I’m increasingly seeing usage of the term “Third Gulf War” by commentators, and without a doubt this now ranks among the biggest conflicts in the region’s recent history. But it may not be as discrete an event as some assume. The dynamics of the conflict, energy markets, and conflict all suggest that it might rumble on for quite some time. It is certainly the case that some long-term ramifications can no longer be avoided.

Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain?

As anticipated, the disruption to markets has only grown with the length of the conflict.

The White House, which has been peculiarly unprepared for the long-expected outcome of any significant conflict in the Gulf, appears to have settled on a message that this will produce “short-term pain for long-term gain.” Administration spokespeople are effectively arguing that disruptions in the market will be temporary — dare I say transitory? — and that there will be no long-term impacts from the war other than the benefits of whatever strategic goal it is intended to achieve.

The president’s messaging on Monday afternoon, that the war was “nearly complete,” helped to soothe panicking markets: the price of Brent Crude immediately dropped 11 percent from a high close of $120. The president, however, has since that time issued statements calling for Iran’s unconditional surrender, and suggesting a longer conflict. The administration is considering some mitigating strategies, including escort convoys in the Strait of Hormuz or the release of strategic petroleum reserves, but thus far has done little practical. If they do not do so in the next couple of days, prices will again push higher.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that this war does end within the week.1 The “short term pain, long term gain” narrative is still pretty questionable. The stakes are certainly high enough that regional states will be very keen to get energy moving through the Strait of Hormuz as fast as possible. Oil prices should drop fairly quickly. But there are significant caveats to the idea that long-term pain can be limited. First, it will take time to restart production, perhaps days or even weeks to do so. Refineries need to be restarted, facilities reopened or repaired, and shipments need time to get to consumers. The ramifications of earlier generations of energy crisis (the 1973 oil embargo, for example), were felt for years in stagnation, inflation, and political fallout.

Second, we haven’t yet seen any significant destruction of energy infrastructure. But refineries in the UAE and Oman have now been targeted, and there have been attempted attacks on Saudi oil fields and Qatari gas export facilities. If such attacks become more successful and widespread, the long-term ramifications will be worse. The same goes for destabilization within Iran itself or the widening of the war.

For both reasons, long-term estimates (i.e., oil futures) are suggesting prices somewhere close to $85 for the remaining year. It’s a reasonable price, but as much as $30 more than late last year. With midterms coming in November, the administration may find itself hard pressed to sell voters on even this moderate amount of long-term pain if they also can’t point to some genuine gain.

Closing Time For Real

Like many folks in DC, I teach a course as an adjunct professor once or twice a year, including a course on Oil and International Security, which provides a nice respite from US foreign policy work while allowing me to keep my background in eneup to date. But it’s also been a hell of a ride. In the last four years, I’ve had to rewrite parts of the course multiple times due to a significant energy-related crisis.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off a multi-month period of intense reshuffling in global energy flows as European states initiated sanctions and attempted to shift away from Russian gas. In September of that year, the Nordstream pipeline was mysteriously blown up, leaving the class to explore the contentious pipeline politics of Eastern Europe — and trying to figure out which party had the motive and opportunity to do it. Last year, the Houthis were engaged in an active bombing campaign in the Red Sea, forcing tankers to divert preexisting routes, and leading to a short, largely unsuccessful US military campaign to protect maritime shipping. Now, we have a worst-case scenario in the Gulf.

It’s been a fun few years.

But it’s also worth noting that each of these incidents — as in the current moment — enabled us to update our understanding of the specific risks from energy disruptions. Energy markets have changed a lot since the disruptions of the 1970s and 1980s, on which most of the existing research is based; more recent incidents have forced us to update our priors on how conflict might shape global markets.

Amy Myers Jaffe has a good piece on the way in which oil shocks look different today domestically. I’ll add a few thoughts here on the security studies literature, which thus far has actually been remarkably accurate in its predictions.

Two specific articles are worth mentioning, as they bear directly on the current scenario: Caitlin Talmadge’s “Closing Time,” and Eugene Gholz and Daryl Press’s “Protecting the Prize.” Both articles are relatively skeptical of the notion that significant risks exist to the free flow of oil from the Gulf — but each explicitly calls out the Hormuz scenario as one of the riskier cases. Neither provides much ground for optimism in the short term.

Gholz and Press explore a variety of oil shocks (i.e., the 1973 oil embargo, Iranian Revolution, and Gulf War) and conclude that markets are extremely self-regulating. Because oil is priced and shipped globally, even significant disruptions produce market adaptation and prices eventually return to normal. This argument is entirely accurate, and indeed, we also saw it in operation during the last major energy shock of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The caveat to it, however, is that most disruptions are resolved within 3 to 6 months and — as we saw in 2022, there can be significant impacts to markets and consumers during that interim period.

Gholz and Press also argue that it is effectively impossible for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz in practice — anti-missiles are too ineffective against thick-hulled tankers, mines too unreliable, etc. This matches Talmadge’s argument that the shipping can be harassed or hindered in trying to navigate the strait, but long-term blockage would be effectively impossible in the face of concerted US or international military action to clear it.

We’re now getting a case study in how all of this plays out in practice. The Strait of Hormuz is not “closed” in a technical sense; it is, however, effectively off limits to traffic. Political scientists were largely correct in their assessment that the Strait would not be closed by, ie, large-scale mining operations, but rather by harassment of vessels and fear of strikes. As the price of oil rises over time, some companies and crews will inevitably find it worth the risk to try to make the crossing, and the United States will find it increasingly necessary to use military means to reopen the passage.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it would be easy. As Talmadge puts it, “the notion that Iran could truly blockade the strait is wrong—but so too is the notion that U.S. operations in response to any Iranian action in the area would be short and simple.” De-mining, escort missions, and other relevant activities would all bring U.S. forces in closer range of Iranian attacks, increasing the risk of casualties, and such a campaign could be lengthy and repetitive.

More generally, it has been an astounding four or five years in terms of geopolitical instability for energy markets. There’s going to be some great studies written about this era, but one factor I think is currently underplayed is how much the United States, which was always assumed in such studies to be the firefighter for crisis in the Gulf, has instead become the arsonist. Through the crises of the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s, the United States was the one attempting to prevent regional actors from undermining energy flows. Today, the Strait of Hormuz is closed not because of unilateral Iranian actions, but because of America’s choice to start a war.

As I wrote in today’s Financial Times, the face that the United States is now an agent of chaos for global energy markets may have long-term implications for how other countries like China build their own energy security strategies.

Endgame

The stock market is behaving like a yo-yo. Prices rise on reports of conflict and the continued effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz; they fall on indications that the conflict may end soon. Contradictory and sometimes inaccurate messaging from the administration is only adding to this chaos. A mistaken tweet from the Secretary of Energy on Tuesday, for example, touted American success in escorting a tanker through the Strait successfully. This apparently never happened; the tweet was deleted shortly thereafter, and markets boomeranged.

But let us say for the sake of example that the administration is in fact serious about wrapping this war up expeditiously. It’s widely known that the president in particular tends to back off when confronted with significant opposition. This fact seems to be moderating markets and comforting the American public. Nonetheless, as various observers have noted, the choice to end this conflict may not lie entirely with the White House.

Iran has faced widespread bombing, the killing of its supreme leader, and a series of deadly and damaging strikes to both infrastructure and civilian targets. The new Supreme Leader lost his wife, father, mother, and child in airstrikes. For the Iranian regime to agree to end this conflict, they would have to believe that it is not going to restart again soon. And after last June’s strikes and this new war, that will be a very hard sell. It certainly does not suggest an Iran that is significantly more willing to make concessions than previously.

In short, the United States can declare victory, but even if the US were to remove most of its troops from the region, we cannot remove US allies in the Gulf, nor continue to protect shipping without those troops. If Iran chooses to continue a long-term harassment strategy in the hopes of raising the political and economic costs on the United States, then the Trump administration will face a costly choice: escalate or offer concessions.

Thus far, the central conclusion I am drawing from this war is the utter failure of the hawkish “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran. Sure, it may look as if Lindsey Graham is getting his heart’s desire. Yet every day that this war continues undermines his arguments that Iran will simply cave once enough pressure has been applied. That we have made it to the military option at all is an indictment of years of prior sanctions and military strikes.

And though it is too early to tell what the long-term results of this conflict will be, it frankly seems more likely that Iran will sprint for a nuclear weapon than give up their enrichment capabilities. The reason Iran hawks gave back in the late 2010s for killing the Obama-era nuclear deal was that it offered a potential long-term path for an Iranian nuclear weapon if things went poorly. It is their advice — pulling out of the deal and doubling down on pressure — that has brought us to this end instead.

Not that it ever really stopped. One of my favorite statistics during the main period of the war on terror was the fact that America had bombed Iraq every year for at least 30 years. This single datapoint really captured the mission creep, shifting rationales, and overextension of our military commitments to the region.

But with changing US foreign policy discussions and the rise of China, we were supposed to have put all this behind us. Like most millennials and younger voters, I was pretty happy to have been offered “no more Forever Wars” by our politicians. Unfortunately, they never seem quite able to keep that promise. And while it’s bad enough when they break their word with pretty justifications and strategic rationales for intervention, it turns out it’s even worse when it’s a half-baked attempt to turn air superiority into rainbows and kittens.1

To say I am not a happy camper would be an understatement.

But as we move into day 4 of this war, and it appears increasingly likely that we’re here for the long haul, I thought it might be useful to share a few broad takeaways — how I’m thinking about this “combat operation” as it develops.2

1. The rationale for the war remains unclear, with different reasons coming from the president, the Secretary of Defense, and from those around the administration like Lindsey Graham. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted out a laundry list of rationales so long that one cannot fit it on a single page; a New York Times tick tock of decision-making makes it sound like a clear case of alliance entrapment by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Secretary of State Marco Rubio likewise tried to throw Israel under the bus. Trump even cited the 1979 hostage crisis as a casus belli. But the bottom line is that it’s honestly not worth debating what the rationale for the conflict is (or was). Rather, it is more useful to note that the different parties involved in the decision-making process within the administration – and notably, within the Israeli government – clearly had very different ideas of what this intervention is intended to achieve. Now the die is cast, they’re in conflict.

2. Indeed, as soon as it became apparent that the goal of the operation was not clear in advance, the most important question became this: what rationale will the administration settle on? And how expansive an end-state are they are seeking? The emergence of the “degrade Iran’s missile infrastructure” goal in the last few days would be one way to set an end point while still pretending it’s an achievable goal. How capacious American goals in the campaign are is in turn likely to depend on the extent to which the White House feels that they need to end this quickly, or whether they have several weeks of leeway. Again, we have seen mixed signals on this: the president himself has commented on the possibility of a four-week war, but a variety of leaks and publicly available information suggests that the administration may start to feel pressure to end things far sooner than that.

3. American public opinion is of middling concern for the administration. A few polls have now been fielded since the start of the operation and suggest that between 25-40% of the US public support the war; a clear majority of Americans tell pollsters that the Trump administration is using military force excessively, and didn’t try hard enough with diplomacy. These numbers are unlikely to improve, though it remains likely that partisan division will drive some “rally around the flag effect” within the Republican Party.

   

4. Many of President Trump’s normal media supporters are relatively unhappy or even openly critical of the conflict, leaving him primarily with the old-fashioned Fox News Republican messaging channels on his side. He’s also getting some covering fire from other mainstream news networks, including MS Now, CNN, CBS, and others, which continue to parade a host of hawkish commentators on the war from both left and right.3 Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, and other podcasters will continue to hammer away at the MAGA base. But popular pressure is likely not the most important factor here for one simple reason: it takes time to translate into political consequences.

5. Timing remains the central question. Some limited time pressure comes from the House and Senate, which are both expected to vote this week on war powers resolutions. Though initially unwilling to do so, Democratic Senate leadership has bowed to the demands of their base and will allow the vote to go ahead. Whether or not they pass, the votes themselves will tell us a lot. Will Democrats oppose this war full-throatedly, or continue with a rather vague procedural criticism? Will Republicans hold together, or will some significant faction defect from the president on this issue? In theory, a successful war powers resolution would allow Congress to restrain the president from further use of force in the region. In practice, however, it has never really been tested and is constitutionally questionable. But it would nonetheless be a significant black eye for the administration if they were to lose one or both votes.

6. More significant time pressure arises from the impact of the war on global markets. Thus far, the impact to oil prices has been relatively muted. Oil has risen about 15% since the conflict started – over 30% if one backtracks to the start of the military buildup earlier in the year. This sounds extreme but still doesn’t rank among significant historical oil price shocks. Traders appear to be adopting a wait-and-see attitude to the conflict, comforted by ample seaborne inventories and the prospect of a short war. Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed; in practice, this has not yet been tested, as most tankers are waiting to see if the conflict will blow over rather than braving the waterway.

   

   Disruptions are already more acute for Liquified Natural Gas, where Qatari gas production has halted. Price increases will be felt globally, but especially in Europe, where the gas market is still relatively vulnerable to shocks since the war in Ukraine. A prolonged shortfall in gas inventories globally could create significant economic disruption or even demand destruction (i.e., loss of industrial capacity) of the type seen after the Russian invasion in 2022.

7. Thus far, the impact on markets has been relatively muted. Yet the longer that things go on, the more the impacts will become apparent. If the war continues past a week or so, markets may begin to panic, consumers and businesses will begin to notice price spikes, and the White House will come under significant pressure. Likewise, any escalation in the conflict to direct attacks on oil production infrastructure in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere would add to market turmoil. Mitigation strategies are being discussed -- ranging from US convoy protection for tankers to domestic SPR releases and providing insurance backstops to transit companies – but these are costly or require significant military commitment.

8. There’s a huge amount of dubiety about the depth of US armament stocks, particularly air defense/interceptors. Indeed, there have been leaks have been debates for the last year or more about declining US stockpiles, in light of how many weapons have been sent to Ukraine and Israel. Reporting before the conflict suggested the Pentagon was concerned that any Middle East action might deplete its stocks. Despite speculation, however, we simply do not know the extent to which stocks might shape the time for which the Pentagon feels it can conduct this campaign. One thing is certain, however: as my colleague Kelly Grieco has pointed out, the cost asymmetry of intercepting cheap drones with exceedingly expensive interceptors does not favor the United States or its allies.4

9. The Gulf states are in a perilous position; they are simply not used to being targets as part of a US-Iran tit-for-tat. Iranian missiles, though, have been used against infrastructure and US-related targets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The choice of Qatar to take gas production offline is likely as much about pressuring the US to consider the impacts of its war, as it is a practical need to do so. For the Gulf States, the notion that their futuristic financial cities and air hubs are in fact not safe for expatriates will be damaging to their future economic prospects. This will not necessarily cause them to side with Iran – all have clearly chosen a side at this point – but it will make their support of US action far more costly than they have faced before.

