Team Trump Appeases As Ukraine Dismantles An Empire
While Trump's real Ukraine policy is likely a mystery even to himself, the talking heads fronting for him are actively sabotaging American power. Allies have no choice but to stand alone.
Well, it’s been a very interesting week in geopolitics, in the old Chinese curse sense of the term - one certain to be remembered as a turning point in world history. There doesn’t appear to be any going back now: Trump’s foreign policy team is clearly bound and determined to pull him down a dead end road for their own self-serving ends. Just like Biden’s.
From a systems science standpoint, you won’t find a more classic case of a shock shattering a rigidity trap and sending a system into abject collapse. America’s idiot leaders haven’t a clue what they’ve unleashed on themselves. This is policy executed by postmodern twits putting on a show. The delusions on display are a flashing beacon screaming for any enemy of America to be ready to make a move. Xi and Putin are shouting for joy. They also don’t realize what happens when Europe, the most vicious and warlike region on the planet, wakes up the way Ukraine has.
As the USA descends into winter, Europe will be in spring. That portends a massive shift in the global balance of power. Moscow and D.C. will lose, Beijing and Brussels will gain. Probably the Global South too. Though the death throes of American and Muscovite power will not be pretty. If Beijing can connive a scenario where it’s just the PLA against the U.S. military in a West Pacific showdown, history suggests the hungry challenger will do well. If Trump’s people don’t understand that the true source of American power since the Second World War has been an international network of alliances held together by the perception that the USA could be expected to understand and look after its own interests, for the most part, they’re doomed. The quintessential mark at the Poker table who doesn’t realize the role they’re fated to play.
Trump’s “negotiating” style - and why he’s nowhere near as rich as half the hangers-on trying to drift in his wake - is the same used by many a boring American used car or - in the old days - door-to-door salesman. The reason I can’t actually bring myself to hate the guy these days is that his con has become so blatantly obvious, the essential patterns so predictable, that anyone who falls for them kind of deserves what they get. Frankly, he’s acting like Biden on meth - this looks irrational in the short term, but really, all Trump is after is his next attention fix. The last generation of American presidents have held the office mainly so they can stroke their own egos.
While he’s basking in the pomp and ceremony of state, Team Trump is pulling their best imitation of Team Biden, building their personal brands at any cost while they can, knowing they could be fired on a whim at any moment. Pure corporate America, and why foreigners make everything of quality - something no amount of tariffs will ever change.
The total lack of creativity that rules the minds of America’s would-be leaders is simply astounding. Postmodern triumph of the will style reasoning rules the day, policy sourced from a grab bag of ideas popular on social media.
The science of real, lasting change is simple, straightforward, and totally rejected by partisans on both teams. It costs, and has to be done carefully to avoid self-inflicted wounds. Just like you don’t demolish a house you plan to renovate by literally setting it on fire, putting a bunch of talking heads in charge of government agencies and firing anyone who won’t blindly follow orders is a recipe for ending up with an even less efficient bureaucracy. You want to provoke the breakup of the USA? Good way to get started. And hate to break it to most of the Red States, but y’all survive on the largess of federal distribution of tax revenues disproportionately coming from Blue States.
This week, several of Trump’s people all but confirmed that they really don’t care about NATO, China, or even making America great. They’re just self-interested scammers, many of them exploiting their prior military service in a way that probably violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Some are actual fellow travelers of Putin who want to take his fake social traditionalism campaign global - not because they believe in it (or anything), but because it it’s a vehicle for power.
About half of the MAGA movement is the flip side of the Sanders-AoC Progressives they so love to loathe, despite that crowd having long ago sold its soul to the Democratic Party establishment. But in the strange Orwellian haze that’s fallen over most of the English-speaking media, left is right, up is down, and feelings alone can blow up Death Stars. This is the terminal culmination of postmodernism. It will end as badly for the USA as it has russia - yes, Putin is postmodern to his core. That’s why he pretends to care about traditional values.
After going on about how delightfully catastrophic Team Trump’s foreign policy performance was this week in Munich, I really ought to be clear about what they did. It isn’t even that Trump called Putin or talked about Ukraine becoming russia someday that’s at issue. It’s the ridiculous statements about negotiations, NATO, and Europe by Trump’s foreign policy appointees that have done permanent damage. Also doing negotiations next week with Moscow without Europe or Ukraine there - that’s an egregious own goal.
Summing up the Trump Doctrine that is emerging, despite the standard efforts by those responsible to partially walk back the most damaging comments once Trump’s political team briefs him on the implications of what his policy team is doing:
No NATO for Ukraine, ever.
No return of territories seized by Moscow since 2014, and probably not 2022.
No real security guarantees for Ukraine.
Europe has to spend 5% of GDP on defense and take over responsibility for its own security.
Everyone from now on will basically do what D.C. wants when it comes to China… just because.
This is how all successful CEOs do deals, right? Surrender up front? Good grief! No wonder American companies that get big always deteriorate. They’re all giant shell games.
Hegseth, Vance, Gabbard, and their set are on the road to utterly destroying Trump’s ability to pursue any part of his agenda. Adopting Putin’s starting position in negotiations about Ukraine is the kind of opening move that screams exploit me more! It’s all part of their weird attempt to pretend they’re simultaneously pro-peace but also want a forever war with Iran and China. That makes as much logical sense as insisting the USA is being abused by foreigners yet has all the power it needs to dictate terms to everyone. Which is true, guys?
Now, in principle, nothing that Trump’s subordinates said this week actually means a damn thing. Biden constantly insisted that he backed Ukraine, yet perpetually neglected to give Kyiv the tools to do more than fend off the enemy - often, not even that much. And I’m not only referring to the six month gap in aid deliveries last year, but the many months that Biden was in office before Putin’s all-out assault began.
