from that, denying assessed threats to fit political storytelling, at scale.

As retired Admiral James Stavridis — former SACEUR and SOUTHCOM Commander — recently wrote, the buildup in the Caribbean far surpasses what is needed for the alleged drug interdiction operations and points toward Maduro as the target. But, as retired Lt Gen Mark Hertling — former Commander of US Army Europe — wrote in this analysis, Venezuela is not a “small Latin American country” and the allotted manpower is significantly less than what would be needed. Tackling Venezuela’s complex human, geographical, and political terrain with insufficient resources, he warns, could look closer to Russia’s miscalculation in February 2022 than US success in Panama in 1989 (which conservative commentators have been referencing as a model).

Anyone familiar with Trump’s planning of a special operations invasion of North Korea during his first term — which has been widely referred to in memoirs from and books about his first presidency, plus piecemeal stories like this recent one about a failed SEAL team operation into North Korea — should have questions. Questions about how much planning has been done, questions about what the predicted casualty rate for “limited” operations in Venezuela would be, and questions about whether any of those assessments are impacting decision-making in this administration. Because while Jim Mattis would say no to something where more than half of soldiers sent on a wild mission wouldn’t return — is anyone sure that would be the case with someone who keeps talking about needing to win a ‘major theater war’ — Mr “Lethality” himself?

“One conflict stands out in stark contrast — the Gulf War,” Hegseth said in his TedTalk to the generals. “Why? Well, there’s a number of reasons, but it was a limited mission with overwhelming force and a clear end state.”

We don’t have overwhelming force present, unless it’s a massive bombing campaign. Do we think there an even a clear end state imagined that Hegseth can articulate without a cartoon turtle doing the heavy lifting? I’m not so sure given his overt slavering over tactical prowess only.

Without a clear end state in mind already, every day of this deployment weakens American power and makes the situation worse. Once you label Maduro a cartel boss and put his wanted poster up on the wall of the saloon, you have to go play sheriff. Otherwise no one is ever going to take your great big nuclear-powered aircraft carrier seriously again. Rocks rolling down a hill.

Narrative 4 — “The only free hemisphere”

Or, Marco Rubio seeks salvation among all the devils’ deals

Knowing procurement of hard power would be a breeze, from the oil and drugs and migrants and gangs, Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/National Archivist Marco Rubio saw a new way to press President Trump to care about the liberation of Venezuela — a thing which Senator Rubio had always supported. Rubio has been criticized for seeming to abandon many of his past ideological beliefs to find a position of power within MAGA — that gold-lacquered bamboo chair of discomfort when you are the one destroying American soft power, canceling democracy support programs across Latin America, canceling TPS for Venezuelans, defending the deportation of tens of thousands of people just like your own parents who came to America from Cuba not so very long ago.

Turning the Miller anti-immigrant narrative into his personal salvation is desperate and it is clever. No matter that it makes Nicolas Maduro the singular baddie directing all the dark forces against America in a largely fictional way. It pulls the right threads to make it an easy story to sell to a memetic president.

Maduro is directing these cartels trafficking people, criminals, and drugs into America. If he is removed, we can stop the drugs and the destabilization that causes migration, and the Venezuelan opposition — which the US recognizes as the rightful victor of the last election — can easily step in to control the country, and they can pay for the whole thing with oil. Think of all the oil we’ll be pumping with Maduro gone! It pulls the strings. But there’s also another layer.

The limp, dead-end isolationism of the JD Vance faction of the administration has failed to gain real traction is because it doesn’t tell enough of a story about what you need power for. You can only take over so many Kennedy Centers and Columbia Universities and CBS Newses before owning the libs loses its luster — especially when you are asking Americans to accept wild curbs to basic liberties in exchange for “security.”

You need the evolving story for control, to advance the consolidation of power into the presidency apace. Rubio’s plan to squeeze Maduro won out over Special Envoy Grenell’s plan to make mutually beneficial deals with him because Rubio made it into a better story. Somewhere deep inside, the voice of past Marco Rubio is still rattling around, apparently, believing people want freedom — and believing leaders want greatness, and will take the chance for greatness when it is in front of them.

Rubio wouldn’t be the first one to try to get Trump to bite on greatness and fail. But Rubio is trying to pursue a big story — a huge gamble to shift perceptions of Trump’s legacy and what MAGA is, and to secure his own MAGA future, if it works.

If. The tension this creates in MAGA is obvious, if you listen to the forever podcasts decrying “neocon saboteurs” trying to trick Trump into a new war. But so far Rubio is still in that rickety chair.

His essential counterpart in this the Venezuelan opposition — and in its current iteration, that is Machado.

In 2019, Rubio encouraged Trump to make a speech to the Venezuelan community in Florida. It included this line: “When Venezuela is free, and Cuba is free, and Nicaragua is free, this will become the first free hemisphere in all of human history.”

In October when Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Price, she said the following: “Once Maduro goes, the Cuban regime will follow, the Nicaraguan regime will follow, and for the first time in history, we will have the Americas free of communism and narco-dictatorships.”

I don’t believe the similarities are accidental. Machado, like Rubio, has become enormously skilled at mirroring MAGA narrative to make it seem they want the same things — so much so that I’m not actually sure where the lines are between what she believes, what she thinks she has to tell Trump to get him to remove Maduro, and what she will actually do if she gets a chance to power. Since being award the Peace Prize, she has seamlessly flattered Trump as Venezuela’s true possible savior. It’s hard to watch without grimacing, but it’s smart strategy given the overt psychology of the president.

Machado has said she will leave Venezuela — where she has stayed in hiding as many of her key deputies have fled abroad — to attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo on December 10. At that point, she becomes an international fugitive — unless maybe she can hitch a ride home with some friends? Of course, if you sneak out, you can sneak back in. And so can others.

Meanwhile Rubio mostly hides in plain site, echoing MAGA narrative points back, but trying to connect them to something that means anything in the defense of the values of the free world.

He has a clear, structured approach for this. Latin America has been a top priority for him as SecState. On the same early trip to Guyana where he threatened Venezuela not to try military incursions into the territorial waters where the Exxon oil fields are, Rubio visited other nations who signed on to a cooperation agreement with the US to be supportive of US operations in the Caribbean Sea. Those included Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Guyana, and Trinidad & Tobago, which “expressed their willingness to collaborate in joint actions against drug trafficking.” This got zero attention in US media, but was glowingly written about in the national outlets of the partner countries, for whom it is a big story. As described earlier, it is a big story, as it bolsters American engagement in the Americas and points it toward a common binding task.

No one wants to say “regime change” — so it’s Maduro is a criminal, and the necessity of removing him for American security.

This is the case Rubio made to the White House to start the movement towards potential operations against Venezuela. It attempts to bend the arc of MAGA back toward the defense of the free world. I wish him the absolute best of luck with this endeavor.

Only, he isn’t the last turtle in the stack. And Trump still has that thing about Russia…

Narrative 5 — “Homeland” realignment

Or, “Americas first” creates space for cooperation with Russia and China, rather than confrontation.

Just after the first boat strike, there was a leak from the Pentagon about the new draft National Defense Strategy. During the first Trump administration, this document focused on normal things, like the threat from China and Russia, and, in that version, that China should be prioritized over Russia. But this new draft was a distinct departure from the expectation of a continued “China hawk” approach, focusing instead on “the homeland and the Western Hemisphere.” This will also have consequences for the global force posture review — a review of where American military assets are based overseas. A recent Senate hearing reflected great frustration from lawmakers about the opaque process of the Pentagon drafters and whether or not their proposed revisions actually reflects the priorities of the president.

The draft National Defense Strategy has been privately described as “like something Dugin wrote” — a reference to Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, whose ideas about limiting the impact of American power and history are credited with informing Putin’s worldview. Dugin says a lot of things, with a lot of words — but the important point in this instance is achieving the withdrawal of the United States from Europe back to the Americas. Essentially, China gets Asia and Russia gets Europe, everyone can squabble equally for African resources, and the US will be tied down by conflicts in its own hemisphere. I think Dugin mostly imagined this meant inspiring Venezuela or another Russian regional ally to increase hybrid, disruptive actions against the United States — weaponized migration, whatever — leveraging the massive Russian intelligence presence in Mexico City and throughout Latin America. He’s probably getting a good laugh that we’re doing it to ourselves.

I’m not sure how Colby was convinced to sell the contraction of American power back to the Americas only as his big idea, abandoning commitments in Europe and Asia along the way. Maybe it’s just his attempt to eat the other spiders first. But it has deeply unnerved people who have seen what he’s drafting. And it’s not disconnected from the Venezuela show.

It seems he’s observing the rocks rolling down the hill, and harvesting some piece of momentum from each of them.

The obsessive, unnecessary focus on the security of “the homeland” from the first — more American troops needed in American cities and near American shores means less need to come up with excuses to abandon allies.

From the second, the acceptance that, properly structured, the three global great powers — China, Russia, and United States — can find opportunities for mutual profit and cooperation when they each agree to remain in their primary area of interest. When values are downgraded and interests supreme, there’s a piece of the oil deal for everyone, for example, and these deals can keep things in balance. (This is also the view being advanced by the real estate tycoons tasked with negotiating with Russia.)

From the third, the acceptance that rules of the post-WWII free world are dead, and the that our concept of power must be closer to our great power adversaries than our free world allies.

From the fourth, that the actions of those who disagree with you can nonetheless be captured into your efforts to subvert their beliefs — that the ruse of Venezuelan liberation can be the capstone on the decline of American power.

So overall, here in the fifth, that in “Americas first” there is the space for and the necessity of cooperation with our adversaries to complete the transformation of America into this frankensteined creature.

The rocks are all rolling down the hill. But only the slowest one sees where the others are going.

* * * * *

Conclusion — “Americas first” is about creating space to cooperate with our adversaries

Were Maduro to disappear from Venezuela tomorrow — either facing justice as delivered by his own people, falling to a US “decapitation” strike, or fleeing to a middling dacha somewhere outside Moscow where his new neighbors Viktor Yanukovych and Bashar al Assad would invite him to sauna — few would shed tears. Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s revolutionary predecessor, had charisma, ideology, and oil boom times. Maduro has none of these. In the times of cheap oil, Maduro and his family discovered their real skillset: honing the machinery of corruption for control.

Maduro has ruined Venezuelan prosperity. He has offered just about every global bad actor a foothold in Venezuela. He has jailed political opponents, driven them into exile, cracked down on protest and free speech. He has co-opted the judiciary, rigged election after election, rewritten the constitution. Since the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999, more than 20 percent of the country has emigrated, a process that greatly accelerated after Maduro took power in 2013. (Some 10 percent of Venezuelan emigres have ended up in the United States, many legally under temporary protected status, or TPS, which the Trump administration allowed to lapse for Venezuelans on November 7.)

There are few who do not directly make money from Maduro who will miss him when he’s gone. But it’s a long, long way from despising Maduro to inviting an American invasion of Venezuela.

Many of the Americans cheering this onward — and the Venezuelan opposition hoping to find his empty chair — speak about the military buildup as an aspirational pressure campaign that will force Maduro from power. US officials are publicly floating the idea that he could live a nice life on a beach in Turkiye somewhere — at least as long as Erdogan maintains his grip on power — despite the fact that this flies in the face of the idea he is a dangerous cartel boss instead of a corrupt ruler.

Maduro has many sins. Drug trafficking, or profiteering therefrom, is not above the middle of the list. I don’t wish him one extra day in power in Venezuela. But how that removal is achieved matters greatly for the future of Venezuela —and now it matters greatly for the future of the United States.

Lately there are too many think tank-types leaning into the “of course Maduro should be removed” discourse without more than a dismissive “Special Forces can handle it” line about the military realities of his “removal.”

No champion of freedom wants to miss the boat on getting rid of an anti-democratic baddie (maybe boats aren’t the right analogy to use here). But the five box flow chart being presented as a fool proof victory plan — military buildup+max pressure —> targeted strikes on critical security infrastructure+Maduro —> some sort of opposition-led force of hundreds of thousands arises to take control+clean out rest of baddies —> opposition government takes power with no resistance —> oil revenues fund the entire recovery+return of Venezuelans+cut to US of A — is missing a lot of steps, potential actors, and contingencies.

A variety of actors, foreign and domestic, have seen opportunity in the noise and have sought to influence the echoing — and found an American administration rife with targets for influence since everyone around the president is constantly jockeying for position and the opportunity to show they are the most bestest at telling this story of dire American struggle. Some of these foreign actors — for example, the Venezuelan opposition — are doing this with good intentions. Others — for example, the Russians — just hope they can keep subverting American will into de facto eroding American power.

Anything can happen in the next episode of the show. But for now, there’s an alliance framework being built out that includes Trump’s captive cryptobros — Argentina’s Milei, the El Salvador guy with his black site prison, Bolsonaro if he manages to escape from prison — and a wider array of smaller Latin nations eager for broader US engagement. There’s narrative architecture in place to justify the operation against the “bad guys.” There are plenty of reasons Trump can reflexively reference — oil, drugs, crime, migration. And it all fits into the strategic document refocusing on the western hemisphere, in ways beneficial to both China and Russia as America redefines itself as a peer instead of a competitor.

The part that sits least well with me is there are a dozen ways to approach this, and the one they are loudest about is the war on drugs. And that seems to be because it is the war on drugs that connects the military mission on the seas to the need to deploy US forces inside the United States.

All of it is premised on distortions, lies, narrative. The war is not on Venezuela — the war is on Americans.

The Russians couldn’t have written it better. It’s a spy novel I could do without.

— MM

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The justification for the military action in the Caribbean is based on a false narrative that is contradicted by our own intelligence. The threat we’re allegedly confronting isn’t any more real. The outcome we are being told to anticipate can’t be any more truthful. If this conflict is pursued, we will be left a weaker nation with closer relationships with our chief adversaries, having made choices that move us further from the nation that we think we are.

Venezuela is not about drugs. Venezuela is not about oil. Venezuela is not about democracy.

Venezuela is about redefining American power.

This Great Power long-read, which looks at the parallel lines of effort pushing us toward conflict with Venezuela, is split into 7 sections, posted as 2 parts [or subscribers can listen to the audio version here — https://www.greatpower.us/p/the-war-on-venezuela-is-a-war-for-1cc ]:

Part 1:

Introduction — All the president’s spiders

Narrative 1 — “Narco-terrorism”

Narrative 2 — Oil boom in Essequibo

Part 2:

Narrative 3 — Winning a “theater war”

Narrative 4 — “The only free hemisphere”

Narrative 5 — “Homeland” realignment

Conclusion — “Americas first” creates space for cooperation with Russia and China

Subscribe now

PART ONE

Introduction — All the president’s spiders

Of all the problems I imagined having to solve in my adult life, one of them was not what to do when a regular household spider takes up residence in your nephew’s tarantula tank — a beloved pet which was left in your care after a move overseas. You weren’t exactly thrilled, but there’s a mutual nonaggression pact: you throw in some crickets and change the heat bulbs but otherwise leave it alone, and it eats the crickets and but otherwise wants nothing to do with you, either. Sometimes as it flings itself from the roof of the terrarium onto its prey, you appreciate that it is utterly terrifying and mesmerizing in form and substance — and that it is really quite mad that you have agreed to keep it captive in your house.

And now there’s this new conundrum: another spider is breeding in its tank. Maybe the new spider was too small for it to pay attention to, or maybe it even enjoys its company a little and thinks the tiny baby spiders are fun to watch. They fight over the tarantula’s scraps — and when there aren’t enough scraps to placate them all, they attack and suck each other dry. The baby spiders can still escape out of the screen at the top of the tank, but find that outside of the protection of the tarantula is great peril. Once the benevolence of the tarantula is enjoyed for too long — there is no escape. There is only life under the shadow of the tarantula, hoping to be big enough to eat other spiders but not so big that the tarantula decides it wants to eat them. The whole ecosystem can only survive because of the tarantula, with which you are trying to avoid a holistic confrontation but have nonetheless been feeding and making more terrifying.

Every time I make the daily cricket sacrifice to the spider, all I can see is the living allegory of the current US administration. The nation maintains a captive tarantula which has grown bored of containment and is seeking new entertainment. Gone are the men of the first administration who sought to constrain the president’s worst impulses and fend off the most damaging missives of favor-seekers. They’ve been replaced by men and women who share no ideology but collectively believe the president is the only horse they can ride to accomplish their ambitions, achieve their own personal salvation, or enable their own self-dealing.

The result is the proverbial “jar of spiders” dynamic amongst the cabinet and senior advisers — they know their only hope of survival is to outcompete (and often eat) the other spiders —but it’s layered under the Stalinesque patina of this particular president, who encourages the mortal competition between loyalists because it all makes for better ratings for the show.

From week to week, the contestants are up, down, in, out, clinging with bloodied fingernails, sitting on a gold-painted fake bamboo chair next to the president in his Florida resort property — a chair upon which no one sits with any particular comfort.

Understanding this unsettled, rickety, non-collaborative environment is key to grasping how it is that a significant percentage of America’s naval power has converged in the Caribbean toward the big red arrow pointing at Venezuela.

There are so many different interests seeking to influence the president on any given day — foreign, domestic, allied, adversarial, overt, covert, corporate, techbro, religious ideological, creepy ideological, a desperate few patriotic ideological — that they inevitably collide — but sometimes converge, generating unexpected momentum.

Few places has this dynamic been more observable than in the mobilization underway in Latin America. The separate interests seeking to escalate the conflict each have different reasons for doing so and present different justifications to spur the president forward. They aren’t collaborative, necessarily, but they share chaotic directionality — rocks rolling down a hill. The motion generates a sense of urgency, competition, inevitability. It may now be impossible to escape.

But that doesn’t make it real — any of it.

President Trump has pushed the nation toward a fulcrum — a point where the entire definition of American power could unhinge, and after which there is greatly increased risk for the United States of America.

The possibility takes shape from the inexorability generated from the convergence of domestic narrative with events in the Caribbean. But it is sparked entirely by this president’s vicious, lascivious manner of wielding power.

The cost for Americans will be high.

Events in the Caribbean deserve far greater attention

Four things are important about the departure point at which we have arrived.

First, the operations targeting “drug boats” are explicitly about creating a narrative that expands the permission structure for the use of the US military domestically. (There will be additional detail on this below, in the Narrative 1.) In the back and forth between the administration and lawmakers about the legal justification of these strikes, the truth of their impact is clear: they erode both the rules of war that guide and constrain our use of American hard power overseas and the rule of law that should govern how law enforcement can use force at home. This blurring of justification weakens both, exposes America to great and unnecessary risk, and will have significant impact on the lives of everyday Americans and American men and women in uniform.

Second, the movement of US hard power assets to the Caribbean is likely a first step toward the new national defense strategy (and accompanying global force posture review) being crafted by the Trump administration. In its current form, that strategy formalizes the domestic/foreign security fusion by prioritizing “defending the homeland” from largely narrativized threats above defending the nation from actual adversarial global threats from Russia and China. Around 11 percent of US naval assets have been moved to the Caribbean, with some 15,000 troops aboard, plus accompanying air support and shifted priorities for special operations and intelligence assets that have been retasked to prepare options for Venezuela. America’s top military commanders have been leapfrogging across the region. Never has Trinidad and Tobago been such an important official destination (though of course, no ambassador has been nominated for this post, so there is only a chargé).

Some of these deployments may be temporary or rotational — the whole point of Marine Expeditionary Units and aircraft carrier groups is, after all, that they can move to where they are needed. But a mothballed airbase in Puerto Rico has been reopened, US planes have been spotted at regional airfields, and a panoply of new defense cooperation arrangements have been discussed or agreed to with nations around the Caribbean basin (with the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Panama, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and also with Ecuador, though the parliament voted down a proposal for a US military base, which would require a constitutional change; Grenada is still considering a US request for a radar installation). While the terms of the security discussions are not always public — and many relate to expanding intelligence and surveillance capabilities — they are mirrored by the White House’s aggressive announcement of frameworks for trade deals with these nations (removing tariffs and other incentives are the reward for agreeing to support US security operations in the region — and to accept deportees).

FOIAed documents have shown at least some sustainment preparations for expanded US military presence in the region through the end of the administration (2028). The administration has pushed ahead with the “Americas first” play despite knowing it undermines confidence with our traditional treaty allies and is costing us valuable intelligence sharing partnerships (reports cite the UK, the Netherlands, and France as having suspended intelligence sharing relating to operations in the Americas, as well as Colombia). The choice to pursue viral video attacks that many assess as akin to extrajudicial killings — layered with strange, grotesquely transactional behavior toward Russia — is slowly eroding the fabric of trust that necessarily underlays our most essential partnerships. Which it becomes clear is an end intentionally pursued by the means, and not an accident.

Third, a war on Venezuela will define a new vision for American power — maybe by happenstance, but a new vision nonetheless. Right now this vision is being presented by the administration as a display of newfound “toughness” in a time when “hard decisions” are needed. In reality, it is solidifying the diminishment — via the contraction — of American power. Rather than countering the global adversaries we know we face, the pursuit of the “Americas first” policy creates space for cooperation with those adversaries (this will be discussed in Narrative 5). It also elevates their methods and strategic perspectives above those we have defended, as the free world, since the end of WWII. Every time Trump does this, it’s a possibility no one was willing to consider. We should see this with clarity, for once.

Fourth, it is also no accident that we find ourselves speeding toward a culminating point in this definitional war, with pressure to move on the “Ukraine peace deal” and American action against Venezuela mounting in parallel. Talks with allies are deprioritized as attentions are divided. Stepping away leaves too much space for the other spiders to pounce.

It is, disconcertingly, Mr. Trump himself who seems the least convinced about escalating from drug-boat bullying to direct action in Venezuela. As per usual, he is enjoying how the threat of war works in the show — but the story arc of the actual war may require a commitment of too many episodes. “If we can save lives, if we can do things the easy way, that’s fine,” Mr. Trump said this week, in indicating he may be open to speaking to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “And if we have to do it the hard way, that’s fine too.” Of course, it turned out Trump had already spoken to Maduro. By the end of the week he “declared Venezuelan airspace closed” — a thing he cannot do unless he means via military means, but the aircraft carrier had already arrived in-theater and was just sitting, and some sense of movement was needed to advance the plot. Twenty-four hours later, he said it didn’t mean anything. Apparently he had given Maduro an ultimatum to leave the country, and the window had expired.

Trump’s speeches and actions are disjointed and hardly rousing for the cause — any cause, even if you think the cause is playing hard to get on a “deal.”

But all around Trump are people who have decided that a crisis with Venezuela is the way to advance their cause. The cadence of crisis is beating, beating, beating — and both our adversaries and all the spiders in the jar are a part of the thrum. Everyone is so eager to get something they want out of the president — and believe this is more possible now than any time in history — that the convergence of purpose is whipping us ahead. But toward what, exactly, few of the drummers are overly concerned.

The array of justifications crafted for intervention in Venezuela indicates a much bigger conflict than anyone is imagining

The media discussion has focused primarily around questions of under what legal authority the military strikes against alleged “drug-boats” are being conducted. This discussion is incredibly important. But there is a far more complex series of internal discussions about potential justifications for removing Maduro from office or conducting military strikes within Venezuela.

These fall into several categories:

Narrative 1 — “Narco-terrorism”

Narrative 2 — Oil boom in Essequibo

Narrative 3 — Winning a “theater war”

Narrative 4 — “The only free hemisphere”

Narrative 5 — “Homeland” realignment

Each of these is discussed below.

Narrative 1 — “Narco-terrorism.”

Or, how the Maduro regime’s alleged support for cartels/drugs/immigrants/crime are direct threats to the lives of Americans.

Stephen Miller, whose own family immigrated to America in the last century, has earned his bones in the MAGA universe as a cartoonishly villainous pusher of anti-immigrant sentiment. Since 2015, right-world relied on stories of migrant workers and “immigrant criminals” to gin-up hatred of “the other” as a reason for America’s problems and declining sense of opportunity. During the first Trump administration, certain individual stories took on a totemic value within the broader narrative, and it all barreled ahead under the “build the wall” chant. Eventually, some of Trump’s closest advisors pleaded guilty of defrauding investors in a private wall-building scheme.