   

10. It seems very much as if the president has bitten off more than he can chew with this attack on Iran. Buoyed by a sense of invulnerability after his successes in Venezuela and elsewhere, the Trump administration may have intended to be a quick leadership decapitation strike. Or perhaps the president genuinely believed arguments that the Iranian people would pour out into the streets and take their country back. Now that he is on this roller coaster, however, it may be far more difficult to get off than previously assumed. In June of last year, when the White House chose to join Israel’s 12-day war, Iran responded with largely face-saving barrages of missiles against targets in the Gulf. But after twice being bombed while at the negotiating table with the Trump administration – and after seeing their own leadership killed – the regime is likely now to see this as a war for survival. Anything short of resistance on the part of Tehran would signal weakness and encourage future aggression. Reports that the Trump administration have offered to return to negotiations may or may not be true, but it seems very clear that the Iranians cannot accept any offramp in the near-term.

11. There’s been a lot of comparisons to US campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, with a focus on whether this is “regime change” or not. But over the last few days, I’ve been thinking much more about the 1980s and 90s, particularly the Gulf War, Iran-Iraq War, and the associated “Tanker War,” all of which featured broader regional conflict, impacts to oil supply routes, and destruction of civilian targets in the region. The tanker war in particular was perceived as successful for the United States, at least until it resulted in the downing of a civilian airliner, Iran Air 655, prompting policy changes. Losses have begun to accumulate in this version of the tanker war: six service members have been killed in action, with multiple more injuries, and potentially hundreds of civilian casualties in Iran.

12. Let me make one final point. The war against Iran is both a sharp break from recent US foreign policy, and in clear continuity with the larger sweep of history. Though the US has been going through a period of foreign policy recalibration, in part driven by the failures of regime change wars in the Middle East, Iran has long been the white whale of American liberal primacy. Both Democrats and Republicans have sustained a long-running animus towards the Islamic Republic since 1979, even when — as Dalia Dassa Kaye’s recent book pointed out — options to improve the relationship have arisen. Trump, who has shown restraint on some other issues, has always been an Iran hawk, and the cadre of Fox News watching Baby Boomers from whom he draws support are similarly bellicose.

    

    Yet in starting this conflict, Trump has lashed both Marco Rubio and JD Vance to the mast in his pursuit of the whale. Until this point, there had been a general consensus that the primary – or at least future contestation within the party – would be driven by a Rubio vs. Vance dynamic on foreign policy, an attempt to appeal to younger, America First voters. This war makes that less likely; both are equally implicated by this move and will bear whatever electoral consequences it brings. It’s even possible that a challenger to succeed Trump as leader of the party may emerge from the antiwar MAGA faction to challenge both. Trump’s obsession with being the president who finally solves America’s problem with Iran may ultimately push the Republican base further towards their traditional hostility to overseas entanglements.

1. The opening letter from the president that crowns each national security strategy is always useful as a barometer of what an administration specifically wants reporters and foreign governments to take away from the document. In this case, the letter from President Donald Trump highlights the pursuit of peace, secure borders, and American strength, along with a healthy dose of self-aggrandizement for his own administration’s achievements. Hardly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention.

2. The document’s repeated emphasis on prioritization is certainly welcome, but even the administration’s pared-down list of interests remains fairly broad. This really should be a rebuke to those who describe this administration as isolationist, but I’m willing to bet that must of the news coverage of this document will do so regardless.

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3. As predicted in advance leaks, the emphasis on the Western Hemisphere is notable. The document even proposes a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine,1 which would focus on the exclusion of extra-regional powers from the Western Hemisphere. That’s a significant expansion of the traditional understanding of the Doctrine, and a lengthy Latin America section at the back of the document offers regional states both the velvet glove (i.e., trade, diplomatic, and economic carrots), along with the iron fist. It promises that “we want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.” Point made.

4. The centrality of cultural and “civilizational” issues in the document is tied in interesting ways to the criticism of post–Cold War foreign policy and the elites that pursued it. As Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment noted over on Twitter, this is the first NSS to explicitly reject global primacy, desribed in the document as America’s “global burdens.” But the document also goes further, blaming US elites for pursuing global ideals and, in doing so, undermining the US national interest in trade, migration, and security policy. To that end, the culture-war issues in here are not purely a domestic sop; they actually reflect how the administration thinks about US foreign policy since 1991.

5. The domestic-international connections aren’t unique to this NSS; there are some notable through-lines from the Biden administration in here. The importance of the defense industrial base, reindustrialization, and references to building widespread and broad-based prosperity for Americans sounds an awful lot like the now defunct “foreign policy for the middle class.” It’s also particularly ironic to see a Trump national security strategy hail the importance of an open, free-trading order in Asia in Biden-esque language while pursuing his current tariff policies.

6. The emphasis on peacemaking in this strategy is and remains a new priority, largely distinct from the first Trump administration. Despite all the cynicism, however, this genuinely appears to be a priority for the president himself, who is portrayed as the key actor in peace and diplomacy — America’s diplomats at the state department are AWOL from these peace processes. The document goes as far as to describe Trump himself as the “President of Peace.” Perhaps, as it is nearly Christmas, we might adapt a Handel oratorio to the Prince of Peace to further make the point?2

7. Which is as good a point as any to point out that the open flattery in the document is frankly embarrassing (though perhaps not as embarrassing as renaming the now-defunct U.S. Institute of Peace to the Trump Institute of Peace). In short, there’s a lot of useful stuff in this document, but you have to get past the blatant appeals to the president and his aging ego to do so.

   

8. Perhaps the biggest substantive change from prior administrations is the open embrace of “burden-shifting.” indeed, the term “burden” didn’t even appear in the Biden administration’s NSS. Alliances are still listed in Trump’s strategy as American strengths, but way further down the list than Biden’s strategy, which called out “alliances and partnerships around the world” as “our most important strategic asset.” This is not to say that allies are abused in this document. Allies in the Trump NSS are not presented in a negative light; if anything, they’re presented as well-resourced, competent states that need to step up. While every administration does push for burden sharing of some kind, the language here is quite explicit and, if reports are to be believed, is going to be followed by actual concrete timetables for this shift. In some regions, the document also explicitly suggests that trade concessions might be available to those allies who play ball.

9. Something that hasn’t achieved enough attention in Trumpian policy in general is the shift towards American “energy dominance” as a potential source of power and influence. The NSS is surprisingly reticent about stating where this energy will come from — perhaps a sop to the Silicon Valley, energy-abundance folks who want to see nuclear as well as more traditional Republican support for hydrocarbon production? But the NSS does explicitly reject European-style energy regulation for the sake of climate policy, placing hard power and security over climate concerns.

   

10. The Western Hemisphere section of the strategy is surprisingly well fleshed-out, with the development of an “enlist and expand” framework sounding a lot more like a traditional NSS in coining phrases than the less jargon-heavy front half of the document. This may reflect Marco Rubio’s own focus on Latin America and the importance of his voice in the administration. Ironically, however, it sounds very similar to Bill Clinton’s 1995 NSS, which proposed a strategy of “engagement and enlargement,” precisely the kind of liberal primacy that this document explicitly repudiates.

11. Although the document is clearly formulated with China in mind as the primary threat to US interests both in the hemisphere and elsewhere, Beijing gets remarkably little screen time. Many had been watching for any changes in language on Taiwan, but the stated policy here is almost a verbatim restatement of the status quo: U.S. ambiguity towards Taiwan backed by military overmatch, and a commitment to not change the status quo. This is another signal that the China hawks inside the administration may be on the back foot, at least for now.

12. Saving the best for last: the Europe section of the document is, frankly, hair-raising. It promises to rebuild “European greatness,” save the continent’s countries from “civilizational erasure” by a flood of migration, and challenge the European Union’s “failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” There’s more in here on European domestic politics than there is on American domestic politics at times, a choice the NSS justifies by noting correctly, that it’s in America’s interest to have a strong Europe. But in building upon the themes that caused such a furore in JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech — including the notion of a Europe that has culturally lost its way and explicitly suggesting that the US government might support certain political parties or movements within Europe — it’s fair to say this document is going to raise a lot of eyebrows in European capitals.

    

A final point: does any of this matter? It’s hard to say. There is a fun passage on page fifteen of the NSS that takes a direct swing at the bloat of national security strategies in recent years. One wonders if perhaps the authors of the document have been reading Justin Logan or Jeremy Shapiro on the limits that bureaucracy and reality exert on the utility of a national security strategy.

Indeed, there are plenty of places where we’ve already seen the Trump administration diverge from this document in practice. As Gandhi once archly noted about Western civilization — that it would be a good idea — it would undoubtedly be wonderful if there were a national security strategy guiding policy and practice. That’s rarely how it actually works. So at best, I think, this document is a restatement of a more realist set of US foreign policy principles. There’s a lot in the document to like, even if it’s obscured with flattery and culture-war overtones.

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While we’re here, this is a great time to promote my new interview on the Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, which released just before the National Security Strategy did. Though it’s not direct commentary, I think has a lot of relevance for how a strategy like this might play out in practice. You can find it here, along with the article it is based on.

Which seems as good a time as any to relaunch this dormant Substack with some material from the book and some commentary on the ways in which it aligns with, (and ways it decidedly differs from) the current administration.

The book is landing at, well, let’s call it an “interesting” moment. When I started to draft the book — in the middle-to-late Biden era — I would have said that we were in a period of unprecedented foreign policy debate. Today, I think it’s clear that we’re in a period of change in U.S. foreign policy itself; we’re no longer just debating it.

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Donald Trump has begun the shift away from America’s “indispensable nation” mantra in earnest, though he has yet to create a coherent foreign policy vision to replace it.

As I put it in the book’s preface:

In 1930, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci wrote a treatise on the political malaise of the moment from his exile in a fascist prison cell. The people had become disaffected with elites, he argued, who continued to exercise power mostly due to inertia. There was little in the way of coherent opposition to those moribund elites. The crisis, he wrote, arose from the fact that the old world was dying, and the new was not yet born. Until it was, “a variety of morbid symptoms” would continue to appear.

This book was written prior to the 2024 election that returned Donald Trump to the presidency, and even prior to Joe Biden’s unceremonious removal from the Democratic presidential ticket. During that time, U.S. foreign policy has lurched from a reactionary embrace of the status quo to a chaotic roller coaster of policy change. Trump’s inaugural address promised to return America to a golden age; his overtures to Russia, brusque dismissal of European allies, and aggressive tariff wars suggest that his second term could overshadow the chaos and incoherence of his first.

Yet even as the new president’s policies are less predictable, they are also more clearly a break with the status quo. Trump’s first term could be viewed by allies and adversaries alike as an aberration—a blip in the normal conduct of U.S. foreign policy, with his worst impulses constrained by mainstream foreign policy advisors and overturned by Biden. Now there is little doubt: the old world is dead. It is, I think, accurate to describe Donald Trump as the first post-unipolar president.

At the same time, the new world is not born either. We are mired in crisis. This book explores the direction of travel in global affairs and in U.S. foreign policy. The presidency of Joe Biden—with its reactionary denial of change in the international system—and the second term of Donald Trump—who appears to be seeking to accelerate the process of global fragmentation—are not the drivers of this change; they are instead the morbid symptoms of an ongoing transformation.

The first half of this book—which analyzes the unipolar moment and explores today’s global trend lines—seeks to explain how we got to this moment. The foreign policy debates of 2025 and 2026 will continue to center around the forces explored in this section, from the increasingly urgent need for the United States to prioritize in defense, to the unraveling of globalized trade, and the contestation within Republican and Democratic parties to frame a new foreign policy consensus.

The back half of the book offers one vision for how the United States might build something new in this post-unipolar world: a strategy of Realist Internationalism. In some areas, this vision shares common ground with the Trump administration: it advocates for burden-shifting to capable allies in Europe and argues for rigid prioritization of U.S. resources to combat China, the only truly significant threat to American interests. In other ways, however, the vision presented here is radically different from Trump’s: it seeks increased global economic engagement, for one thing. Both visions are realist and nationalist, but there is a difference between Trump’s coercive vision of America unchained, and my hope for a flexible, engaged America.

Fundamentally, however, the Biden administration, the Trump administration, and this book are all trying to solve the same problem: how the United States can adapt its foreign policy from the overreach of the unipolar moment to something better suited to the emerging multipolar reality. There is no more important task for policymakers in the coming decade.

So there you have it. We live in interesting times.1

I’ll have more to say on this Substack in the coming days and weeks on many of these topics — on the history of the unipolar moment and how we got here, on the rise of multipolarity, on US foreign policy debates and “tribes,” on breaking free of stale grand strategy debates, and on why realism (for all the hate!) remains a coherent and helpful guide to the world. But suffice to say, if this sounds interesting to you (and if not, why are you even subscribed here? 😆), then you should buy the book.

Amazon

Yale University Press

You can also find a few book related shorter pieces over at Foreign Policy and the Financial Times, along with this fun FP Live conversation from earlier this week.

Until next time.

Ok. As is so often the case with candidates’ foreign policy leanings, the media assessment of Vance’s foreign policy has been riddled with misunderstandings about the basic contours of foreign policy debate and saddled with a heavy status-quo bias that paints even the most moderate shifts in U.S. policy as extreme.

The bottom line on Vance’s nomination is much simpler: it highlights the growing influence of the realist, nationalist wing of the Republican party on foreign policy. Their approach is characterized by a willingness to reject Bush-era neoconservatism, prioritization of the China challenge, and a focus on issues like the defense industrial base, trade, and migration, rather than global alliances and value-driven foreign policy.

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This is certainly not a dovish approach, nor is it isolationist. Where it is radical is not on traditional national security concerns, but rather on adjacent issues like trade and migration. And though Trump’s choice to elevate Vance is suggestive of the future direction of the party on foreign policy, it’s by no means the inevitable future of a GOP that still includes more than a few John Bolton-style hawks.

The Isolationist Canard

As my friend Stephen Wertheim has written—indeed, he’s written an entire book about it! – “isolationism is not, and has never been, a real position” in U.S. policy discussions. Stephen’s book traces the history of the interwar years and highlights how the term ‘isolationism’ was born primarily as a slogan against those who opposed U.S. military intervention in World War II, none of whom were calling for the U.S. to retreat from the world entirely.

This trend continued throughout the Cold War and even into the post-Cold War period, with ever-more absurd examples. The great Walter Lippmann, for example, was described as an isolationist in the press due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. Lippmann responded to critics by arguing that indeed he was isolationist, “if the limitation of our power is isolationism.” The term was later used in the context of debates over NATO expansion in the 2000s, when congressional hearings on the topic saw speculation that a mere failure to expand NATO would be isolationist.

Lippman’s quote is particularly telling: to be called an isolationist is often simply the result of suggesting that America is not omnipotent, or of arguing against a prevailing hawkish consensus. Brandan Buck over on Twitter points us to a similar quote attributed to William Howard Taft: “an ‘isolationist’ is “anyone who has opposed the policy of the moment.” And indeed, Barack Obama was once described as “an isolationist with drones” for suggesting that U.S. policy should be more cautious; Donald Trump was labeled an isolationist in 2016 for suggesting that the U.S. had wasted blood and treasure during the Global War on Terror.

Isolationism, then, is almost entirely useless as an analytical category. It tells you absolutely nothing about the critiqued person’s foreign policy -- except that the speaker dislikes it.