American leaders lie - it’s in their DNA. Nothing they say can be taken for granted, and when it comes to politics partisanship has demolished the incentive structures that made politicians at least somewhat accountable to the national interest.
The real trouble with Trump’s crew is that he has been conned into hiring a team of entrepreneurial sycophants whose values change with the season - Vance and Gabbard, the military veterans and ex-liberals who definitely know better - as well as outright morons like Hegseth who are among the few that served in the military explicitly to someday use their training against other Americans. Yes, these exist: I met more than a few during a single year on active duty, and they were always the same: dreaming of replacing the secular Constitution with a pseudo-Christian version of Islamic Sharia Law.
Sometimes, you become what you fight. A fair few American Christians idolize the power that Islamist extremists seem to wield. And a subset of American Catholics have pretty much abandoned actual Christianity the same way Putin’s russian orthodox cult did under Putin. Many actually believe that Americans who don’t believe as they do should be repressed, Inquisition style. And since they have no fixed beliefs, that reduces to applying power for the sake of it.
Like Putin’s own inner circle, this crew is feeding Trump all sorts of self-serving nonsense. Trump likely believes he can control them, play the good cop to their bad in the final stages of any negotiations then come up looking like the hero.
But the way the actual policy system works, public statements can and will bind Trump’s hands. The vampires around Trump actively aim to pull him into their various strange crusades, likely telling him that he survived assassination because their god (who is really just their own ego) loves him. And not, you know, because he was targeted by a loser with poor aim who got lucky enough to get into firing position because of bad planning.
A natural consequence of this kind of dysfunctional leadership team is that what parts of it want to believe is real will trump material reality. Down that road lies utter ruin, especially when the USA’s apparent economic and military strength is so brutally illusory - as is its supposed unity.
The clown car parade that is D.C. stands in stark contrast - as usual - to what the Ukrainians are achieving on the ground every day. Moscow’s winter campaign has weakened to the point that Ukraine has started launching sustained organized counterattacks on multiple fronts.
These don’t yet amount to more than opportunistic strikes that seek local level advantages as Ukraine holds off the orc tide, but the shift in posture is visible and noteworthy. Media hype about negotiations somehow ending the war in Ukraine this spring is, as ever, incredibly premature - especially when Trump’s people have just validated Putin’s long game. Trouble for Moscow and D.C. is that Ukraine doesn’t have to accept any bad deal as long as Europe stands firm. The Europeans already provide half of the military aid that Ukraine gets and, unlike the US, has been ramping up production for three years. Some material has to be bought from US stocks, but there’s no way Trump will turn down hard cash for gear Elon Musk will certainly want to score juicy contracts for Tesla to replace.
On the contrary, Ukraine’s posture is shifting decidedly towards the expectation that there will be a lot of hard fighting this year. A brief Easter ceasefire for show is possible - but far less likely now, thanks to Team Trump’s ineptitude - and might even be to Ukraine’s advantage as the rain and mud of spring makes drone operations more challenging.
But if one is tried, something will happen that one side or the other decides is too egregious to ignore. And Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive stands to be sharp and vicious. In a sense, Team Trump’s enabling of Putin may encourage the latter to double down on an already disastrous battlefield approach. And with their posture shifting, against all common sense, towards open betrayal of Ukraine, neither Ukraine nor Europe has any reason to hold back.
Better to face Putin now, before the full consequences of American betrayal are felt, than to wait. Yes, the US has capabilities that Europe lacks - but outside of heavy airlift, something the US needs more than Europe because it’s so far from its allies, most can be filled by relying on commercial sources. Lots of European companies operate excellent satellite networks. And right now the European economic has a lot more slack than America’s.
More on geopolitics in a bit. First, to the fronts.
Ukraine War 2025: Week 7 Fronts Overview
Whether the motivation is a sense of Moscow’s latest winter campaign having bogged down (very likely), a desire to look strong before negotiations (possible), Syrskyi’s tenure as commander-in-chief entering its second year (maybe), his appointee Drapatyi taking charge of key fronts (likely), something else (probably), or a combination of factors (definitely), the past couple weeks have seen what looked at first like fairly straightforward local counterattacks evolve into something more sustained. Kursk and Pokrovsk have seen the most Ukrainian activity in this regard, but the Kostiantynivka front and portions of the northern Donbas region have also marked an uptick in more aggressive actions.
While there is little hard evidence at this stage, it does seem that the weakening orc offensive on most fronts has allowed a portion of Ukraine’s forces to rest. As one example, the experienced 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which was finally forced out of Vuhledar in 2024 after at least a year and a half of holding the town, has apparently been in Kherson since at least December, only its attached drone battalion known to be actively engaged in operations. All or portions of several other brigades are likely being built up and given new gear. This will be the result of painful sacrifices made by members of the newer 140 and 150 series brigades.
It’s a bit early to divine any shifts in Ukrainian tactics, but a shift towards rapid and intensive operations aimed at narrow sectors is palpable. Presumably, substantial drone reconnaissance precedes and strike support accompanies major movements, along with heavy electronic warfare. Goal of any push is to deliver enough infantry to a target area using armored vehicles to hold out against counterattacks. Drone attacks behind the front help isolate targeted orc positions, preventing their reinforcement and interrupting proper support. When supporting elements go into action, drones and artillery hunt them down.
Two or three simultaneous short thrusts by company-strength elements can penetrate four or five kilometers into enemy positions then consolidate. It doesn’t appear that the orcs are used to their assault troops taking a punch as they build up ahead of the next push forward. Disorganization and the lack of effective training most ruscist assault soldiers are given allows Ukrainian forces to consolidate positions and withdraw their armored vehicles before enemy drones infest the skies again. From there, it’s another standard defensive fight in a tactical sense, localized operations nearby taking advantage of the enemy’s preoccupation.