But the wall was a dead idea. The 2024 election cycle needed a juiced version of this story to escalate the sense of chaos — chaos that only a mega-disruptor like Trump could solve. Thus began “the invasion.” This narrative was the elevation of the threat of semi-controlled migration into an “invasion,” and then immigration was linked to crime, then gang violence, then drug trafficking. Eventually it became a story of immigrant gangs flooding America with drugs and dangerous migrants, killing and poisoning Americans. GOP electors happily waved “mass deportations now” signs at the convention. During the transition and early days of the new administration, the “invasion” became the argument for the use of military deployments domestically.

But if it’s an “invasion,” you need a foreign baddie. And that became Venezuela — because, basically, absolutely nobody likes Maduro (but more on this in the conclusion of the piece).

So, there was a narrative constructed to win an election and then drive internal action — to fuel mass deportations via wildly expansive enforcement activities operating with little oversight and $170 billion budget. But to sustain that narrative — and the swelling powers and slush funds — external action became required. The administration’s own intelligence assessment found little connection between Maduro, drug trafficking, and the cartels he supposedly directs — so they asked for it to be rewritten in a way that would better align with their narrative.

Now the domestic and foreign false narratives echo back and forth in a reflexive call-and-response — we are rounding up the “dangerous migrants” “bringing drugs” into America, and we are killing alleged drug-traffickers on the seas. The cacophony overwrites the fact that this narrative was only ever loosely connected to reality, at best.

This series of falsehoods and distorted truths is the entire public basis for military action in the Western hemisphere. The designation of drug-runners as “narco-terrorists” and of some of the gangs as foreign terrorist organizations is meant to convey some higher organizational purpose that allows them to be legitimate military targets. Military assets have convened to conduct flashy strikes — a vastly disproportional use of American hard power aimed at the lowest point of intervention in a trafficking hierarchy, traditionally dealt with as a law enforcement activity. Few outside hard MAGA loyalists seem convinced by the narco-terrorism label, nor by the inability of the administration to produce more information on who has been targeted in the boat strikes and why.

But the immigration/crime/gangs/drugs storytelling and the loose legal reasoning it provides have been a primary driver toward military action and underlay the Justice Department’s opinion that the boat strikes — but likely not strikes inside Venezuela — are lawful orders.

For Miller and his ilk, the point of the Caribbean operation is that it also escalates the sense of crisis that the internal security operations are meant to address — providing even greater cover for the expanded brutality and disregard for civil rights of immigrants and American citizens alike, and for the presence of the American military in American cities.

Narrative 2 — Oil boom in Essequibo

Overall, the idea that whatever is going on around Venezuela is “all about oil” is overdone. But, oil is kind of around all of it. It’s the grease on the gears, if you will.

One of the things rattling around the Pentagon is some kind of memo that connects potential military action against Maduro and Venezuela to an analysis of Essequibo, a territory which comprises roughly two-thirds of Guyana but which Venezuela has historically claimed based on some colonial shadowpuppetry or other. Following the discovery of large offshore oil reserves and other strategic resources in Essequibo, Maduro has been more actively engaged in interference in the territory, making claims on the land, holding elections for new leadership, sending Venezuelan ships to pester the oil fields.

It’s the last part, of course, that is the real problem, and the only reason you would hear the word “Essequibo” in the Pentagon. Because the biggest shareholder in the Essequibo oil project is ExxonMobil.

A quick step back here to flag one of those connections between negotiations over Ukraine and whatever is happening in the Caribbean — ExxonMobil. Exxon had been aggressively lobbying the White House/backchanneling with the Russians about re-establishing operations in Russia. This was discussed during the Alaska summit. Putin issued a decree allowing Exxon to re-enter the Russian market the same day. In September, Exxon signed an agreement with Rosneft to recoup almost $5 billion in losses that occurred after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when US companies had to exit the Russian market. It’s a nice sweetener for helping get improved US-Russian relations back on the menu.

It’s not that fanciful to believe that if Exxon is pushing the administration on Russia, it also has access on issues like Latin America where they have an easy story to tell to an oil-driven president. We’ve already seen signs of this connection. As President Trump stepped up sanctions on Russian oil and increased pressured on those still buying Russian oil and gas, he drew some praise for this tougher stance on Russia, even though it was just as likely this was about his overall obsession with US oil and gas production as anything to do with Moscow. In fact, when Trump pressured India to stop buying Russian oil, India replaced some of their Russian sources with oil from Guyana — a huge deal for Guyana and for Exxon. In August, Trinidad and Tobago also signed a deal with Exxon to develop deepwater oil assets, a deal which Exxon had been pursuing since before Trump’s re-election.

There’s one additional sign of Exxon’s clout in events around Venezuela. Chevron, another American oil major, has long been a primary investor in Venezuelan oil via a partnership with PDVSA (the Venezuelan oil company). Chevron has a complex relationship with the Venezuelan government, and in many respects has been a key lifeline of hard currency payments into the Venezuelan economy under Maduro. Chevron is only allowed to operate amidst all the sanctions with a special US license. The Trump administration suspended the license in February as part of its renewed pressure on Maduro.

But Chevron had been planning for its future. In July, it won a long legal battle with Exxon resulting from Chevron’s acquisition of Hess. Hess had been a stakeholder in the Guyana oil project, and Exxon and the other partner had unsuccessfully argued that they should have the right to acquire the Hess stake in the Stabroek block. With Chevron as Exxon’s new partner in Guyana, their license to operate in Venezuela was suddenly restored. (Under the revised license, hard currency payments are not allowed, so Chevron hands oil over to Venezuela, which it mostly sells to China, and now Venezuela survives on crypto exchange. Its crypto partner is Binance — the founder of which Trump recently pardoned in another self-dealing scheme. But those are rabbitholes for other days.)

So there are two American oil companies directly and indirectly connected in some way to Venezuela’s ability to survive as a petrostate. That already looks bad — especially with all that oil getting sold to China at discounted, desperation rates — but it’s standard fare for extractive industries.

But it is also necessary to factor in that a major partner of PDVSA is a renamed subsidiary of Rosneft — in fact they just signed a new 15 year agreement as one aspect of an expanded Russia-Venezuela strategic partnership agreement. PDVSA fundamentally relies on Chevron’s technological and engineering inputs to keep the Venezuelan oil industry alive, and Russia and China both benefit from this. Oh, and that third partner in the Stabroek block in Guyana, that was fighting with Exxon against the Chevron acquisition? That’s CNOOC, a Chinese state-owned oil company. Several Senators have asked Exxon to clarify its tax payments in relation to the Stabroek block, concerned that US taxpayer money may be de facto subsidizing the operations of a Chinese state oil company.

So you’ll pardon me when every time someone claims whatever is happening in the Caribbean is “countering Russian and Chinese influence” — well, it’s a nice talking point that can get right down off its high horse and wade around in the murky oil dealings with the rest of us. (But we’ll revisit this in Narrative 5.)

Back to Essequibo, the disputed territory in Guyana. The paper circulating describes Essequibo as run by a Venezuelan paramilitary group being run by the Venezuelan government, and it suggests the designation of this group as a terrorist organization. This would seem to be Cartel de los Soles, which the State Department recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Cartel de los Soles isn’t really a cartel, it’s a name applied to an alleged network of corrupt and criminal dealings within the Venezuelan government itself. The State Department says Cartel de los Soles operates as an extension of the Venezuelan regime, with support from military and other officials. The US asserts this cartel supplies drugs to the US market and is thus a direct threat to its national security.

The State Department language on Cartel de los Soles is pretty loose: “The Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary. Neither Maduro nor his cronies represent Venezuela’s legitimate government. Cartel de los Soles by and with other designated FTOs including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel are responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.”

Leaning on the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and drawing connections with red strings on a tack board is a slapdash way of declaring a foreign government to be a legitimate target of potential military operations that are supposedly targeting “narco-terrorists.” The Treasury designation links Cartel de los Soles to both Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel — and by claiming Maduro is directing both groups against the United States, the “narco-terrorist” thing is supposed to take on a deeper meaning.

But the red strings represent shaky intelligence, at best. A declassified US National Intelligence Council report from April, which examined the Venezuelan government’s ties to Tren de Aragua, found that some regime members “may cooperate with TDA for financial gain,” but there is no evidence of systematic cooperation. “The Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States… [The NIC] has not observed the regime directing TDA, including to push migrants to the United States, which probably would require extensive coordination and funding between regime entities and TDA leaders… highly unlikely that TDA coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.” Mexico has also said there is no investigation of links between Maduro and the Sinaloa cartel.

A Trump appointee pressed for the assessment to be rewritten. DNI Gabbard fired intelligence officials responsible of the report in an effort to get the eye of Sauron off of her. In September, she recalled the report. By then, people were less interested in the migration/deportation explanations than the justification for the strikes in the Caribbean.

But elements of the Miller narrative had been told for so long, it would have been easy enough for Exxon to lean in. Exxon has been engaged in a years-long arbitration case against Venezuela over seized assets, which has not gone the way Exxon hoped. On March 1, a Venezuelan ship approached the Exxon/CNOOC fields off Guyana and made threats. In May, Venezuela held elections for new representation of Essequibo (in 2023, Maduro held a referendum to advance Venezuela’s historic claim over the territory, but it is not controlled by Venezuela). Venezuela has accused Exxon of conspiring to get Chevron operations in Venezuela suspended, and of financing Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado as part of an effort to get the US to remove Maduro from office. Machado supported the suspension of Chevron’s license. In an interview for Donald Trump Jr’s podcast back in February, she said US oil companies will make a lot of money when she privatizes Venezuelan oil production.

Leaving aside any conspiracies — Maduro’s actions relating to Essequibo create an opening for additional justifications to act against him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been tracking developments in Essequibo, warning Venezuela to back off during his visit to Guyana in March. If Cartel de los Soles allegedly “controls” Essequibo and is in turn controlled by the Maduro regime, fighting the “narco-terrorists” tumbles into liberation narratives beyond Venezuela itself.

Essentially, you can say a territory “illegally occupied by Venezuelan proxies” must be restored to Guyana to make America safe. If you wanted to, anyway.

[… continued in part 2]

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On November 20, President Trump’s Secretary of the Army presented a draft 28-point plan to President Zelenskyy. Nominally, it is a framework for ending the active conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

There is no other way to understand the 28-point plan than as a standard Russian exercise in reflexive control, the outcome of which is the elevation of Russia’s status and the diminishment of American credibility and power — all at basically no cost to the Russians. When you negotiate with the Russians without any deep understanding of the history of the security services and their strategic objectives, or without constantly reorienting yourself against that understanding — you become invested in the perpetuation of the long con of Russian great power. Essentially, you listen to the Russians too long and with any belief in their earnestness, and their drivel starts to eat your brain. In this agreement, for example, Russia is treated as the victor of a war it is not winning.

This is the longest of Russian cons — which I was reminded of recently when reading some accounts about the various westerners who gave Russia nuclear secrets. Many of these did so for purely ideological reasons, offering endless explanations that they gave the Soviets the knowledge to build atomic weapons for “parity” — so everyone would be armed with the same weapons, which would guarantee there wouldn’t be a “third world war.” It wasn’t “fair” for the knowledge not to be shared with our former wartime partner, so the story went.

It was a stark reminder that Russia’s greatest power has always been crafting seductive illusions. The illusion of the necessity of their parity helped them to become equal in a way that would ensure all their weakness would be overlooked. The idea of the necessity of working with Moscow zombies on and on.

Central to understanding our failure to deter Russian aggression in any real measure since the death of Soviet Union must be acceptance that the United States has gotten Russia wrong because it still evaluates Russia from within the mirage of smoke and mirrors that Moscow has so elegantly crafted for us. This funhouse tells us that Russia is an economic and military power that can be a partner in maintaining peace in a “difficult region” — when in truth the “difficulty” is Russia and its objective has always been confrontation, expansion, and domination.

But Trump’s negotiators are new to this party and believe the smoke and mirrors are revelation. The “new” Trump-presented plan is a lightly warmed-over version of previous Russian proposals that have been presented via diplomatic channels, business intermediaries, and other shadier interlocutors, including the disgraced former mayor of New York City. Essentially, this plan is: Ukraine gives up more territory than Russian currently occupies, Ukraine agrees to remain a “buffer state” vulnerable to Moscow’s manipulations, and Russia is never held to account for any of the 194,000+ (and counting) war crimes committed during its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.

There’s enough promise of direct financial incentive for America sprinkled across this version to ensure little else would have been presented to President Trump to ensure his stamp of approval. In fact, it’s clear the origination point of the document was that the US and Russia should work together to reclaim Russian frozen assets and divide them. This leads to the second key point — that what Russia wants in return for its money is full amnesty.

The assumptions underpinning this framework are highly flawed. The first assumption is the idea that “Russia is winning/will inevitably win” in Ukraine — which is a false premise. (You can read a range of assessments on Russia’s lack of theory of victory in Ukraine here, here, and here.) The second assumption is that Russia has any right to reclaim its frozen assets. Which it only can if we all decide that war crimes don’t matter.

All this serves as a reminder that the current Russian theory of “victory” is getting the United States to end its support for Ukraine or force Ukraine into a crappy deal that will rip Ukraine apart, politically. Because what we always forget is that Russia’s war against Ukraine has always been equally against us — the west, us; NATO, us; America, us. With either option, the US looks weak and creates division with its allies. Win win win for Russia.

Further evidence that getting the US to accept these ideas and present them as their own was an exercise in reflexive control is that as soon as the details were leaked to the press — which Witkoff tweeted was done by the Russians themselves — the Kremlin basically “new phone who dis”-ed the thing, saying they had not seen the final document.

So now the plan, “agreed” to by the White House and the Kremlin, has only been agreed to by the White House, which will be left defending its premise as the Kremlin inevitably asks for more favorable terms — because absolutely everything in their physical action shows them expanding their war in Ukraine and against the West, not “seeking peace.”

But let us again examine how we are told we must give Russia an atomic weapon to “ensure peace.” Below, the underlying meaning of the individual points of the 28-point plan are evaluated, as well as the additional text on Ukrainian security guarantees. (Each point is presented as leaked below in bold text; analysis is in italic text).

* * * * *

Draft 28-point plan “for peace in Ukraine”

1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.

Sovereignty — but not territorial integrity, which this document makes clear is over. Ukraine will continue to exist and have the power to govern itself — provided it accepts the many qualifications and limitations on its self-definition as defined in the remainder of this document.

2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.

First, absent here is reference to the United States, which no doubt Witkoff was convinced was wise — leaving European problems to the Europeans — but which would de facto mean Russian aggression against the United States is just fine. It also de facto defines Ukraine as outside Europe.

Second, non-aggression pacts with Russia aren’t worth the paper they are written on.

Third, “will be concluded” leaves a lot to be desired — would this include an end to Russia’s hybrid aggression?

Fourth, “all ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled” — between Russia and Europe? What’s Europe, in this case? Are we talking the de facto recognition of Russian annexation of territories in Moldova and Georgia as well as Ukraine? What about the small border disputes in the Baltics and with Finland? What about ongoing prosecutions relating to espionage, sabotage, assassinations, and interference — are those “settled” too? This is a sweeping statement that not only lets Russia off the hook for just about everything (more on that below), but it forces the US to do an incredible amount of Russian heavy-lifting on the Kremlin’s behalf — against its treaty allies.

3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further.

“Expected” is also doing some heavy-lifting here, enabling a thoroughly wishy-washy construction of non-guarantee. What about non-neighboring countries? “NATO will not expand further” embraces the Russian propaganda that NATO expansion is the cause of Russian aggression, rather than the choice of sovereign nations seeking to contribute to and benefit from a security alliance.

4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.

This constructs again mirrors the Russian propaganda narrative that conflict between Russia and NATO undermines global security and “economic cooperation.” It also places the United States outside of NATO, and makes the United States an equal arbiter between an adversary and our own alliance, as if they are somehow comparable as non-American things in the eyes of this administration. “Cooperation and future economic development” — it’s almost amazing we’ve made it to point 4 without the money being waved around, as we know it is the topic Putin continually raises to capture the attention of President Trump. Of course, what’s super odd here is including this in a “dialogue between Russia and NATO” — as NATO is not an economic alliance.

5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.

While there is a bit more on this in the additional text on security guarantees (discussed below) — the passive voice here is notable. Receive from who? Guarantees of what? Better than the last time, I hope, since the Budapest Memorandum wasn’t such a hot deal?

6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel.

Current estimates on the size of Ukraine’s army are obviously considerably higher as a wartime structure, if not always transparent or exact. But this would be a reduction by at least 25 percent of the current force. An “end” to the war with appropriate security guarantees would mean a reduction in mobilization, of course — but it should be up to Ukraine and not Moscow or Washington to determine the pace of demobilization and the right size of the force to defend Ukraine — and contribute to security operations in Europe and beyond. Before Russia invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Ukraine was a significant contributor to global security and peacekeeping missions, and in Ukraine — as in the United States — the choice of a military career has long been an important pathway for education and advancement. These are complex questions for Ukraine that relate to security, economy, employment, social attainment, and more. A decision made over their heads treats them as the defeated party in a war — or are we also defining force limits for Moscow? Yeah, didn’t think so. Maybe Europe?

7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.

Both aspects here accomplish a core deliverable for Moscow while running roughshod over Ukrainian sovereignty and NATO principles and policies. If it’s already been agreed in the above article that “NATO will not expand,” it is absolutely unnecessary for NATO to change its statutes to explicitly exclude only Ukraine and no other nation. The point is to make the US force NATO to eat sh*t on this, chairing unpleasant internal councils where America continually dons its bad-guy hat, hammers a wedge through the transatlantic alliance, and inflames divisions between frontline states and other parts of NATO. Ukraine must “enshrine in its constitution” — so now we’re telling the sovereign Ukrainian parliament what to do, too? Ukrainians have led three revolutions to ensure their pathway into Europe and NATO — and Russia knows this is a poison pill for any Ukrainian government or parliament.

8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.

In point 8, we have the US back in “NATO” to agree not to station troops in Ukraine. “Station” can mean a lot of things. Are we talking permanent forces or rotational forces too? Does this preclude training detachments, which prior to 2022, have long been rotated through Ukraine? SOF to SOF cooperation and exchanges? Also, “NATO agrees” — does this writing imagine this also prohibits bilateral arrangements? This is important because many European NATO nations — including previously at the urging of the United States, which was berating Europe to fix its own problems — have been separately discussing how troops from some European nations might be sent to Ukraine as a component of security guarantees that would have a higher deterrent effect on Moscow. This seems to say that is not happening — and I imagine the Brits and Europeans have thoughts about Washington and Moscow telling them where they are allows to deploy their forces.

9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.

To state the obvious — Poland has dozens of fighter jets, many more on the way, and is European. Hence, there are already European fighter jets in Poland, always. It would be up to a Poland to determine if other allied forces can be stationed in Poland. Which is probably a good idea since this whole agreement elevates Poland’s frontline pressures — as no one trusts a non-aggression pact with Moscow, etc. “European” here and not “NATO” is again deliberate and interesting — in no small part because the US has a significant military presence based in Poland and currently leads the NATO eFP (enhanced forward presence) in Poland, but does not want to be included in this duty roster. Many questions.

10. The U.S. guarantee:

• The U.S. will receive compensation for the guarantee;

• If Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee;

• If Russia invades Ukraine, in addition to a decisive coordinated military response, all global sanctions will be reinstated, recognition of the new territory and all other benefits of this deal will be revoked;

• If Ukraine launches a missile at Moscow or St. Petersburg without cause, the security guarantee will be deemed invalid.

Just the order of operations here is depressing and base. It defaults to: the US does nothing unless you pay up; Ukraine is a more likely rogue actor than Russia; Russia will behave because we gave it all the stuff it wants anyway — right?; back to Ukraine being the likely bad guy again — but also, what’s the “with cause” scenario in which Ukraine is launching a missile at a major Russian city despite a non-aggression pact being in place? Can they keep bombing other places though? Are drones ok but not missiles? Are we imagining then that the air war between the two nations continues, so the “invasion” aka illegal war of aggression by Moscow is technically “over,” but everyone is still bombing everyone? The ideas and language here are equally sloppy and imprecise, creating wide openings for ongoing hostilities instead of precise ways in which the peace will be enforced.

11. Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the European market while this issue is being considered.

Again, it’s for Europe to decide this — which it has already done by granting Ukraine candidate status for accession and opening accession negations with Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began. This is a settled issue between Brussels and Kyiv, not Washington and Moscow — and neither of the latter have much right to dictate trade preferences between European nations, either. But there is nothing to be “considered” — the direction is agreed and Ukraine is working to meet the terms of those accession negotiations. It’s a carrot Ukraine has already eaten.

12. A powerful global package of measures to rebuild Ukraine, including but not limited to:

• The creation of a Ukraine Development Fund to invest in fast-growing industries, including technology, data centers, and artificial intelligence.

• The United States will cooperate with Ukraine to jointly rebuild, develop, modernize, and operate Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, including pipelines and storage facilities.

• Joint efforts to rehabilitate war-affected areas for the restoration, reconstruction and modernization of cities and residential areas.

• Infrastructure development.

• Extraction of minerals and natural resources.

• The World Bank will develop a special financing package to accelerate these efforts.

The squishy language here is meant to seem appealing to Trump without providing anything specific — despite being the most important aspect of any post-war scenario in Ukraine. The reconstruction of Ukraine, especially if — as discussed elsewhere in this document — Russia is not held to account for its illegal war of aggression and pays no compensation to Ukrainians or their nation, is a vast project. Ukraine is massive and populous, and its economy and infrastructure must support the return of Ukrainians from abroad and from the frontlines to a safe nation where they have good prospects. There is already a register of damage established for Ukrainians to submit compensation claims — and this process must be carried forward. But this shoddy listing views Ukrainian reconstruction as an afterthought for someone else to figure out, other than staking out where the US imagines it will have direct financial interests. Additionally, the vague World Bank reference is to avoid committing the seized Russian assets fully to Ukrainian reconstruction — see below for more on this.

13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:

• The lifting of sanctions will be discussed and agreed upon in stages and on a case-by-case basis.

• The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.

• Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.

I mean sure, lift the sanctions in phases if Russia ever makes good on its promises, and given the Exxon worm in Trump’s ear, we know American petroleum companies will rush back into Russia, eager to have their assets taken away by the Russians at another future occasion, just as we know we will never escape the illusion of “rare earth” independence from China. Whatever. But the idea of cooperating with Russia on AI and any related infrastructure should elicit nothing but a bitter, sardonic laugh. “Ending” Russia’s war in Ukraine does not make Russia an ally, and cooperating with a nation that defines us as their main enemy to develop the tools that will be integral to all future warfare and supremacy — no thanks. This is the first Trump admin “cyber security cooperation group with Russia” reboot. For fun, you can look back to the tech cooperation the Obama administration encouraged as part of the reset — which just helped Russia develop capabilities it has weaponized against the United States and its allies since. Russia’s strategic partnerships with Beijing and Tehran also make this a pretty hollow and absurd idea. Let Moscow sort this one out on its own — or not. They can just steal our stuff like they usually do, since we are barely even bothering with basic counterintelligence anymore as everyone is retasked to the imaginary “invasion” of migrants.

But in the G8 — just a flat LOL. Russia deserves no place in this group, which is organized around shared principles of democratic governance. Russia is not a democracy. There are plenty of other fora where they can show up and wave their little great power hat.

14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:

• $100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;

• The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100 billion to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Frozen European funds will be unfrozen. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.

Ah, here we see why the seized assets were not mentioned above — and this is the core premise from which this entire document has emerged. Because Russia has gotten America to bring forth this document as their own by attempting to bribe them with frozen Russian assets that Russia is never getting back and which the US has no right to.