Vance and the Realist Hawks

Much of the criticism of Vance can be summed up by Taft’s aphorism about the current moment. Washington’s central focus for the last two years has been the war in Ukraine. There are plenty of good reasons for that: it’s the first significant land war in Europe in decades, it bears on the security of America’s NATO allies, etc. But the war itself – and the debate over its future – have become bogged down, thanks to overly optimistic predictions of Ukrainian success and falling Western public support. Ukraine’s current strategy is entirely unrealistic; no one in power is offering a coherent strategy for how to fix that.

Vance, in contrast, has been a clear voice arguing that we need to dial down U.S. contributions to the war in Ukraine and find a manageable solution. He makes the same arguments as many realists: we have reached the point of diminishing returns in this conflict, and there are significant resource constraints that will make it difficult to continue this level of support, particularly if other global crises arise.

The senator even went to the Munich Security Conference this year, and told shocked delegates that this was the way American public opinion and politics was trending. The shocked and horrified responses to his relatively banal statements suggested a lot more about the bubble-like nature of invites to Munich than it did about the actual extremism of Vance’s views. The same is true of his views on European security more broadly, where he has advocated for increased burden-sharing.

Neither view is popular in a Ukraine-obsessed Washington.

Vance’s actual language from Munich is moderate: “I offer this in the spirit of friendship, not in the spirit of criticism, because, no, I don’t think that we should pull out of NATO, and no, I don’t think that we should abandon Europe. But yes, I think that we should pivot.” That's not the language of someone who hates Europe. That's the language of a growing pool of Republican foreign policy hands who, in line with long-running realist critiques, are beginning to argue that the United States must prioritize and burden-shift to European states.

I may be just a cranky old lady at this point, but the matching of means and ends was considered an essential part of strategy when I was learning about it. It was not some radical innovation that should be distrusted. If the United States doesn’t have the stockpiles of ammunition or the defense industrial capacity to manage several global conflicts at once, then we either need to make the extremely unpopular case to massively dial up defense spending – or we need to prioritize. Means and ends that are completely out-of-whack will not achieve good results.

Yet the media discourse treats this as a strange aberration. One article even described this approach as “Asia First isolationism,” which is a tautology, a bad slogan, and a crime against the English language, all at the same time.

If we step back from Europe, moreover, Vance starts to look much more like the rest of his party. Like other Republicans – and indeed, like most of the Democratic Party these days – he’s a hawk on China. He’s hawkish on Iran and supportive of Israel. And he’s suggested that the U.S. military should be able to target drug cartels inside Mexico, an idea that’s become increasingly popular among Republicans concerned about the intersection of migration, drugs, and cartels inside Mexico.

In the case of China and Iran, certainly, it’s not at all clear that Vance is looking for a war; he’s opposed strikes on Iran in the past. But none of his rhetoric is particularly dovish, either; it only appears so in comparison to the Republican foreign policy approach of the last two decades. Vance is a dove on Iran if you compare him to Dick Cheney or John Bolton; that just means he has some common sense. This is in practice the main reason why the media’s status-quo bias is so problematic. If your baseline for foreign policy is 2007- at the peak of the war on terror - then almost anything looks like retrenchment in comparison.

Perhaps the most notable thing about JD Vance’s foreign policy background is his own relationship to those wars. He’s the first post-9/11 veteran of the war on terror to run on a major party presidential ticket; his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy are part of a broader trend among veterans in congress and activist groups over the last few years, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle.

What does all this mean for Republican foreign policy?

In 2016, Donald Trump’s chosen running mate was Mike Pence, a candidate who was expected to shore up Trump’s support among evangelicals, but who also didn’t align with him on foreign policy. Pence was a died-in-the-wool neoconservative, who during his tenure in congress once voted against George W Bush for trying to withdraw some troops from Iraq. And without getting into the many disturbing reasons why Pence is no longer on the presidential ticket, it's notable that this time around Trump feels he has consolidated the Republican Party enough to pick someone who broadly appears to align with him on foreign policy.

Trump’s nomination of JD Vance will probably widen the intra-Republican gap on foreign policy. Indeed, foreign policy has been a significant cleavage in the party since Trump descended his golden escalator back in 2016. A central reason why the Never Trump faction of the Republican party was so opposed to his candidacy was his perceived foreign policy stances. The first Trump administration may have been erratic on foreign policy, but the ‘Trump shock’ of 2016 nonetheless prompted significant intra-Republican foreign policy debate.

There have been several attempts to categorize these debates. Jeremy Shapiro and Majda Ruge over at the European Council on Foreign Relations, for example, have built a topology of three different camps within the Republican party: ‘restrainers,’ ‘prioritizers,’ and ‘primacists.’ My debate companion over at Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, wrote a book in which he argues in contrast that there are no significant differences, and that Republicans are mostly unifying around a “Trump-Reagan” synthesis.

In my own forthcoming book on U.S. foreign policy,1 however, I argue that Republicans are increasingly clustering around two distinct worldviews: First are the neoconservative or primacy-leaning Republicans who adhere to much of the consensus of the last three decades, and who still have much in common with their political opponents in the Biden administration. They advocate an assertive and forward-leaning strategy that seeks to leverage US military and financial power – sometimes for liberal ends, sometimes unilaterally – but always broadly. Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Liz Cheney and even Mitt Romney all belong to this group.

The second group are also often hawkish, and more than willing to use military force – or economic coercion – when they believe it is necessary. But they are much more willing to be selective about the use of U.S. force, more concerned about the rise of China than conflicts elsewhere, and much more willing to see alliances as tools to achieve U.S. national interests than “sacred obligations” of some kind. They’re also increasingly protectionist on trade and anti-immigration. Vance clearly fits within this group.

In the context of Republican foreign policy, ultimately, the fact that Vance received the VP nod and not Haley, Pompeo, or even Rubio, is likely to empower this second group further. Vance is young and potentially could be around Republican politics for a long time; this fact alone may make him more consequential than many VP picks when it comes to foreign policy.

What about the election?

Elections are not won or lost on foreign policy – or at least not in the ways that we typically think about it. Occasionally, a significant foreign policy disaster may have bearing on an electoral result – Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, or Johnson and the Vietnam War – but foreign policy typically ranks lower in salience for voters than issues like the economy.

At the same time, it's also highly unusual to see the kind of gap on foreign policy between the parties that the 2024 election promises. For much of the post-Cold War period, a bipartisan consensus existed around a form of ‘liberal hegemony.’ Presidential candidates certainly criticized one another for not being tough enough on foreign policy, but in-office, they demonstrated few policy differences.

A Trump-Biden rematch will almost inevitably involve more foreign policy debate than other elections; Biden has made his foreign policy legacy a centerpiece of his campaign. Indeed, his own case and his advisors’ case for keeping him as the Democratic candidate often leans on his foreign policy achievements.2 The erratic nature of foreign policy during the first Trump administration also leaves plenty of opportunity for Biden and Democrats to attack Trump on the issue.

But in ideological terms, the two candidates are worlds apart on foreign policy. Biden is perhaps the foremost proponent of the foreign policy status quo; since 2016, meanwhile, Trump's America First rhetoric has advanced from fringe to a mainstream foreign policy view. It's entirely possible that other issues, from abortion to social spending, will end up dominating the election. And given Trump's worrying record in almost every area related to the rule of law, you could make a solid argument that voters shouldn't be voting on foreign policy.

But foreign policy remains a notable policy contrast between the two men, and one which plays in Trump’s favor. All we have to do is to picture the contrast: a declining, greying Biden telling voters that American power can do everything, in a world where clearly not everything is going well, compared a braggadocious Trump saying ‘we should put America first’ and ‘we should ask other countries to pay their own fair share’?

That’s a bad comparison for Biden.

NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary, a remarkably long-lived existence for such an organization, and an age that puts it within spitting distance of becoming the next nominee for U.S. president.

NATO has had significant successes over the years, particularly during the Cold War, when it acted as formidable organizational tool in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But it’s also not had such a great recent history, from the legacies of NATO expansion to its bloody intervention in Libya. And overtime, the alliance has morphed from a vehicle to pursue US interests in Europe to something more closely approximating a civic religion for Washington’s chattering classes. Expect to hear a lot this week about the ways that NATO keeps us safe, democratic and free, as the alliance itself engages in an all-out public relations blitz to cement its own importance.

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Certainly, NATO has proven itself capable of reinvention a number of times over; it is probably be a mistake to bet against it continuing in some form. But the storm clouds that are looming over the alliance carry a rather different cast than past challenges did. Today, the question isn’t about NATO’s structure or purpose, but rather about whether America will continue to play the leading role in European defense. With growing voices in Republican politics calling for greater burden shifting to European states, tensions created by the war in Ukraine, budgetary constraints, and the rise of China, the future of American military power in Europe is less certain than it has been in decades.

To celebrate this Diamond Jubilee, I have a new paper out this week via Stimson that takes a foresight-inflected approach to thinking about these questions. The paper maps out the ways in which US retrenchment might happen, the strategies that European states might adopt in response, and then tries to tell some plausible stories about the future of European security under conditions of American retrenchment.

Continue reading for a preview below, or go straight to the whole paper on Stimson’s website here.

American Roulette

This paper grew out of discussions about Donald Trump and whether he will pull the U.S. out of NATO. Foreign Affairs even ran an expert survey this week asking whether the alliance will survive a second Trump presidency. But the turmoil surrounding America’s role in NATO is deeper than one mercurial president. As a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations put it recently, “The fact that the nations of Europe cannot defend themselves without resorting to NATO and the help of the United States has never been more obvious; and yet, it has never been less certain that the US commitment to European security will remain firm.”

NATO boosters — including the Biden administration — want to sustain the status quo. And they may be right that a significant U.S. commitment in Europe can continue indefinitely. But a host of factors suggest that some level of U.S. burden-shifting is coming in the next few decades.

In the paper, I argue that Europe faces a collective action problem on defense. Policymakers must settle four dilemmas:

• Where and against whom should European defense be focused?

• Which capabilities are needed — and from which countries?

• Who gets to reap the economic benefits of defense in Europe?

• What institutional formations are best suited to manage European defense?

We all know about these dilemmas, even if only implicitly. They’ve traditionally been overcome by the US role in NATO, which smothers the European collective action problem by simply making decisions and providing the military resources necessary. European states have rarely been willing to question this state of affairs. But in the absence of US military force, these dilemmas would pop back to the front of policy discussions.

To construct plausible scenarios, we need to think about the ways in which the United States might retrench from Europe. Two of the more obvious aspects are speed and intention, which we can use to divide out potential U.S. retrenchment options: how fast does the US leave the European continent? Is it in respond to a conscious political choice in Washington, or as a result of some unplanned contingency?

We also need to think about European countries and their strategic responses to U.S. retrenchment. How might different states seek to fill their own security gaps after U.S. retrenchment? They might, for example:

• Engage in “Bilateral Bargaining,” appealing directly to the United States to backstop their security through bilateral defense commitments outside the NATO framework.

• Offer the United States a “China Quid Pro Quo,” making significant concessions on China policy, in exchange for a U.S. pledge to maintain specific capabilities in Europe.

• Focus on “Homegrown Adaptation,” a sudden sprint toward native military capabilities in some form. This is by far the broadest of the options available because it could take multiple forms, ranging from a concerted European effort to build out a continental defense industrial base and create a coherent joint command structure to a much narrower, predominately national and minilateral approach in which states turn to smaller groupings like the Weimar Triangle.

The scenarios apply these strategies across three plausible potential futures in which the United States retrenches from Europe: a Taiwan Contingency, a debt-crisis induced slow retrenchment, and a “Trump” shock. Not all strategies are plausible in all cases, and the scenarios show that the range of outcomes is far wider than a simple binary of “adapt” or “don’t adapt.”

You can find the full narrative for each scenario in the paper, but even from the overviews, you can see some interesting takeaways. The scenarios are particularly useful for helping us to think through the best and worst ways for a potential U.S. retrenchment from Europe to occur, and for thinking about where barriers to cooperation in Europe might arise. One surprising takeaway for me was that a fast retrenchment might actually be better at producing a coherent European defense than a slow, ‘boiling-a-frog’ process of gradual U.S. retrenchment over time. Another takeaway that shouldn’t surprise anyone is that although a Trump withdrawal from NATO - or a shift to a ‘dormant NATO’ - is probably the most likely of these scenarios to actually happen in the near future, the quixotic nature of Donald Trump himself also offers significant pitfalls for a genuine U.S. retrenchment, rather than one that is mostly rhetorical or symbolic.

The paper also talks about three wildcard issues: the war in Ukraine, Russian behavior, and the question of extended nuclear deterrence. Each is closely related to the question of U.S. presence in Europe and to NATO, but all could vary across these scenarios.

The title of the paper is ‘American Roulette,’ and the reference should be obvious. When we talk about European security, our reference points is all-too-often Russia, and how its obviously aggressive actions will make states in Europe less secure. But in many ways, the future of European security is less dependent on decisions made in Moscow than on decisions made in Washington. With U.S. retrenchment from Europe increasingly likely in the coming years, it would be a high-stakes gamble indeed for by American and European policymakers not to plan for such a contingency.

The whole paper can be found here.

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The war underwent yet another escalation this week, as news emerged that the White House had given Kiev permission to strike inside Russian territory with US weapons. The news is a little more nuanced than it is generally being reported. The exception applies only to the area near the border where Russians have launched an offensive against the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, and where fires from artillery and other shorter-range weapons may go back and forth across the border. One could quite plausibly argue that the Russians – in starting a new offensive right on the border – brought this one on themselves.

As far as we can tell from the reporting, however, the US still does not intend to allow Ukraine to use long-range strike weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia. This remains a good policy, as shown by the Ukrainian drone attack on a radar used to detect incoming ballistic nuclear missiles last week. Nuclear experts have pointed out that this target had almost no military utility for the war inside Ukraine but could be highly destabilizing in the nuclear space. Yet Kyiv and Washington are at odds on the question, and an increasing number of European allies are pushing for this restriction to be lifted, along with other potentially escalatory steps such as sending advisors to Ukraine, or even Western troops for ‘behind-the-lines’ duty.

It’s really notable how much the debate on Ukraine has become driven by the news cycle — and how failures that should have been eminently foreseeable are now creating pressure for escalation rather than any recalibration in Western strategy.

What Does America Want in Ukraine?

I wanted to flag two recent articles that push on some of the bigger strategic questions at play here. A few weeks back with my colleagues Stephen Wertheim and Josh Shifrinson, I wrote an article for Foreign Policy in which we argued that America's fundamental problem in Ukraine is the lack of a coherent strategy, something the recent passage of the supplemental aid bill in congress did surprisingly little to resolve.

We argued:

The White House presented the supplemental as an all-or-nothing choice: Approve billions in funding or watch Ukraine go under. Such rhetoric contains eerie echoes of wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, where the United States kept pouring resources into lost causes at least in part because no U.S. leader wanted to be held responsible at the final moment of failure. Throughout the Ukraine aid debate, key questions were left entirely unanswered: What is the United States trying to achieve in Ukraine given that total victory is not feasible? What is it willing to risk and spend to get there? The supplemental punts these uncomfortable questions down the road.