Northern Theater
In Kursk Ukraine’s ongoing attacks southeast of Sudzha haven’t advanced nearly as quickly as at first, but that’s to be expected. The orcs are still visibly unsettled by Ukraine’s push and have not been able to effectively counter it. What they are doing is attempting to hit the other flank of Ukraine’s defenses in Kursk, to the west near Sverdlikovo.
This adds further credence to the theory that Ukraine’s counteroffensive on the east flank of Kursk mainly aims to prevent a coordinated attack. Punching east can also secure some additional breathing room for Ukrainian supplies entering Sudzha along the R200 highway coming in from Sumy.
North Koreans are reportedly on the front lines in Kursk again, this time operating in smaller formations. Gosh, North Korean generals, pretending that it’s still 1953 didn’t work so well? Who’d have thought?
What’s sad is that while every American military professional lacking a star on their collar is probably fully aware of how most standard practices are now vulnerable to sustained disruption by cheap drones, they’ll probably be stuck sending their people into hopeless situations because orders are orders. One of the great dangers of institutions is that the people in them will tend to maintain the status quo for the sake of it. America’s military is a repeat offender. It takes losing badly to force a reboot - and these days, it’s unclear whether the establishment would survive a shock defeat. Not when they try to pretend that American military might is invincible against all available evidence.
As an aside, I write in the style that I do, instead of something more consistently dry and academic, because I know full well that the audience which wants the latter is more interested in debate than victory. There’s not much hope for that sort - but mid-career and junior enlisted and officer types alike have to live with the consequences of bad science and policy. They’re the ones who will force change when the time comes - or at the very least, recognize when their superiors are out of touch and do what they can to protect those they are responsible for. And most don’t have time for self-indulgent academic debate.
Back to the fronts - fighting in Kursk seems certain to intensify again in the near future, especially with Zelensky throwing down a clever gauntlet by suggesting that Free Kursk could be swapped for Ukrainian territory in negotiations. That sounded like a concession, but in fact pointed a dagger at Putin’s chest, because the beating heart of Putin’s assault on Ukraine, the thing that legitimates the horrendous cost in the terms that matter to his perverse system, is that Ukraine doesn’t really exist. You can’t swap territory with a non-entity.
Hence Putin’s desire to negotiate directly with Trump and without Zelensky. As Hitler negotiated the Munich Pact of 1938 fully intending to violate it at first opportunity - same as he did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 - so does Putin hope to bluff Trump into accepting a stupid deal that exposes Trump to future humiliation. Putin is already at war with NATO: the choices are now surrender or victory. This is the tragedy of our times, but no less true for that. And if you won’t stop Moscow, you’re definitely not stopping Beijing.
Meanwhile, down on the Kharkiv front, Moscow continues to lack the force to do more than probe Ukrainian lines. That is good, because the Dvorichna bridgehead north of Kupiansk has lately been the one bright spot in the faltering orc winter campaign.
Eastern Theater
The situation on the Kupiansk front is far from critical, but still tends to worsen by the day. Moscow’s troops are still filtering over the Oskil and infesting Dvorichna, expanding their bridgehead along the river bank to the north. If this keeps going, by late spring Ukraine might need to seriously reinforce this area. That could actually turn out well, if Ukraine found an opportunity to push across the border, Kursk style, and seize the logistics node at Valuyki.
So far, reports suggest that only infantry are across the Oskil in force, the perimeter of the bridgehead expanding as more soldiers are ferried in by boat. The fog you tend to get in a river valley during winter probably makes it difficult for drones to lock the area down as happens further south.
Infiltrating through gaps in Ukraine’s coverage slows operations down, but in the Second World War Imperial Japanese soldiers proved that body-heavy, maximally aggressive tactics do move lines. However, their far more brilliant operations in the early Pacific War were based on maneuver coupled with infiltration. Once they started holding fixed positions, firepower wiped them out.
Once the enemy’s troops are thinned out, this approach becomes badly maladaptive for them. But in the short run, it’s difficult to completely halt progress. The flip side is that as supplies of key enabling gear, like armored vehicles, run low, each individual orc attack wave gets a bit weaker, on average.
Moscow did adapt its fight to better match reality in 2023, but this shift has reached hard limits. Ukraine has adapted too, and so far Moscow lacks an effective answer to Ukrainian drones. Small wonder Putin is desperate to con Trump into forcing Ukraine to make peace. Too bad so few American leaders have the vision to see the opportunity Moscow’s incredible weakness presents.
Hard power is a zero-sum affair. The more Moscow has, the less everyone else does. And whether or not you directly profit from the dismantling of one empire, the reduction in competition and potential for rivals to over-extend makes being the second-mover, so to speak, highly desirable. Relatively few in the empire really lose if Putin falls - even most members of his own dismal empire stand a chance to gain from the collapse of the inner circle that has colonized so much capital.
Again, if Moscow were really some kind of superpower, it wouldn’t be having to reduce the scope of major operations in Ukraine and sacrifice pressure on one front or even theater to sustain another. Ukraine faces similar pressures, but the balance of impact hasn’t favored Moscow for a long time.
South of Kupiansk, the Borova-Lyman area - which I generally refer to as Donbas North - remains an area where the orcs continue to seek dubious gains at high cost. The orcs have been trying to creep closer to Borova, on the east bank of the Oskil, for months now. So far the Ukrainian brigades in this area - Third Assault among them - have been very active in launching local counterattacks. These have likely prevented the orcs from getting closer to the Oskil.