On its face, this is appalling — no matter how the war “ends,” it was an illegal and unprovoked invasion for which Russia should have to pay a a direct price TO UKRAINE, not to the United States of America for letting Russia off the hook.

It is also not something the US can control, as the vast majority of the seized assets are in Europe. And the vagueness here — sure, maybe the US will rebuild some stuff, or they can also just use the money for investment, which doesn’t necessarily directly address the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to undo the damage Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine has caused, or maybe it’s just investing into US companies with vague Ukrainian projects that never happen. Also, speaking about “profits” here — from the reconstruction of a nation that another nation was trying to wipe from the face of the earth — is the most grubby and debasing thing.

So to be clear, frozen Russian assets will be shared between the US and Russia — and some of those assets may help rebuild Ukraine, or not, and the rest will rebuild the Russian economy and give them resources to continue their infiltration of the west via anyone who will take their dirty blood money. Meanwhile Europe is expected to pony up the funds for Ukraine — and let me just tell you, rebuilding Ukraine is going to take a lot more than $200 billion.

“Strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict” — this is a flawed idea presented in laughable language designed to cover up a theft of resources from the Ukrainian people and a reward to Russia for its war of aggression. It’s an utter shambles. There are not enough bells in all church towers in Europe to ring out the shame of this heist.

15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.

The foxes have stolen the eggs but don’t worry they will keep watch on the henhouse for you. Sure sure. Total trust. Such a framework would ensure nothing, and only be a vehicle for the further Russian manipulation of American strategic clout.

16. Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine.

Russia is famously a rule of law state, after all (fact check: it isn’t). And again — the framing that no such guarantee is needed with the United States says multitudes.

17. The United States and Russia will agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty.

Great, fine, whatever.

18. Ukraine agrees to be a non-nuclear state in accordance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Again — Ukraine has not been defeated in the war, and such terms are sovereign matters of determination — particularly if you’re already telling Ukraine it will be outside NATO and need stronger deterrent capabilities of its own.

19. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the IAEA, and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine — 50:50.

Russia has spent much of the full-scale invasion destroying the Ukrainian power grid and electricity generation capacity, and occupying and threatening civilian nuclear facilities. This rewards those war crimes and allows Russia to remain a beneficiary. Why should Ukraine be forced to keep an integrated energy grid with Russia when the rest of Europe is severing those connections as fast as they can? Oh right, to leave open Russian leverage over Ukraine.

20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programs in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice:

• Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.

• Both countries will agree to abolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education. (Note: Similar ideas were incorporated into Trump’s 2020 Israel-Palestine peace plan).

• All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited.

It’s particularly funny to see the reemergence of the Russian “Ukrainians are Nazis” propaganda on the same day the news breaks that the US Coast Guard no longer thinks Nazis symbols are bad — but this small point aside, the text here is designed to ensure that Russia regains its cultural influence in Ukraine, manipulating democratic ideals to be able to do so, or, failing that, it’s ability to use these issues to divide Ukraine and propagate anti-Ukrainian narratives. The Baltic states, notably Estonia, have positively argued, as European nations, for policies that safeguard their nations but protect the rights of their citizens and residents. These will be complex issues for Ukrainians to manage — but it is a national issue, and they should not give up the consolidation of statehood that has occurred during the war. Also, I seriously doubt Russia is going to be defending Ukrainian language and culture in Russia, as Putin has argued Ukrainianness is not real.

21. Territories:

• Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian, including by the United States.

• Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will be frozen along the line of contact, which will mean de facto recognition along the line of contact.

• Russia will relinquish other agreed territories it controls outside the five regions.

• Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk Oblast that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarized buffer zone, internationally recognized as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarized zone.

Don’t need to say much here, as the Ukrainian president — and people — have already made it clear where they stand on the occupied regions — let alone on giving up territory they actually control to give Russian occupation “a buffer zone.” A reminder that this isn’t land, but millions of lives — millions of people left under Russian occupation authorities and Stalinist systems of control, or left adrift from their homes and cultural heritage — and future economic potential for Ukraine and its recovery. Russia is not the victor, and should not be granted the spoils of illegal aggression — de facto or not. It will absolutely be the end of the system the United States of America built after WWII, signed and delivered by the American president.

22. After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, both the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force. Any security guarantees will not apply in the event of a breach of this commitment.

“Once territory has been gained by force, no further force will be allowed to gain territory, unless you think you can use force to gain territory for terms more favorable than this agreement” — sure sure, totally plausible. Ukraine can just stand by and watch the Russian occupation authorities oppress Ukrainians and threaten to steal/not return their children, sounds like a great plan.

23. Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.

“Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using its own rivers and ports to transport its own economic products” — seems like that nonaggression pact kinda sucks? How about “Russia will stop interfering in the freedom of navigation throughout the Black Sea”? Heck throw in the Baltic Sea while we’re agreeing to things.

24. A humanitarian committee will be established to resolve outstanding issues:

• All remaining prisoners and bodies will be exchanged on an ‘all for all’ basis.

• All civilian detainees and hostages will be returned, including children.

• A family reunification program will be implemented.

• Measures will be taken to alleviate the suffering of the victims of the conflict.

One point to address the vast human suffering, neat! The language here, in reality, needs to be quite specific in advance. Russia has many prisoners it does not properly identify or has unlawfully convicted inside Russia. POW lists are more reliable, but the lists of civilian detainees are not as well defined as there is no formal process governing them. No one should trust for a second that Russia will return all of the tens of thousands of children when no one even knows what the complete list is, and many have been renamed and adopted off to Russian families. “Family reunification” — in which direction? What is being done to address the forced Russian passportization? How is transit between Ukraine and its occupied regions being managed? “Measures will be taken to alleviate” — you mean like the register of damages that has not been mentioned here since Russia does not want it to exist? Russia owes billions in restitution for its targeting of civilians, their property, and civilian infrastructure. “Measures will be taken” is dismissive passive language, passing the buck to a nonexistent “someone.”

25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.

Ukraine will hold elections when the state of emergency ends, but 100 days from what point, exactly, matters. And no one should think the Ukrainian people won’t be on top of this themselves.

26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.

Just as point 14 is clearly the grubby point of departure for this whole draft, point 26 is the grubby point of arrival for Moscow. There is nothing Moscow fears so much as ever facing accountability for its almost 200,000 war crimes against Ukrainians — especially under a framework being developed by the Europeans, which includes many nations who suffered under Moscow in the 20th century. Moscow has never faced justice for a century of crimes — and hopes to keep up its streak. The task of the civilized world is to deny them their escape.

Because it isn’t just the crimes — it is the failure to account for history. I’ve watched scholars and archivists in the former captive nations try to assemble the history of their suffering, survival, and resistance from the records that remain — stories of their identity and history that Moscow deprived them of as a central element of control. Ukraine deserves narrative sovereignty as much as any other kind — and this means collecting stories of the Russian crimes.

27. This agreement will be legally binding. Its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J. Trump. Sanctions will be imposed for violations.

It’s super weird to put in a specific name and not the office. One ring will rule them all, I guess — but this language makes the entire agreement a whim.

28. Once all parties agree to this memorandum, the ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to agreed points to begin implementation of the agreement.

“The agreement will start when the agreement starts, and then will be an agreement” — who needs law school when we can just type this stuff up on our phones as we go, am I right???

Additional text on security guarantees — comments added in brackets:

This Framework establishes the conditions for an armistice between Ukraine and the Russian Federation and provides a security assurance modeled on the principles of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, adapted to the circumstances of this conflict and the interests of the United States and its European partners.

1. The United States affirms that a significant, deliberate, and sustained armed attack by the Russian Federation across the agreed armistice line into Ukrainian territory shall be regarded as an attack threatening the peace and security of the transatlantic community. [But not “minor” “temporary” attacks or say bombardment by missiles or drones of Ukraine cities?] In such an event, the President of the United States shall, in exercise of constitutional authority [what constitutional authority — oh right, he believes congress has abdicated its powers completely to the presidency] and after immediate consultations with Ukraine, NATO, and European partners, determine the measures necessary to restore security. These measures may include armed force, intelligence and logistical assistance, economic and diplomatic actions, and other steps judged appropriate. A joint assessment mechanism with NATO and Ukraine will evaluate any claimed breach. [“If Russia does something, we’ll have a process to discuss it” — but the US, now a co-investor in Russian recovery, will solely determine the response, what could go wrong?]

2. NATO members, including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and Finland, affirm that Ukraine’s security is integral to European stability and commit to act in concert with the United States in responding to any qualifying violation, ensuring a unified and credible deterrent posture.

3. This Framework enters into force upon signature and shall remain valid for ten years, renewable by mutual agreement. A Joint Monitoring Commission led by European partners with U.S. participation will oversee compliance.

Signed:

• Ukraine

• The Russian Federation

• The United States of America

• European Union

• NATO

[Not sure why Russia is a signatory of Ukrainian security guarantees. Just leave them out of this. Also ten years is less that the duration of the war. Just sayin’. Throughout this, again the US speaks as not a member of NATO.]

* * * * *

To sum up — soul of this not-good agreement is in points 14 and 26 — and it amounts to, if the United States lets Russia evade accountability for its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine — its illegal war in Europe — then together the US and Russia can split the booty and stick the Europeans with the cost of clean-up, locking Ukraine into a series of agreements that will keep it a half-state and ensure it never becomes the Ukraine that we can see it could be in its best moments. A Ukraine that is a significant power in Europe, for Europe.

This deal deprives Ukraine of everything it has won by withstanding Russian aggression and defending the borders of Europe. The deal rewards Russian lawlessness. Worse, the deal makes America complicit in the lawlessness — the signer of the death warrant of the principles crafted from the lessons of World War II.

It is fully inadequate for the task we face.

Returning to the idea of reflexive control — what was this whole exercise even about? Clearly not even the Russians believe this “deal” is going to get done.

For the Russians — the goal was to get the United States to present Russian ideas for security architecture as their own (with an added patina of self-enrichment at the expense of values), which destabilizes Ukraine, disrupts American relations with its allies (particularly Europe) and undermines American global leadership, and shows Russian continuation as one of three great powers dictating the course of the 21st century. By leaking the agreed document, they got a pretty good return on investment. In this case, that was just a couple flights to Miami, the cost of indoctrinating a real estate mogul or two, and “giving” its frozen assets — which it is absolutely never getting back anyway — as a direct bribe to the United States of America.

The only good news in this deal is that it shows that both the Americans and the Russians know it’s actually the Europeans who hold all the cards here — because they hold the money, they’ve done the work to prepare for justice and accountability efforts, and they’re expected to carry all the water going ahead. And Europe should be assertive and clear in rebuffing this farce and putting together their own plan with Ukraine. This plan must showcase the work Europe has already done to strengthen its own security and to help Ukraine prepare to hold Russia to account for its war crimes.

It becomes clear now that the best way for America’s legacy to survive is for Europe to get its act together as the true fourth power that can disrupt the direction of the Russian-Chinese-American new world order deliberations that are going so desperately off the rails.

“Ukraine is Europe” is the point this new vision of European power departs from, and it is the idea that can make it a success.

— MM

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With a name like McKew, you can guess that my family was Catholic — Catholic on both sides, all the way down, as is often the case. As children, my sister and I were put in Catholic school — education was extremely important to my parents, Idaho public schools were behind in major areas, and Catholic schools were really the only alternative. But even with kind teachers instructing us the on softest, most-cleaned-up, golden-rule version of Catholicism, there was — when it came to my young mind, at least — a major ideological competitor: Idaho itself.

We grew up wild, remote, far from extended family, running in mountain cathedrals and in drought-stricken valleys, baking in the high-desert sun by day and mesmerized by the Milky Way in the heat-starved nights, always tracking the dust or snow of Idaho back into the house when we returned. We marveled at the wide painted skies of the high-west sunrises and sunsets, watching each one like an act of worship in a half-settled place. Native flowers were rare in the drought years of our childhood, and when spotted — transcendent, alien, starkly beautiful against the sage and the rocks, unique to this place which felt out of time.

Whatever school tried to say was spiritual, we found a hundred-fold in the wilderness we lived adjacent to. I used to look off the edge of the bluff our neighborhood was on and wonder how it was that the mountains vaulted so far into the sky and yet the western heavens were so much more vast and unreachable than those our east coast family lived beneath.

I think we Americans — looking down now into our phones and enrapt by the psychological terror the algorithms are designed to wield on us — often forget how utterly, spectacularly, heartbreakingly beautiful our country is. How it must have been astonishingly, mindbendingly miraculous for those first generations of foreign settlers who arrived — traversing Atlantic seas with fish and whales so dense you could “walk across their backs;” walking beneath towering Eastern old growth forests full of game and dappled with rich, open farmland; crossing the sweeping multi-hued plains with its endless empty horizons and rivers of buffalo; climbing the high-west mountains and deserts and red rocks and streaked canyons; and finally tumbling out into the sunset Pacific and its array of bounties up and down the coast.

For many of the peoples who came free or semi-free to the new America, it was an escape from nations where land was never yours, where hierarchies and social orders were a prison, where non-conformist beliefs where a death sentence, where being left alone to live how you pleased was impossible because everything in nature belonged to someone else — where absolute freedom was so far away, even the dangerous crossing off the former edge of the map seemed a better bet than what they knew.

Yes, there were the wealthy governors and landed gentry of European title attempting to rebuild the benefits of such tyranny in a new land, too, and yes, this is massively simplifying the colonization of the land that would become America. But my deep belief in the wonder of the natural world I grew up in led me to the second pillar of my core beliefs — America itself.

The earliest formative notions of what America was still shape how I see it.

That the very emergence of America from all the possible paths of history was like the lone stalk of bright vermillion Indian paintbrush reaching up from sandy soil between two rocks on the side of a mountain — impossible, miraculous, not to be taken for granted.

That in those end days of the Cold War, what we believed we were remained as important a beacon of hope as it had ever been.

And that — as eventually learned in Idaho, from local history of supplanted indigenous cultures and the Japanese internment camps Idaho was home to during the Second World War — part of what made us strong as a nation, allowing us to remain devout to our core beliefs, is that they were constantly tested by our own failings. We screw up, and that forces us to get better — we confront our own wrong history and mistakes, learn about those who had to fight even harder for the rights and freedoms we have, and incorporate them into our own shared story of the quest toward the more perfect union.

What a unique idea this was — that America was a moving target, a spirit always in motion, lost if believing perfection has been attained but thriving in the idea of the pursuit. It made America seem ageless and immortal — constantly being remade, reforged, sharpened and honed.

I don’t think we Americans consider enough the bravery it would have taken for absolutely ordinary people to come here with nothing more than hope — a deep unspoken belief that somewhere, there was something that would finally be their own.

And I don’t think we consider enough the bravery of all the Americans and eventual Americans we served less well than we should have as they tried to pursue their own possibilities — that their struggle towards our own beliefs actually proved the truth of what we held sacred. We just needed — still need — to continue the quest toward the more perfect.

This common feature of belief — of the zealotry of possibility and progress — is, for me, more than anything, the idea that shaped America.

That zealotry — let lose under the vast American sky, shaped by the wonder of the land, forged by the demanding and harsh life of making something from nothing, whether in forge or field or frontier — finally emerged via the fire of revolution as the divine American idea. The idea of possibility, and the idea that it moves toward the more perfect. That there is so much more to come, and freedom is the best way to achieve the possibilities we know not yet how to even define.

In this American religion, there was, most crucially, no savior. Instead, the power for salvation is bequeathed to each of us — as an American birthright, and an American duty.

A humble surveyor becomes the victorious general of a revolution and the foundational president of a nation. One freed slave helps craft our very conception of democracy, and another collects intelligence that will help win a war to free the rest of her people. A handful of astronauts know enough math and engineering to save themselves and the American quest for the stars from death in space.

We’re shaped by the big stories of salvation. But we’re educated and inspired by the small ones. A band of brothers. A family crossing the frontier against impossible odds. A hometown coach and a winning season. A cancer survivor who runs a marathon. In my own family story, a young man whose family of German-American brewmasters was utterly upended by Prohibition and sought a new life in San Diego, delivering my grandfather — through a series of hard-won yet improbable opportunities — to Pearl Harbor, where he helped cut sailors out of wrecked ships and wrote the final report on the damages.

Our smaller stories connect us to the bigger ones, which is why it’s so important that we share them.

America’s heroes aren’t always angels and they aren’t always good guys. We love a rogue and an outlaw as much as an honorable man. We love a redemption story woven into a good tale of salvation. But it is the action toward possibility — a pursuit of salvation — that buttresses the mythmaking of our identity.

And in this incredibly fraught time when we have lost all sense of ourselves in an absolutely mad way, it’s time for us to reckon with why we all feel so much has been taken from us. Whether the nation is betraying us, or we, the nation.

America has always been a religious nation, but we quell away from openly discussing our secular American religion — which was never about God as much as it was about us — about what our beliefs, whatever they may be, can together conjure toward the common purpose of the never-reached target of the more perfect.

Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt absolutely spoke of American divinity in their reverence for the land and how it shaped us; those like Abraham Lincoln spoke of the necessary sacrifice of the Civil War as a penance for our foundational sins.

Our modern caution in using religious terminology to describe our secular devotion seems now a great mistake. It has ceded the power of the words of true belief to those who would use them to make freedom a finite and contested resource rightfully held by only a narrow few. Freedom has never been finite in America, just as possibility can’t be limited if our core tenets of American identity are to continue to flourish.

America was and is a miracle. Its core ideas are spiritual, and require lifelong devotion to pursue their realization. Dedication to such tasks, and service toward the pursuit of the more perfect, can make a life — big or small, rich or modest — meaningful and transformative. The state of perfection can never be reached, as the entire point is that dedication to the work — pursuit of possibility — has no end point.

Our founding fathers — and especially George Washington — were wise enough to allow us no king and no national deity. Instead what is divine is the idea of sacrifice in the pursuit of freedom. This central, amorphous, imperfect idea is why we have survived in our first republic — shit goes awry, but the sacrifice of great women and men to restore the sacred course of the nation toward something better is not a sign of failure but of strength. Of commitment to the original and most divine American idea.

This is American divinity. Our secular and binding religion. We wander way off course an awful lot of the time — but that shining beacon on the hill is for us as much as anybody else.

There aren’t many sacred spaces in this secular American religion. But three in Washington DC stand out.

One is the US Capitol.

The sacred space of lawmaking, of debate amongst the peoples’ chosen representatives about the shape and direction of the nation we will be. Many Americans take an 8th grade class trip to Washington and walk under the soaring Capitol dome for the first time, passing quietly in a kind of awe, whispering beneath this most American cathedral so as not to offend the watchful spirits of the men and women who have lain in state in the rotunda.

Having lived in DC since mere days after 9/11, there’s never a season that dome doesn’t look glorious on the Hill — above pinks and whites and new greens in spring, reds and golds in autumn, the glowing greens of summer, the stark beauty of the dome and the Statue of Freedom standing alone against a stormy sky. Or other days when the dome fades into the gray white sky as snow falls on the slopes of the Hill, and the children of the city bring makeshift sleds and squeal in delight at such informal joy in the shadow of such a mighty parent. There’s never a time of day when the light hits the Capitol in a way that doesn’t catch the breath a little — the soft morning light, the bright midday sun, the golden dusk, lit up against a sky full of stars and a rising full moon. The dome forbids you to walk by with a jaded heart about the significance of what you are seeing.

But we know this President watched on TV as a mob set the Capitol on fire, and he prevented the deployment of forces to stop it faster. The people responsible for this cataclysm he has pardoned and set free, even as he requires his adherents to deny the event ever happened. It has resulted in a psychic break in some of those followers — people who couldn’t believe what they were seeing, had a moment of a wake up, and now believe that everything must be a psyop or a simulation. Nothing is real and anything is possible because he made you deny what you saw with your own eyes.

The insurrection attacked a space sacred for all Americans, and has rendered it sullied and profaned. Perhaps in time this could be forgivable — but it should not be forgettable.

A second sacred space for Americans — and in particularly those who have served in uniform and the families of those who have sacrificed their lives in defense of the nation — is Arlington National Cemetery.

On rolling green hills adjacent the Potomac, every vista in Arlington shows a different part of the nation’s capital. In every view there is a monument to catch the eye that is a reminder of what those buried in this hallowed ground had to fight for — of what their sacrifice preserved for us. The geometric rows of identical white gravestones force order on the land, which it resists with steeper slopes and soaring old trees. It is the contrast of the two that makes the place so aching beautiful, and that beauty is so much more poignant for the deep quiet that the place holds onto despite planes and helicopters flying overhead at all hours — and often taps playing somewhere in the distance.

The rows seem to go on forever in all directions. The immensity of the sacrifice of the place — and its point of origin after the devastation of the Civil War and one of our greatest leaps toward attaining our ideal (ending slavery) — weighs heavy and yet uplifts. The names on the headstones represent the origins of Americans from all over the world, including many true indigenous Americans; captains next to privates next to colonels showing each sacrifice is equal, as each life was equal; symbols representing so many different religions, many visitors don’t know them all. The homogeneity of the stones belies the diversity of the people who fought to keep America and its divine ideas alive.

The President has never been able to set foot in Arlington with appropriate reverence for this sacred space. He veers into political attacks, gets bored, and his staff causes scenes, generating headlines that remind us of the President’s narcissism rather than the story of even one single person who has earned the right for burial in Arlington. He doesn’t understand it. We know this because he has bragged about how he avoided his own military service, and we know this because the generals who tried to serve him told us about his comments about “suckers” and “losers.” His loyalists have now erased the stories of sacrifice of Black and female servicemembers from the Arlington website as part of their absolutely wrong pursuit of equality equaling people who look exactly like them and believe exactly what they believe. The digital purge can never hide the truth of what the gravestones tell us — the truth of the long lists of names of the men and women buried in Arlington and at military cemeteries all across America, in Europe, and indeed on every inhabited continent.

The Capitol and Arlington are spaces the public has access to, though post-9/11 and post-1/6 there have been significant security changes. The third sacred site — the White House — is the house the people keep for the President, and thus it is the most mysterious.

Part of this mystery is what preserves the idea of an American President as one of us, but one who stands necessarily apart to preserve the sanctity of the office.

I can’t even write at great length about the White House, so fresh is the wound of its maiming. My first memory of it probably isn’t even my own but one formed from family stories of one photo of my sister from the White House Easter Egg Roll when I was still a toddler. Growing up in Idaho, this was like finding out your family had once visited royalty somewhere — there she was, mere steps from the Truman balcony! When I moved back to DC in those post 9/11 days, when the city was empty and the flags seemed to be at half-mast forever, I remember how sad it made me that there were new higher fences separating the people from the White House, and the view of it seemed to be from further and further away.

When John Adams was moving into the new White House on November 1, 1800, he wrote to his wife: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and all that shall here after inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” FDR had this blessing engraved on the mantle of the State Dining Room, where presumably it still stands unless someone has also taken a sledgehammer to it, how would we know? Trump destroyed property that belonged to the nation, and not to him. He destroyed a sacred site of the history of the nation, and all the ghosts and specters that remained. It was shocking, visceral, outrageous. It was sacrilege.

I honestly struggle to think what must have been going through the mind of any sane machinery operator when they are given the task to tear down a wing of the White House with one day’s notice and as quickly as possible. While Trump had been going on and on about his renovations project — home-decorating being the one creative impulse he actually has — the timing of the thing, mere days after the largest protest in American history which was explicitly against him and his vision of the use (and abuse) of the presidency, was exactly what it looks like: a great big middle finger to everyone who believes his power should be restrained by laws or courts.

But even bad kings know to respect the heritage sites that are the iconic symbols of their own power.

In his wanton wrecking of the White House, President Trump turns his rage into an act of profanity against the foundational beliefs of the nation, which he respects even less than our heritage sites.