Instead, that vacuum is increasingly filled by talk of escalation:

After all, if the present trajectory is unfavorable and adopting more limited aims is ruled out, policymakers will seek the other logical solution: that of expanding involvement in the conflict. The West has gradually escalated over the past two years, as has Russia. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine and its Western supporters have pushed for ever more advanced weapons. From support vehicles to tanks, tube artillery to ATACMS, the cycle was consistent: As soon as the White House approved one system, pressure would mount to supply the next. A similar trend played out in Europe.

Though published weeks ago, this new escalation in the conflict — and the White House’s continued willingness to romp freely across its own red lines — only suggests that the substitution of escalation for critical thinking continues apace in Western capitals. That pressure is now focused less on specific systems and more on riskier forms of escalation: advisors or behind-the-lines direct military support.

Are We Letting Assumptions Dictate Strategy?

Over at Stimson, meanwhile, I put together a paper that takes a longer view, examining some of the most commonly heard arguments about the war in Ukraine. Many of these are assumptions rather than fact, and it’s a significant problem for US strategy that our understandings of the ways in which this war could develop are so blinkered.

Here’s a few of these assumptions:

This is a question that cannot be answered easily; whether any policy choice is affordable or not depends on your own views about government spending, the national debt, and the priorities of the U.S. government. But here are some concrete facts about the costs of support for Ukraine and how it compares to other spending: In the first two years of the war, Congress appropriated about $175 billion related to the costs of the war in Ukraine, predominantly for arms. This amounts to approximately $60 billion dollars per year – if one assumes the most recent supplemental lasts about a year – and is equivalent to about seven percent of the annual U.S. defense budget per year.

Critics would argue that this is a bargain: the ability to attrite the Russian military for less than ten percent of our annual military spending is a great deal. They are undoubtedly right when talking about 2022, and perhaps even 2023. Where this assumption becomes more problematic, though, is in the long run. Spending seven or eight percent of the defense budget per year on Ukraine will add up significantly over time, contributing not just to spending levels, but also – as we learned during the war on terror – ramping up the national debt. This level of cost repeated over five to seven years is far less sustainable than a one-time addition to the defense budget; it’s also a cost with diminishing marginal gains.

Opportunity cost is perhaps the most relevant metric here. Depending on where you land on the political spectrum, perhaps you would prefer to spend this money on domestic programs, or on returning money to taxpayers. But even if we were to assume this money would get spent on national security regardless, seven or eight percent of the defense budget per year to Ukraine is a significant opportunity cost for money that could potentially be spent elsewhere on improving U.S. capabilities or readiness. This amount of money could double the budget of the State Department, for example, purchase multiple aircraft carriers, or fund four of the new ballistic missile submarines needed to modernize the nuclear triad.

For the first year of the war, it often seemed that European states were not contributing as much – particularly in military aid to Ukraine – as the United States. It is also true that these states were simultaneously bearing the brunt of refugee costs and the energy crisis, both of which were indirect results of the war; though experiencing inflation, the United States has not been impacted as severely by these costs. In direct aid, however, it has taken some time for Europe to catch up. Today, Europe and the United States are nearly neck-and-neck in the amount of aid spent on Ukraine. Where the difference emerges is when one looks at total commitments to Ukraine, where Europe leaps ahead in the amount of money pledged to Ukraine in coming years. Yet this is mostly budgeting chicanery: where the European Union (EU) and some European states can promise future aid over a longer time horizon, the White House cannot preauthorize spending without congressional approval. Comparing future U.S. and European commitments, therefore, is an exercise in comparing apples to oranges, one which has the effect of inflating perceptions of European commitments to Ukraine. About $65 billion of these pledges from Europe, moreover, are loans, not grants, and come with the expectation of future repayment.

Another way in which such perceptions are often inflated is by comparing contributions to Ukraine as a percentage of GDP, a choice which has the effect of catapulting small European states in the Baltics and Scandinavia up the table of contributors. But though these efforts are laudable, they are still small by absolute standards. These states are also closest to the conflict; it is unsurprising that they would feel compelled to contribute more to Ukraine’s defense. These states typically do not have security concerns in other regions and can focus all their spending and efforts in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the data shows that when controlling for distance, U.S. contributions still stand far ahead of the pack.

This argument has become more prevalent in recent months, partly due to the congressional fight over the supplemental, as proponents of further aid have sought to emphasize the potential negative repercussions of Russian gains in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelensky has been particularly forward-leaning on this point: he told a CBS news team in March 2024 that if Ukraine falls, then Putin will want “Kazakhstan, then the Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.” The message is clear: any Russian gains in Ukraine will embolden Putin, who will come for NATO member states next, sparking a broader war. Americans who make this case often focus on Europe as a whole, either on the economic costs of instability on the continent or embracing George W. Bush's infamous post-9/11 dictum: ‘We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

Few would dispute that a proxy war – in which Ukraine fights Russia on behalf of the United States – is better than a direct conflict between NATO and Russia; U.S. troops are not dying in Ukraine, and the risks of nuclear escalation remain far lower than they might in the event of direct conflict with Russia. But it does not necessarily follow from this that the logical result of failure in Ukraine would be a Russian attack on NATO. Indeed, something that has been very clear in the last two years is that NATO’s Article 5 does appear to have significant deterrent power. Russia has been careful not to cross the line into direct, attributable attacks on NATO territory or troops, even as it has disregarded other norms and rules of international conduct.

Indeed, despite the significant flows of arms and equipment from NATO countries into Ukraine, Russia has taken no steps to interdict them outside of Ukrainian territory. This suggests something important: attacking a NATO member state is a distinct proposition from attacking a non-member state. Even if Russia did have the intention to seize other parts of Eastern Europe, the calculus for starting such a conflict would be very different.

Perhaps the most problematic form of this argument is the notion that Russian victory in Ukraine could destabilize Europe and undermine trade with one of the biggest economic partners of the United States. Europe is indeed a major trade partner for the United States, and stability in Europe remains a substantial strategic interest for the United States. But it is disingenuous to link smaller failures in Ukraine to the fate of Europe as a whole. Two years of war in Ukraine have not destabilized Europe economically, and the focus of EU-U.S. trade tensions is mostly in other areas. The war itself remains the primary drag on growth. The Cold War example is also instructive: the United States and its European partners held out against the Soviet Union for decades, prospering economically, even when Ukraine was an integral part of the USSR.

If there has been one constant throughout the last two years, it has been the fixation of Western policymakers on Ukrainian territorial integrity, which manifests in assertions that Ukraine cannot survive or thrive if it doesn’t return to its 1991 borders. Such statements imply a second, unstated assumption: that a return to these borders will inevitably produce a more durable peace settlement. Both these notions once again contradict scholarly understandings of war termination.

Within rationalist models of war, another big obstacle to ending a conflict is what political scientists call indivisible interests. In brief: there are certain issues that may be so important to one side or the other that they are unwilling to compromise, or – perhaps more commonly – there are issues on which one cannot compromise for a variety of reasons. Only one person can be king of a country, for example, and many cities cannot easily be divided in two. Resolving an indivisible issue requires the wisdom of Solomon; one cannot simply ‘split the baby.’

Political science literature suggests that indivisibility is perhaps less important than one might assume. But even so, the war in Ukraine features several indivisible issues. Ukraine can either join NATO or remain neutral, for one; it cannot be half-in and half-out of the alliance. Ukraine cannot both embrace a fully Western identity as a state and remain within Russia’s sphere of influence. And some of the concessions that Russia has demanded in Ukrainian domestic politics are incompatible with the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state, such as poorly defined Russian demands that Ukraine ‘de-nazify’ its government.

But it is important to note that the one thing in this conflict that is not indivisible is territory. Indeed, much of what Ukraine and Russia are currently fighting over – at least in territorial terms – is almost irrelevant to big picture questions of Ukraine's economic viability, or its integration into the Euro-Atlantic system. This contrasts strongly with Russia’s attempts earlier in the war to seize the port of Odessa, something which would have undermined Ukraine’s economic viability. Whether or not Ukraine takes another twenty miles of territory in the Donbas, however, the conflict’s underlying issues will remain unaddressed. This should cause us to question the idea that reclaiming territory is the most effective way to peace.

There are ten assumptions tested in the report, including whether aid to Ukraine boosts the U.S. economy, whether a ceasefire in the conflict is even possible, and the idea that Ukraine cannot be secure in the future without Western security guarantees. You can read the whole thing here at Stimson’s website.

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The war in Ukraine is liable to continue for some time. There is no good way to tell if Moscow is serious about its offer of negotiations, or if it is simply manipulating Western public opinion. And though it would probably be wise for Kyiv to appear willing to talk, there is little appetite in Western capitals to seek peace when Ukraine is obviously at a disadvantage – even if it remains unclear whether that situation will improve or worsen over time.

But escalation is an increasingly dangerous option, particularly as policymakers consider relatively extreme steps such as sending troops into Ukraine directly.

Unfortunately, it also appears to be increasingly likely.

The speaker is caught between dueling factions of his own caucus, either of which could imperil his speakership if he chooses wrongly. Perhaps the supplemental will eventually go before the House, pass and be signed into law, or maybe it will simply continue to languish in purgatory. Aid to Ukraine is beginning to feel like Schrodinger’s cat: no one can tell if it’s dead or alive.

Despite this, there’s relatively little negotiation going on behind the scenes. A few fixes have been suggested, such as turning some of the aid into a loan to get a skeptical Donald Trump on board. But by-and-large, both sides have simply dug into their existing positions. The White House argues that the aid utterly essential for Ukraine's future; opponents in congress argue that the war is a drain on U.S. resources that cannot be won through military force alone. The media narrative surrounding the aid has become an all-or-nothing story in which congress will either support Ukraine or abandon it to Putin.

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But this all-or-nothing framing of the debate does us all a disservice. It does nothing to assess what America’s national interests in Ukraine are or how to pursue them. It offers no strategy for how Ukraine can win and no plan for achieving peace. And it gives the American people no real explanation of what sending further billions to Ukraine might or might not achieve, and what the tradeoffs of continuing to heavily invest in this approach are.

Hope over Strategy

Part of the problem, of course, is that the wide-ranging supplemental spending bill has become mired in politics. Though it seemed like a smart tactical decision on the part of the Biden administration in late 2023 to link Ukraine aid to Israel aid, that linkage has proven problematic. At first, it was Republican hesitation over Ukraine that held up the Israel aid; even sweeteners related to Taiwan failed to move the needle on Republican votes. Now, several months into Israel’s punitive war in Gaza, the Israel part of the bill has become controversial among progressive Democrats. There is undoubtedly still a majority in Congress that favors at least some further aid to Ukraine, but whether this bill can succeed in its current Frankenstein form is an open question.

The fundamental problem, though, is not the usual politics of any mega-spending bill; it’s the growing unpopularity of further Ukraine spending across the political spectrum – where half of Americans think the U.S. is already doing enough or too much for Ukraine – along with the grinding, fruitless course of the war itself.

In its current form, the supplemental calls for about $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, in addition to $26 billion in Defense Department spending to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Indeed, despite the breadth of the bill, the lion’s share of spending in it is for Ukraine-related issues. Of the direct spending on defense, 76% will go to Ukraine. This is a significant chunk of change, and almost as much as the $75 billion that the United States has already spent on Ukraine over the last two years.

And while the strategic foundation for some further spending is fairly strong, the argument for spending this much is shakier. The administration has largely failed to make concrete arguments about how this spending would improve the course of the war. In his remarks in December, President Biden argued that failing to pass the bill would “give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for,” and that without this spending, the U.S. might have to send troops to defend other European countries from Russian invasion. In a speech in October, he argued that the funding would help to uphold U.S. global leadership. About the closest the administration has come to discussing the course of the war itself was General Cavoli, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who told congress that without significant increases in ammunition supplies, Ukrainian forces may start to lose ground to Russia.

Even that argument can’t explain what another $60-plus billion dollars could realistically hope to achieve in Ukraine. The war has largely degenerated into one of attrition, with Russia holding a significant advantage in manpower and in artillery ammunition. Since the failure of last year’s counteroffensive, many military analysts agree that the prospect for significant Ukrainian territorial gains will require years of reconstituting Ukrainian forces, along with further mobilization by Kyiv. The administration appears to be reaching this conclusion too, at least in private: though officials’ stated goals are still to help Ukraine take back all its territory, privately, they appear to be shifting towards a defensive strategy and a multi-year process of rebuilding Ukraine’s forces.

If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, it might be because it echoes Americans’ experiences of debates over the War on Terror. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine have very little in common, but policy discussions surrounding both have been characterized by an unwillingness among policy elites to recognize battlefield realities – or simply the limits of military power. Just as military leaders kept promising every year that this year would be the year we turned the corner in Afghanistan, the Ukraine debate is full of familiar promises that a multi-year process of investment in Ukraine’s defensive capabilities will somehow yield victory further down the line.  

Maybe policymakers they have convinced themselves that anything short of absolute victory in Ukraine will be a disaster. Or perhaps they’re simply engaged in that most human tendency: embracing hope and avoiding difficult choices. Either way, the end result is likely to be similar: years of spending untethered from concrete goals, with no clear path to victory.

That’s why it is so important to avoid falling into this pattern in Ukraine. Rather than simply passing another massive supplemental – kicking the can down the road - it's time for policymakers to think more seriously about tethering spending to strategy in Ukraine. They should also seriously consider whether the time has come to open negotiations in attempt to lock in existing gains and halt the drain on Ukrainian manpower and Western resources.

Strategy before Spending

The burden of elucidating a better strategy falls most heavily on the White House. Part of what has made this process so contentious is that this is fundamentally a disagreement between the executive and Congress over foreign policy, an area in which congress has limited tools. Congress can do oversight, and it can control spending.1 But congress can’t do strategy, or at least not directly, and their refusal to fund Ukraine aid should be seen at least partly as an opening gambit to negotiations with the White House.

It’s not even necessarily a partisan issue. Various Democrats have expressed concerns about the administration’s unclear goals in Ukraine; Adam Smith, the chair of the House Armed Services committee, though a supporter of the funding bill, has nonetheless criticized the administration’s maximalist stance on regaining all Ukraine’s territory, and criticized their ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ policy as “ridiculous.”  

It is certainly true, as Biden’s spokespeople have pointed out, that most opponents of Ukraine aid haven’t articulated a coherent or workable strategy either. Former – and perhaps future – President Trump, for example, has argued that he could end the conflict in 24 hours by giving up Ukrainian land for peace. One suspects that this is just the 2024 version of his “secret campaign to defeat ISIS,” which turned out to be nonexistent.

But reasonable voices in congress on both sides of this issue are increasingly questions the strategy issue. Smith, for example, has focused his comments on the need to move away from territorial definitions of victory to one focused on preserving a “sovereign democratic Ukraine that can survive.” Senator JD Vance of Ohio, meanwhile, has focused on the limits of U.S. industrial capacity, U.S. needs in Asia, and the need to switch to a defensive strategy in Ukraine. Both appear to realize what the White House does not: absolute victory in Ukraine is out of reach, but there are a variety of other ways to ensure that Ukraine survives and thrives, while Russia is denied its goals in the conflict.

Yet it is only the Biden administration that can bring other options into the mix here. Congress can deny funding; they cannot implement strategy.