A bridgehead over the Zherebets, which runs roughly parallel to the larger Oskil that runs some thirty kilometers east, forced Ukraine out of the village of Terny a few weeks ago. It continues to slowly expand, but at an even more lethargic pace than the crossing of the Oskil in Kupiansk.
The Borova and Lyman fronts, like the Siversk front to the south, are actually possible locations for a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive at some point. Ukrainian forces along the arc connecting these fronts tend to be aggressive in their defense, fairly often launching local counterattacks to disrupt enemy plans. Techniques developed here appear to have been exported to other sectors.
According to the The Centre for Defence Studies, both this area as well as Kostyantynivka are likely to receive increased orc attention in the near future. With encircling Pokrovsk - much less actually taking the place - now very unlikely, Moscow may hope to give the impression that the orcs are marching into free urban Donbas ahead of prospective talks. While taking action merely to bolster your bargaining position is nearly always a recipe for disaster in military affairs, that doesn’t mean Putin won’t demand it if he thinks Team Trump will use that to push the narrative that Ukraine is bound to lose.
On the Kostyantynivka front, while the Chasiv Yar sector has been fairly frozen of late, Ukrainian forces still holding out in a block of high rises and in a string of settlements on the outskirts, down in Toretsk local counterattacks have been intensifying. Though Moscow holds most of the ruins, Ukrainian positions on the northern edge are still strong enough to contest the suburbs and several mine tailing hills that rise some eighty meters above the surrounding ground.
Fairly often these days, Ukrainian local counterattacks precede a future orc advance. It is likely that these are weaker than would otherwise prove the case thanks to Ukraine throwing short jabs during the phase when the enemy is building up troop numbers. As is proving the case in Kursk, orc inability to properly synchronize operations carries serious costs. That’s why military types used to talk so much about “force multipliers” - officer-speak for emergent effects where the outcome is not strictly a function of summed parts, but a new level of potential generated by their combination.
The Pokrovsk front is an excellent example of how orc offensives fail: three months ago, many pundits were writing about the possible fall of Pokrovsk. But by withdrawing closer to its supply base in the region, Ukraine’s defenders here now have the orcs at a tactical disadvantage along the front line. The enemy has to move supplies tens of kilometers across drone-infested roads from Donetsk City, while Ukraine can build up a striking force in Pokrovsk and swiftly dispatch it to launch counterattacks. This has helped the defense hold where it must to avert a crisis - at least so far.
Over the past few weeks, I and other analysts have suggested that the orc bridgehead over the Solona river between Kotlyne and Udachne might become vulnerable, and this is now proving the case. Some sharp Ukrainian counterattacks have reportedly pushed the orcs almost out of Kotlyne, and another substantial one that a week ago looked purely tactical in nature liberated the town of Pishchane, threatening the flank of the orc front. If 59th Assault can manage to reclaim Novovasylivka, the orcs should be forced to beat a hasty retreat of five to six kilometers. A supporting attack further east into Dachenske has also achieved success - it could lead to Ukraine liberating a string of nearby villages along the Solonyi river that acted as a convenient bulwark ahead of the main defense lines near Pokrovsk.
Considering that even as recently as January this orc assault axis risked reaching a key logistics trunk entering Pokrovsk from the northwest, Ukraine’s timing is notable. It suggests intent: the orcs were lured into a trap. With 155th Mechanized Brigade receiving so much negative press, I have to wonder if its placement in this area wasn’t intentional, since ruscist officers seem to prioritize attacking formations they perceive as weak.
I can’t forecast a bigger Ukrainian counterattack out of Pokrovsk any time soon, but substantial deterioration of the orc line here could lead to a major turnaround as soon as spring. If Moscow does shift focus to the north, this becomes even more likely.
On the other flank of Pokrovsk, between Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka the orcs are slowly creeping towards the T-0504 highway, but the pace suggests very heavy losses. If Moscow does aim to shift the focus of the offensive in Donbas this spring to Kostyantynivka, an early sign will probably be reinforcements arriving to expand the bridgehead over the Bychok here.
As I argued in early 2024, for the orcs to successfully lay siege to Kostyantynivka they need to get around its southern flank and approach from the southeast, along the T-0504. This would have forced Ukrainian troops to evacuate the ridges between the highway and Toretsk, making its seizure far less difficult. Now Moscow seems to be defaulting to a more sensible plan, the efforts on the Pokrovsk and Donbas-South fronts a serious and irreversible error despite the orc seizure of Vuhledar, Kurakhove, and Velyka Novosilka.
The southern edge of Donbas remains tough going for Ukrainian troops, with Moscow’s advance unseating the defense around the Andriivka-Ulakly-Kostyantynopil as I’ve been expecting for a few weeks. With the orcs expanding their presence in Andriivka and having broken through to the southern outskirts of Ulakly this week, I have to expect that Drapatyi, who took over command of this area, is actively pulling the line back towards Bahatyr and Oleksiivka.
Incidentally, an orc assault towards Kostyantynopil finally hit the area I’d previously mapped as an example of how a company-based defense might cover a two kilometer sector of front in the vicinity. Here’s that image for reference:
When the orc attack came, it followed roughly the anticipated axis I expected. The cluster of blue dots show where Ukrainian forces ambushed and destroyed a ruscist assault group. Note how the orcs followed the trees and avoided pushing over the open fields - fire from where I expect Ukrainian forces had a number of fighting positions would have savaged them. Of course, now they have to maintain support for whatever troops made it to the outskirts of Kostyantynopil. Though Ukraine lost a Leopard during the fighting, the enemy hasn’t consolidated control of the area so far.