There is a fourth sacred American space that is the birthright of every American that I would be remiss not to mention: American lands, its parks, its wilderness. In this, too, Trump has missed no opportunity to profane. Has he ever hiked up a mountain in the lesser eastern ranges and thought of the splendor those first American settlers must have seen before them, or seen the sunrise light up the majestic red and white walls of Bryce Canyon, or stood in the impossibly green valleys near Yellowstone looking up at the craggy blue and violet mountains soaring into the big sky? Has he even been near unmanicured nature and not thought “someone should pave this and build a tacky hotel”?

His continued attempts to sell off this American treasure unnecessarily to miners, developers, and drillers is an absolute betrayal of the land and divinity that birthed the very possibility of America.

Every American can visit these sacred natural spaces that inspired the generations before us to love this land, dream of the more perfect, and fight for the impossibility of what we have. But Mr Trump would prefer these be owned by other rich men rather than us. He seems to abhor the outdoors if it isn’t a golf course, just as he shies away from pets and other living creatures. I can’t remember if he has done one of the famous Thanksgiving turkey pardons. Maybe it doesn’t matter since now every day some turkey or another is pardoned by the White House.

The man who would be American king? No, that isn’t what he is. We just fear to speak the words of what he is even more than we fear to speak of the American idea as a religious pursuit, because naming him makes each of us complicit in our acceptance of a hybrid system that represents a greater return of tyranny than at any other point in our history.

Like denying the attack on the Capitol, we are supposed to call his tyranny liberty, supposed to believe his destruction of the fundamental federal compact is “more perfect” — rather than the end of that union completely. I hate my opponent and I don’t wish the best for them, he told us. He has abandoned his duty to be the president of all Americans, and his minions enthusiastically find ways to make Americans suffer, struggle, starve, and live in fear. They have no American faith.

250 years isn’t much in the overall history. While not an old nation, we are the oldest democracy. I think we all thought we would have a lot more time. Despite the grotesque merchandising, Trump seems to want July 4, 2026 to be not an anniversary but the day of birth of … something else.

But let us remember the divine American spirit — there is no American savior, but the duty of salvation falls to each of us. The more perfect is the task of each American generation, and we are no exception. Our chapter in the American story starts now.

Mr Trump wishes he could dismantle American democracy as easily as he inspires a mob to burn the seat of our democracy, as easily as he dismisses the service and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands for our democracy, as easily as he can destroy the house of all American presidents (but one) who preserved that democracy. Like at every other time in his life, he is trying to conjure money that is not his to manifest his desires — and surely he is finding accomplices in this task of pissing daily upon the laws of the land and the idea that they also apply to billionaires.

But his desire to be a serious and feared autocrat doesn’t make him so. His seeming desire for himself and his tech bro/vulture capital council to emulate Putin and his collective of oligarchs doesn’t yet mean a handful of men can dictate the lives of a nation via systems of control and the perversion of state resources into the private wealth that maintains and reinforces those systems.

Putin speaks frequently about long arcs of history and uses them to sculpt fictitious narratives of power that justify his modern crimes. One constant in all of them is the idea that systems of government that represent “the people” are the anomaly in the long human story of strongman rule.

There is no “the people” for Putin. The evidence of this is in the mountains of dead and wounded it has cost Russia to uncomfortably occupy a mere 7 percent of Ukrainian land since the fullscale invasion in 2022.

If democracy is the anomaly in a long dark history, America is the light that must be extinguished if you view the world as the KGB did, and still does. Or better yet — America should be turned into an anti-democratic force. America should turn itself — abandon its faith.

For Putin, he is the only salvation for a besieged Russia holding back the hostile non-Russian world. Trump and his ideologues have tried to spin a similar story of besiegement, and far too many have fallen for a version of it that allows and requires lawlessness.

But we have the duty of our own salvation. Though the White House not be blessed with an honest or wise ruler under its roof, that’s why its inhabitants barely settle in before they move on. Because America is constantly changing, and its leaders must be able to accept and guide that change rather than fight and betray the divine American idea.

Only when we forget that we are the Americans — and Trump the anomaly in our story — will he be the victor. He would take everything of meaning from us and replace it with cheap baubles that we are supposed to oooooo and ahhhhh over, just as the White House now looks like a tacky knockoff of a satirical Central Asian presidential palace.

So no, I won’t ooooo and ahhhhh, because f*ck that, and no, I will not even say thank you. No, I will not be silent — just as you should not, and just as all the current and former leaders of our nation, our congress, and our military should not, because the silence masks the terrible lawlessness with which Trump rends the White House, and it masks the terrible lawlessness with which Trump rends American divinity.

If you believe freedom is a necessarily scarce commodity, and if you believe that possibility must be only for a few if it is to be of value — if you covet an idea of America that is the smallest, most vulgar version and not the wide cathedral skies that have given us all a space to worship and live and love, to fail and struggle and strive and succeed — then you do not understand the miracle of the origin of this nation, or why it has survived. You don’t have the faith to be a defender of what is divine about America, or the faith that when this trial is passed, our steel will be forged stronger than it was before the last fire.

He can tear it all down — it teaches us no lesson but what a shallow, profane man he is, too afraid to walk the halls in the footsteps of wiser presidents. He can keep doing what our enemies have never been able to accomplish. He can stand with his complicit political, judicial, and financial henchmen before the rubble for photos — behind the high fence he hopes will keep us out. We are a nation of believers and the children of all the zealots of the America idea before us. False idols always fall. We will save ourselves again as we always have before and as this nation was born in the first place.

I often think of my mother in these times, who could not abide a bully or a liar or a tyrant. Her favorite of the Idaho wildflowers was the elusive Indian paintbrush. It’s a hardy and resilient plant, or it wouldn’t grow in even the harshest Idaho conditions — but it is nearly impossible to harvest or transplant. I used to pick her flowers that would fade before I made it down the mountain. Finally, I tried to dig up a plant and bring it down to her, with its native soil and rocks. It never worked. The paintbrush wasn’t a captive plant — it only flourished where it was meant to, free and high and wild.

Our American democracy, which I hope we remain devoted to, is like these mountain wildflowers. When we get too far from the divine ideas that make it possible, it will fail for all of us. Trump does not understand what is sacred, and he believes his vulgarity is more powerful than our collective story and the ideas that they are born from and feed into. I think that he will fail, because I think we will remember the impossibly brave people who arrived to build America and who have always fought for the more perfect version of it against long odds. What is a more American fundamental belief than that the brave come out on the right side of history, in the end?

This administration may erase our history and profane our monuments and pervert our national story to justify their crimes and the way they exert power to accomplish them.

But I know the truth. You know the truth. I remember the vast American sky and the rogue vermillion flower and the open American heart and the divinity of the pursuit of the more perfect.

Our president isn’t trying to be better and he isn’t trying to be more perfect. He doesn’t believe he can ever be anything more than what he is. He is constantly afraid that someone around him will achieve something he can’t, and so he takes the more and the better away from everybody else.

This is simply not how America was forged. In the poverty of Trump’s American faith comes the impoverishment of our founding ideas — and the fractures ripping America apart. The smallness of all he does makes everybody smaller. The smallness crushes bravery — of rich men, of political leaders, of supposed media and journalistic elite. No American wants to live this way. We remember the wide open frontier.

Getting America right has never been easy. In each of us, salvation. What will you sacrifice.

— MM

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I didn’t want to write about the recent events in Alaska as if they were events of any consequence. But now that we’ve reached the whatever part of the cycle, it’s time to reflect on how all this inconsequence is squandering our future and putting us in danger.

We live in a time of great peril. It’s a time when serious people are needed to guide the outcome of events.

We Americans don’t have that.

It was obvious to anyone who remains even a little unenchanted by the propagandistic wizardry of the current American administration that the Alaska meeting was a dud from the start. Even the governmental fabulism gravitron set the bar incredibly low: so enamored is the president of his largely-imaginary relationship with a barbarous, freedom-hating war criminal that he wanted a reason to invite him to American soil for lunch. Don’t expect breakthroughs. No one did. Mostly, everyone was just hoping to avoid an overt disaster.

I mean, ok, it’s summertime, everyone expects, dreads, and welcomes a county fair, all apace. And so carnival rides were erected; the tickets and tokens were used to play the rigged games and eat the deep-fried snacks and ride the rides round and round until everyone felt nauseous and little bit sticky.

The unclean feeling was enhanced by the desperation of the broader commentariat of any political stripe to glean some deeper meaning from this display in order to keep the public engaged in the show. But this was just throwing confetti into the vacuous maw of empty pageantry that rolls a red carpet across the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.

An unbelievable amount of print space was dedicated to reminders about the purchase of Alaska from Russia, for example. But virtually none to the signaling that drew a posse of European leaders to Washington as Putin beat his way home — that Russia and America were speaking about Europe without Europe and without even being in or crossing Europe. We don’t need you, it said, even if we have to half-ass this thing at a derelict airstrip that doesn’t even celebrate the stunning beauty of the locale.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t that the Alaska meeting happened. The problem isn’t even that it yielded nothing. The problem is that it was the Baked Alaska of diplomacy.

Yes, Baked Alaska — that retched and improbable American dessert constructed from cake, ice cream, and meringue, frozen solid and then scorched in an oven or with a blowtorch or, in its flashiest presentation, drenched in booze and set alight to the oohs and aahs of spectators. You might order it once because you’ve never actually seen it before. But it isn’t really about the pleasure of the consumer so much as the pride of the presenter.

As with everything in American public life right now, the Alaska meeting was a froofy confection meant for show rather than taste, void of all nutrition and quickly forgotten once politely and awkwardly eaten. The point is just that you set it on fire and everyone clapped their little hands in delight.

And behold, peace has been “pursued” in Alaska.

*****

This show is the flash that squanders any the real chance of holding Russia to account for what it has done to global security.

Russia’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine is reshaping global power and global security for the remainder of the century — the tip of the spear for the axis of disruption that shields and enables Iran, China, North Korea, and an expanding cast of characters who delight in the permanent swap-meet of bad guy stuff to oppress their own people and kill, torment, or occupy others. How the war is won and the peace defined in Ukraine is of desperate importance to America and Americans and to the American future we imagine we still have.

President Trump is not wrong to highlight the immense human suffering in Ukraine. But as with most things Russia, he has it all upside-down. In his orientation, Russia — a nation willing to use barbarism beyond the bounds of international law to achieve its the leader’s strategic objectives no matter what the cost in Russian lives or treasure — is the nation to be engaged and feted. Ukraine — the nation that has survived against all odds, innovated and broken through every limitation and expectation placed upon them, upholding the laws of war even as untold harm is brought against them and their civilian population — is the nation to be chastised.

This balance of perception did not fundamentally change during the meeting in Alaska or the subsequent meetings in Washington with President Zelenskyy and the supporting cadre of European leaders.

But Trump’s meeting with Putin guarantees the war will expand and continue. Anyone selling a different story here is attempting to impose intention on the Russians that simply does not exist.

*****

There are three main takeaways from these exchanges, all about the American leadership.

First, the administration is engaging Russia with people being easily manipulated by the Russians, which is evident in how they echo Russian narrative, present illogical Russian goals as sensible requirements, and scurry back and forth to keep themselves on the hook of Russian “engagement.” The Russians don’t respect this. Every time the president or someone close to him represents a Russian demand as a fair point, the Russians chuckle into their hands at their good fortune and call their counterparts unflattering names.

Much has been written about Special Envoy Witkoff, his activities in Moscow, his go-it-alone style, and the administration’s attempts to make it look like it’s all part of a plan. Maybe it is their plan. But it sure ends up looking a lot like Moscow’s plan. The Russians do not deserve goodwill. Their grievances have been indulged enough. That path leads only to escalation because Putin sees giving them the benefit of the doubt as the worst kind of weakness.

Second, the administration will not achieve anything if they don’t have an objective beyond “a deal” that is itself just another Baked Alaska. This mindset of “the deal”allows Moscow to set the terms and hold the hoops. There must be a clear vision for what an agreement between Ukraine and Russia should entail, and how that benefits the interest of America and its allies and partners who will have to enforce the peace.

Third, if the administration allows Russia to evade all accountability and reparations for its illegal war of aggression, then “ending” the war weakens the security architecture America relies on even further, rather than bolstering or revitalizing it in any way. This puts Americans in danger and makes the chance of expanded or new conflict greater.

This last point will always be a sticky one, because, as Steve Bannon likes to herald, Trump is a disruptor, a relentless breaker of rules and systems, not a builder of durable ideologies or institutions.

Disruptors are drawn to, admire, sometimes abhor each other, in modern times and in history, learning from each other even if there’s no real bond between them beyond a desire and envy to break and rule.

This is part of what draws Trump as a leader to guys like Putin and Kim and Xi. But what he always gets wrong in his evaluations is that everything he — Trump — does is instinctual. Something in him just understands how to rend the fabric of society and global order in ways he perceives he can benefit from. He is sometimes aided by deeper strategists and ideologues — but never do they constantly have his ear as he views himself to be above them. None of them, he understands, can replicate his primal ability. There will always be a moment when he trusts his own judgment over anyone else’s advice.

Trump may perceive these other men as brother disruptors — but each are more deliberate than instinctual, and they are the product of deep systems and strategies of disruption and replacement. There is directionality that is not self-centric. There is defined purpose. There are real systems of authoritarian central control that work — first and foremost upon the elite, not the masses.

The common desire to end what is may be shared, but the manifestations of that urge are entirely disparate.

*****

I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever felt so deeply uncomfortable as watching an American president clap for the impeding arrival of a murderous dictator, greeting him with genuine affection before mocking the American press on his behalf. Every aspect of this — ick — but in particular, the self-abasement by allowing such a man a position of primacy above you.

There’s just a lack of understanding of the game being played — the game into which the administration has conscripted itself. All this is evident in the Russian fighter jets violating American airspace near Alaska every few days since the meeting, the ongoing Russian bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine (including the second largest attack launched since the start of the full scale invasion), and the Russian forces attempting to mass a new incursion into Ukrainian-held territory. The Russian tempo has not changed despite obvious frustration from President Trump at these salvos.

During the media spray in the Oval Office with President Zelenskyy, Trump griped about claims that Putin on American soil is “defeat for Trump.” He complained about the media while allowing the entire narrative of the public meeting to be driven by right wing media agitators in the spray.

The string pulled, Trump launched into the spin to tie all the narratives together. The missing ballots and corrupt DC and the stolen election and the war that shouldn’t have happened and whatever cultural bullsh*t that’s the flavor of the week. It’s all one story — in which Russia isn’t a bad guy. It’s all one package that Americans have been too willing to gulp down as some states occupy others to impose policy, while monuments police pull fare-jumpers off DC buses to bolster their arrest statistics, while the cost of everything for Americans is being driven through the roof — like any of this is coherent and sensible.

“This war would have never happened” with the “right results of the election” is a story Putin tries to tell about a lot of different places.

It’s never true. It’s always just about Putin.

*****

Equally unnerving was the sense that Trump was coordinating action with Putin and reporting to him, which was on full display when the European leaders joined President Zelenskyy at the White House.

The Europeans executed a carefully orchestrated act of flattery and appeal to Trump, each building on the one prior and meant to move Trump another half step toward a policy that would be better for America and the alliance. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like it.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte complimented Trump on his outreach to Putin. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen mirrored Trump’s own rhetoric about big deals and “stopping the killing.” Trump has favorable views of these leaders at the moment after another bullying NATO Summit and a trade deal with the EU, and would have expected positive comments from them. Easing in.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz then pivoted back to the point that there can be no negotiations without a ceasefire — a bit of cold water on the discussion, as the Trump administration knows a ceasefire is unlikely and thus keeps saying you can end a war without one. When the (outdated) expectation is typically that the Germans are most eager to end the war, it was important to give Merz this line that how we get to the end, and confidence-building in the meantime, really matters.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has good relations with Trump and others in his circle, emphasized that to reach peace and guarantee justice, the allies must be united. An important message to come from someone viewed as a political outlier in the group.

French President Emmanuel Macron, maintaining his mantle of being out front on military issues, said a “robust and long-standing peace” would require a credible Ukraine army “for years and decades to come,” and that Europe would support the necessary security guarantees for Ukraine and its own security. This put an essential message — that Russian demands for Ukrainian disarmament are not up for negotiation— next to a message Trump wants to hear — European security won’t have to be his problem IF…

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer added some words about security guarantees.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb echoed the man-love Trump had thrown in his direction at the top of the meeting, saying something about how more progress had been made in last few weeks than last few years. This was barfy but necessary flattery — and it greased his pivot into the most significant statement of the group:

Why is the President of Finland here? I think the reason is that we might come from a small country, but we have a long border with Russia — over 800 miles — and we of course have our own historical experience with Russia from World War II — the Winter War and the War of Continuation. And if I look at the silver lining of where we stand right now, we found a solution in 1944, and I'm sure that we'll be able to find a solution in 2025 to end Russia's war of aggression.

The Winter War may be a topic most Americans know nothing about, but it still strikes fear into the heart of Russian soldiers and informs Finland’s entire mobilization strategy. This is not a casual mention. Russia can be defeated. Russia should be defeated. There are things that can be done to ensure this is the case. Likewise, calling Russia’s wars of aggression what they are is critical. Russia is the aggressor, the invader, and Ukrainian defending itself. Flattening out that reality does no one any good when it comes to ending a war.

In only a few minutes, the eight European leaders delivered a masterpiece of diplomacy that made the tarmac glad-handing in Alaska seem shoddy and ill-fit. I can’t even imagine the time that must have been spent constructing it and assigning parts. There was a moment when you allowed yourself to hope —

And then Trump spoke again for the absent Putin. The balloon bursts.

*****

Putin’s war is spun from lies, lies repeated for so long they have a mythic air. Trump — and now his envoy, and various right wing propagandists before him — breathes in and parrots these myths, which precludes the possibility of ending the war.

Why? Because they attribute to Russia sentiments they do not have, and ignore motivations that they have clearly articulated through word and deed.

Russia steals Ukrainian children, tortures civilians, starves and maims prisoners of war, and encourages its soldiers to commit atrocities on their enemies because they do not view Ukrainians as “real.” To dismiss this as some footnote instead of the headline is to enable more atrocity by dusting over what has occurred — which is pretty much the story of the last century of Moscow’s relations with its neighbors.

Continuing down this path is a choice — expecting it to have a sharp change of direction is folly.

President Trump has strange ideas about what it is to be a soldier serving a democratic nation and pledged to uphold the constitution — and these ideas are no doubt reinforced by having an unqualified defense secretary who has championed the pardoning of American war criminals who forgot who they were, conflated cruelty with justice, and were convicted by their own peers for their crimes.

The Trump administration has largely abandoned America’s great work, born from Nuremberg and Tokyo, of documenting and prosecuting war crimes to build a more just world — a world better able to navigate into the future on the understandings of the lustrated past. Similarly, they have abandoned America’s work supporting the democratic aspirations of other nations. If you think like this, it seems a small enough thing to walk away from the idea of holding Moscow accountable for its 150,000+ modern war crimes. Trump certainly never mused that be would be the one to put Vladimir Putin on trial.

But it is not a small thing.

It is the deepest and most fundamental thing. Moscow evades accountability and it obfuscates and repeats its history. Western nations that have never experienced Russian occupation — and don’t understand its inherent brutality — minimize and dismiss this history, and this in turn misguides contemporary decision-making. Just like erasing January 6 as a great crime against Americans has weakened America by making heroes of its traitors, failing to bring accountability to the Russians allows them to repeat their crimes.

Witkoff, star-struck by the golden glove treatment from the band of leading propagandists that have been his hosts in Russia, presents issues from Moscow as if they make sense. A closer read shows he is just representing the same tired Russian complaints as if they are new. Russia wants the right to retain cultural supremacy over Ukrainianness. Russia absolutely refuses to pay reparations for its illegal war of aggression. This is posited as a dispute over frozen assets — but what Moscow wants, as always, is to ensure there is no accountability for any of its crimes, and it wants Witkoff to carry this bag on their behalf as a “negotiation with Ukraine.” Helping Moscow evade accountability also puts the US at odds with most of our European allies, who have already committed to seeing this process move ahead.

Putting the bloody Russians on trial is the best way for all of us to reinvigorate our values and gain momentum in this century. There’s a nicer way to say that and 45 supporting explanatory points — but maybe just saying it that way is how we need to do it.

President Trump looks for any opportunity to complain that he wants the media to be fair.

Well what’s fair is — President Trump can end the war. Or the war can expand and continue. When Trump is too focused on Putin as a friend, he isn’t ending the war. There is no incentive that will get Putin to stop doing the thing he most wants — because it is the thing he most wants and believes he needs to survive. There is no carrot to offer. Only pain — economic, military, and diplomatic pain. Only the enforcement of boundaries and accountability for sins will ever stop Moscow.

We can learn that in the actions of Ukraine and the mindset of Finland. After all, America, too, has a long border with Russia.

*****

As the weeks slide by with no results, Trump’s interest has predictably waned.

“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.” We need to have a ceasefire to make peace. Who needs a ceasefire to make peace? If Putin doesn’t agree we’ll sanction him. Maybe we’ll “do sanctions” on Russia. Maybe “economic war.” Maybe the US will support European security guarantees for Ukraine. There won’t be territorial concessions from Ukraine. Ukraine will have to concede territory. Europe is unrealistic. Ukraine must decide. You guys should decide. Ask me in two weeks.

The President, his people say, just “wants it over” — not for any ideological reason other than his own self-narrative about being a peacemaker worthy of international recognition. The problem with this is, as any dealmaker knows, your lack of perceived outcome gives the opponent the upper hand.

Trump wants to be lauded as a diplomat while applying the math of dictators — which is why there is never a solution.

But you can’t explain this to anyone in Washington, which is deep in the midst of agonizingly re-narrativizing “realism” as a “new” idea that can make a coherent orientation out of this soup. It all stands for nothing, it wants to be great — but the isolationism and laziness are dual poisons to that aspiration. It wants to use force, but has given up all our leverage. It wants to be strong-man, but writes policies to weaken the nation now and into the future, and diverts security resources to propaganda security operations.

Truly only Washington and its denizens could look at this and see a through line. The rest of the world has little problem seeing what is happening without requiring any new terminology at all.

When faced with bloody-minded dictators, hope is nice, but actually mustering the will and resources to stop them is essential.

Yes, stopping Russia will take time. But there will be time because Putin doesn’t have the resources to fight us, and has no intention of stopping until he is stopped. I get that America doesn’t want this to be an American problem. But, well, it is.

Overall there is this divergence, where we Americans don’t see how far out of alignment we are with other wealthy, democratic nations because our cultural, media, and political leaders have realized they do better when we are isolated in an information environment entirely our own. The American island, on the map and in our minds.

We’ve coasted a long time on goodwill and assumptions. We bought that goodwill partly through winning the war against the Nazis — but mostly by winning the peace after the defeat of the Nazis. Our security guarantee of that peace and prosperity is why our closest cousins are too polite to point out that the baseline standard of what Americans believe about health care and climate science and the duties of democratic government and a dozen other things is — to be polite — unique. But we brought the guns, and let others lead those other fights. Every partnership has different strengths.

But then we let the crazy eating America bleed back out into the world while simultaneously deciding we weren’t interested in this job of setting the terms of global security. We’ve singlehandedly exposed all our weaknesses while taking away the thing that protected us from those who would exploit them. And it’s frickin’ madness — a flaming ball of sugar, every damn day, with all the little hands clapping.

There are many things that are or were unique to America that did make us great. But it’s not and if:then statement. There are equally as many things unique to America now that are making us weaker, more insecure, and destined for manipulation and domination by nations that will not give one-eighth of a sh*t about what happens to any of us.

In the same way Trump can spin all the stories together into one grand narrative of grievance, America is allowing its strengths — the things that protect all of us Americans in reality, not fairy tales — to be subsumed by its ravenous weaknesses. The surest litmus test I have of our clarity, or lack thereof, of this necessary separation and survival, remains how we imagine the task to save Ukraine, and the American toolbox we bring to bear in this task.