The administration could dial down their request to Congress, attempting to make aid more palatable through a lower sticker price, or through less focus on high-end offensive systems. They could devote more attention to explicit trade-offs between US needs in Asia and Europe. Even better would be for the administration to elucidate exactly what they believe further aid to Ukraine might yield in terms of concrete benefits. A more limited aid package focused on cheaper, defensive weapons, tied to an administration commitment to push for the cease-fire in the conflict, for example, could go some way towards easing congressional concerns.

Regardless of how they do it, it’s increasingly clear the administration needs a new strategy for Ukraine, with practical elements like shifting more burden to European states, embracing a defensive approach, or looking for ways to decrease the intensity of conflict. And the fight over Ukraine aid signals once again just how badly the administration needs to consider its foreign policy priorities. With war raging in the Middle East, and an increasingly assertive China in Asia, the notion that the United States can continue to massively support Ukraine’s war effort for the next three to five years (or more!) is ill-conceived at best — and potentially ruinous at worst.

That happened to me at a panel yesterday on Ukraine. The panel was based on a new RAND report that looks at what we have learned about escalation over the course of the last eighteen months in Ukraine, what factors might contribute to future escalation, and whether the findings can be applied in other contexts. The long-form version of the report is a good read for anyone interested in some of the big picture lessons of the war for US policy.

But of course, the Q&A for the panelists focused as much on the future course of the war than on the report itself.1 The question was simple: “What should the Biden administration do now on Ukraine?”

There’s no simple answer, though. It’s increasingly clear that things cannot simply continue the way they have been, and the scope of choices for US leaders has shrunk.

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Indeed, some of things that were always known - even if they weren’t talked about in public – have become clearer, requiring us to answer a much longer set of challenging questions: How much territory can Ukraine realistically recover through military means? How long will Western public opinion continue to support funding the war? When do the tradeoffs and failure to invest in our defense industrial base mean that our stockpiles are insufficient to resource Ukraine?

The last eighteen months has been a veritable orgy of triumphalist rhetoric, with Western policymakers grandstanding about Ukrainian victory and inevitable NATO membership. How can U.S. policymakers respond now that reality is beginning to set in?

The Limits of Existing Strategy

Let’s start by oversimplifying the situation in Ukraine: since the spring, Ukraine’s forces have largely spent their existing offensive capabilities while making limited gains; they are poorly positioned for defense; they face a potential shortfall in Western support; and the winter is likely to be rough, with another Russian infrastructure bombing campaign.

Some of this is the result of Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive. Military analysts have already done some excellent early analysis of this conflict, and the Washington Post – just this week – published a lengthy two-part expose on the course of the counteroffensive.

I recommend you read them yourself, but the bottom line seems fairly clear at this point: a combination of factors helped to undermine the counteroffensive, including a mismatch between US and Ukrainian views of strategy,  and some of the tactical decisions taken by Ukrainian leadership (i.e., the decision to use less experienced troops in a leading role, or the decision to defend Bakhmut at significant cost in men and materiel). Russian fortifications, which proved far more solid and effective in repelling Ukrainian advances than might have been expected, were significant. 

Some of these factors couldn’t have been predicted up front, but Western popular perceptions always wildly overestimated the potential gains that Ukraine could make in this counteroffensive; even a fairly successful campaign would probably have looked lackluster compared to some of the predictions from this summer.

So it’s not a surprise that the campaign failed to meet this high bar, but it also doesn’t bode well for Ukraine’s ability to retake territory that it failed to meet even the lowest bar for success.  And the problems run bigger than battlefield setbacks. A few highlights:

• Public support for Ukraine is in decline across western countries, particularly in the United States, and in western Europe. Here in Washington, Republicans in congress have swung strongly against continued funding for the conflict; the new speaker’s ability to maintain his hold on the majority may make it more difficult for him to bring the administration’s supplemental request for funding to the floor without some kind of sleight of hand. Currently, GOP leaders are insisting that any Ukraine funding will need to be part of a larger package involving immigration reform. If U.S. funding fails, Ukraine will become dependent on European states to step into the breach; there are limits to how much they can do this simply in terms of their own defense-industrial capacity.

• Even if aid does come through, the defense-industrial concern still looms. Production has increased across the West since 2022, but not by the amount needed; countries have been raiding stockpiles to supply enough shells and ammunition to Ukraine throughout 2023. Those stockpiles are starting to run dry. Concerns about tradeoffs between Ukraine and Taiwan may be overblown, but the US does face real and growing capacity constraints on its ability to supply other states with arms.

• Russia is not thriving, but neither is it collapsing. Sanctions haven’t destroyed the Russian economy, and leaders in Moscow have been able to draw on the country’s deep pool of manpower and industrial capabilities to sustain the war.2 Sure, these carry costs: we’re not likely to see another wave of mobilization prior to the Russian presidential election next year, and a reliance on war to power the economy means it will remain stagnant at best. But even if Russian elites want out of the war, there is no real sign that the Kremlin is facing significant pressure to do so.3 

What is To Be Done?

Of course, unlike the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive failure, these problems were eminently predictable.

Declining Western public support for a long, grinding war of attrition? What a surprise! Sanctions can’t cut a great power and major oil exporter out of the global economy entirely? 
You don’t say. Leaders prioritizing other things over costly investments in the defense-industrial base? Hold the phone. 

Sorry, I got stuck in sarcasm mode for a moment there.

Regardless of whether it was foreseeable, though, it’s more concerning that the Biden administration has been almost willfully incurious about the future course of the war and whether it is sustainable. They appear surprised that their messaging strategy – linking Ukraine aid to Israel, and highlighting the US jobs created by defense spending – isn’t particularly moving the needle. And while I assume (I hope!) they have an internal Plan B for what to do as existing Ukraine funding runs out, thus far nothing has been said publicly. Instead, Biden doubled down today, telling congress in a speech that they must vote for aid or let Putin win.

What should he be doing instead? Let’s look at the most common suggestions, and then I’ll tell you what I think a more viable approach is.

The first option, and one you’ll hear regularly in DC, is that Ukraine just needs more time and more equipment to triumph. This opinion, perhaps unsurprisingly, often goes hand-in-hand with the theory that the counteroffensive failed largely because the United States did not provide Ukraine with everything it needed quickly enough.

But this is not a terribly plausible option. If the Biden administration is already struggling to get a Ukraine supplemental through the House, the prospects for significantly increased aid are slim. Whether or not this tranche of aid passes, there will probably be no additional funding prior to the 2024 election. The stockpile problem is also acute. Just to resource this year’s operations, U.S. and European officials have had to dig deep, sourcing artillery shells from South Korea, and sending cluster munitions from US stores to provide enough firepower for this offensive. The cupboard is starting to look a bit like a Soviet supermarket: empty.

Even with a significant further infusion of cash and weapons, it’s not clear that the Ukrainians would be ready to fight an offensive campaign any time soon; they’ve suffered significant losses and need time to train and replace these personnel. There aren’t many plausible ways to increase Ukraine’s fire power in the next year, which is why most folks advocating this option either gloss over these problems, or talk about a multi-year process, with the next significant Ukrainian push in 2025 or later.

The second option is that the United States should push Ukraine to sue for peace in the near-term. I'm deeply sympathetic to elements of this argument, and agree with those like RAND’s Sam Charap, who argue that even if the prospects for an agreement are low now, it is still worth opening the lines of communications and exploring Moscow’s willingness to talk about an armistice. And while I don’t think Kyiv should be pressured into a ceasefire, it’s past time that Washington and Kyiv had an open and honest conversation about negotiations and the endgame of the war.4 It would be far better from the point of view of human lives and of cost to try and at least freeze the conflict in place rather than continuing the slaughter.

At the same time, conditions are hardly ripe for a deal.5 Everything above suggests Moscow would probably benefit from continuing the conflict. And the biggest wild card remains the 2024 US election; the prospect of a second Trump presidency offers a way out for Putin that cannot be ignored.

So negotiation isn’t likely to work either. But whether the supplemental passes or not, I think there’s a third option that the administration should pursue: turn this into a low-stakes defensive war.

There are two components to such a strategy. The first is refocusing from offense to defense inside Ukraine. This, luckily, is both the path of least resistance, and what a responsible military strategy should look like in the short term given the exhaustion of Ukrainian forces after the fall offensive. It means less focus on high-level systems designed to give Ukraine a qualitative or technological advantage in offense (i.e., F16s, mine clearing equipment, long-range strike capabilities) and more focus on items like artillery and small arms ammunition, or spare parts for existing equipment. The White House should encourage Ukraine – if it is not already doing so – to build fortifications, dig in, and consider where they might be most vulnerable to Russian attack in the next year. Even without US funding, some variant of this approach might be a feasible strategy for European assistance.

The second part of this approach is changing the narrative. For much of the last year, the White House’s narrative has been that US support is essential to help Ukraine retake its territory, and to avoid a Russian win. But this necessarily paints U.S. policymakers into a box where any failure by Ukraine to retake all of its territory looks like a loss.6

Instead, the White House should promote an alternative narrative:

This is a war of defense for Ukrainian sovereignty. It's already a strategic defeat for Russia. The US can support Ukraine in this war while also acknowledging that there are other national security priorities that might need to take precedence. 

This narrative has the big benefit of being entirely true. It’s also far less aspirational, in ways that make it more salable to the public, and that lower the stakes of Ukrainian battlefield wins or losses. It should be matched by attempts to encourage the Ukrainians to engage in dialogue with Russia on the potential for an armistice, along with direct US-Russia dialogue on related security questions.

Attempting to transition the war in Ukraine to a lower-cost, lower-stakes conflict in the next year will not necessarily be popular, either in Kyiv, or among US allies in Europe. Nor is it a plan that would win the war or offer significant gains over the current situation. But it is a plan that can prevent Ukraine from making significant losses to Russia, and – if the Biden administration is re-elected in November – this plan would allow them to open the possibility of ceasefire negotiations in late-2024 from a much stronger position.

Or they could just keep sticking their heads in the sand.

Share What Is To Be Done?

“The five U.S. Senators and one House member in Halifax, often holding private sessions with foreign officials in what their staff called the “command center,” said they didn’t hear any skepticism about American resolve behind closed doors.” 

As the Economist editor Shashank Joshi put it over on X, that’s a statement that makes “you wonder whether U.S. lawmakers are being fed, and are willfully drinking, Kool-Aid.”

It doesn’t surprise me, though. During visits to several European countries in the last couple of months, I kept hearing similar sentiments. Foreign policy folks across the pond might agree that U.S. domestic politics is increasingly risky, but tend to argue that America will still able and willing to step up if needed. When asked about backup plans – the ways in which U.S. allies are hedging against the worst outcomes – they mostly demur.

To close observers of U.S. domestic politics, however, the idea that America today is the basket in which one would wish to put all one's eggs is somewhat stupefying. Congress just defenestrated one speaker of the house and took three weeks to find a new one; it remains unclear whether the new speaker will be willing to put a Ukraine aid package on the floor. Donald Trump is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in early 2024 polls, and even if Biden is re-elected, there are strategic and budgetary headwinds that call into question the ability of the US to stay committed in Europe for the long-term.

So why aren’t European states hedging more?

It’s not that they don’t recognize the problem. There has clearly been at least some shift in attitude among policymakers across Europe, and states have made significant progress on defense in the last few years, perhaps more than anyone could have imagined prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the question of whether that response has been sufficient is a different one. The German Zeitenwende, for example, though initially promising a significant investment of $100 billion in defense, turned out to be a smaller commitment in practice: split over multiple years, and time-limited, with no guarantee of renewal after the first four years. The European Union’s commitment to supply Ukraine with a million artillery rounds by the end of 2023 will fall short.

Europe’s progress on defense is real. It’s also slow, fragmented and perhaps too little, too late. Consider this recent news:

“Several countries — including Germany, Britain and Norway — are increasing production of weapons, especially the artillery ammunition that Ukraine so badly needs. Germany, once a laggard in providing aid to Ukraine, announced a week ago that it planned to double its support to $8.5 billion in 2024 and would deliver more crucial air-defense systems by the end of this year and European Union states are gearing up to train an additional 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers, bringing the total so far to 40,000.”

This shift has come as doubts rise about future U.S. funding, with congressional battles over the speakership and a rolling, looming government funding and shutdown threat. It’s still unclear whether – or in what form – further funding to Ukraine might make it to the floor for a vote, prompting a mad scramble by European states to fill whatever gaps they can. The chaos looks remarkably similar to the post-February 2022 European pivot on defense, when it took the Trump presidency plus a full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine to push even moderate European investments in defense.

It’s worth taking a step back to ask just why it is that Europe cannot get its act together on defense until the situation is truly dire. Perhaps, as some argue, Europeans are simply unwilling to commit the resources necessary to provide for their own defense, preferring to rely on Uncle Sucker? Perhaps some believe even in a post-Ukraine, post-Trump world that there is no need for a strong homegrown defense? Or perhaps, as Bob Kagan once infamously argued, it’s because Europeans are from Venus and Americans are from Mars?

Nah.

The attempt to build a coherent, centralized Europe-wide defense tends to fail because of a unique set of pathologies almost entirely encapsulated by Henry Kissinger's famous remark about Europe. Even as it has become far clearer who to call with regard to monetary policy, migration, or trade, there’s still no obvious answer on defense and foreign policy.

The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower. Here are the basic problems:

1.     Smaller nations inside Europe – primarily those added to NATO since the end of the cold war – trust their Western European neighbors less than they do the United States, and fear abandonment in the case of a conflict. The Baltic states, for example, view French and German willingness to treat with the Russians after the 2014 seizure of Crimea as evidence of Western European fecklessness. With the countries that are richest and most capable of providing defense predominantly located in Western Europe, and smaller, poorer countries most in need of defense in Eastern Europe, the stage is easily set for fears of abandonment.1

2.     Institutional and bureaucratic turf wars make it harder to figure out which institutions should be responsible for coordinating European defense. NATO and the European Union do not play as well together as one might assume, and fears about either duplicating NATO capabilities or undermining the alliance have often undermined nascent attempts to build EU capacity over the years. More generally, there are bureaucratic incentives for both institutions to lay claim to important programs, which can be high-profile and potentially lucrative, at least in terms of budgetary share. The result has been a tangled mess of strategic and tactical divisions between NATO and nascent European union programs.

This is improving over time, with NATO increasingly tending towards actual defense and contingency management (which requires command structures), and the EU increasingly focusing on procurement of capabilities and the development of a defense industrial base. But it should be no surprise to anyone that these two approaches sometimes conflict, and the departure of one of Europe’s most militarily capable states from the EU leaves UK-EU-NATO cooperation as another potential bureaucratic morass.

3.     There is no common “European” threat perception, and therefore no common European strategy. The EU is a sprawling, cross-national entity that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Carpathian Mountains. For states in the south, Mediterranean security and the migrant crisis are the predominant concern; for those in the east, it remains Russia; and Finland, Norway and impending member Sweden add concerns about Arctic security. Unsurprisingly, the EU’s Strategic Compass, published last year for the first time, mimicked an American National Security Strategy by simply including every threat, moving no closer to agreement on this question.