Whether they should hold firm in the area is doubtful at this stage, but the option remains open. This map also shows an area to the east of the ruscist attack where Ukrainian forces appear to have launched a local level counterattack a couple weeks ago. While I imagine the enemy will firm up control south of the Sukhi Yali river soon, for now their assault troops are in a trap.
Further south, as expected, ruscist troops in Velyka Novosilka have begun trying to push the front lines further north, though on both sides of the town, not just the eastern bank of the Mokri Yali. This is partly defensive, but also likely part of an attempt to cut off Bahatyr before Ukraine can form a solid line. Further north the orcs are trying to push southeast from Sribne to create a northern jaw.
After forcing Ukraine out of Bahatyr and Oleksiivka, if that even happens, ruscist forces here should be exhausted. While an attack towards Huliaipole and the Southern Theater is a possibility, at present the orc grind in Donbas seems set to shift north towards Kostyantynivka heading into spring. With armored vehicle losses extreme and wheeled transportation limited to roads when the mud gets bad, the ruscist army will want shorter supply lines to sustain their ever-narrowing campaign
Southern Theater
Relative to the north and east, Ukraine’s south continues to be on the quieter side. The Geoconfirmed.org map of geolocated events over the past week is illustrative of where fighting is concentrated. Also shows how deep into russia that Ukrainian attacks routinely hit.
It’s mostly drones and aircraft doing the fighting in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia right now, as neither side has assets to spare for making big moves on the ground at present. In addition, Ukraine’s degradation of ruscist logistics is well advanced. Speaking in a strategic sense, the more that Moscow is lulled into a false sense of security on this front, the more devastating a surprise move here will be. I do have to wonder if all the activity in Kursk is not at least in part intended to distract over the long term from a far more dangerous Ukrainian campaign.
Air, Sea, & Strike
Ukrainian dismantling of critical ruscist infrastructure continues apace, with oil refineries coming under attack again this week. At least one major facility is reportedly half destroyed, testament to what repeated small drone attacks can accomplish even if most are shot down.
Moscow launches sporadic missile strikes, but so far has held off from the massive raids attempted in the past. With winter coming to a close, and not a particularly cold one in Ukraine at that, going after heating and energy infrastructure isn’t as attractive. One salvo of ballistic missiles was directed at Kyiv, along with drones, and people are often hurt or killed by wreckage or errant enemy weapons in these attacks, but the risk is nothing like what it was two years ago. People in Putin’s empire are very fortunate that Ukraine doesn’t deliberately target civilians like the Allies did in World War Two.
It’s been fairly status quo in the other supporting theaters, winter tough for operations on the water and both sides effectively stalemated when it comes to using crewed jets near the front lines. For the record, those who say that an essential US contribution to European security is the ability to destroy enemy air defenses are repeating cheap propaganda. It is very, very, very difficult to take down a decentralized air defense network sufficient to fly crewed aircraft over enemy territory these days. No, stealth jets are not magic - stealth is a relative thing, and distributed sensors tuned to the right wavelengths can cope.
The air war in Ukraine has demonstrated that most NATO assumptions about how to control the skies are deeply flawed. Cheap drones are almost always better to employ wherever there is real risk of aircrew loss. Crewed jets are vital in supporting roles, but avoid direct contact with the enemy.
Likewise, large numbers of simple, mid-tier drones is as important as fancy multi-million dollar missiles. This is proving true both in hitting targets and protecting them. The practical policy implication is a serious reduction in the value of the kinds of assets allies have long relied on the US military to offer.
Aside from media reports suggesting that Ukraine now has at least two dozen Vipers and three to six Mirage 2000s, the biggest news on the aviation front is probably a Wall Street Journal report about the Viper lost with its pilot last year. It offers a crucial piece of evidence that shifts the default assumption about the cause of the loss away from the original official explanation and towards the Patriot friendly fire theory. That is now the most plausible scenario.
While some are going to rush out and insist that Ukrainian authorities lied to the public, the truth is more complicated. I doubted the Patriot shootdown claim for a simple reason called Link-16. It’s the NATO-standard network that allows all the pieces of the military system to talk in real time.
Aside from a malfunction or a mistake in procedure, Link 16 is very good at preventing friendly fire incidents. Trouble is, the Biden Administration made sure it wasn’t activated on the Patriot systems or Vipers sent to Ukraine! And apparently didn’t tell anyone about it, either. So the Viper pilot who died chasing down orc missiles would have been flying into battle not knowing that a critical margin of safety was disabled. A missile lacking the right data can easily jump target lock and go for an F-16 instead of a cruise missile or drone. Something like this happened to a U.S. Navy jet in the Red Sea a few weeks back.
Now, why didn’t Ukraine admit this up front? Because the lack of Link 16 dramatically reduces the effectiveness of Ukrainian Vipers and Patriots alike. That’s the last thing you want the orcs knowing when they’re already being much more cautious simply because Ukraine has Vipers in the sky. Apparently, Ukraine was given a version of the AMRAAM air to air missile with extended range, at least 120km, so it may well be possible to actually ambush glide bomb toting Flankers under the right conditions. But without Link 16, that’s a whole lot harder.
It is to be hoped that the Link 16 issue has been resolved. If not, Ukraine is going to have a heck of a time employing the Swedish AWACS aircraft that will hopefully arrive this year. And people wondered why I was so hard on Team Biden all the time! The biggest difference with Trump is that the mistakes are all out in the open.
One of the more frustrating aspects of monitoring the Ukraine War these past three-plus years has been the ability of politicians to undermine all prediction by acting against their own best interests. A serious pathology grips American policy circles that leads, more often than not, to disaster. It doesn’t matter which team is in charge: nobody serves the American people.