I don’t know why we want to keep hearing this story of our weakness being greater than our strength. It’s as much a myth as the world Putin describes as his own. There is no world where a vibrant, free America prospers after the subsumption of a vibrant, free Ukraine. None.

Anyone telling you this century is going to be easy if only we can take a thing from someone else is lying to you. Stop ooohing and aahing the flames, and put them out. Stop clapping for the show, and pick up a tool, and get to work.

—MM

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Please enjoy this audio version of my long-read, Thin blue-and-yellow line

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[Click here for an audio version of this long-read for Great Power supporters]

In the coming days, we’re going to hear a lot about lines between order and chaos. But a lot of these lines will not be between anything — they are just lines toward different types of accelerating chaos.

Chaos is disordered and in that sense it can be frightening — but it can also be an opportunity for redefining systems. This is why Russia stirs chaos everywhere and fosters a culture of risk-taking — because it is actually Russia that “doesn’t have the cards” and is left trying to conjure opportunities for itself from the ephemera. The team around the current American president understands chaos in much the same way — opportunity to advance what would otherwise be unachievable.

So I want us to step back for a second and think through some of the lines of conflict we are running up against, and some of the choices — opportunities — ahead of us. And ultimately, I want us remember how a particular phrase that haunts modern American security discourse, thin blue line, was originally written — what it meant about America, American values, and the absolutely vital role American power plays in holding back the darkness of a less free world that we cannot, for any price, allow ourselves to be subsumed by.

But to do that, we have to triangulate a bit in the swirling nexus of super-disruption. And in time and substance, a key node to examine is where Russian aggression, Donald Trump, and the system of technology-fueled false “realities” that so ably ensnare us collided.

* There’s only ever the same Kremlin, but we refuse to see it *

We have this joke, in my team, about how every new US administration comes into office, reads the binder on Russia, declares but hark! If only Russia realized that the benefit for them is to join the West, then all will be well!, and then wastes a lot of time trying to bait the Kremlin into being a better version of itself. There are sticks and carrots and outlandish gimmes. Eventually, everyone realizes that a better Kremlin was never a possibility — though Moscow has perfected the art of playing along. But the Russians are NPCs in the game, as the kids would say — non-player characters. There are only hard-coded behaviors and objectives to animate them.

Ultimately, it isn’t a very funny joke: the lack of escape velocity from this interminable cycle of lost time since Putin openly told us what was coming in 2007 has resulted in a lot of deaths that didn’t need to happen. The failure to confront, or even measurably slow, the Kremlin’s full-frontal autocratic insurgency against democratic nations — including invading neighbors, widening intelligence operations and assassinations abroad, designing 21st century state mercenaries, screwing around in elections, and deploying a range of sabotage and hybrid operations on land, at sea, in cyberspace, and in the air — has also contributed to the erosion of the democratic order.

For the Americans who really don’t love this “30,000 ft” democratic order phrase — Russia has contributed to the erosion of all the things that keep us relatively safe and prosperous, including the economic, alliance, and security systems that America built after WWII as giant feedback loops to give us disproportionate positive benefits from these systems for the inputs we provide. Said simply, by failing to defend the attacks on this bigger architecture that holds up the sky of the free world, we’re ceding advantage to our enemies, yes — but we’re also making it harder and harder for our democracy to deliver to Americans at home.

This erosion is sometimes hard to fully illustrate. But there are points in the recent American timeline worth revisiting so we might learn.

I think a lot of us spend *a lot* of time thinking about February 2022 and the lead up to Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine. The questions rattle around — why did we do so little if we “had all the intelligence,” why did we believe Moscow’s narrative so thoroughly, why do we still listen to the analysts and experts who got this so thoroughly wrong. Myself, I knew what the reported intel was saying; I knew how some of the allies I deeply respect were reading that intel; I knew how the Ukrainians were chewing on it.

And I wanted to laugh at how batsh*t it was.

Not because Moscow wouldn’t do it. Not because the Kremlin was “more logical” than to attempt such an invasion at all, let alone without sufficient troops. Certainly not because of the finger-wagging or threats of sanctions or whatever was echoed back from Washington. Not because any of these rational-ish things. But because if you had spent a single day in Kyiv after 2014 and talked to any random Ukrainian in a bar, you knew that (ok maybe not every, but certainly a f*ckload of) Ukrainians were going to channel their inner Riho Uhtegi and rain hell on any invader that tried to take to the capital. This should never, ever have been a question. Nonetheless, the US administration signaled to Ukraine that there were options for surrender in advance.

Now 30-odd years out from when the Soviet Union gasped its last, we’re still letting Moscow interpret history, people, and events for us like this is some great wisdom and not sheer, elegant, beautifully crafted deception designed to engage us and reel us in and preserve the primacy of the connection to Moscow over our own best interests and our connections with our now-allies from the better nations that escaped Moscow’s rule.

**Ignoring Russian bullsh*t has placed the American homeland at risk **

This haunts me more than I like to admit, having spent the last 17 years observing the casual way we endlessly make deals small and large with Moscow at the expense of others as if there is no cost to us. But developing those reflexes of not seeing the costs of enabling Russian bullsh*t also placed the American homeland at risk.

I want to be very clear that the current US administration shares more with past administrations’ views on Russia that the popular discourse is comfortable admitting. Obama’s reset policy was a catastrophe that his people have never had to account for because of the questions about Russian meddling to aid Trump’s election in 2016. This interference was a thing that absolutely did happen, and whether you believe it was decisive or not, that manipulation and complicity targeted both sides of the American spectrum highly effectively.

Stated more clearly: we all played the roles Moscow hoped we would play when they started pouring poison into our ears. We divided. We raged. We ran up against the line of conflict from both sides. We set it on fire again anew anytime President Trump handed classified info to the Russians in the Oval Office, or obsequiously denied Russia’s attack on America sitting next to Putin in Helsinki, or threatened Ukrainian survival for such a small and sad reason as wanting info on a rival’s son. There were other things happening in Europe at the time — the bolstering of US defensive posture, positive programs of support to Ukraine and other frontline nations — but this, by necessity, was under the radar, happening around the president rather than through him.

In the big narrative, there was only Trump’s complicity with the Kremlin, or the total non-existence of the “Russia hoax.” Running a circle around this useless conflict line was the truth: we are Russia’s stated enemy, they are at war with us, and ensuring that defending against Russian aggression was no longer a point of bipartisan national agreement in America but the thing that divides us most made every risk they took to attack us worth it — a thousand fold.

Russia knows we still don’t see the nature and importance of their war. And our American blindness is a key accelerant to all the other nasty sh*t that they are doing in the world. This includes their efforts to erase the Ukrainian nation from the face of the earth.

The Kremlin saw how easy it was to deepen the divisions among us. How easy it was to make us see, feel, believe each other as enemies. How easy it was to create that “permanently operating front” through American society, with both sides clawing up against the line of conflict to keep it raw and seeping.

The conspiracies about everything deepened, for everyone, and sometimes I really fear no Americans actually see reality anymore, or understand that the future of our nation is still that all of us have to be in here together, as we have always been — hopefully with a full panoply of qualified public servants in their jobs, and maybe even elected officials we chose for their abilities to govern fairly and with information, rather than their deftness with ragebaiting us into burning down the republic.

*** Democracy requires some shared reality ***

Part of the outcome of 2016 meant the integrity of our information environment was just absolutely shredded. Shared reality was receding in the distance. “Truth” became non-intersecting narratives. Any threads connecting them were being actively cut by the intersecting interests of foreign adversaries and domestic extremists.

This warping of reality is the death of democracy.

Institutions can function, elections can be held, the garbage can be picked up, the motions of functional society can all be observed — but sane and ordinary people can fall down a narrative rabbit hole and spin further and further from making decisions that improve their lives or protect their own interests when the information that informs all the actions they take and how they judge the actions of others is now just a bucket of slop that too much “real” media wastes time slopping around even more for the rage clicks.

With our lack of defenses, our enemies would frankly be remiss in failing to exploit this tool against us.

And we — ourselves, our leaders, our defenders — would be remiss for not doing everything we can as individuals, institutions, and society to reestablish unwarped reality.

We’ve passed a dozen crisis points where we Americans had possibilities to reforge a common hold on something real. On January 6th, we almost made it. The abject horror of the looting of our Capitol by Americans stirred to bloodlust over whatever imagined phantasms veered our divergent realities back toward each other, so close, a crash, a rebound, then a fingertip away. But the deceptive gossamer across which we glanced each other was hardy stuff; before we could break through, the erasure of the insurrection was fast underway.

And that leaves me to imagine — to hope — that maybe the only real way back cannot be found in these domestics confrontations, but in correcting the origin point from which this newfound violent amplitude leapt.

And that is the moment we were attacked by an adversary — and failed to meet the challenge. Acknowledging Russia is our enemy in this spectral war, and defeating them first, may be the clearest way to defeat all the axis powers of this existential conflict.

**** Is it a thin blue line between order and chaos — or a blue and yellow one? ****

That leaves the battlefield between American reality and disreality not only on American streets — but in Ukraine. In defeating Russia — Russian lies, Russian ambitions, Russian tactics — in Ukraine. Not because defeating Russia will defeat every American bogeyman or conspiracy — but because saving Ukraine holds up the sky a little longer, inspiring more of our better angels to return to the scene. Having to commit the resources to save a brave, inspiring, good-natured, innovative nation — with the population, army, industry, and mindset to rebalance the scales of the collective west against the rising autocrats — could help us rebalance at home. They are the leading defenders of the values we claim as our historical legacy.

The domains that matter most for the future of the free world as we understand it must be won in Ukraine. Reinforced international humanitarian law and a centennial refresher that might does not make right; renewed commitment to the idea that every individual matters, has potential, has value, deserves opportunity; reborn commitment to representative government, and ensuring democracies can adapt to meet the challenges of the modern day — all of this can be delivered by defeating Russia in Ukraine, putting the Kremlin on trial for its crimes, and rebuilding a strong Ukraine integrated into our feedback loop architecture. It elevates the problems facing Americans to the challenges facing all of the free world, and gives us greater space and resources to find ways to deliver solutions with a commonality of purpose instead of homestead pitchforks and torches.

I always believe America is best at finding itself when it has to step outside its door. That who we are in the world and who we are at home are inextricably linked. It’s hard to see from the confines of our American island — like the Earth itself, maybe you have to travel all the way to the moon to appreciate its beauty and fragility and uniqueness.

***

At this point, some of you will definitely call bullsh*t and run off to tilt some other windmill. If that’s you, I wish you luck. But for the rest of you — I think maybe you understand the merit of trying to win the big fight instead of 20,000 small ones. The small ones remain important and they won’t all go away — but some of them at least will be overtaken by events, dimmed, burn less brightly long enough for us to regain sight of the North Star. This is time we need, breath we need. To remember that more perfect union we used to aspire toward instead of condemn.

Now, for those willing to give the Hail Mary a go, there’s one main roadblock: Donald Trump’s preoccupation with Moscow, and his seeming inability to accept that they hate him just as much as they disdain every other American.

***** Trump put the Trump in Trump-Russia all by himself *****

For forty years, President Trump has been fixated on Russia. Making a deal with Russia, reaping the riches of Russia, knowing the power of the most powerful in truly closed systems like Russia. He has pursued this across space and time. There could be a lot of reasons for this — maybe because of his Slavic wives, maybe because it used to be the forbidden kingdom, maybe he just got the idea in his head one day — who knows. But starting in the ‘80s, he pursued Russia. He visited the Soviet Union. He sent his kids to Moscow to try to find business partners. He did his stupid beauty pageant in Russia. There’s a trail of outreach to Russia and from Russia. But absolutely nothing to show for it in Russia.

But for all these decades, Trump kept pushing, and Russia kept pulling those strings. Because this is how it works with Moscow — once they know you’ll do things for them — want something from them — they never have to give you anything, they just keep you on the hook. And then, while they are jerking you around on the big peace deal you want, they call each other and laugh about it on the phone until they cry, and this is intercepted by allied signals intelligence because they absolutely want you to hear it.

A poignant big-stakes example of this can seen unfolding across the Black Sea from Ukraine in Georgia, where Russian assets and agents helped a Russian-made oligarch win the election in 2012 — and they’ve never given him a day off since. Sure, the guy got to move a bunch of his money out of Russia, and has significantly expanded that wealth with all his preferential “co-investments” in Georgia while he’s kept control of the country from the shadows. But he’s had a constant task list — to sabotage Georgian democracy, to allay any possibility of progress toward Europe and NATO, to ignore the war in Ukraine despite Russia’s continuing occupation of 20 percent of Georgian territory, to keep the doors open for “troublesome” Russians fleeing Russia, and to help Moscow evade sanctions and keep its relations with Iran wide open. These days he’s managing widespread popular protests against allegedly fraudulent elections, arresting political opposition and dialing the violence up and down to manage escalation without outside attention. There’s no rest for those who did Moscow a solid, even those who just want to retreat to their hilltop fortress and watch their sharks swim around. That isn’t ever how it works. The second you stop, there’ll just be someone new — like those captive sharks that keep dying in the tank when they forget to keep swimming.

That Russia is never going to give him what he wants is a lesson Trump has never learned, or does not care to. Returning to the presidency, what he wanted was an easy peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, which he thought he could get because he was a nice guy to one side and willing to strong-arm the other. Since the election, Moscow has done everything possible to signal they have no interest in stopping killing Ukrainians — including just saying it out loud repeatedly. Nonetheless the rollercoaster of goodies and outreach the White House has dangled for Russia in past months is hard to keep track of. Maybe Russia should be invited to the NATO Summit. Maybe Russia should be welcomed back to G8. It seems at least possible that Trump’s Middle East tour was meant to culminate in Istanbul to meet Putin — if the Russian president had bothered to show up for the peace talks Trump pushed for.

While other world leaders remain reluctant to even call Putin, Trump has an open line for him — as did Elon Musk, whose father is currently in Moscow to speak at a conference with the Kremlin’s favorite anti-western ideologues who have defined the whole “America is the enemy of Russia” thing for a new generation. Trump’s social media account did finally post a warning about Russia’s accelerated attacks on Ukrainian civilians since the supposed peace process started, but the blurted — “Vladimir, STOP!” — fell on deaf ears, especially when no actions from the White House followed. Trump’s allies in the Senate tried to give him an out by putting together an airtight package of stronger sanctions against Moscow — and Trump asked them to water it down. After telling Ukraine repeatedly they had no choice but to do it on their own — including diverting promised military aid for Ukrainian air defense to (supposedly) the Middle East — Trump said Ukrainians deserved whatever pain Russia would bring to them after their brilliant drone attack on Russian strategic bombers.

This list of Trump’s preferential bias toward Moscow in the last months is nowhere near complete — and nonetheless the picture is clear. As in 2016, rather that being angry that Russia tried to weaken his position and respond with strength against Moscow on behalf of his nation, Trump chose to wave his little hat and deliver a sheepish smile. Vladimir, here awaiting your call. <<insert call-me ring-a-ding hand gesture>>

It doesn’t make any sense — especially not for the current president. Except — except — this is just the thing he has worked toward for so bloody long.

****** All the men around the stupidly big tables ******

Sometimes people have a hard time understanding Trump’s odd obsequiousness in person with Putin — the same way it was very strange to watch him meekly do TV interviews as the junior partner to Elon Musk. But this dynamic is no surprise if you’ve ever seen the interactions between real oligarchs, which is a hierarchy dictated entirely by who has the most money, because you got that money in absolutely brutal ways — and every oligarch in the room knows exactly where they fit in that ranking. It’s why Putin famously made the show of strength, when he called the oligarchs in to heel, of making Oleg Deripaska — then rumored to be the richest man in Russia — get up and walk the length of the table in front of all the other oligarchs to sign the agreement he had not yet signed, and then do it again to return Putin’s pen. It was signaling about who the richest man in the room was, and who would be controlling the hierarchy of how wealth flowed from now on. And the hierarchy has remained the same ever since.

The American rich guy hierarchy is maybe less lethal, but the same reflexes of known rank exist. There’s an aspect of this in how Trump acts with Putin, an artifact from those decades working toward Russia.

The long table Trump now lords over, if the rift with Musk is real and continues, is at least one where he acknowledges he holds the most powerful office in the world. And if he can put one upstart gazillionaire in his place, why not another one? Maybe he will learn to appreciate the joy of upsetting the oligarch pecking order as much as he sparks joy from disrupting everything else.

But now we’ve arrived at present day — as the White House endeavors to create the conditions to deploy American soldiers into American streets, as the sense that violence has become inevitable is fanned, as the operations must be conducted to populate the narrative — an art form in which the Kremlin holds most of the awards. But after 2017, the American conspiracies became the justification for the hearings and investigations, and then the justification for new laws and executive orders, and now we’re diverting billions from the defense budget to fight an alleged invasion that isn’t.

The hyper-masculinity vibe of this administration is so jarring if you don’t inhabit that narrative dimension — but it makes perfect sense to those immersed in the brocaster jingoism of toughness and misogyny and supplement powders and “enhancements.” It also makes sense that this try-hard masculinity thus seeks to test itself against phantoms conjured by the bullsh*t narrative they have hawked.

There was never an invasion, and there was never an army of enemies in America. There is a problem with our immigration system that Americans want solved. But INVADERS was the word used quite deliberately to lay the groundwork for the test of constitutional powers that is underway. Only for those who require this narrative to be real is any of this tough or great and not merely the display of a bunch of men who either didn’t ever serve or take glee in pardoning war criminals wanting to feel whats it like to hold the lives of others in their hands.

It starts to feel like a strange dystopian set piece, split screens of the president getting air kisses from UFC fighters while his clash of narratives sets fires in LA — reminiscent somehow of Chechen warlord (and child cage fight enthusiast) Ramzan Kadyrov sending his fighters to do carnage in the early days of 2022.

Laughing it up with whichever cabinet members the sun shines on that day while your edicts to unleash the US military into American cities are published is such a jarring misalignment of how most Americans and the military both feel about this situation. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one to recall the famous line from Commander Adama in Battlestar Galactica (which remains a brilliant commentary on civil-military affairs in times of crisis):

“There's a reason that you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

******* the thin blue line isn’t what you think *******

A more rational administration that didn’t live in its own psyop box — amped up on adrenaline and in the midst of some dumb deathmatch with the factionalizing broligarchy — would simply look around, realize the ability of these methods to deliver real criminal migrants into custody was minimal, and weigh that the reaction from the public meant they had to adapt their means. If you’re simply arresting migrants who are reporting in for appointments and court dates, do it with uniformed officers who can show their faces and calmly explain procedures. There’s no need to raid an elementary school graduation in full tactical kit. Anyone who will argue this mismatch of means and ends is warranted is only in it for the narrative, and not at all for the preservation of the constitution, the rule of law, or the fine line of trust between law enforcement and the people that allows free society to function.

That fine line of trust is precisely the opposite of what the thin blue line ideology has come to represent. Its historical usage in the context of police has been widely documented. Sometimes it has been used in a more positive connotation, as a phrase of support for the enormously difficult work that many community police officers face, especially as they become the Swiss Army knife for a wide range of community problems that an abhorrence for social support spending has left them to handle. With permissive American gun laws, our police face serious risks in unpredictable situations. We all know that is undeniable.

But the other application of thin blue line has always been a more militant definition. At its core is the premise that it is only a small group of law enforcement officers that keeps chaos from overwhelming society. And while our police have every right to feel that way sometimes, this idea is, in a functioning democratic society, a lie. It’s society itself that preserves order in most instances, because the deal we make to live in societies is that we give up certain absolute freedoms in exchange for not having to do everything ourselves to survive.

This is the rule of law — ordinary folk upholding the rules of society because they know it is a better and safer way to live in exchange for the benefits of the system. The police are just there for the anomalous events. When the mindset of policing is us-or-them, force-or-darkness — it’s a false choice that can and has eroded trust with society. Combine that with the post-9/11 up-armorment of police forces and the heyday of defense industries selling machines and weapons of war and enemy surveillance to police the domestic population — and, well, that Adama line is getting blurred in purpose and mindset. Are the people who you serve, or are they the enemy.

Putin makes a similar argument about how the Russian security state “preserves order” for the population — only I doubt blue would be the color he would pick for the line, and the sacrificed freedoms are deep and vast. “Order” was how he erased even the seeds of a representative Russia, elevating the footmen of his thin KGB line to a stranglehold of the economy, speech, media, power, and the ability to wield state violence for control of absolutely everything. I don’t think that is the vision most Americans have for their nation — or at least, I really hope not.

The clarity to find just order at home, the clarity to build just order abroad — and here we are again, back to the idea that the two are linked for America.

And for this, I will just give you the original usage of thin blue line — which was in a poem by N.D. Anderson written more than a century ago, about the blue uniforms and unique purpose of the American army. It’s better if you just read it for yourself:

The thin blue line was about war, just war in the name of what is right. American soldiers — then in blue — fought for right not might and prevailed against oppression, and the poem is a warning that they must do everything in their power to preserve this tradition and not be corrupted by those who would use them for ill purpose.

Maybe America always feels it walks a thin line between order and chaos, between freedom and oppression, between those who would preserve the rights of others and those who would take them away. Our history on these lines has been messy, and often not at all glorious — but it has maintained directionality toward the more perfect union of imperfect parts. And that’s the idea of democracy — that the whole is strong and resilient even when everything underneath is always churn.

We Americans have at times found reflection and inspiration for that struggle at home in the more black-and-white battles of defending these ideas in the world. Likewise, when we have gotten them really wrong in the world, it feeds back into how we are getting them wrong at home. This spiritual linkage of the America apart and the America destined to lead is what makes us unique in our own core mythology. It’s what helps to give us purpose and knits our narratives together enough that they run parallel if never conjoin.

We’ve lost sight of even our most basic common purpose and common narrative at a time when the blue American line is so needed out there in the world — and possibly even more so, the blue-and-yellow line. Russia is the NPC, technology-fueled disreality the accelerant — and Donald Trump could just be the chaos or he could embrace the opportunity. But that means confronting Russia, and picking the right side of the right line. The lines his administration keeps drawing through America, he can only ever be on the wrong side of — an American Putin of a similarly decaying empire rotted by false narratives from which there are no escape.

In the lie of Putin and Russia, that he is great and Russia untouchable, maybe you can tell yourself this is something to work toward. But in the reality, there’s just a rich autocrat who drives 100 mph from his bunker to the Kremlin because he is afraid of his own people as much as Ukrainian drones. Any American president should want more than this smallness.

Quite simply, the generational line between order and chaos, freedom and oppression, is in Ukraine if Donald Trump wants to find it. And as an agent of chaos, he would likely find deep joy in how absolutely pissed off everyone would be if he ends up being the savior of the free world instead of its Stay Puft marshmallow man.

There, on the blue and yellow line, is a chance for real greatness, and a chance — just a chance — to win the chaos, and for the blue American line to stand for what it once did again.

— MM

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There’s a Japanese manga/anime series, Berserk, that is particularly popular among younger members of the Ukrainian armed forces. Like all such things, the plot is complex, but the basics are pretty straightforward: a warrior, changed by incalculable loss, continues to fight against the idea of fate, or that he can’t shape his own destiny against much greater forces.

It makes sense that this subject matter resonates with young people fighting for their own survival and survival of their nation — a task which just about everyone who isn’t Ukrainian is constantly telling them is impossible. But what’s interesting to me is the first volume, set in medieval Europe, was written in 1989. It doesn’t take long to see the clear influences from the end days of the Cold War, echoing fears of nuclear annihilation, and the iconic pop anti-heroes of the ‘80s — Mad Max, Kaneda (from Akira), Conan, even the Highlander. Existential survival epics playing out across wasted landscapes. Things are breaking down. Something has been lost. The time and context isn’t clear. There is just survival — and the men who achieve those goals by doing horrific and brutal things for the right reasons.