4.     A lack of common threat perceptions and fears of abandonment means states may invest in defense systems that are best suited to their own defense needs – or more cynically, in systems that are high-profile and appeal to politicians. This leaves capability gaps on a Europe-wide basis. The plug-and play-model of defense proposed in the strategic compass – particularly the EU “Rapid Deployment Capacity” – is one potential solution to the technical side of this problem, but it does not reduce the fears of abandonment that might lead to states to prioritize redundant systems.

[As an aside, I should note here that it’s true that generations of U.S. policymakers actively worked to enhance these concerns. They made it more difficult for European states to work together on defense, while sustaining the U.S. presence in Europe in the hopes of prolonging American military primacy. But U.S. policy was never the only problem. Just as Russian election-meddling highlights divisions that are already there in countries around the world, the U.S. was simply capitalizing on existing European divisions. Meanwhile, NATO and EU expansion made these problems more acute. The more useful and interesting question for today is whether Europe can overcome these problems even in the absence of U.S. opposition.]

5.     The defense industrial base and military procurement offer specific, problematic incentives to policymakers across the continent. Just as “Buy American” creates pathologies in the U.S. procurement system, parochialism in purchasing across European states leads to substandard distribution of production across Europe. The worst of this is the frequent duplication of high-profile programs like fighter jets, but there are also significant inefficiencies in the distribution of production of ammunition and arms. The political fallout from choosing the wrong system – along with a desire to keep the United States hooked into European defense for the long-term – has often led policymakers in European states to simply opt for American equipment instead. As Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin put it, such choices keep the European defense industrial base weak, and “create dependencies that will last for decades.”2

6.     A final problem is speed: European elites are relatively comfortable with gradual processes of agglomeration that place increasing regulatory and administrative power in the hands of Brussels, while making trade-offs that allow member-state elites to sell those shifts at home. The common market, for example, was a victory over the forces of parochialism in agriculture and trade; the Euro was the culmination of a several-decade process of negotiation over how much sovereignty states might be willing to cede on fiscal and monetary policy. The current project of European defense development actually looks remarkably like these other processes. If policymakers believe that defense will be similar to other parts of the European project - a decades-long gradual shift towards evermore shared responsibility for defense - then their time-horizons may well be out-of-step with reality.

The list of problems isn’t endless, but it’s pretty damn long. Europe has been able to manage these disagreements on defense for decades, thanks largely to the American willingness to paper over European collective action problems in the name of the common defense. Today, they’re resurfacing.

And even with newly found willpower and the prospect of losing the U.S. backstop to European defense, these problems will not be easily overcome. They help to explain why, even faced with the prospect of a second Trump presidency, many European foreign policy hands are still whistling past the graveyard on defense, hoping instead for a second Biden administration, and praying that they will have the time to construct European defense as a generational project, without too many costly political and economic choices.

It seems an increasingly risky bet.  

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I'm here for a conference at the Council on Foreign Relations, where I'll be talking about the war in Ukraine, and the geopolitics of European defense. Of course, I've barely been able to pay attention to Ukraine for the last few weeks, as my other regional interest - the Middle East - has exploded back to prominence in the news. I'm spending a lot of my time talking about the regional petrostates - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran - that are the central characters of my book, all while frantically trying to keep up with developments in Europe, and feeling like I can't quite find the time for longer term strategic writing projects. So I'm pretty sure I have an intuitive feeling for how the foreign policy folks at the top of the Biden administration feel at the moment.

With that in mind, I have a few Friday morning thoughts on “The Sources of American Power,” an article published by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan earlier this week in Foreign Affairs. Lots of folks have focused on the big gotcha in the article, which was clearly sent to print before Hamas’ brutal October 7th attacks on Israel, and which includes the memorable pull-quote “the Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades.”

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But I think the article is actually more notable for what it tells us about the Biden administration’s strategy strategy more broadly. As you might expect from Sullivan, it's a very clear, well-stated representation of how the administration thinks about foreign policy. It's also deeply problematic in practice. Here are my general impressions:

1. The article is a fairly consistent representation of what the administration has emphasized in foreign policy: a heavy focus on economic statecraft, concerns about domestic-foreign policy linkages, and a strong emphasis on alliance-building. It talks less about maintaining US military primacy, though that’s clearly still a central component of the Biden policy agenda. The piece foregrounds an economic policy agenda, which is consistent with the administration’s past statements, and its focus on coercive economic statecraft and industrial policy designed to undermine key competitors. There's not time here to delve into the full implications of that agenda, but I remain unconvinced that sharpening and expanding the use of American economic power globally will produce a more open or liberal global economic system. Sullivan’s assertion that this isn’t protectionism continues to ring somewhat hollow.

2. There's a very clear sense in the piece that Sullivan - and likely others in the administration - see their role as analogous to that played by thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s, whose choices about strategy ultimately put US foreign policy on a path that would last decades. Even the title evokes that period, though it was undoubtedly picked by the editors rather than by Sullivan himself. It is notable, though, that while Kennan’s X article sought to explain the sources of Soviet Conduct, Sullivan is instead talking primarily about how America wants to shape the world. There's no clear framing of threats the United States faces, or particular attention to the perspectives of other states. It’s very US-centric.

3. Particularly striking in the context of that 1950s comparison is how little genuine change is proposed in this document. Whatever else we might say about the policy debates that characterized US foreign policy in the 1940s and 1950s, one cannot deny that in responding to a changed world, they made significant shifts in US policy. Instead, the Biden administration's approach to alliances has always reminded me a bit of a tacky 1990s fridge magnet. “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other is gold” might be a good slogan for cards at the Hallmark store, but it's not a great way to run a foreign policy. Sullivan argues that the US is updating and reforming alliances to match 21st century needs, but the process he describes is just doubling down on existing commitments, while adding new ones.

4. I often hesitate to draw on public opinion polling for foreign policy, because I tend to think it's as much driven by elite cues as anything else. But that’s not always the case, and it’s notable how out-of-touch Sullivan 's article is with much of the recent polling on US foreign policy. This is most visible in his assertion that the American approach to Ukraine is sustainable, that American support for Ukraine is broad and that it will endure. Instead, polling now shows a majority of Americans opposed to significant further Ukraine aid. A recent poll from my friends over at the Eurasia Group Foundation found that a majority of Americans want to negotiate an end to the war, and even among Democrats, the number that think Ukraine aid is too high has tripled since the start of the war.

5. The public support problem is not the only reason to question the fundamental basis of Sullivan's argument. He actually concedes in this document that the liberal order is largely ephemeral — or at least that it is real, with real benefits, but heavily dependent on US power to sustain it. As he puts it:

“The post–Cold War era was a period of great change, but the common thread throughout the 1990s and the years after 9/11 was the absence of intense great-power competition. This was mainly the result of the United States’ military and economic preeminence, although it was widely interpreted as evidence that the world agreed on the basic direction of the international order.”

This contradicts much of the administration’s rhetoric. It also suggests genuine concern is warranted about whether the relatively open liberal order can survive in the absence of US power. The US faces genuine questions about resource constraints, something Sullivan himself acknowledges when he argues that the withdrawal from Afghanistan has helped to free up resources for Ukraine. Is US power sufficient for what Sullivan and Biden hope to do in the world? I don’t know, and neither do they. It’s a huge bet, with significant downside risk.

All of this brings me back to the article’s Middle East gaffe. This is the second time that the administration has been overtaken by events in this way; many of you may recall that the National Security Strategy had to be redrafted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at least in part to re-emphasize Russia as a threat. This highlights a big problem with the administration’s approach to the world: they clearly recognize that there are trade-offs, and accept that some regions are less important than others. But they are unwilling to actually take the steps to deprioritize those regions. Even after the initial crisis, they have failed to push more strongly for European burden-sharing, both on Ukraine aid and on European defense more broadly, a huge wasted opportunity. They clearly failed in their attempts to build a more sustainable Middle Eastern order by subordinating the Palestinian problem to an anti-Iran and anti-China approach. In short, when a crisis arises anywhere, the administration rushes back, drawn by their inability to accept the consequences of deprioritizing certain regions.

The end result is overstretch and the de prioritization of anything that isn’t an immediate crisis. I wrote an article for Defense News earlier this week talking about the administration’s budget supplemental request, which also exemplifies this problem:

“Perhaps the biggest problem here is the increasingly grandiose and global nature of the Biden administration’s approach to national security. Bundling together Israel, Ukraine, the border and even Taiwan in the budget supplemental may reinforce the arguments Biden made in his speech: that “there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity,” and that America is the “essential nation.”

But the actual breakdown of the supplemental request shows the reality: the United States does face trade-offs in foreign policy. In prioritizing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is in practice deprioritizing the Indo-Pacific, perhaps the region with the most genuinely pressing security threats for the United States itself. Congress would be wise to consider whether the breakdown of this supplemental spending bill is really the most efficient and strategic use of America’s limited resources.”

Is there a way to make the Biden administration’s ambitious global approach sustainable? Whether you look at public opinion or at spending - where the deficit doubled in the last year - or even at the overstretched state of the defense industrial base, I think you have to question that. A good strategy would address this problem head-on, considering the trade-offs or sacrifices that might need to be made in order to achieve sustainability. Instead, this article just reminds us that the Biden administration has largely chosen to ignore potential constraints, building up economic tools, and doing little to put American foreign policy on a strategically sustainable footing.

Government shutdowns are an increasingly hardy perennial of Washington life, popping up every couple of years to challenge the notion that America’s institutions are strong. For those whose livelihoods depend on the federal government, the shutdown fights are a source of paramount anxiety; for Washington’s political elites, they are a source of leverage for whichever faction sees it as in their interests to play at brinksmanship with the federal budget.

But even by those low, low standards, the dynamics of this weekend’s government shutdown showdown were bizarre. After weeks of back-and-forth wrangling with Democrats, the Senate, and the right wing of his own caucus, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suddenly reversed position and brought to the floor a clean, continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the government through November, with just one caveat: it would not provide additional aid for Ukraine.1

This move was unsurprising to anybody that has been following the politics of the right in recent months – or indeed to anybody that has been following the polls. Almost three-quarters of Americans thought the US should do more or the same in terms of aid to Ukraine back in March 2022, but less than half of Americans take that position today. The shift has been heavily driven by changing views inside the Republican base, where 44% now think that the U.S. is doing too much when it comes to Ukraine.

Despite this, the elimination of Ukraine aid from the CR seemed to be a surprise to many in Washington, and at least one senator briefly put a hold on the bill’s passage over concerns about Ukraine aid. Even worse was the rhetoric. Representatives were quick to criticize Republicans who voted against Ukraine aid, often in ad hominem ways. Representative Jaime Raskin, normally a fairly reasonable voice on foreign policy, described Republicans as “Putin’s little helpers,” while the typically more incendiary David Frum described them as “the pro-Putin caucus.”2

The polls – and this weekend’s showdown – suggest that the issue of Ukraine is well on its way to becoming a partisan issue, a track that rarely results in good outcomes, as the last few years of wrangling over Iran highlights.3 This is matched by the growing toxicity of debate on the topic; it is increasingly difficult for anything like a moderate stance on the conflict to be heard. Indeed, as the war in Ukraine has become politicized, the ability of Washington to approach the conflict strategically has all but vanished.

The emerging partisan battle lines on Ukraine are clear:

• Trump-leaning Republicans – along with a number of Asia hawks – see the war in Ukraine as a new, costly quagmire for the United States, a distraction from China, and from border security issues here at home.  For them, the slow creep of additional aid to Ukraine – and the emergence of programs that have little to do with the war – suggests that America has not yet fully recovered from its nation-building addiction.4

• Democrats, meanwhile, largely identify the war in Ukraine with an American defense of the democratic world. The Biden administration has succeeded to some extent in reorienting the party back towards liberal internationalism, and though there are some concerns among elements of the progressive left about mission creep in Ukraine, the notion of America as the ‘indispensable nation,’ helping other states to resist tyranny, has so far carried the day.

Both stances lend themselves to maximalist solutions. If the war in Ukraine is indeed a new forever war – and given the Biden administration’s resistance to oversight or constraints on aid – then it makes sense to simply pull the plug. If, on the other hand, the war is a pivotal struggle for the future of world democracy, then it makes sense to continue Ukraine aid for “as long as it takes,” as Biden continues to put it.

In reality, of course, the situation is more muddled. U.S. support has been essential in helping Ukraine to hold its own and push back the Russian invasion. That’s a good thing for global norms of sovereignty, and good for U.S. interests. It’s also true that for a fairly small investment, U.S. support for Ukraine has helped to decimate Russian forces – and all without direct involvement. The escalation risks have been manageable for the most part, and the White House has been fairly good at shutting down the truly stupid ideas – like setting up a no-fly zone in Ukraine – quickly.

At the same time, the war has become one of attrition, and further Ukrainian territorial gains are likely to be incremental and modest. Escalation risks remain. There are serious questions about the sustainability of the war, whether that’s western arms and ammunition production, the budgetary costs of sustaining the Ukrainian government directly, or the ability of Ukrainians to source the manpower necessary for a prolonged campaign. Similar problems apply on the Russian side, but sanctions have not proved disastrous to Russia’s capabilities to regenerate a somewhat capable defensive force.

Most problematically, the United States has no clear strategic goals in the war and has apparently recommitted to spearhead European defense for the long-term.

Increasingly squeezed by the politics of this moment is anyone who takes a moderate view of Ukraine. In short: anyone who thinks that it’s good for the U.S. to support Ukraine to some extent, that the U.S. has some interest in European security, but that Ukraine is not the be-all-and-end-all for U.S. foreign policy, and that it might be distracting us from other important foreign policy issues.

With no place in our discourse for moderation, there’s no discussion of the limits of our support for Ukraine, the potential costs and risks of a long war, or the possibility of pursuing any diplomatic options that present themselves. Consider the response this summer to news that some fellows from the Council on Foreign Relations had traveled to Russia to discuss the war. The purpose of the trip was laudable – feeling out whether there was any appetite in Moscow for diplomacy to end the conflict – but it was met with open derision, and as a betrayal of Ukraine.

Yet the tendency towards absolutism in the Ukraine debate is taking us down an increasingly dangerous road.

On the one hand, there’s the risk that GOP opponents will succeed in completely cutting aid to Ukraine with no warning, undermining what the U.S. has achieved there in the last eighteen months. On the other hand, there’s the risk that our strategy of boiling a frog in Ukraine – slowly increasing support over time to avoid sudden escalation – will come back to bite us. If Washington cannot conceive of an outcome where Ukraine doesn’t obtain an absolute victory, then the U.S. may find itself committing more and more resources to reach an impossible victory, as recent calls for the U.S. to station military advisors in Ukraine highlight. The “forever wars” comparison between Afghanistan and Ukraine is facile, but this is one area where it seems eerily accurate.

If both sides persist in their approach, the Ukraine question will become more politicized – and as we move into the 2024 presidential campaign – the all-or-nothing dynamics of the conflict will only become more pronounced. That may close the window for moderation for good.

There’s an article today at Foreign Policy on the need to create an “Economic War Council” on China, with the impressive clickbait-style subtitle “If Washington wants peace in Asia, it must prepare for financial war.”1 The article itself is more measured than the headline, but if this is an indicator of how China policy is trending, then we’re nowhere near hitting bottom yet.