Leadership & Personnel
Not much new to report on Ukraine’s military reboot - the corps system is going to take time to fully establish. My sense is that it’s already active, and partly responsible for Moscow’s offensive bogging down this winter. The integration of dedicated drone brigades with front line formations is a tricky job, but a number of innovative units are getting it done. Scaling up and out is the challenge - not unlike transforming a start-up into something built to last.
The greater part of the responsibility for Ukraine’s ongoing survival, of course, rests with Ukraine’s soldiers. Weary as they are, as a group they seem set to defy the forecasts of so many wise minds living far away.
It’s definitely good news that Ukrainian authorities are offering some major incentives to under-25s who sign up to fight. Free housing, college education, a good wage - that’s all the least anyone who fought on the front lines in this war is owed. A lot of American veterans benefited from programs like these. Too bad their leaders make such a habit of betraying everything they sacrificed for.
Geopolitical Brief
North America
Hate to dwell so much on the strange disaster that is America’s federal government, but right now this is simply called for. It’s difficult to overstate just how much damage Trump’s nincompoop policy team has done to their own interests.
Maybe Team Trump is playing at some kind of good cop-bad cop act designed to make Trump look like the tough guy. If so, it’s not working out as planned. Putin now knows to keep on pushing to Kyiv, Warsaw, and Berlin, because obviously America isn’t tough enough to take the same stand it did after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. This is far from the spirit of Ronald Reagan, or even Nixon going to China. Chamberlain doffing his hat to Hitler in Munich is the correct historical analogy.
At best, Trump can now hope for a brief show ceasefire. After that, the Ukraine War will be right back to where it started: the USA has to put up or shut up. If the latter, well, that’s how America begins to totally unravel. America can only be seen to have been defeated by so many enemies before no one trusts the federal government and groups of states see the necessity of some kind of autonomy.
Trump might be 99% talk, but often enough rhetoric become binding. International politics is ruled by the simple law that only behavior truly matters: reputation is everything. US allies like Canada have all but voluntarily disarmed because everyone assumed the modern USA would never really dream of, say, annexing Canada. Even if Trump is just gaslighting everyone as part of a negotiating strategy on tariffs, this behavior entails serious consequences that will substantially weaken the USA. And good luck negotiating favorable trade deals then!
If you can choose to buy a car from a dealer that uses pressure tactics and lies about the vehicle’s condition, or one with a reputation for rarely giving in on price but offers an extended warranty that nobody ever needs to use, always go with the latter. No matter how smart you think you are, the shady dealer has information you lack that will come back to bite you. Right now, the first dealer is the USA, and the second Ukraine. I’d trust Ukrainians to defend the U.S. Constitution with more gusto than American partisans.
Even in most of America, reputation is everything to a good business. It’s fair to ask - what is Trump’s reputation as a businessman? The answer: hawking gilded towers in New York City, a metropolis that probably won’t exist in about fifty years, because sea levels will rise. An appropriate metaphor.
Coming from the West Coast, I wholeheartedly agree that big tech companies are irritating on many fronts, but you know what? Google, Amazon, and all the rest reshaped global commerce. That’s the spirit of Pacific America for you. Ain’t all good, obviously but you can make use of what we produce. What do New York scam artists like Trump make? The best they can do is buddy up with others who actually do.
I’m only just reading Colin Woodard’s excellent book American Nations, and it’s striking to note the similarities between today and the years before the American War of Independence - Civil War Two. The USA is divided into not just two, but multiple competing nations, defined mostly by geography.
This county level map from Nationhood Lab is a great starting point for understanding the USA’s actual internal dynamics. Each natural region of the USA is defined by a mixture of several distinct national heritages which gives the states within their common character. That isn’t to suggest all are the same, only that patterns of settlement, climate, and history have shaped state cultures in certain regions a particular way.
For example, the culture of Pacific America - that is, the five states bordering the Pacific Ocean plus the USA’s Pacific territories - has over the past half century become increasingly distinct from the rest of the country. Ours is a mix of what Woodard terms the Left Coast, Far West, El Norte, and First Nation cultures, and while predominantly part of “Blue” America our views on the proper role of government and policy are distinct from those held by most Yankee Northeasterners. Where they believe that government, economy and society are supposed to be closely bound together at all times, out here government is seen as a necessary evil - a useful tool, but also a blunt one.
That’s why even the conservative Far West is much less pro-Trump than Appalachia. At the same time he pretends to care about freedom, his people also want to use the federal government in ways most old-school Republicans find deeply troubling. Turns out, you can have both individual freedom and efficient, effective government. Here in the Pacific Northwest we struggle with the latter, but most people don’t take the former too far. It’s why I always call us the USA’s Scandinavia. And California is Germany.
The true diversity of America is important to keep in mind right now, because whichever partisan team controls the federal government is automatically hostile to the idea that the USA can’t be efficiently or effectively managed from D.C. Though Team Trump claims to be trying to fix the federal government, their plan for going about it is nothing more than a grab bag of ideas popular in certain online communities. They’re the explicit mirror image of the Democrats who have spent years playing the same game to boost donor participation by any means necessary.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be all kinds of unexpected consequences stemming from blowing up the federal system. There is little to suggest that Trump’s people understand it or how fragile it has always been. America’s federal institutions simply can’t flex too quickly without stuff breaking that actually does do the public a lot of good. The ideological pattern visible in what agencies and programs are attacked suggests that nobody involved in reforming the bureaucracy comprehends what they’re getting into.
A lot of Americans seem to believe that presidents can dictate reality. That this hasn’t ever proven the case appears lost on most partisans. Worse, the blind taboo against studying real geography - the science, not map memorization exercises - in the USA means that the fundamental tendency towards fragmentation is unexamined. Countries are held together by complex bundles of intersecting incentives. Right now, professionals in the USA are beginning to wonder whether the rule of law is going to hold.