Ukraine’s youngest soldiers don’t remember the Soviet Union, or the days when its captive nations finally tore it apart, or the eeriness of the 1980s and how it evolved into the frenetic uncertainty of the 1990s. They don’t remember, but they understand it anyway. The voices of those times speak to them as they fight their own existential war. Their destiny is their own to forge, even when the cost is dear.

The cost, the journey, and the destination are constantly on the mind of every Ukrainian in this war. The silent tallying of resources — what is needed, what is there, what is left, what will be after — is a cadence to their thoughts. And this cadence becomes the heartbeat of Ukrainian operational art.

Operational art is a military term everyone defines a vaguely different way. But essentially, it’s how you decide to connect tactics to strategy, a kind of “cognitive approach” to ensuring your tactical execution will lead to the strategic objective. Operational “art” because there’s never really one way to do that — it’s an inherently creative and adaptive process for commanders. Better art can yield huge advantages in the deployment of resources.

The US military seems to spend an inordinate amount of wordage arguing about what the definition of operational art actually is, primarily in order to argue we need to completely redefine it. This haggling over definitions is meant to provide some deeper answer to the question of why it is that our tactically-sound modern wars are failing to achieve our stated strategic objectives. Something has been lost. Very few people would define where we ended up in Iraq or Afghanistan as any kind of art, especially the men and women who fought in those wars.

But it was the operational art of Ukraine’s June 1st Pavutyna (spiderweb) operation — which used small drones to hit Russian airbases — that made the strategic outcome so satisfying, and which reminds us that Ukraine is operating cognitively at a different level than other modern militaries.

By now you know the basics of Pavutyna. Over the course of 18 months — as Russian bombers continued to play an integral role in the daily bombing of Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure, and as Ukraine was still denied deep-strike weapons that might reach the airfields those bombers launch from — Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) planned and executed a drone strike on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet that was launched from within Russian territory. They studied the aircraft in the national Air Force museum to determine where targeted explosive charges could be most effective at disabling the bombers. They figured out how to do that with small drones, which Ukraine now manufactures itself and the use of which can’t be constrained by foreign (primarily American) providers. They figured out how to run those drones through the Russian mobile network so they could do it from far beyond the range of the drones themselves. They programmed back-up AI targeting systems, just in case.

Then small FPV drones strapped with explosive were smuggled into Russia, as were small prefab wooden structures with secret compartments under their rooves. The drones were hidden in the structures under launch doors that could be remotely opened. The structures were placed on trucks, and drivers were hired to deliver them to locations near Moscow, near the Arctic Circle, and all the way in Siberia just north of Mongolia. En route, the drivers report receiving messages to divert to specific locations — cafes, gas stations, etc — near five strategic airfields. Then the rooves opened and the drones were activated one at a time and piloted to their targets.

Ukraine says 41 aircraft were hit, including strategic bombers and an A-50 (AWAC-type/early warning and control aircraft). The estimated losses would tally $7 billion. Russians officials of course say the planes were out to lunch at the time of the attack. But so far some 13 of those strikes have been confirmed by satellite photos of two bases (the others were under clouds). Whether the number is 13 or 41, it’s a significant loss for Russia, which hasn’t built bombers or AWACs since the early 1990s. It can’t buy them. They can’t be replaced. And while they have mostly been using them to kill Ukrainian civilians (and harass our Japanese allies in the east), they are an integral part of Russia’s strategic nuclear capabilities and strategic flexibility. Now there’s a lot of smoldering parking slots on the tarmac for a nation that uses nuclear threats to control escalation at least once a month.

Pavutyna was Ukraine’s latest act of existential defiance. There was an elegance, a brilliance, to this necessary drone operation which will be the stuff of legend for armies, special operators, intelligence organizations, and guerrilla fighters for generations to come.

Many bombers that haunted Ukrainian skies are no more. In the most straightforward sense, the tactical means (drone strikes delivered from covert launch vehicles) achieved the strategic ends (less bombers).

But beyond the unfathomable technical work and sensitivity of planning a covert operation on enemy territory, how the strategic objective was met really, deeply matters and achieves secondary effects that contribute to the overall strategic objectives for Ukraine in this war. This is the “art.”

As always, a component of the Ukrainian art is about the morale of its own population — the most vital asset in any war on your own territory — and then the rest is half about Russia and half about the allies. After months of lazy “Russian victory is inevitable” commentary that has been unfortunately amplified by a US administration focused on making a “deal,” operation pavutyna provided a narrative reset on the war for Ukraine and its partners.

But for Ukraine and the designers of this operation, the targeting was quite specific.

First, as mentioned, these are the bombers that have been used to launch strikes on Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure from beyond the range of Ukraine’s defenses. Ukraine continually asked for capabilities to strike the airfields these attacks are launched from, and got a lot of squishy responses in return. In the days before the June 1 strike, Russia was sending hundreds of drones and missiles into Ukrainian skies. Shooting down (or diverting with electronic warfare) hundreds of targets a day versus striking the origin points of those attacks was always bad resource math. It befuddled Ukrainians that so many outside partners seemed to think it was sustainable.

Second, June 1, 1996 was the date of removal of the last nuclear warhead that Ukraine agreed to “return” to Russia under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum — an agreement which Ukraine lived up to the terms of, but which Russia and the western signatories promising security guarantees to Ukraine have not.

Third, at least some of the aging strategic bombers hit by Ukrainian drones were part of the same strategic arsenal that Ukraine had to “return.”

Finally, Russia keeps pulling those nuclear blackmail strings and getting the predictable responses from the Western partners that it needs to constrain Ukraine to a theory of victory that amounts to dying less in the meatgrinder than your aggressor if you can. That nuclear flexibility just took a hit. Ukraine continues to pursue a theory of victory that is not through the meatgrinder.

We left Ukraine out in the cold on this one — so they figured out how to deal with it themselves. They did it in a way to send a message. It’s a moment of poetry that adds purpose and meaning to necessary military actions — aka art.

Shaking us up a bit is also important. The default western mindset on Russia is a bit like that fancy slime that kids are obsessed with these days — you can pull it and smash it and stretch it to new limits, sometimes it sparkles and exudes soothing odors, but the second the pressure is off, it starts oozing back to its original form of wanting calm and stable relations with a Moscow that has no interest in any such thing. Periodically, our imagination has to be re-expanded, and the Ukrainians have been particularly good at this, forcing us to reimagine what is possible, forcing us to re-examine assumptions about Moscow, and forcing us to understand that in a war of endurance and adaptation, nothing is inevitable.

Ukraine has consistently targeted assets and capabilities in Russia that are essential to Moscow’s ability to make war on Ukraine, but which Ukraine’s network of allies have been reluctant to target directly — with sanctions or with weapons. For example, despite sanctions and other financial measures, Russia continues to pay for a chunk of its war machine with blackmarket oil revenues and Europe’s addiction to Russian energy. So Ukraine started targeting drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and terminals. The last US administration was famously unhappy about this, but for Ukraine this was just simple math and a legitimate military target. Their top strategic aims — that Russia be defeated/no longer able to continue the conduct of its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, that Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty be restored, that all Ukrainian prisoners and stolen children be returned — are tactically aided by the weakening of key economic sectors, as well as the psychological impact of Ukraine being able to hit infrastructure inside Russia that is critical to the wartime economy.

Finally, then, there’s the part targeting the Russian mindset — the art of bringing fear and paranoia to Russia about its own security, the art of showing Russians they can’t live blissfully unaware of the slaughter of Ukrainians, the art of demonstrating that morale, will, and adaptability are assets on Ukraine’s balance sheet that Russia can never fully predict or account for. No, this drone strike won’t stop the war. But it took away a piece of the Soviet machinery that Moscow relies on. Unlike how they view the lives of their soldiers and conscripts, the Kremlin lost something it knows is irreplaceable.

Another secondary effect of pavutyna accepts the reality of the situation under the new US administration, evaluating it as opportunity and not just as loss. Before, Ukraine was always mindful of the rules of engagement their American counterparts applied, because America was keeping the coalition that supported Ukraine together, and Ukraine needed that coalition. But that’s changed a lot in four months. If the US isn’t invested in Ukrainian military support anymore, then Ukraine isn’t invested in observing the American constraints, either. And the jarring messaging from the administration has galvanized Europe, which now speaks much more openly of Ukraine as a definite part of Europe.

It isn’t 2022 anymore. Ukraine is confident in its ability to wage this war, even if it would still prefer that outside support make the costs for them less human, and it listens to its own counsel more and more as it finds itself beyond the edge of most Western military thinking. You can’t deal with an attacking navy without your own navy — well, Ukraine sank the Black Sea fleet. You can’t break Russian sanctuary without starting WWIII — well, Ukraine did that too.

Listening to some of the tortured commentary on the war in Ukraine — and the more recent statements from some of our new Pentagon officials — too many people are still seeing the wrong lessons from Ukraine. The lesson, as Ukraine well knows, is not “well now we can do everything with drones and robots and we don’t need armor and planes and ships anymore.” We still need armor and planes and ships — in fact, we need a lot more of all that than we have, and especially we need stockpiles of munitions and missiles that far exceed what we used to imagine.

As a Ukrainian involved in the strike planning told me: “[These Russian bombers] are just launchers, it doesn’t matter. [The United States] invests zillions in new platforms without having any missiles for them to launch.” He’s not wrong in the basic assessment. American missiles are exceedingly effective — and exceedingly expensive. Patriot missiles, ATACMs and other rockets for HIMARS, pretty much any surface-to-air or air-to-air missile that can be used for air defense — these are in high demand by us, by our allies, and absolutely by Ukraine. We don’t make enough. The stockpiles didn’t stand up to the needs of supporting Ukrainian defense against Russia’s illegal war of aggression, the joint NATO mission in the Red Sea, the varying questionable requests we get from Middle Eastern interests, and their regular deployment in defense of US and allied assets. The last US administration was far too slow in ordering more from manufacturers, and even then far too conservative in their estimations. We still aren’t making enough.

But we must account for the fact that those very expensive things can be destroyed by other things that are not expensive — that wealth and elaborate engineering and not the only ways to bridge gaps in capabilities. And we must account for the critical need for an adaptive mindset that can be quicker and more creative in conflict — above or below the threshold of hot wars.

For much of the conduct of the war, the United States of America was constraining the way Ukrainian brought the war to Russia — because we have a warped understanding of Moscow, because we are afraid of a Moscow that isn’t real — and the Ukrainians largely had to follow these constraints because they needed to keep America on-side to keep the broader coalition of support together, and they needed that support.

But now, America has signaled it’s done. It’s still trying to meddle in a set of negotiations that also are not real in order to try to get a slice of Ukraine when it survives, but there’s been no talk about additional military support for Ukraine or working with the coalition to drum up more support. Thankfully the non-American parts of this coalition, including our NATO allies and other American treaty allies in Asia, have continued to put out new support packages. But America stamping around Europe asking “can’t someone else do it?” has had this outcome. Ukraine has different choices, harder choices, freer choices maybe — and it will take them. Because it has no other choice but continuing to make its tactical possibilities achieve strategic success.

Russia has been a bogeyman for such a long time. But once the bogeyman is in the house, you can hide under the bed and imagine how much worse it might be, or you can smash a vase into its head and see if it bleeds like the rest of us.

Turns out Russia bleeds.

Young Ukrainians seek inspiration in this fantasy of a lone manga warrior fighting armies and the “godhand” for survival against the odds — but the inverse of this is grit in the gears of strategic thinking for big military powers like Russia and China and the United States. You start to think your out-sized capabilities are determinative in any conflict, and then some kids on dirt-bikes or a handful of Ukrainians with toy drones show you up.

Ukrainians are amazing in every definition of that word — and every damn day we should consider ourselves lucky that this brave, innovative, persistent, dedicated nation is fighting this war to cripple one of the world’s nominal great military powers to be a free, democratic nation that’s on our team (well, if America decides to stay on the team).

A nation absolutely outmatched on every spreadsheet can design a theory of victory that defies every big army conception of how this stuff works. Ukraine used 117 drones — which themselves cost about $58,500 — to blow up or at least damage billions of dollars of irreplaceable strategic assets across a swath of territory that spans almost 4000 miles. Ukraine can build more than 6500 new drones tomorrow — in one day. Russia can’t build or buy a new bomber for any amount of money in a reasonable period of time because since 1991 its main superpower has been its smoke and mirrors.

The American behemoth may not be as rusty, but we have plenty of dust — or perhaps, cobwebs — to shake off, and, like the Russians, it’s best to learn the lesson now about not making strategic decisions based on your own propaganda narrative. The supposed air defense “golden dome,” for example — which to be clear everyone involved knows will not work — will be a fine enterprise to launder billions of dollars to American defense contractors who will happily take that money to make elaborately expensive partial solutions to expensive imaginary problems. But meanwhile, any “Chinese student” can fly an FPV drone over a US military base and we’re pretty chillax about it.

Yes, guerrilla warfare has always been guerrilla warfare, and asymmetric forces including terrorists, insurgents, special operators, and freedom fighters have always been able to use their smallness and decentralization to trip up large powers and somewhat equalize aspects of lethality. But this one’s a little different. It’s about control and risk and what you are willing to risk. And we aren’t. And someone else will.

Russia’s great expanse of territory, famously spanning nine time zones, did not protect its assets from deep strikes by an adversary with limited long range capabilities and air power. And we should get used to understanding our American island may be similarly open — especially if you decide to be in the business of alienating nations instead of cultivating alliances and systems that bring order.

What Ukraine has shown us is not that drones work, or that betting against Ukrainians was dumb, or that Moscow is as hollow as a maskirovka tank. The unnecessarily costly way we have made Ukraine fight to survive has been absolutely disruptive to how wars work — and also to the understanding of what power is in times of war and peace. What Ukraine has shown us is we don’t think right about war — strategically, operationally, and tactically — which means we don’t think right about power. The truth of this is right before our eyes.

Some people have been trying to reckon with this spiritual — as the Russians would define it — aspect of power. And some people are still trying to make a spreadsheet that will explain it in a way that the AI can conjure an answer to.

But the post-WWII order is done. There is no way back, only through. Ukrainian victory remains the shortest and most certain way through this transition in which the free world survives — renewed, reinvigorated, with a new story of victory to carry us on the way — on the other side. The adversaries of democracies understand this. The last American administration did not. The current American administration seems set on a strategy of American irrelevance — can’t someone else do it? Of allowing American futures to be defined by other nations. But — 117 toy drones later — we need to open our eyes about what the ongoing success of the American project will take before that opportunity is lost. America is a global power. And we need to act like it at home and abroad.

We gave the Ukrainians no choice but to redefine everything to survive. As on day one of the full-scale invasion, we told ourselves they couldn’t. But they have.

In this fundamental miscalculation, we also changed the rules for ourselves. And we have not lived up to the challenge. We’re sliding down the sand dune in the opposite direction, with leaders who think push-ups and tweets are a path to great power. The focus on alleged internal enemies — on the propaganda narrative — is a missed opportunity to decapitate a real strategic enemy of the nation and again help dictate the terms of the era that follows. Our commitment to doing this to win WWII and win the peace after gave us 80 years of untold prosperity and growth. We don’t know those stories or that lesson anymore. We desperately need to remember.

Where is our theory of victory? Where is the operational art that will define the tactics, operations, and strategic goals for American greatness in this century? Why do our leaders refuse to choose the most certain opportunity we have to keep our dominating influence in the global order?

Maybe we have no choice but to redefine modern democracies to survive. We tell ourselves we can’t, but maybe we have to anyway.

We don’t have a hero — or even an anti-hero — to guide us. Ukrainian operational art is defined by its need for survival and its belief that its salvation can bolster the strength of the free world. There is a lot of inspiration that we should take from this, a lot of gratitude we should have, and a lot of will we need to muster for what is coming.

—MM

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I met up with some friends from the before times — from a core group of conservative think tankers that was together in the Iraq war days. Of the original group, many went on to Hill and government jobs, joined various military reserves forces, maybe then on to foundations or corporations, though some are still/back in think tanks — in short, a typical DC policy career cross section, though the DC we “grew up” in is no more. I’m the anomaly in the group.

Early February found a few of us in this wonderful DC dive bar in the middle of nowhere in northeast — it’s somehow under a bridge and next to the railroad tracks, I think it’s an abandoned railway brakemen hall, it has all the right vibes. The lights are pink. The tables and chairs are probably stolen from a church bingo hall. The walls are covered in obliquely pornographic references unique to DC. The only food is hot dogs.

Turns out it’s trivia night, so the place is swarming with gaggles of DC people trying to pretend they are too low key even to be hipsters, when they are all DC adjacent people as it is a company town. One of trivia teams was named “the Chiefs can still win if Mike Pence has the courage” — a reference to the Super Bowl, January 6th, and how deep we all are in the nonsense of living in DC. Another team was probably fired federal workers looking for jobs.

The trivia goes on and on around us. Most of the categories are political or trolling. The host periodically hands out consolation prizes, which means a team gets a run on a homemade “plinko” board — you drop a disc down a pegged board and it bounces into a slot at the bottom to decide the prize, and the prizes are weird things from the weird bar. The worst of which by far is the pickled eggs — they seem to be homemade in assorted flavors, all of which are absolutely vile, and they sit in giant jars behind the bar like collected eyeballs, waiting to be splonked out into a paper tray.

There is something hauntingly thunderdome-esque about packs of anti-hipsters chanting PICKLED EGG and the absurdity of everything relating to trivia night while we blow up our own country for the lulz.

It had just then begun. It’s totally surreal. But this is everything now. Everyone at the table with me is just continuing on in writing books and disbursing grants and what have you.

But the leopards are going to eat all of the faces and then each other and then there will be a nuclear accident (or whatever) and everyone will still be cheering because Americans didn’t elect a government, they elected a carnival of cruelty and sadism and they still believe this makes them good people, because they have been willingly convinced that being good people means taking care only of your own — but mostly only of yourself.

When you’re in it for the show, you keep cheering. It is, after all, a show.

Maybe at first you weren’t cheering for the cruelty but for the “reforms” — but then you realize you were right next to those other people and cheering for the cruelty too and then you’re in it so deep — and this has been Trump since the beginning. He captures better inclinations into the absurdity. Then you’re there already so you want the absurdity to be right. A former ideologue in a cabinet position subverted by the capture. A senator who was probably only ever in it for the power and thus happy to aid the subversion — welcome highly sus people to your new life in US intelligence. Each character arc ends the same but everyone gets to be the hero of their own play.

Everyone is chanting PICKLED EGG because now they want you to get one. This didn’t used to be who we were as a people, but for now we are.

The Trump administration will probably lose every court case and they have already ignored most court orders and they have declared the president alone gets to interpret what the laws really say. He’s already issued questionable orders to the military, which they have followed (on domestic affairs). No one even has time to keep track.

They are making the typical calculation that if you just keep going, rules can’t contain you and doubly true when you are tearing down the system meant to contain and you already have the alternative power structures — the people with the money— on board.

It’s nearing the end of the republic but we’re cheering for the pickled egg.

There’s nothing novel in this realization that this is how a country descends into (hopefully momentary) madness — but we’re further down the pathway than we thought we were. The interruption of the Trump presidencies into two actually made the potential for the damage he can do or that can be done in his name tenfold. It was like giving the Russians time to recover after invading Georgia. There was reflection, planning, network building, and a lot of it was opaque. People simply didn’t have the right targeting to even begin to collect information about these processes — it was all a closed loop into itself. Everyone projecting what the second Trump administration would be was also merely a hero of their own play. And what’s going to happen is some of the fever dreams are going to be made real — by accident or because why not or because the containment has failed — and all around us this show is enabling the others in the world who believe only in the cynicism and transactionalism, and a lot of people are going to die, and that will be on America if we don’t pull out of the dive. But the decade of deep information manipulation has left us a nation of cripples on our own psychological defense, and we literally see nothing as it actually is. And this madness is so terrifying, no one with any real power is willing to intervene. Yet.

Completely reasonable people will tell you the mistake was Wilsonian thinking, America ever intervening abroad, and Trump is the one with the courage to undo a century of American madness and overreach. “The world safe for democracy” was a mass hoax/delusion that always worked against true American interests because [insert revisionist history lesson here — have seen several that are quite specific but it’s like science fiction]. This is not the main point of what the administration is doing — but it’s found a place there to fester. It suits the desire to rewrite the rules. It isn’t really about isolationism either. Because when we go down, absolutely everyone is coming down the gravity well behind us.

You know as well as I do that the thing about the fever dreams — the halls of mirrors — is they can break, dispel, so fast in the end. But they can last for decades. As a nation we don’t have the tools to reckon with what we might have done before that break. So I hope it’s before the point of unthinkability.

What can you do? Be better. Be sane. Outside American shores, guide with rationality and humanity. Remind us who we were and need to be. Tell us the stories we stopped telling ourselves. Don’t believe that participating in the show is going to result in anything to your benefit. Never let the pressure dynamics diminish you into only defending your own. Be better. Be bigger. Show us what strength really is. Be a family we can easily rejoin when we decide the show is over. Be a framework where the pieces that will continue on the right path can still engage. When the test comes, don’t fail it — even though this isn’t fair of us to ask. That you do what we could not.

There is now a lot of discussion about revitalizing the tools we bring against the adversary. But what is the adversary now. What is deterrence now. Where do those tools need to be deployed to prevent future attacks.

Once the event horizon is crossed, escape becomes improbable — we know this from watching the singular heroes of singular plays as they are compressed into the smallest and worst versions of themselves. Past the event horizon, there is only pickled egg.

We’re nearing the end of the republic — and America needs to stop cheering for the pickled egg.

—MM

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This paper was originally published in February 2019 by Stand Up Republic Ideas/Stand Up Republic Foundation as part of a series of papers on DEFUSING DISINFO. When the foundation transitioned into another organization in 2021 and eventually merged with others, at some point the archive of these papers disappeared from the internet. So I am reposting mine here, because — despite being almost 6 years old!! — the frame of reference about how we should understand the impact of social media information operations — and thus, the kind of rules we should expect to protect us as civilians — remain the same.

Background

Since the US elections in 2016, we have struggled to develop an adequate response to revelations that techniques of persuasion and influence are being applied by foreign and domestic actors via social media to shape the information environment of Americans in ways that are deceptive and manipulative. At the Senate’s recent hearing to discuss the Worldwide Threat Assessment from the Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged that the Russians continue to use social media for information operations against Americans, and that other actors are learning from their techniques.

Awareness of the problem has grown, but clarity of response and responsibility has not. Who is responsible for monitoring, exposing, and warning us about these attacks, and who is supposed to defend us from them — intelligence agencies, social media platforms, a network of nonprofits or private companies, “fact-checkers,” ourselves? There is a loosely-defined assumption that some fusion of goodwill-based efforts from tech companies, academics and experts, nonprofits, lawmakers, and intelligence agencies will provide the basis for an eventual solution — and that may in fact be the only way forward. In the meantime, tactics adapt and evolve and the problem grows.

Facebook and Twitter have identified that American actors are mimicking the disinformation tactics of the Kremlin for use against other Americans, and the recent exposure of efforts by progressive activists to replicate the disinformation techniques that they believe provided a material advantage to conservatives in 2016 has been a poignant example of missteps that will occur when everyone fears they are in a persuasion arms race. There is real discomfort with the idea that an environment steeped in information operations will just be the normal way of business from here on out.

It is wrong for a foreign state or non-state actor to use “black” information campaigns designed to deceive, divide, and dismay Americans — the assessment that this occurred and is morally and legally wrong is the entire basis of the investigation into Russia’s attack on Americans during the 2016 elections. But this moral line of outrage seems hazier when we are discussing non-state American operators.

Additionally, the focus on technology solutions and education campaigns to mitigate the impact of information operations has ignored the necessity of a difficult conversation about the cognitive impact of the use of manipulation and persuasion in online influence operations — about the ethics of civilian information operations, writ large.

In short, we need a code of conduct — civilian rules of engagement for the information war we seem dead-set on waging against one another — before it is too late.