The main thrust of the argument is the authors’ contention that the United States needs to think more strategically about its use of the economic weapon, building a planning committee that can advise on potential uses of economic statecraft and build consensus for multilateral action in advance of crisis situations.

I’m definitely on board with advance planning of these issues. And there are two specific areas where I strongly agree with the authors:

1. Sanctions didn’t deter Putin from invading Ukraine precisely because they weren’t made clear before the invasion. This is the gaping hole at the center of every argument that the US failed to deter Russia in Ukraine. Frankly, back in February 2022, no one know how far the West would be willing to go in sanctioning Russia or transitioning from Russian gas. Like many observers, if you’d told me at that time how draconian the eventual sanctions would be, I would not have believed you; it just did not fit with the prior cautious way in which Europe in particularly had approached sanctions. We can debate why things shifted so fast , but the bottom line here is that doubt does not make for good deterrence.

2. The creation of a centralized entity within the US government that can explore the potential downsides of future sanctions and their unintended effects could be hugely valuable, especially if it took the scenario-style approach that military planners often employ. Advance planning for a variety of contingencies could be a really helpful tool in helping us avoid self-inflicted economic wounds like the rise in gas prices we saw last summer as world oil markets struggled mightily to manage the sudden disruptions of US and EU sanctions on Russian oil.

At the same time, the article is more broadly problematic in a few ways.

First, as some of the literature on “weaponized interdependence” suggests, there’s a widespread assumption in US policy circles that aggressive use of US economic statecraft will not necessarily degrade America’s centrality in global markets. That’s certainly one possible outcome. Indeed, it has been proven accurate in prior cases when sanctions have been imposed on more marginal actors in the international system. European banks and companies, for example, chose to divest from Iran rather than risk the Trump administration’s retribution.

But it’s equally possible that this assumption is incorrect when it comes to more central actors, and that America’s choice to weaponize our trade and finance ties to China could end up undermining our economic position more broadly. The article seems to suggest that advance coordination can overcome disagreements about whether to ‘decouple’ from China (or ‘derisk,’ as some would put it). But even America’s closest European allies are wary of calls for trade decoupling; how would the rest of the world react to an “us or them” choice from the United States?

Second, the article has an interesting note on the use of sanctions for the attrition of military power, arguing that:

The sad reality is that the sanctions came too late to make a big difference in the current war, though they will undoubtedly constrain Putin’s ability to fulfill his imperial dreams moving forward. Attritional sanctions would have been far more useful before Putin decided to invade Ukraine, throwing a wrench into Russia’s military modernization program years before Putin ordered the tanks to cross Ukraine’s border.

The lesson for China policy is that it will be too late to apply attritional sanctions after Xi has decided to invade Taiwan. The Biden administration seems to understand this, based on the sweeping export controls it imposed on China’s semiconductor industry last October. But despite their ambitions, these moves were limited to a single foundational technology. The hard reality is that if Washington is serious about degrading China’s military capacity, it will need to widen its aim beyond a handful of high-tech components—painful as that might be for U.S. investors and businesses that have grown accustomed to reliance on China.

This implies a much broader decoupling from China than the narrow tech-based ‘strategic decoupling’ arguments of recent years. Indeed, it implies a shift away from trade with China generally, not something concentrated only in certain sectors. The last sentence alludes to the potential domestic business such a step could produce. But I think it underestimates it. In addition, there are new reports that China is considering barring some kinds of rare earth mineral exports to the United States in response to the last set of semiconductor restrictions.

If this article is any indication, the debate is no longer whether the United States should engage in strategic decoupling in key sectors, but rather whether a wholesale divestment from China is needed.

It’s hard to overstate how significant a reversal this would be to US economic policy in general — and it is being driven at least partly by presumed foreign policy interests. It was the norm in recent decades to be relatively free-trade minded in US foreign policy circles — or at least not to bother too much about a relatively liberal trade consensus while focusing on other issues. But foreign policy debates are now helping to drive the United States towards a position as an anti-trade actor globally.

I’m not convinced we’ve thought through the long-term ramifications of killing the golden goose of American overseas economic engagement.

A few good reads on this from recent weeks:

Adam Posen, Foreign Policy, America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up

Michael Spence, CFR, Destructive Decoupling

Hank Paulson, Foreign Affairs, America’s China Policy is Not Working

Finland Joins NATO

I have two pieces out on Finland’s accession to NATO, which took place at the start of this week. One is in the LA Times, and the other is my regular debate column (It’s Debatable!) with Matthew Kroenig at Foreign Policy.

I’ve taken a special interest in this case, because it has been a highly unusual case of NATO expansion, at least in recent years. Finland and Sweden are reasonably well integrated with the alliance already; they’re European Union members; and they are advanced, industrialized democracies with well-developed militaries. That puts them at odds with almost all of the candidates proposed for NATO membership in the last fifteen years, which were smaller or poorer countries like Georgia, Macedonia, or Bosnia.

The Finns in particular also bring a long and fascinating history of neutrality and self-defense that contrasts strongly with many of the Eastern European states that joined NATO after the Cold War, bringing little in the way of military capacity or even inclination. At a minimum, this suggests Finland is less likely to become a burden on the alliance — or on the United States. But it certainly brings new strategic problems, particularly the addition of 800 new miles of NATO-Russia border. Finnish membership in NATO brings the alliance to within a few hours drive of St. Petersburg.

Then there’s the issue of European defense more broadly. As I wrote in the LA Times:

It’s worth noting that NATO has a history of substituting expansion for genuine problem-solving. Indeed, for the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO’s leaders punted on questions about the alliance’s future, its purpose and its military capabilities in favor of a focus on expansion to include the nations of Eastern Europe. Until at least 2008, debates about expansion were a central focus of many of the alliance’s summits.

It seems that NATO’s leaders may be returning to form, focusing on expansion in lieu of solving the actual tough questions in European security. This is particularly problematic as things appear to have stalled out after all the hope and promise of the Zeitenwende.

So let’s give a warm welcome to Finland, our newest ally, but bear in mind that they aren’t going to solve our transatlantic defense dilemmas.

Good takes on this:

Max Bergman and Sophia Besch, Foreign Affairs, Why European Defense Still Depends on America

Chris Preble, Zack Cooper, and Melanie Marlowe, War on the Rocks Net Assessment, Better Burden-Sharing with Allies

Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin, ECFR, The Art of Vassalization

The War in Ukraine is Getting Murkier

And finally, there are few new, interesting stories coming out of the press on the spooky side of the Ukraine ledger. The first of these is a potential leak of information related to Ukraine’s long awaited spring offensive. The plans - which apparently came from some strange corners of the Internet - appear to be bad photos of slides from a briefing at the Pentagon in early March. They reveal some information on the disposition of Ukrainian forces, along with casualty figures, but are fairly out-of-date and nonspecific. The waters have been further muddied by the fact that a poorly-photoshopped version of the slides has also been circulating, trying to claim that Russian casualties are lower - and Ukrainian ones higher - than the original.

There’s very little of interest here to us (although Russian military planners will undoubtedly glean some nuggets of useful information). But with very little other information emerging from the battlefront in recent weeks, it’s no surprise that news sources jumped on this.

Second, and at the risk of sticking my fingers in a hornet nest, there have been a few news stories on the more interesting and potentially explosive story of what happened to Nord Stream.

These stories are notable not because they tell us who blew up the pipeline, but because they suggest that Western intelligence services aren’t looking too closely at this question. Indeed, our understanding of the issue hasn’t advanced much beyond what we could have discerned in September from a simple assessment of means, motives, and opportunity.

In a nutshell: the Russians may be the most likely to commit this kind of sabotage, but had little to gain from taking Nord Stream out of commission permanently. And despite the conspiracy-theorizing to the contrary. it’s hard to imagine the cautious, measured Biden administration engaging in such a flagrantly illegal and ill-conceived action. And all of the other options - the Ukrainians, the Eastern Europeans, or even non state actors linked to Ukrainian oligarchs - are problematic from the point of view of alliance management.

We can’t infer from these stories whether Western intelligence isn’t looking further because they know there’s something they won’t like, or whether they’re just scared they’ll find something they won’t like if they keep looking. Regardless, it’s not a good look for Western intelligence services to be quoted in the press, even anonymously, saying they don’t intend to solve this one.

Other Good Reads of the Week

Tim Sweijs and Mike Mazarr, War on the Rocks, Mind the Middle Powers

Franz-Stefan Gady, Foreign Policy, Why Neutrality is Obsolete in the 21st Century

Rose Gottemoeller, Texas National Security Review, The Role of U.S. Diplomacy in Countering Russia’s Nuclear Threats and Misbehavior

Kelly Grieco, War on the Rocks, In Defense of Denial: Why Deterring China Requires New Airpower Thinking

And Last, But Not Least: Happy Easter!

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“Fears that China will soon invade Taiwan are overblown. There is little evidence that Chinese leaders see a closing window for action. Such fears appear to be driven more by Washington’s assessments of its own military vulnerabilities than by Beijing’s risk-reward calculus. Historically, Chinese leaders have not started wars to divert attention from domestic challenges, and they continue to favor using measures short of conflict to achieve their objectives. If anything, problems at home have moderated Chinese foreign policy, and Chinese popular opinion has tended to reward government bluster and displays of resolve that do not lead to open conflict.”

Or as Dan Drezner describes her article just a touch more succinctly:

“Jessica Chen Weiss advises us all to calm the hell down.”

For those in and around Washington, D.C., the increasingly urgent talk about a potential war with China has become a fact of daily life. U.S. military leaders seem to be tripping over themselves to suggest that the Chinese timeline for an invasion of Taiwan might have accelerated: first it was 2027, then 2026. A vaguely-Strangelovian memo from Air Force Gen. Minihan then predicted a 2025 conflict and exhorted his troops to prepare by firing “a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”1

Crazy generals aside,2 there are other reasons to be concerned that America’s China policy is moving in the wrong direction. The most notable of these is the new congressional select committee on China, which appears to be less focused on policy debates and more on denouncing anyone it suspects of sympathy for Beijing. As Fareed Zakaria pointed out, given the hearing’s McCarthyite overtones, viewers of the hearings might as well have been “transported back to the 1950s.” Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at CSIS, likewise described the hearings as “an absolute and total embarrassment,” akin to a “moral panic.”

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Then there was the genuine panic created by the balloon incident a few weeks back, in which an apparently off-course Chinese spy balloon floated over the US, prompting a week of panicked overreaction that saw the US air force decimate a variety of civilian weather balloon projects with obscenely overpriced missiles.

Each of these incidents signal just how dramatically the Washington consensus has changed in the last few years, from engagement (or at least “congagement”) to full-blown containment and military build-up. So a spate of commentary suggesting that perhaps the Washington approach to China has swung too far and too fast is overdue. It also bears pointing out that none of the folks writing these articles are what one might traditionally describe as “doves” on foreign policy – most back a serious and rigorous policy to deal with the implications of China’s rise.

You could say the same about me: as I noted over on Twitter this morning, one of the main reasons that I have spent my career advocating for policies including U.S. strategic retrenchment from the Middle East, ending the disastrous war on terror, and increasing burden-sharing among capable allies in Europe is because I’m more concerned about the threat of a rising China than I am about brush wars in the Middle East and Africa. That places me more in the camp of someone like Steve Walt, who takes a more traditional realist balancing to the world than a full-blown ‘restrainer’ in the mold of Barry Posen.3

In the last year, however, the D.C. consensus has blown right past my concerns about China into full-blown war panic. Indeed, it’s notable that you hear even fairly hawkish China specialists express concerns about some of the rhetoric and proposed policies that are entering the policy mix. Just look at the Taiwan Policy Act, which passed the Senate despite some pretty inflammatory provisions surrounding Taiwanese sovereignty that threaten to imperil the long-standing One China policy. Or the idea that Chinese companies investing in U.S. agricultural land is a serious security threat.  

So we've moved at whiplash-inducing speed from a US foreign policy that was probably too lax on China – and far too focused on the Middle East – towards one that openly embraces economic and military containment, in a period of less than five years.4 Media and foreign policy commentators now openly suggest that we’re headed for war with China.

Except that, as Weiss notes in her piece, fears of inevitable future war all too often have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. The security dilemma – sometimes referred to as the spiral model – emerges when one state believes that the steps another state is taking to ensure its own defense are in fact threatening. In the worst cases, such misperceptions can result in a downward spiral to great power war.

Thus two things can be equally true:

1. China poses by far the biggest threat to US interests and security in coming decades.

2. A forward-leaning strategy of military containment might end up making things worse.

It should go without saying that we don’t want a major war with China. The costs would be immense, even if it didn’t go nuclear, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the United States would win the conflict.

At the same time, there are some seriously difficult debates in China policy, one of the most challenging of which is the idea of whether to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. There are a variety of well-thought out realist-inflected arguments on the topic, ranging from those who emphasize military-strategic arguments (Caitlin Talmadge and Brendon Green’s assessment that the loss of Taiwan would undermine the US military’s freedom of maneuver throughout the pacific), to those who emphasize the risks of bandwagoning (Elbridge Colby’s work on a ‘counter-hegemonic coalition’ in Asia), and finally to those who argue that incentivizing and support Taiwanese deterrence and self-defense is the best approach (Mike Mazarr and Patrick Porter being among those who argue this camp).

I tend towards Mazarr and Porter’s approach myself, but the important point is that all of these are viable strategic paths; none of them benefit from a Washington panic about China.  So that's why I'm so pleased to see the pushback of recent articles coming from different quarters. We need to find a reasonable and responsible China policy, not rush from complacence straight into war scares and moral panic.

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But the end of the year also brings an opportunity to plus-up our bookshelves, as every publication provides lengthy lists of “best books of the year.” So in that spirit, here’s my list of the best books and podcasts of the year at the extremely specific intersection of my own research interests: grand strategy, economic statecraft, Russian politics, science fiction, and energy politics.

Politics, Economics, and History

Chip War: The Fight For the World’s Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller. I’m a bit of a luddite, but Chris Miller’s book on the entangled web of US national security with the global semiconductor industry over the last four decades was engaging enough to keep even me interested in the technical details. For Miller, semiconductors enabled America’s cold war victory and its military preeminence over the last few decades. The key question then becomes: can the U.S. constrain China’s rise in this space? If you’re curious about recent semiconductor export controls, this one is for you.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Adam Tooze. Tooze is everyone’s favorite economic historian, but I was new to his work this year, reading The Deluge, and The Wages of Destruction in addition to this book. It was, however, this book that I found compulsively readable. Crashed is from 2018, but still stands up well. More importantly – and unlike most histories of the financial crisis – it’s also decidedly un-self-congratulatory. That lets Tooze connect seemingly disparate events across the sweep of a decade: the 2008 financial crisis, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump to show that the turmoil of markets in the early 2010s was not handled as well as we often assume.

The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, Nicholas Mulder. It was pretty much a given that I would love this book. But I had not expected it to be so thoroughly – and in some ways terrifyingly – relevant to geopolitics in 2022. Mulder explores the development of sanctions in the 1920s, when the allied nations first used their economic might to crush Germany’s economy, and then departed from existing global norms to repurpose economic sanctions as a way to punish wayward states in the international system. It explores the early development of sanctions as a tool – both of warfare, and as an alternative to it. As the Western world once again turns to extreme forms of economic coercion against Russia – and increasingly China – this book is far too relevant for comfort.

Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, Eds. Nuno Monteiro and Fritz Bartel. This edited volume takes an interdisciplinary view of the post-Cold War period, bringing together strategists and historians to explore why the ‘new world order’ that George Bush Sr. so famously anticipated failed to emerge in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2021, when this was published, it seemed that the book’s biggest flaw might be that it was too focused on Russia and the legacies of the Soviet collapse, and too little on the rise China; in 2022, this seems almost a virtue. With chapters on the spread of autocracy, the politics of NATO enlargement, and the arc of post-Cold War US grand strategy, it has a bit of something for everyone.

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark. I started reading this book in December last year, and was favorably impressed enough by the opening chapters that I put it on my 2021 Christmas reading list. But after getting distracted and coming back to it in February this year, it belongs here too, not least because of the juxtaposition of Clark’s detailed and distressing history of Europe’s march to war in 1914 with the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, the start of this book read like a historical case study; by 2022, the end of the story seemed all too close for comfort, as the characters and events tripped off Clark’s page in ways curiously reminiscent of today’s interconnected world, and ways which highlight the all-too real risk of accidentally sleepwalking into major war.  

Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World, Charles Kupchan. If you’ve ever expressed publicly the notion that America should pursue a less ambitious global agenda, you’ve probably been called an isolationist. If you’ve ever done so on Twitter, they probably threw in some cuss words for emphasis. And like many ‘restrainers,’ or ‘realists,’ I’ve often laughed at this characterization, which equates military activism with actual global engagement. Kupchan, however, takes a different tack in this book, looking at the historical record of America in the world. The result is a nuanced and interesting history that suggests not only that accusations of isolationism are caricatures today, but that they have always been so. America used to regard itself as exceptional in standing above the world’s petty struggles; today, in contrast, we view ourselves as exceptional in seeking to solve those problems. Both viewpoints are uniquely American.

Dis-honorable Mention

Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates, by… well, me. My book on petrostates and their foreign policies was published in June of this year. It might seem like a bit of a niche topic, but part of the book’s core argument is that petrostates are more numerous, diverse, and integrated into international affairs than you might think. With sections on petrostates and conflict, oil prices and the global arms trade, proxy sponsorship, the ‘oil weapon,’ and where petrostates will fit in the ‘green transition’ over the next few decades, you will probably find something in there that interests you! Not to mention the sections on Russian military modernization, and the energy politics of the post-Soviet space, which ended up being a little more real-world relevant than I anticipated So check it out, and I promise that 2023 will have less self-promotion.

Podcasts

Columbia Energy Exchange. There are surprisingly few publications out there that put energy issues in layman’s terms, and fewer still that are focused on policy questions, rather than aimed at markets and investors. The Columbia Energy Exchange podcast is a nice exception to that rule, providing wide-ranging and accessible conversations on a variety of energy market, technology, and climate issues.

Revolutions. This podcast may well be familiar to you already. But with the series reaching the end of its near-decade long run, it’s a great time to check it out if you haven’t already. Mike Duncan’s history of world revolutions takes you through the grand sweep of modern history, and surfaces a lot of interesting interconnections that you might not have expected. Being a regular listener to the series has also reinforced my existing believe that structural factors will never get you 100% of the way there; the secret sauce of historical advancement is always the spark of human agency.1

American Prestige. I’m biased because I’ve been a guest on this show a few times, but it’s hard to overstate how much more useful this podcast is than many of your standard issue, generic DC policy-discussion podcasts. Here, the hosts bring on interesting guests – mostly from academia – who know their subjects well, and can get into the nitty-gritty of history and politics. There’s a free version, or – if you’re feeling generous – a paid subscription version.

Fiction

The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi. This book is every bit as dumb as it sounds from the title, and is even better for it. It’s the novel equivalent of fast food, but a surprisingly good read. If you’ve ever wondered where Godzilla legends came from and whether they’re still relevant, this one is for you.

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine. At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got some serious science fiction. A Memory Called Empire and its sequel are political and military thrillers with a side of linguistic and cultural conflict thrown in. More importantly, they’re a meditation on the subtle ways that empire extends its hold on neighboring polities, and on the question of whether expats or country experts – once corrupted by a foreign culture – can ever really go home again.

All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, Christopher Brookmyre. I re-read this book whenever I’m feeling down. It’s a fun romp with an unlikely heroine – or as my husband describes it: ‘Glaswegian housewife James Bond fan-fiction.’ Jane Fleming is a stay-at-home grandma, at least until she’s pulled into a world of spies, defense contractors, and hired killers, where it turns out that the skills she learned in 25 years of parenting are remarkably useful in outwitting the baddies who are gunning for her family. Pure escapism.  

My 2023 Reading List

My reading list for 2023 is already full of promising reads, and I’m looking forward to cracking into these in the new year. In no particular order:  

Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO, Susan Colbourn

The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism, Paul D. Miller

The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley

Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar, Daniel McDowell

Megatrends, Nouriel Roubini

Accidental Tsar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin, Andrew Weiss

The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism, Fritz Bartel2

Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, Van Jackson

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard3

On Friday, I was lucky enough to attend a talk at the Carnegie Endowment given by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. There were no real shocks to be found in it; Sullivan has given a few talks this autumn, introducing the new National Security Strategy and presenting the rationale behind the administration’s aggressive new export controls on semiconductors. This conversation had similar overtones to both, perhaps with a few more interesting nuances.

One surprise was that the framing of Sullivan’s remarks about US national security seemed a call back to the administration’s original mantra of ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class,’ a concept that notably vanished between the interim national security strategic guidance and the final publication of the national security strategy almost two years later. In contrast, Sullivan barely alluded to the administration’s more recent framework of a global struggle between democracies and revisionist autocracies framework. Certainly, that might just have been about sucking up to his audience. After all, Sullivan was part of a task force at Carnegie which produced a 2020 report on the ways policymakers can ensure that foreign policy better serves the interests of the middle class. Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear him emphasize repeatedly the notion that foreign policy needs to center the interests of working Americans, even as the administration’s own documents have largely rejected that framing.

There were a couple of other interesting nuggets from the event. It was notable that when asked the administration’s priorities for the next two years, the national security advisor chose to emphasize implementation of existing policies, implying that we’re not likely to see any bold new policies soon. Indeed, in reflecting on his remarks I was struck by how this administration looks in some ways quite like the Obama administration in foreign policy: very competent in day-to-day diplomacy and in weathering crises – the financial crisis, the rise of ISIS, or the war in Ukraine – but not particularly bold, and not necessarily seeking to turn the major crises with which they’ve been besieged into opportunities for new thinking about global affairs.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan – arguably the administration’s biggest foreign policy achievement – was determined by the previous administration, and big, splashy announcements like the AUKUS agreement have run into serious problems in practice.[ii] It’s perhaps not the best comparison, but one could think instead about the boldness inherent in Richard Nixon’s tenure. Faced with domestic turmoil and international crises, his administration made decisive choices: ending the war in Vietnam, abandoning the gold standard, seeking to reopen relations with communist China.

The one exception might be the administration’s use of economic statecraft. And it was highly notable the extent to which Jake Sullivan’s comments on Friday emphasized the growing salience of economics in the context of international security, from supply chain resilience to the energy transition and US sanctions and export controls as a tool of foreign policy. But even here, what was offered was not bold strategy, but bold policy tools, a trend that I think characterizes tracks the Biden administration’s foreign policy to this point. In a nutshell: this administration is using powerful, innovative new tools of economic statecraft in pursuit of a national security agenda aimed at preserving the foreign policy status quo.

Bear with me here.

We’ve certainly seen a lot of significant geopolitical change over the last few years, whether it’s the war in Ukraine or Xi Jinping’s appointment to an unprecedented third term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Policymakers everywhere are talking about change; the German Chancellor calls it a Zeitenwende (‘era shift’), while the National Security Strategy describes it as a ‘decisive decade.’ And I think that’s broadly correct: the unipolar moment – that period of pronounced American global dominance that characterized the post-Cold War period – is ending, or perhaps already over. What comes next is unclear, but its foundations are being laid now.

In practice, however, there’s less genuine change in security policy than that might suggest. There’s a continued lack of viable alternatives to US power globally, and the US remains largely unable to pivot to new challenges. The war in Ukraine has highlighted that Europe retains its traditional free rider and collective action problems in defense, making it difficult to develop the necessary capabilities, defense industrial base, or even common will needed to substitute for U.S. power. In the Middle East, despite the Abraham Accords and a growing alignment between the Gulf States and Israel, the security side is still backstopped by US military power. The National Security Strategy may have de-emphasized the Middle East and emphasized Asia, but there have been few, if any, practical shifts of US forces from the former region.

Instead, what we’ve seen from this administration is an increasing focus on the technical-economic side of the ledger: the elevation of financial and trade power in the name of strategic decoupling, resilient supply chains, and energy transition. The use of export controls on semiconductors to restrain China’s technological rise, and the use of sanctions to constrain Russia’s wartime economy are among the most assertive and widespread application of economic tools we’ve seen since the interwar period. To put it bluntly: the so-called ‘liberal order’ is rapidly becoming less economically liberal.

More importantly, these economic tools don’t actually answer fundamental questions about America’s role in the world or the goals we’re trying to achieve. Instead, the Biden team is mostly putting new tools into the service of an existing strategy of US global primacy. It’s a risky approach, with the potential to blowback on the United States, and to alienate the countries of the global south. Nor is it clear if it’s sustainable. Right now, America is leveraging thirty-plus years of intense globalization to impose costs on China and Russia, but our ability to do that will shrink over time as globalization contracts. And for all the talk in Washington about ‘ally shoring’ or ‘friend shoring,’ the heavy use of the stick – the economic weapon – has not yet been matched by the carrots of new trade agreements or increased interdependence with friendly states.

In short, the Biden administration’s use of economic statecraft will have far reaching implications, but won’t necessarily move us any closer to resolving the big security questions that the United States faces in the 21st Century. If one believes the rhetoric in the National Security Strategy, then the goal of this economic warfare is to preserve a global liberal order under US leadership. But these economic choices themselves seem inimical to that goal. At best, it offers the possibility that America might sustain its military primacy in an increasingly illiberal global order, an exchange that seems problematic to say the least.

I’ll be writing a lot more on this in coming months, as I’m happy to be launching a new project over at the Stimson Center in the coming year. The project on Geopolitics and Economic Statecraft will explore the places where grand strategy and economics intersect, with an eye to understanding how America can better position itself in an increasingly competitive global system.

Up next: My top books of 2021, and what’s on my reading list for 2022.

[i] The english speakers in the audience will probably know this aphorism better as: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”

[ii] Discussions are ongoing, but the major problem facing AUKUS appears to be the lack of actual capacity to build the submarine component of the deal in either the US or the UK.

The most famous prior transit of that station, of course, was the infamous journey undertaken by Lenin and his Bolshevik allies in April 1917, which would end in their arrival at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, Lenin’s famous speech calling for “peace, bread, and land,” and ultimately, in the October Revolution.

I’m certainly no Marxist. And while I might not be first against the wall when the Revolution comes, I suspect that with my own personal mix of European social democratic convictions and free market liberalism, I probably wouldn’t last long either. So why choose this title?

Indeed, though the title of Lenin’s book has always stuck with me,1 it’s as much the substance of the piece that prompted this choice. In What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Lenin not only explores more traditional Marxist topics – the relation of the people to revolution, the notion of class consciousness, etc. – but begins to assess how one would operationalize a Marxist revolution.

It is here that Lenin first advocates his theory of ‘vanguardism,’ the idea that a small subset of intellectuals might be able to educate and organize larger segments of the working class in order to push towards revolution. This was a radical notion at the time among Marxists, who had long assumed that the eventual communist revolution would emerge naturally from the proletarian masses in the course of historical development. Instead, Lenin suggested the potential for political change to advance through education and organization and advocated an all-Russia newspaper that would carry out this function. What Is To Be Done? expresses the radical idea that historically significant policy shifts can be shaped and prepared for, not merely awaited.

My own work focuses on U.S. foreign policy and how U.S. policymakers should respond to a changing world. Though my academic background is in energy politics, Russia, and the Middle East, I spend much of time these days thinking about questions of change and continuity in U.S. foreign policy. The United States faces a rapidly changing world yet has a policy community whose ideas are still in many ways stuck in the bad old days of the unipolar 1990s.

At the same time, there are emerging criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. Some of these come from the progressive anti-war left, some from the emerging nationalist right, and others build on a long tradition of realist opposition to U.S. overextension. But while these critics – myself included – have been relatively successful in their attacks on America’s failures in the war on terror, they have been far less successful in gaining traction when it comes to burden-sharing, alliance politics, or military spending. Meanwhile, the integral politics of this ‘restraint’ coalition are almost as complex as the politics of how it fits into the broader landscape of US foreign policy contestation.

How do elite debates and world events produce new foreign policy consensus? How should we think about the inherently difficult politics of building coalitions in the policy space? Is it possible to hold together coalitions on foreign policy in the face of difficult dilemmas like the war in Ukraine? Is it even possible to build a new bipartisan consensus in foreign policy – one better suited to our era of emerging multipolarity – or are we doomed to spiral into a politicized partisan divide on the issue?

What Is To Be Done? is indeed the burning question of our time on foreign policy; the ways in which we approach the politics of policy change in that space will help to shape the outcomes we see.

For those who aren’t familiar with my prior work, here are a few relevant pieces that bear on this question:

• On the coalitional politics of U.S. foreign policy: Strategies of Restraint, Foreign Affairs

• On the Biden administration’s inability to build a new foreign policy consensus: Why The US Still Can’t Have It All, Just Security

• On the Republican foreign policy establishment: Battlegrounds: The Fight for US foreign Policy, Texas National Security Review

• On realism and US foreign policy: In Praise of Lesser Evils, Foreign Affairs

• On expertise, Trump, and US foreign policy change: Build a Better Blob, Foreign Affairs

• My regular column, It’s Debatable, can be found at Foreign Policy every other week.

So welcome! I expect updates here to be semi-regular, informal and blog-like in nature, at least so long as Twitter survives. But I will use it on a regular basis to keep folks apprised of my work elsewhere, and perhaps more regularly if the bird site does actually die. If you have thoughts, please drop them in the comments or drop me an email in response! One of the things I have always found most valuable on Twitter is the interaction with folks, whether or not I agree with them; I’d like to enjoy the same kind of productive exchange here.

Next up: Field notes from my recent swing through Europe and some thoughts on the energy crisis and American economic statecraft.

With the demise of Twitter looming ever-larger in the minds’ eye, I’m setting this up as an alternative forum to interact with folks online. If you’re familiar with my work from Twitter, you know that my feed is predominantly foreign policy analysis, commentary on current events from a realist perspective, and bad puns. Here, you can expect slightly fewer puns, and slightly longer musings on foreign policy. Not sure how often I’ll update this, but if Twitter does go down, I suspect it will become more regular.

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