J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, and their allies sincerely believe that their peculiar version of Christianity - a weird offshoot of true Catholicism that has merged with the most delusional aspects of the American Evangelical movement - literally trumps the Constitution, an inherently secular document. They seek to colonize it and the federal government in a bid to impose their cult’s version of what amounts to Sharia Law. In their mind, liberty does not extend to anything they don’t see as expressly supported in their interpretation of the Bible.
Exactly like the postmodern “woke” DEI people they rail against, these con artists don’t care about facts or science. Their positions shift like the wind, because they’re just entrepreneurs seeking an audience at any cost. Right now, they have begun to explicitly claim powers for the Executive Branch reserved in the Constitution for the Legislative and Judicial Branches that threaten to upend the checks and balances that made the USA possible in the first place.
This kind of power grab is what precipitated the War of Independence and Civil War. If you take a loose, continent-spanning federation like the USA and attempt to impose the cultural values of one region or alliance of regions on the rest, the thing will break.
Obviously, rumors and rumblings rarely amount to much. But among a plurality of Americans, likely soon a majority, dangerous questions are being asked about how far this all goes and where it ends. In a social system, that can swiftly become a tipping point that produces an explosion. The fact that substantial portions of the US media and political establishment spent all of 2024 warning of imminent fascism only to suddenly seem meekly cowed is going to generate some serious cognitive dissonance in the minds of millions of Americans.
American politics and policy right now is dominated by a strange paradox: America is supposedly so weak and exploited by foreigners that radical measures are required, yet is also strong enough to simply tell those same foreigners when to jump. That’s a tell-tale sign of a movement that has no real direction, is a product of millions of people feeling as if all hope for the future is lost unless they take whatever they can right now.
Eventually, a countervailing movement will take shape. Given the USA’s history, it will likely latch on to the simple question of why the country even has a unitary federal government at all when the USA is so legally and culturally diverse. More Americans would be happy with a regional federal government than the pundit class dares admit. The era of “United” America is over. And that’s probably a healthy thing - at least in the long run.
As far as Ukraine policy goes, my expectation continues to be that Trump won’t give Ukraine more free aid, but also won’t stand in the way of Europeans buying American stuff for Ukraine. American support has never been reliable, and I’ve been making the case for three years that a global replacement is required.
Europe
What’s happening in Europe may be the beginning. If the Pacific democracies can be pulled in, the democratic bloc that would result stands to be more stable than anything D.C. puts together. South Korea and Japan gain much by trading American security guarantees for European. The confluence of long-term interests in the political, economic, and social domains is difficult to ignore - unless you live in D.C.
Abandoning Europe is perhaps the worst strategic error the USA could possibly make from the standpoint of securing its power in a rapidly changing world order. The real secret of the USA’s strength for decades was a partial surrender of sovereignty by numerous allies to American military power. US military might relies on access to a vast network of overseas bases - carrier groups are powerful, but not enough to win wars on their own.
Trump’s team has awakened a sleeping dragon. They won’t like the consequences. The underlying cultural tensions pulling America apart make the country’s fragmentation increasingly likely. Shocking Europe into any kind of coherent action on security or trade will blow right back on the USA. And when you’re doing that while also threatening to upend your domestic politics - well, hubris oft precedes a nasty plunge off a cliff onto shark rocks. All that’s left for the sane folks in the world to do is seek opportunity as they can. In the long run, a sharp slap to the face will be healthy for America.
For over half a century European and Asian democracies have spent less on defense than the US, because the deal was they would generally go along with America’s wishes when it mattered in exchange for being able to blame the aggressive Americans for playing heavy in world affairs. The moment Europeans and other allies can look after their own defense, there is zero reason to listen to D.C.
The broader European leadership level response to the USA’s antics so far has been to allow the lingering antipathy felt by many Europeans about American pretensions of cultural and military dominance to simmer. Now, they have a strong incentive to provoke it. While the USA’s Democratic Party leadership caste sits back and debates whether to passively go along with Trump or try to co-opt his message somehow, Europeans and the English-speaking community abroad look on and wonder how their worst stereotypes of Americans can be so easily reaffirmed.
Even the magazine Politico, long a stronghold of colonized Germans who have decided to go along with the whole America rules the world scam, is openly talking about Europe going it alone. Lose the politicians, lose the media, and an alliance is done. Holding negotiations with Putin’s thugs that exclude Europe and Ukraine is another pointless self-inflicted wound. It honestly makes a fella wonder whether Vance, Hegseth, and Gabbard aren’t in fact compromised by ruscist intelligence just like the Democrats insist. The orcs do love their blackmail - and gullible fools.
For Ukraine, in the medium to long run this whole fandango is as much of a blessing as anything Trump might decide to do for Ukraine if and when he gets tired of Putin trying to play him. His apparent need to satisfy the pro-Moscow Vance-Hegseth-Gabbard wing of his coalition means that even if he were to promise a massive flood of aid, it would probably come with Biden-esque caveats like no use in russia or target pre-approval.
In Europe, where the study of history is more systematic by grace of the fact that stopping the chronic European habit of waging wars became a necessity of mutual survival, most leaders are reading the signals from America lately as evidence of effective collapse. If the American "end of history” boosters were wrong (I’ve been right on that much since my undergrad days twenty years ago) and nothing has truly changed in global affairs, then Europeans know where this can and will lead.