Relevant standards from military rules of engagement for IO and PSYOP

In determining ethical boundaries for civilian information operations, a good starting point is to evaluate how the US military has approached this question. Though much of the public doctrine for information operations (IO) and psychological operations (PSYOP) has not been fully adapted to account for the social media domain (doctrine takes a long time to write, and much of it was written prior to the social media explosion1), there are nonetheless definitions and rules that can be extracted from the military’s expertise, training, and discipline in thinking through the the practical application and consequences of IO/PSYOP.

Information and psychological operations

To apply these lessons on the conduct of IO to the civilian domain, definitions need to be narrowed and simplified. For the military, IO includes a broad range of capabilities, including electronic warfare, PSYOP, and more. But in the most parsed-down terms, these are the best definitions for understanding terminology:

Information operations is the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.2

The information environment—comprising individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information—has three dimensions: physical, informational, and cognitive.3

The component of IO that focuses on the messaging content is mostly in the realm of PSYOP.

The purpose of PSYOP is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to U.S. national objectives. PSYOP are characteristically delivered as information for effect, used during peacetime and conflict, to inform and influence. When properly employed, PSYOP can save lives of friendly and adversary forces by reducing the adversaries’ will to fight.4

In the civilian/social domain, what we call “information operations” are really influence operations conducted with psychological (“information support”) capabilities.5

Quick review of IO and PSYOP purpose and rules of engagement

A RAND study evaluating the changing nature of information warfare defined the two critical “realms” of modern information warfare: the psychological (message content and target) and the technical (means of delivery). Elements of the rules of engagement from IO and PSYOP apply to both of these realms, but those for PSYOP are most directly relevant for defining a civilian code of ethics that delineates redlines and constraints in purpose, tactics, and impact.

The purpose of PSYOP, described as “to inform and influence,” is often mischaracterized. PSYOP is a nonlethal capability for commanders to use during peace or war to help achieve objectives. The PSYOP manual emphasizes terminology like “reducing the adversaries’ will to fight” and “discourag[ing] aggressive actions.”6 Roles for PSYOP include to “influence foreign populations by expressing information subjectively to influence attitudes and behavior, and to obtain compliance, noninterference, or other desired behavioral changes;” “maintain or restore civil order;” and “counter enemy propaganda, misinformation, disinformation.”7

A point to emphasize: IO broadly aims to impact decision-making, while PSYOP measures impact as achieving behavioral change.

Behavioral change is at the root of the PSYOP mission. Although concerned with the mental processes of the [target audience], it is the observable modification of TA behavior that determines the mission success of PSYOP. It is this link between influence and behavior that distinguishes PSYOP from other capabilities and activities of information operations (IO) and sets it apart as a unique core capability.8

The terminology and desired effects are defined almost entirely positively: the goal is to stabilize an environment and reduce the potential for violence or unrest, or the need to achieve objectives using lethal measures, instead.

PSYOP is not meant to be used against your own people — a Department of Defense Directive specifies that “DoD IO activities will not be directed at or intended to manipulate audiences, public actions, or opinions in the United States”9 — and not really meant to target your allies, either (though there are historical examples that demonstrate when this may be important).

The rules of engagement for PSYOP specify the need to adapt tactics and operations significantly when civilians are present. In wartime, all defined enemy targets are fair game, but outside of war, the rules of engagement are highly restrained and account for broader impact, like potential political concerns. This is because of the belief that “excessive force undermines the legitimacy of the operation and jeopardizes political objectives.”

The principles of necessity and proportionality help define the peacetime justification to use force in self-defense… The principle of necessity permits friendly forces to engage only those forces committing hostile acts or clearly demonstrating hostile intent.The principle of proportionality requires that the force is reasonable in intensity, duration, and magnitude.10

Within PSYOP (which has also been called “military information support operations,” or MISO), the real debate is about using true information versus misleading information — between “white” and “black”.11

In current MISO doctrine, information is assessed as white, gray, or black based on both its content and its attribution… Falsehood in either content or attribution is problematic, because when discovered, it damages credibility. In fact, even the possibility of falsehood damages credibility.

There is a vast preference in PSYOP, in order to maintain credibility, on “white” (aka truthful) operations, as opposed to the use of deception. There is an understood difference between “virtuous persuasion” vs “manipulation and falsehood”.12 This is emphasized in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff guidance on MISO, which explicitly lists types of content that should not be used in operations for any program area:

Themes to avoid (all programs)

1. Ultimatums with no intent or capability to respond in the event of noncompliance.

2. Implications that the United States is infringing on sovereignty.

3. Themes that favor a specific country, nationality, religion, tribe, ethnic group, or race at the potential perceived detriment of another.

4. Messages that promote the legitimacy of organizations or governments committing illegal acts or violations of international or domestic law.

5. Themes that have a negative impact on legitimate exercise of peaceful religious tenets.

6. Themes that recall or reflect colonialism.

7. Themes that imply an inherent moral, cultural, or ideological superiority of the United States to local audiences.

8. Unfounded accusations of atrocities.

Additionally, there is an extensive, deliberate, seven-step decision-making process used in PSYOP to help ensure operational objectives can be met within the rules of engagement and without unintended effects.

The essential but hard to quantify aspect across all this material is that it is inherently based on values, and defining intention that upholds those values. This standard is, of course, reflective of the broader rules of engagement that the US military observes, in combat, stability operations, or otherwise.

MISO should “protect, preserve, and enhance the leader’s ability to make timely, accurate, and relevant decisions13.” Inherent to this is the belief that if you go too far in clouding an information environment to achieve objectives, there will be a negative impact on your own operations.

Why is this so important? Going back to the three dimensions of the information environment — physical, informational, and cognitive — “the information dimension links the physical and cognitive dimensions”.14 The cognitive dimension is defined as “the impact of information on the human will” — and attempting influence in this space must come with incredibly high standards to avoid unintended or lasting effects.

Summary of core guidance from military IO/PSYOP

The core elements of these rules of engagement that create high standards and demonstrate the credibility of influence operations can be summarized as:

• There is a difference between targeting your people and foreign audiences.

• Mostly, you should never target your own.

• There are explicit differences for operations potentially targeting civilians/noncombatants.

• Objectives should focus on de-escalation and enhancing stability, not stoking greater conflict, because this better protects your own forces and environment.

• Defensive measures should be necessary and proportional.

• The use of deception, either of content or attribution, is not preferred.

• The effects of attempting to change the behavior of a target audience must be accounted for.

• The deliberative process in engaging in IO is designed to minimize unintended consequences, cognitive or otherwise.

• The force exerted via IO/PSYOP should be reasonable in intensity, duration, and magnitude.

Applying the standards of military IO/PSYOP to civilian influence operations on social media

In the civilian world, it’s probably best to say that there are four dimensions of the information environment: physical, informational, social, and cognitive. Like informational, social links the physical and the cognitive dimensions, but has an accelerated and disproportionate ability to distort perception and modify decision-making and other behavior.

There are also different challenges in attempting to create a code of conduct for social media influence operations, including: enhanced unpredictability of the information environment; the accelerated pace of information dissemination because of social networks; a broad spectrum of actors with a range of motivations and levels of training; commercially-available or mercenary-style capabilities; permissive platform architecture that incentivizes amplification and inflammatory content; the opacity of algorithms; the pervasiveness of conspiracy and disinformation; unpredictable cognitive impacts on individuals; and unknown impacts on political systems, markets, reputation, and social structures.

Here we will consider rules for IO conducted in the political, social, or news/information lanes — with the intent to inform and influence political opinions, views on society or groups within society, or perceptions of the world, your nation, or your local environment as they relate to these views. This is not meant to apply to product marketing and other types of promotion and advertisement, nor to governmental programs that must observe the necessary guidelines and restrictions as determined by official policy.

With all this in mind, the points of core guidance from IO/PSYOP can be adapted as follows into rough elements of a code of ethics for the conduct of social media influence operations which aim to influence views of politics and society:

• Influence operations should be of reasonable intensity, duration, and magnitude.

• Influence operations should be designed to minimize unintended consequences, particularly regarding cognitive effects.

• Deception should not be used in influence operations, either in content or attribution. Purpose, overall objective, target audience, and intended behavioral modification objectives should be transparent and aim for “virtuous persuasion.”

• Influence operations should not aim to erode social fabric, stoke division, or weaken or distort the overall information environment, including via use of disinformation, misinformation, or deliberate falsehood and manipulation.

• The impact of influence operations should be tracked by those conducting them, with unintended consequences accounted for transparently.

This list is meant to provide a framework for a voluntary code of ethics for the conduct of social media influence operations. It can be reviewed and adapted. In the absence of effective regulation, legislation, or platform rules, those conducting social media influence operations can disclose whether or not they follow this code of ethics in order to create a standard amongst peers. This can likewise help guide the efforts of lawmakers and policymakers as they better define legal or regulatory limitations for the conduct of influence operations.

— MM

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**The following is adapted from remarks delivered to the Future of Democracy Forum in Vilnius on 7 November 2024, on the topic of why it is that democracies, with more economic and military might, hold back in the fight against autocracy.

It seems like a particularly good week to talk about the future of democracy, near the end of a year of what feels by now like too many elections. And it is a good day to remember, really, that democracy is the greatest force ever to exist on the planet. Not strongmen, not dictatorship — but democracy. Inclusive systems that can disproportionately mobilize human will.

And will, actually, is the point — and for me, it has always been the answer to this question about what democracies can do to better use their disproportionate power to push back against the rise of autocratic powers.

In June, I was having dinner in Kyiv with a friend detailed to an embassy there. We were arguing about whether or not more could have been done to stop the full-scale invasion from happening, and I cited a casualty number as evidence that we should have done better. My friend dismissed this number and countered that it was probably ten times lower — a number that I don’t even believe covers the civilian losses in Mariupol. I responded with a short list of actions I believed could have been taken to actually deter the full-scale invasion.

Well yeah, my friend responded, but we were never going to do any of those things.

In essence — we were never going to stop the war.

We were never going to stop the war that Putin had painstakingly justified in a 10,000 word essay about how there is no Ukraine — and no Belarus — even though we understood that from the moment of the full-scale invasion’s initiation, it would achieve its goal of scattering part of the Ukrainian nation to the wind, separating Ukrainians from their land, their language, and their heritage. It would leave hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians in graves, and at least tens of thousands — but likely hundreds of thousands — of children stolen from Ukraine’s next generation, slowly indoctrinated to become soldiers against their own nation. From the moment it began, the full-scale invasion achieved key objectives for the Kremlin. And we knew.

This summer was the 30th anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s first trip to the newly re-independent Baltic States. He went to Riga on July 6, 1994, where the Baltic presidents all gathered — of course all three together, the B3, as these three very different states have always acted since they won their freedom — to welcome him. I was curious, so I looked up Clinton’s speech*. It was a classic Clintonesque address, very well written, lots of references to the unique history of the Baltic states and their resistance movements, how they never surrendered their statehood even under occupation, how many Balts found their way to American shores and now bound our nations together.

But even then, in the second to last paragraph, were already the fruits of five years of warming relations between Washington and Moscow, the planting of the seeds of this idea that really it was Moscow that would be the force for good and for stability in these new and transitional states that Moscow had occupied for decades, and these “breakaway republics” were the dangerous ones, the “nationalists.” Clinton told the Baltic people they needed to find their own “better angels” and treat the former occupiers still living among them with justice and equality.

It’s a powerful reminder that for 30 years, we’ve been letting Russia frame its own narrative for us. For 30 years, we’ve been wrong about Russia — which means for 30 years, we’ve been wrong about ourselves, and about our understanding of power. And our failure to have to adapt during this whole arc of time is why we now absolutely suck at conceptualizing how to use power creatively.

The 20th century was one of careful symmetry. The 21st century is fundamentally asymmetric. And we have failed to see it.

I teach a lot of courses about whatever we want to call Russian hybrid warfare, and in it I use these 8 words to try to get my students to understand how Russians understand power. Asymmetry. Chaos. Informality. Deniability. Risk. Cynicism. Capture. Guerrilla (the use of irregular forces).

These are Russian strengths because of Russian weakness. They have to do these things. And these are areas where democracies are extremely uncomfortable operating.

For 30 years we’ve gotten Russia wrong. And during this time, they have sculpted our threat perception of them. They have sculpted how we viewed this region and how we viewed its possibilities — and thankfully the Baltic states ignored all the advice to wait and be patient and instead to push for first NATO and then EU membership, otherwise they too would still be waiting in a line. Russia has sculpted Ukraine’s perception of itself, and how we see Ukraine, too.

We are still trapped in this narrative box. And now it affects how we see ourselves.

Yes — autocracy is fast and decisive, and democracy is typically slow.

Yes — we had a generation of desert wars that made both the political class and the electorate reluctant and cautious in regard to new commitments for the use of force.

Yes — the economic upheaval of the pandemic lingers and clouds judgement and makes us think maybe these existential threats can continue to wait while we sort ourselves out at home.

We have things to lose, yes — and we don’t want to lose them. We think by not fighting, they can’t be lost. It’s a lovely idea, but unfortunately our desire not to lose things has been weaponized against us. Our adversaries make the right noises about taking things from us because they know no politician in a democratic system wants to deliver that message.

And actually this is a remarkable thing about President Trump. He is very good at convincing people with a hell of a lot to lose that really they have nothing to lose. And this becomes transformative.

So I’m going to offer four points.

First, relative strength is about will. Will is about decision-making, and in democracies there are consequences for decision-making that an increasingly careerist political class mostly is unwilling to face. And an increasingly online electorate expects to be able to mete out consequences with their thumbs if not at the ballot box.

Democracies have problems generated by billionaires with “I can go live in space”-level wealth, and democracies have problems adapting to technology — and obviously, those two things are heavily intertwined.

Democracies have not adapted to the speed of this century, and as long as we fail to meet this challenge, political forces that bring autocratic tactics to democratic systems will continue to win elections.

Speed and decisiveness are what autocracies — and private business — have that democracies usually do not. They are out-competing democracy, and increasingly they are moving toward the same unified endpoint.

Second, there is no future for democracy — any of our democracies — if we are not willing to hold Russians accountable for their illegal war of aggression in Ukraine, which is based on genocidal intentions, and do it for as long as it takes.

To the extent that we have had 70 years of relative democratic-led peace, it was because of international human rights law. Moscow has never viewed itself as accountable to the idea of international human rights law, which was established from the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. They view themselves as outside this system. And if we are not willing to end Russia’s role as chief disruptor of this framework, it is done.

Either we put Russia on trial in a generational justice initiative for all the war crimes they have committed in Ukraine since February 2022 — and use this as a vehicle to document the century of crimes for which Moscow will never stand trial — or we admit that we are too tired to defend the rules-based order any longer, and accept the century of chaotic nonlinearism that will come.

It will be ideal if some of the first to stand up for this idea of putting Russians on trial for as long as it takes were not just the Balts and Ukrainians, but the Russians and Belarusians whose own history has also been stolen from them. I think a lot about this exchange of letters between Karagodin and the granddaughter of his grandfather’s executioner*, and an unknown history that leaves victims and executioners in one family. The security state will always rule Russia while its history remains obscured.

Third, we need to understand that everything is now about information dominance, the counterbalance of which is psychological defense. We must be comfortable operating in both of these spaces as modern democracies.

Finally, we need to break free from this 30 year old box of smoke and mirrors. We must end the idea of Russian sanctuary — the idea that we cannot touch Russia — which absolutely poisons our analytical abilities. We need to define strategies for 21st century war termination that also confront hybrid wars.

And this also, of course, begins with how we end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.

Our only chance comes from Ukraine — from how we win in Ukraine, and what can be born from the revitalization of order that comes after Ukraine.

Otherwise, it’s just gonna be chaos monkeys all the way down.

Why were we never going to do any of those things? Why were we never going to try to stop the full-scale invasion? If we do not ask ourselves this question every day while Ukrainians are dying for us — why were we not willing to use our power to prevent this barbarism and the spiraling instability carried outward from it — then we don’t understand the costs of our inaction, and we still do not see what must be done. We still don’t see the box we have been in for too long.

Earlier this year, not far from here, at the Vilnius Security Forum, Lt Gen Ben Hodges (ret), former commander of US Army Europe, detailed the incredible will and leadership that was needed to get an America dead-set on not getting involved in Europe — an America with the 14th largest military in the world, smaller then than the Italian army at the time — from Pearl Harbor to victory in WWII*. It was a powerful reminder that we can do anything we choose to do.

A reminder that we too, as the West, have “go live in space”-level money and the technology to get there — if we choose to.

But this is a matter of will.

—MM

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Clinton speech: https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/1994/07/1994-07-06-president-and-latvia-president-freedom-monument-riga.html

Karagodin letters: https://www.rferl.org/a/stalin-great-terror-search-for-great-grandfather-executioners-reconciliation-russia/28131158.html

Hodges speech available via: https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/1762008633192144976?s=46&t=EL4_YsxunSzIMapQAjHfZg

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Kyiv, Ukraine

In Kyiv, the cadence of the loss drowns in liminality. Funerals happen among weddings and birthdays, the living and the dead share phone books and streets, war and regular life are like the lit windows of commuter trains passing in opposite directions in the night.

“Maybe it seems strange,” says a friend briefly in Kyiv before his next rotation back to the front. We’re sitting in an ice cream shop that feels like early summer in absolutely any European city. “But this is absolutely important for us. I can go to the war, I focus on my mission. But when I am in Kyiv, I can live this normal life a little.”

This island of normal life was, it should not be forgotten, hard won. That Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian defenders remains the point from which all potential futures in Ukraine now depart. With its air defense in place, it is an unwalled fortress of Ukrainianness. Children go to school, they go to the mall with their friends. People go to work, they go to cafes, they stop in the bookshop — perhaps to choose the latest Ukrainian book about the war, or a selection of Ukrainian literature or history, the revival of which has been bolstered by a decade of Russia trying to steal it from them, again. The primal wail of the air raid siren scratches deep into the psyche, a reminder that these are not normal times. Even in the silence, in the rain, in traffic, in the sound of passing crowds — the phantom alarm is a hollow that the ears strain to fill. Not reacting at all is a badge of resilience. Even the birds continue singing. Everything is the same as the moment before. “If you hear the sirens, you are still alive.”

From every meeting or encounter, there are generational family stories. Children far away growing up without you, or waiting to be picked up, or stolen by invaders. Grandmothers who never wanted to see such times in Ukraine again, who cannot bear the losses, who know already how to manage in the blackouts and wonder when you are coming to help in the vegetable garden. A generation that gained their freedom, took twice to the streets to ensure it, then mobilized a million men and women in a decade-long war for the audacity of their insistence that they want nothing to do with Moscow and don’t want to have to bleed for Russian imperial delusions ever again.

There are a lot of different kinds of Ukrainians who have chosen to fight this war against Russia. This war against Moscow’s unapologetic aggression. This war to keep all of us free.

One of those was Captain Arsen Fedosenko. His photographs of the war are all throughout this piece. On Thursday, his friends and family and the men and women he served with and for in the Armed Forces of Ukraine gathered in Kyiv for his burial. He died from injuries sustained in the line of duty in the Kharkiv region.

On social media, we see heroes and recruits, we see soldiers who have fought this whole decade, we see medics who save lives, we see the drone operators who are the new snipers of this war. We have scattered recognition of the writers and poets and politicians, the athletes and artists and activists who also serve and too often fall. These are mostly anomalous for us who are not facing a call to service that requires us to risk our life to save our whole nation from annihilation.

But many, many Ukrainians have chosen to fight. And a good number of their faces — the ones the really stay with you — were photographed by Fedosenko.

Arsen Fedosenko was a celebrated photographer before Russia tried again to swallow Ukraine.  He filmed and photographed the Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan. One thing he was well-known for were his pictures of Ukrainian vineyards and wine, and his desire to make wines that would represent what he loved about Ukraine and the unique terroir of Bakhmut. These photos are full of nature and sunlight and color and beauty. They are taken by a man who celebrated life.

In February 2022, he found himself taking photographs of Ukrainian soldiers evacuating civilians from Irpin, near Bucha and Hostomel — names now famous for the brutality, destruction, and terror that Russian invaders managed to exact during their short-lived and failed attempt to capture Kyiv at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Gone are the greens of vines and the reds of wines and the sparkling golden sunlight — now the only color in the photographs is the survival of humanity standing against the scarred and burned-out grayscale of Russian aggression. The starkness of the landscape showed him what needed to be protected. “The existence of Ukraine is not a part of Russia’s plans. Our chance to survive as a nation is to fight with the weapons that we have in hand.”

Fedosenko soon joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He was then 44 years old, and had a wife and two sons who he did not want to imagine having to fight the Russians. Because of his tremendous talent, he was selected for service in the media team of the AFU Stratcom unit. The unit is full of photographers and cameramen and journalists and writers who were willing to turn their talent into a vital weapon for Ukraine. They deploy all along the frontlines to capture the stories of the war in places where civilians can’t go. Sometimes, this is the war itself. Sometimes, it is the quiet between the battles. Sometimes, it is the aftermath, the necessity to capture the evidence of Russian war crimes to ensure they cannot be forgotten — that justice will find every member of the enemy forces that committed them.

Fedosenko had a knack for war photography, unflinching under fire, always looking for the moment that needed to be captured on film. He quickly became the soul of the team, a steady, professional presence whatever the circumstances. No matter where he went, his teammates say, he had a thousand different conversations with the soldiers and civilians caught up in the war — conversations about better times, and the future, and dreams of everything that Ukraine would be. The soldiers he served with say they never saw him sad — concerned, maybe worried, but never sad. Fedosenko brought sunlight with him where sometimes there was none to be had.

In May of 2022, his photos showed the soldiers manning Ukraine’s new trench lines, telling the story of their brotherhood and good humor and exhaustion and every day life. They also showed the liberation of settlements in Kharkiv — how civilians had lived under Russian occupation. Even in the bunkers, Fedosenko finds elegant Ukrainian resistance — hand drawn national flags, a small jar of deep purple spring lilacs, strength in tired faces ready to leave the darkness.

Throughout the war, his best photographs capture the resilience and camaraderie of Ukraine’s defenders — at war, at rest, together and alone. The photos of the fighters have the same quality of the photos of the Baltic forest brothers — resistance fighters — who stood against Russian occupation in the last century. Eyes filled with purpose bore through the camera, space, and time and etch the images and the importance of this moment into your brain. What was before or what will be after can’t be known, but it has a mythical quality.

Fedosenko would always send copies to the men and women in them so they could see what he saw. In his words — “their values, thoughts, and motivations... In these faces, there is a clear understanding of why they are there, what they are fighting for.”

His photos are full of soldiers full of life who ultimately gave those lives for Ukraine during the past two years. Each one is a photograph of a choice to fight. Each one is a reminder of how much we have required of Ukrainians while we delay in accepting what our eyes show us about Russia.

When the Russians advanced in the Kharkiv region again this spring, the AFU Stratcom media teams were back on the line. When Captain Fedosenko found himself in the path of a Russian glide bomb last week, it was far from the first time he and his fellow media team members came under fire. They had just left the frontlines in Kharkiv and come back for a rest when the bomb came.

I asked Fedosenko’s commander if he knew why he had chosen to sign up. “Because he was a patriot” was the instantaneous answer.

We minimize what is at risk in Ukraine to insulate ourselves from the cost of our failures to support the Ukrainians who have chosen to fight in a war they never wanted and did not ask for, but now must win if they are to survive as a people, a nation, a language, a culture, a history. Fedosenko showed us the faces of those Ukrainians. Fedosenko was one of those Ukrainians.

We know this war — for Russia — is as much about us as Ukrainians. But we don’t yet believe that this war is as much about us as the Ukrainians. We keep avoiding the necessary choices. We are losing opportunities to remember what we are. We keep forgetting what this war is.

It is a war to subjugate a people who managed to escape the inexorable gravity of Moscow — no matter how much money Russia used to corrupt Ukraine and its political class, no matter how many Russian agents were devoted to the task of Ukrainian captivity, Ukrainians said no, no, and chose again to revolt, to be free, to forge a different life in another direction.

It is a war to re-entrench us in the smoke and mirrors of Russian power and Russian risk-taking that has enabled every poor strategic decision we have made about Russia since the captive nations fled the Soviet Union and left Russia alone in the ruins of its own making.

It is a war to solidify Russia’s role as the system-wrecker behind which China watches and waits and plans.

It is a war to make us compromise what we know is right and strong and real, to make us walk away from the values that elevated us above the times when freedom meant only safety inside walls.

There are a lot of different kinds of Ukrainians who have chosen to fight Russia for us.

And one of those was Arsen Fedosenko.

I write these stories in the hopes that we — and in particular America we — will decide to remember what it means to be a great power, and to exercise great power in the world. That great power can be the color and not the grayscale of humanity — that it can expand and defend the world of light and beauty when the choices it enables are unflinching and clear.

Great power is absolutely nothing without brave men and women who arrive at the moment to say no — and are brave enough to stand against the supposedly inexorable forces.

Great power speaks with action, not with force. Great power is not a wall to keep enemies out — but an umbrella to welcome those who are still hungry enough for what we have to bolster it, fight for it, make it new again. It is the sword and shield — the will to defend, and the will strike down those who choose to come against us. The will to look at those who would take everything, and at the right moment to say — no.

There are those who will tell you the fight in Ukraine is not “existential” for America or the civilized world. That we have done enough. That avoiding an escalating confrontation between great powers is the only thing that matters.

But those people are wrong, and they do not get it. They don’t get America, they don’t get Russia, and they don’t get Ukraine.

Ukraine is the greatest power of this generation. It has utterly changed how we will think of power for the remainder of the century. The “great power” militaries are running to catch up to the innovation and transformation that Ukraine has accomplished under invasion, under fire, and while everyday Russia is trying to kill the men and women who are responsible for this salvation. The cadence of the loss, each one taking a future of Ukraine.

Left really alone in a crucible against a dying power, Ukraine has been forced to define what power is on its own. Every now and then there are absolutely untrue stories that pop up about how this or that intelligence agency “created” this Ukrainian initiative or that — but really, the truth is and has been since 2014 that the Ukrainians did it all themselves, and sometimes we help them by making it just so slightly easier. Sometimes.

If we let Ukraine fall, let Russia win and rest and come again, it would be as if we gathered at Collevile-sur-Mer not to commemorate the valorous dead who won a beachhead back toward the freedom that we once understood was the foundation of everything we are and everything we have — but instead that we stood at the edge of the raging sea to mourn what was lost and remains far away, out of our grasp and our graying imagination.

We will not be a great power as we navigate this troubled century if we let Ukraine fall. Neither America we, nor NATO we, nor Europe we. We will have to make other choices that will erode and not bolster the safety, prosperity, and freedom that we think are immutable. The grotesque luxury to be lazy about what freedom really is as we cosplay about liberty at home and fail to defend it abroad will be over. Another set of forces for whom that value of a single human life means nothing will control the shaping of the century, even as now they nibble away at our resolve with 10,000 tiny attacks.

Arsen Fedosenko traded a life of capturing beauty for a life of capturing the love and terror and loneliness and brotherhood of war. He showed us faces, sacred objects, joy, devastation, the vast and the small. He showed us moments of a war too immense to conceptualize in a way we could see clearly if we chose to look. He showed us who and what to fight for. He knew the war for what it was — and what it was for. He never looked away. He knew Ukraine will win.

Captain Arsen Fedosenko was a piece of great Ukrainian power.

What an engine Ukraine will be for the expansion of freedom, the expansion of the law and prosperity of civilization, when we unf*ck our Russia-blinded minds and embrace the future Ukrainians are trying to buy for us. This should be — in any sensible and honest world — absolutely the only thing we are focused on now. Instead, we minimize the scope of Russia’s machinery of death and horror so we can believe our own press releases.

We haven’t done enough. There is more we can do. We are avoiding our choices, and letting others make them for us.

Ukraine can win. Ukraine must win. And we must be brave enough to achieve it.

— MM

**This article is possible thanks to the generous support of Great Power subscribers. Please consider joining them if you haven’t already — lots of new pieces to come in the months ahead!

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It was Thanksgiving week 2013 — exactly this week, nine years ago. The deep blue sky was glorious over Washington DC. The Capitol Dome was shining. The golden autumn sun held back the chill in the crisp November air. The doors hidden under the grand stairs that ascend from the plaza on the east side of the Capitol to the formal entrance of the House of Representatives swung open, and Misha Saakashvili — who had just finished his second term as President of Georgia at the age of 45 — strode out into the group of congressmen who concealed their smoking habit in the shaded arch under the stairs.

Puffs of smoke were drawn in sharply by the startled congressmen, eyes going wide — and in their defense, we were not, strictly speaking, supposed to have come out of this door. But there was Misha, towering over them in casual post-presidency wear, looking past them to the bright sun beyond. The smokers included two members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who knew Misha well; both were hiding their cigarettes behind their backs like guilty schoolboys. They blinked as Misha dawned his sunglasses and gave them a jaunty wave — “Oh hey,” he said, finally realizing they were there — before zipping off into the plaza. There was an audible sound of exhaling.

“Congressmen,” I nodded in greeting and farewell before they could absorb my presence (or the laughter I was hiding), half-running as always to catch up with Misha, who mostly moved through life at one speed: cannonball.

Misha was in town for two reasons. First, to distribute the medals he had awarded to the members of Congress who had aided the fight for Georgian freedom and democracy in the transformational (cannonball speed) years since Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003. Second, to warn them about what was coming now.

Misha had come to Washington directly from Ukraine, where just days before the demonstrations that would become the Euromaidan protests had kicked off.

“Support them,” Misha told every member of Congress that we met — plus a few more that he ambushed coming off the House floor from votes. “Support their aspirations and what they want. They have chosen you, and you have to understand how important it is for you to be with them.”

He went into more detail about this at a long table of haphazardly assembled staffers eating plates from the basement cafeteria’s famous Thanksgiving buffet lunch. A holiday about survival, and we talked about survival. They were all friends of Georgia, and they wanted to know what would happen there now after the complete transfer of power to the Georgian Dream party, led by a Russian-made billionaire. But Misha would just shake this off. It was the end of something in Georgia — though few in Washington were willing then to acknowledge the decade of drift, decline, and Russian hybrid success that was to come — but it was the beginning of something critically important in Ukraine. Misha knew this instinctively, seeing them as points along the same Russian spectrum of activity. Georgia, for now, was lost. But Ukraine could still be won. Ukraine, he said, must be won.

In the weeks and months that followed, Misha would spend much of his time in Ukraine, and on the Maidan, among the demonstrators or rallying them from the stage. Many of the Congressmen and Senators we saw that day would join him in Kyiv to support the brave Ukrainians on the burning, frozen square. All of this drove the Russians absolutely crazy, with state media going into hyperdrive about “the CIA-backed coup” and secret plots to blah blah. But the truth then was the same as the truth now: this was an entirely Ukrainian effort to fight for Ukraine’s future in the way that it had to be won.

Ukraine could change the future for everyone. Only now, nine years later, do I think the full scope of what Misha meant is truly visible.

* * * * *

November 21 is the Day of Dignity and Freedom in Ukraine. It marks the anniversary of the official beginning of the demonstrations in 2013 — known in the West as the Euromaidan protests, but known to Ukrainians as the Revolution of Dignity. It also marks the day in 2004 when the protests that became the Orange Revolution began. First the fight for freedom, and then the fight to keep it. Freedom, and dignity.

The Orange Revolution — coming a year after Georgia’s Rose Revolution, of which Misha was one leader — was a youthful, optimistic wish for a better, more pro-Western Ukraine that could enjoy the economic and security benefits of faster European integration. The Orange Revolution’s success briefly brought new momentum to Ukrainian aspirations, but (for reasons of Russian hybrid measures, political infighting, and corruption that I will not go into here), too soon Russian-aligned actors returned to power. The public figurehead was Viktor Yanukovych and his “party of regions” — aided, of course, by Paul Manafort and his team, and by the Russian intelligence agent who nominally worked for Manafort in Ukraine.

Things drifted along for a while — the same feigned movements towards the West that we have seen in Georgia since 2013, nice words but no action — but when Yanukovych moved to preclude Ukraine’s further European integration, Ukrainians came back to the streets in massive numbers, and stayed on the Maidan through ice, fire, and sniper fire to defend with will and blood the future they know Ukraine deserves. The Maidan was a forge — a more mature iteration of the Orange Revolution, and more realistic about what was required to be free of Russia, about the work that needed to be done, and about what it would take to be truly in control of the nation’s destiny. The Maidan was purposefully designed as a mass movement, not as the rise of new charismatic personalities to take control. This momentum is evident in how Ukraine fights the Russian invasion.

Many of the Ukrainian defenders now on the frontlines don’t remember any of the Soviet days. They were barely born during the Orange Revolution, and still relatively young during Maidan. In the years after, living in a vibrant Ukraine, the war in the east pretty far away for most people, they may have believed these kinds of tests were over. But now they are in the trenches, on the tanks, and flying drones. They sit right next to the far more grizzled veterans who flocked to Ukraine’s new army after the Russian invasion in 2014. In 2019, the average age of Ukrainian recruits was 36, and the average age of defenders at the front was closer to 40 — all evidence that the generation who remembered what it was like not to have independence felt a personal duty to fight for it when it was under threat.

Now, during the total invasion, every generation of Ukraine understands this war in a visceral, instinctive way. Cultural memories of Holodomor, when millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin to get them to submit to Soviet will, and other Stalinist oppressions have been refreshed by the Russian barbarism evident in Ukraine’s occupied regions as they are steadily recovered by Ukrainian forces. Torture, executions, disappearances, efforts to erase and destroy Ukrainian culture, efforts to destroy all aspects of economic life. Families disassembled. The 2022 war is for survival — but it is a war about far more than survival, too. It has galvanized Ukrainians into a fundamentally new nation. There is no way back.

It was nine years between the Orange Revolution and the beginning of the Maidan — and now another nine years to the depths of war.

One revolution for freedom, one for dignity — and now a war for survival.

A war that Ukrainians hope will be the final blood price they must pay for the future they have waited for for so long.

A war that Ukrainians hope will decide whether we can together shake off history or merely remain captives of it.

* * * * *

For the Kremlin, the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution are forever linked, forming the foundation of the persistent paranoia about “color revolutions” taking things away from Russia that set the strategy for the new era of Russian aggression that began officially in 2007. For Moscow, Georgians and Ukrainians — especially those who had been educated in the West after the Soviet collapse, or who had spent time on US exchange programs, for example — wanting to decouple their national futures from Moscow’s efforts at control was a sure sign of a plot against the Kremlin. It could not be that these nations wanted to be free of the imperial meddling that had subjected them to seven decades of ruthless oppression, apparently. It could not be that the far more rapid European integration of the Baltic states served as an example to others. No, no — surely, a plot against Russia.

The Kremlin’s attempts to dismantle these revolutions came in many forms, and different tactics were used in both places at different times, but the linkage remains. The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 served to stall both nation’s NATO aspirations, which then-President Medvedev admitted was its purpose. Failing to respond adequately to Russian aggression in 2008 set the pathway for enhanced hybrid measures in both nations, for the return of Yanukovych,  for the election of the oligarch in Georgia, and ultimately for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. These eight years of war against Ukraine have allowed the Kremlin to advance its work in Georgia without much attention or interference. Many of the driven, talented Georgians that worked in the government under President Saakashvili ended up in Ukraine when they were forced to leave Georgia — building the new police force, reforming the prosecutor’s office, serving in countless ways — as did many Georgian officers and soldiers, including a former chief of defense, who came to fight Russians in Ukraine when the new Georgian government showed little interest in doing the same.

Georgia is Russia’s most successful hybrid war. As it is now, it is nearly won. Only a total Ukrainian victory may help to change that dynamic. Because the problem has not only been unfettered re-infiltration of Russian money and assets back into the system in Georgia, but the complicity of Georgia’s western partners in feigning blindness of this advance for far, far too long — as it did to some extent in Ukraine before the Maidan. To date, President Zelensky has been one of the few willing to call the Georgian Dream movement what it really is — another puppet of Russian influence.

* * * * *

These nine years have been critical for Ukraine — and for Georgia. As Ukraine won its independence — again — and moved most crucially toward building institutions that would defend the nation, Georgia slid back down the sand dune, not really bothering to take many steps upward while this oligarchic noose of Russian influence was pulling them steadily downward.

But I think of the Georgians in Ukraine, quietly helping where they can, and doing everything now because they cannot bear to lose another country. There are other Georgians scattered across international institutions and organizations, universities and think tanks, working in myriad ways to slow and reverse the creeping Russian advance, to sharpen tools to push Russia back, to raise awareness of why this is so utterly, vitally important for the United States, the broader Euroatlantic alliance, and American treaty allies in the Pacific, Five Eyes and otherwise.

Georgia is small — a nation of less than 4 million people, less than one tenth the size of Ukraine — but for awhile, it was a mighty engine. The scattering of that brilliant human machinery to the winds was a devastating Russian success when it comes to keeping Georgia quiet, controlled — and also as a lesson to others who would find their own path.

It’s hard not to see Russian efforts to destroy Ukrainian culture and language, force Ukrainians out of Ukraine, and steal Ukrainian children to reprogram them as Russians as a much more brutal and complex attempt to replicate this tactic against a much larger and more powerful Ukrainian foe. If they were scared of tiny Georgia’s success, Ukrainian success must chill them to their very bones. If Georgia was an engine, Ukraine is crucible, forge, smithy — maker of impossible things.

The biggest failure of Moscow — and most times, the broader West — is to look at these nations who emerged from the rotted Russian prison of the Soviet Union and rebuilt themselves from nothing, and not to see equals. Ukraine is the nation that will finally make us reckon with this failure. For Russia, it can stay the course of brutality that sustains itself by consuming its own citizens, or it can finally confront its history and decide to be something more. For the Western alliance, our ability to navigate what comes after the Ukraine war will hinge upon this understanding of equality. Either we accept and work toward the earth-moving opportunity of Ukrainian victory — or we choose, as Russia has done so far, to see ourselves only as a reflection of the past, and these former captive nations as an in-between place we aren’t exactly sure is like us.

This is a question of leadership — will we choose to finish the political thought we have been working toward since the end of the Second World War, or will we undermine it with our own uncertainty? Will be believe in the eastern flank as the newest, strongest armor in the alliance, or continue to offer empathy more than belief? Will we do better than our long-time adversary in admitting the flaws in our mindset and analysis — or will our actions too continue to condemn the Balts and Poles and Ukrainians and others to ongoing Russian attempts to rebuild the empire they never deserved to have?

Ukraine is a powerful reckoning. We have to see what they do — move ahead as fast as possible, build momentum that cannot be overcome — and emulate this bravery that comes from conviction so we do not waste Ukrainian sacrifice, Ukrainian innovation, and Ukraine’s deep, deep belief in us.

* * * * *

The Maidan, for these nine years, has always felt to me like the long space between one deep breath and the next. Waiting, waiting. For what, we will see. The informal barricades of Revolution of Dignity are long gone, but the memorials for the Ukrainians who were slaughtered by Yanukovych’s dying regime look out over new piles of rusting hedgehogs and bright concertina wire waiting to block the square again should invading Russian forces manage to make it so far.

Ukrainians actually know what it is to fight for “every inch” of something. They know the price that they are paying — for their own nation, and for all of ours — of having to chew through half of Russia’s army with only some of the proper tools needed. When the tools are not available, the gap is made up with lives. Ukrainian lives. And I think everyone of us in the West should understand this.

Ukraine’s military strategy in this conflict has been without peer. They achieve their objectives. We owe it to them to stop questioning whether they can do so. It would be better for us to accept that they will, and make the math a lot less awful.

The question of whether or not to give Ukraine, say, ATACMs — longer-range missiles that can be fired by weapons systems like HIMARS and MLRS against high-value targets — or an equivalent capability with armed drones of one variety or another, has so far been defined by this nonsensical discussion of whether Ukraine might use them to inflict damage in Russian territory that could somehow further escalate the conflict. This has nothing to do with anything. Ukraine needs those missiles to hit certain targets — and we know what those targets are — that are of essential strategic value to achieve defined objectives. By not giving them this capability for a longer range strike, we aren’t deterring them from staying the course of their strategy — we’re just asking them to pay more for it in blood. They will get to the objective, but more Ukrainians will have to die to do it.

It’s the same math on failing to provide tanks and APCs (armored personnel carriers) — Ukraine will still conduct the operations it needed those things for, but in regular or maybe armored 4x4s or other military vehicles, more of which will be needed for the same operation, and more of which will be destroyed to reach the same objective.

Ukraine does not advertise this cost — but every Ukrainian knows how high the price is for ever meter of territory regained. They know the faces and the names of the price, the stolen children of the price, the days of occupation of the price. And they will pay it for the work that must be done — but we can make it less. We can make sure more of these brave Ukrainians live to see the nation they are willing to die for become a reality, that more of their belief and innovation survives to contribute to this new Ukraine. We can give them the best chance so they will make it this time — by acknowledging now that they have earned it, more than earned it. By acknowledging that the “success” of our deterrence, this time, came by leaving Ukraine outside the wire. Came by sacrificing Ukraine to do the real work against Russia, even when the need to do this work was at least in fair measure the result of our failures to act in the past.

We owe this to Ukraine. And we owe it to ourselves not to waste this opportunity for something different with Russia.

* * * * *

In October 2021, Misha — who had, since the Revolution of Dignity, served as an advisor to the Ukrainian president and as Governor of Odessa, had a falling out with President Poroshenko, and then had his Ukrainian citizenship restored by President Zelensky (still at cannonball speed, you see) — made the decision to return to Georgia, where in the interim the oligarch-led government had convicted him of various charges, as they had done with dozens of officials from his government. Misha was immediately put in prison.

At the beginning of February 2022, in testimony before Congress, Fiona Hill summed up the significance of this event in explaining Russia’s rising influence in the region: “Georgia’s current government treads more carefully with Russia than its predecessor. Russia, of course, invaded Georgia in August 2008. Georgia’s then president, Mikheil Saakashvili, a perennial thorn in Moscow’s side, saw his popularity plummet in the aftermath and was eventually ousted in an election in 2013. He had a second political career in exile in Ukraine, but now sits in jail in Tbilisi after an ill-advised return to Georgia in October 2021. Russian officials and commentators frequently use Saakashvili and his fate as a cautionary tale. In November 2021, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the risks of following Saakashvili’s path.”

On February 24, as Russia prepared to launched strikes across Ukraine, Misha used a courtroom appearance to speak to Ukrainians directly: “In 2014, on the Maidan, I said that the Russian Empire would end there. And really it ends here, in Ukraine.” About this, at least, Misha wasn’t wrong. He believed in what Ukraine could do, and what it would be.

Before Russia’s “total invasion” was launched — in the months where there was all this intelligence about what they would do but no action taken to change possibilities or shape outcomes — I wrote about how we needed to begin to conceptualize what Russian defeat looks like. A year later — months into this new war, nearing a critical juncture where the decision must come to fully aid Ukraine in carrying it through until the end — it is clear that most Western nations do not even want to look at this issue. Like children in a schoolyard, they are afraid that if they look directly at the eclipse — in this case, at the eclipse of Russia’s imaginary power — they will be struck blind.

But Russia isn’t the sun. It was always smoke and mirrors. And the best thing for us — and for Russians — is to end the ability of this mass delusion to influence our decision-making anymore. It will change us, it will change them — it will change the entire region around Russia, and it can be for the better if we have the vision to get it done.

And even better, to do so means lessening the price Ukrainians will pay to give all of us this chance for an un-eclipsed future. Arm Ukraine. And this Thanksgiving, be thankful for the amazing, brave Ukrainians who are willing to fight, to do the impossible, for this chance.

— MM

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I think there are two points worth dwelling on.

First, there will always be fresh terror from Putin. A show trial. Chernobyl. Chem/bio insinuations. Sometimes I feel we go looking for new terror to control us when there is already terror enough. Until we take control of the pacing and strategy of this war, the fears Putin creates for us are boxing us in. This has been the Russian strategy from the start. I don’t know why we are not more clear on this. It is the clear reason why we have so much intelligence on what they planned to do and what it would look like. Because they wanted the White House to see it, because they knew what the likely reaction would be. And they were right. We put ourselves into the box and took actions off the table that could have changed the outcome. We accepted the stage that Putin set. We still are. I will always believe that this is the wrong course of action. It has led us to this situation where Putin seems to be unraveling and the danger increasing before our eyes.

This fear is absolutely useless. “Russian warship, go f*ck yourself” must be the mandatory attitude of whoever will lead us through this confrontation with Putin.

Second, on nukes and Putin’s nuclear blackmail. Putin is a coward — by which I mean, he is not brave. He plans and acts in ways where he believes he has the greatest advantage and will endure the least costs for the greatest rewards. He does take risks — when there is empty space before him into which he can move before an opponent can. But he is not the type to die bravely and nobly in heroic sacrifice for his nation — as evidenced by his broadcasts from a bunker in the Urals (or wherever).

This matters in particular in relation to his overt nuclear fearmongering — which he is doing exactly to keep the White House penned in and afraid to act, not because he wants to risk his own annihilation. This is one important thing to understand about why Putin keeps raising the nuclear specter. The other is about what he specifically means.

Since all the way back to the 2000 Russian National Security Concept, the first that Putin signed as president, Russia has explicitly discussed the use of smaller/tactical nuclear weapons as a conventional weapon of war for deterring invasion in their own territory — aka, they would conduct a tactical nuclear strike to prevent the loss of territory to an enemy. So in this situation, where Putin has already declared that Ukraine is de facto held territory, what he talking about is nuking Ukraine. If he did this, it would not be as some part of an escalation ladder with the West — it would be explicitly outside it. He would do it to break Ukraine, and he would do it to break us.

A small strike, perhaps muddled with some narrative relating to the nuclear power plants that Russian forces have occupied, or the storytelling about how this is to secure the supposed secret nuclear program that Ukraine may have been developing with US support. Again, his action would be calculated to avoid consequences, and avoid the full salvo response. He would know the West would not risk overt nuclear confrontation with Russia for “one little accident” in Ukraine. But, the strike would deny the use of territory by the enemy. The strike could paralyze everyone — perhaps even the “fifth column” Putin now imagines he faces inside Russia — because we would really be in new territory then.

It is impossible to know what Putin’s personal thinking is versus the military doctrine. But there is nothing to indicate he is a blaze of glory guy. It seems unlikely he would use a nuke in a circumstance when there would be equal retaliation. In one sense, this means that we should stop being hemmed in by this fear and accept that the risks and costs are Ukraine’s to assess and determine. Ukraine is taking all the risk. They are paying all the costs. We should listen to them about what risks they are willing to take and costs incur. This is the minimum amount of respect that we can give to them when they have already shown the soundness of their strategic planning against Russia has far, far surpassed our own.

But we must also be prepared for the unthinkable, and be ready to respond in ways we do not want to think about, and understand that there are some situations in which the only way to avoid worse calamity is overwhelming use of force — which can also mean signaling that we will use overwhelming force to disrupt a typical escalation ladder. We must be ready for this. There is simply too much weird sh*t rattling around in the can today for us not to be prepared for a range of options far beyond what we have comfortably discussed for some time.

We are approaching an end stage where the only possible way out is a military defeat of Putin — a strategic defeat of Putin, before everything unravels too far to stop a worse calamity. Are we ready for that? Not on old paper plans, but in our minds? It is imperative that we stop reacting, and start to set the terms, while this is still possible.

We must stop being afraid of Putin — as the Ukrainians have done. It is the only way ahead.

— MM

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