A strong Europe is a necessary part of any effort to keep Beijing from turning into a malignant empire bent on expansion after Moscow and D.C. fall. In the emerging global power mosaic, attempting to encircle China outright is the worst possible choice, bound to lead to a horrific war. Presenting Beijing with multiple independent fronts to cope with is superior, as there will always be a backchannel or two available to head off lethal conflicts. In a complex world, it pays to maintain as many connections as possible, with brazen hostility tending to alienate the aggressor over time until some egregious act sparks the formation of a countervailing coalition.
The USA’s collapse and rebirth cycle cannot be stopped, and will take at least five to ten years for a new spring to come, its shape hard to know. Europe’s choice is to face a Beijing-Moscow alliance deepened by provocations from D.C. driven by domestic political imperatives, or allow Beijing to throw its unreliable enemy-turned-temporary-ally under the bus in exchange for guarantees of access to markets and cooperation when it comes to stabilizing the Middle East, where both get their oil. This, plus the Muscovite empire’s collapse in the wake of Putin’s botch of an imperial war to finally destroy Ukraine, should be able to prevent a global-level collapse.
In the 2030s it is to be hoped that a reformed and more stable USA will be back to its entrepreneurial self, China will feel less of a need to be able to seize Taiwan if needed to distract the domestic population from a severe economic crisis, and nobody will have to worry about a concentrated “Eurasian” power getting in the way. A new global balance would be achieved that might last a century. Even more, if the science of managing it were properly advanced.
This, I suspect, is what a number of European leaders, mostly in the north and east, have already begun to work towards, even if they don’t know it yet. They have no choice, given that nobody really knows if the USA will actually back NATO anymore. And they might well start working much more closely with democracies in Asia, like Japan and South Korea, to give them an alternative to D.C. Now that many Canadians are actually concerned about Trump’s annexation rhetoric, whether justified or not, and the British are calling appeasement as details of Trump’s talks with Putin emerge, America’s closest and most loyal allies are having second thoughts.
Middle East
The ceasefire with Hamas held - barely, after real fears of the deal falling apart. It may still. Trump’s talk about kicking the Palestinians out of Gaza permanently is inspiring Israeli hardliners to rub their hands in anticipation of full-on ethnic cleansing. The Hezbollah ceasefire is holding, but is also threatened. If things deteriorate, the Houthis may go back to shooting at ships.
Meanwhile, if Iran doesn’t already have enough material for half a dozen nukes waiting to be assembled and tested, it could in weeks. Maybe that will be enough to deter any adventures. But Trump’s talk about the US taking over Gaza could easily inspire some nasty attacks against American personnel in the region. A downward spiral provoked by silly rhetoric would then be probable. How long until Putin finds a way to make that happen, I wonder?
The thing with Trump’s people is that they tell you how to beat them. All they really want is to be seen to be doing a deal. All hope to be in other jobs with a cool line on their resume by the time the piper comes calling for payment.
Pacific
All in all, the authorities in Beijing must be sitting back and smiling about now. If you were to construct a secret master plan ending in the USA’s sudden collapse, what Trump’s people have been doing lately is just about what the plot would look like as it began to unfold. In fact, I actually wrote out a scenario broadly like this as the backstory to the near-future plot thread in Bringing Ragnarok before Trump was ever elected to office.
To reiterate, I’ve got no partisan angle to push here. I just happen to have substantial formal expertise in policy science. As a simple matter of actually making policy, what’s happening in D.C. now is as laughable as Biden play-acting FDR. As it turns out, thanks to increased prices for everything, the US is spending less on infrastructure now than it was four years ago. Faith in the United States federal government as it stands ought to be near zero.
For Trump’s people to try breaking so much with a bare-bones majority after an election where less than 2/3 of eligible voters turned out is tantamount to political suicide. To start insisting that the Judiciary can’t restrain the Executive while claiming powers over the purse expressly given to Congress by the Constitution is the height of stupidity. You start poking at the rule of law, and what’s to say that me launching a drone assault on D.C. to wipe out the Trump regime isn’t technically illegal if, as Trump recently asserted, what you do can’t be illegal if it saves the country.
Ah, but from whom? Open that door even a little, and someone’s tyranny will slip through. And do leaders really believe their security is ready to stop drones?
Given the global unraveling underway and its extremely geographic contours, I think that my concept for a West Coast Defense Force needs to be re-titled to The Pacific American Forces. Mission: safeguarding the people of the Constitution from all hazards, human and natural.
Pacific America as an autonomous region would have as much weight as Japan or Germany on the global power scale. Just think of all those Nimitz-class aircraft carriers redone as drone hives. A drone that can drop a bomb can also help fight fires.
As it turns out, I may need to devote a little time each week to that particular project in this section. I guess we’ll have to see what D.C. does in the coming weeks. But historically speaking, Pacific America was never meant to be part of the USA anyway. Jefferson and others among the Founders saw it as naturally being its own thing, too far from D.C. to be governed by it, better off being a descendant governed by similar principles locally executed.
True enough. Maybe it’s time. Watch out, Moscow, because your russian world delusion includes parts of us. We’re a natural ally of Ukraine. In the event, expect the Pacific Fleet to soon encounter a series of accidents.
Concluding Comments
That was a long post, I know, and apologies for so may words. But as someone with some pretty solid training in policy and science, it’s hard not to comment when you see such blazing stupidity at work.
Whatever anyone believes, the consequences are unlikely to be controllable. It’s just like what happens when a company is bought out in a hostile takeover. The thing gets loaded up with debt then dumped, creditors and taxpayers taking the hit while senior shareholders and banks are bailed out.
When this mess unravels, a lot of the people Trump insists he’s looking out for will suffer the most. But he’s not up for re-election, so what does he care? Just like Biden, it’s all about his legacy now. Thanks to his ridiculous team, scorched earth looks probable.