Russia and Europe and the Ukraine War

The Russia-Ukraine War is starting to feel for a lot of us not directly involved like a permanent feature of the world now. I mean, the Korean War is still officially not settled. But it hasn’t been an active shooting war for decades.

There is a new report about a Russian drone strike in Romania. Officially the Russians are denying they had anything to do with it. It’s possible it was part of a group of drones on the way to strike Ukraine and one of them just strayed and accidentally struck a building in Romania. Oopsie! Fog of war, you know. Stuff happens!

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has said the alliance is “ready to defend every inch” of its territory after a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, a member state, during an overnight attack on neighbouring Ukraine.

The incident in Galați, which injured two people, prompted swift condemnation and the threat of repercussions, even as Russia denied the reports of the involvement of a Russian drone as “groundless”.

The strike in Romania is the latest example of the war in Ukraine spilling beyond the country’s borders, amid growing concern over Russia’s wider campaign of hybrid warfare across Europe.

Gen Gheorghe Maxim, a stand-in commander for the Romanian armed forces’ joint staff, told a news conference on Friday that the strike in Galati was not “an attack from Russia against Romania”, but that “Romanians should understand that Russia is a threat to the security of the countries in the area.” (1)

But given the public signals that Russia has been sending lately, I’m guessing there’s at least an even chance this was intentional. Ukraine has been making drone strikes inside Russia, including on Moscow. And from what military commentators are saying, Ukraine couldn’t conduct those particular kinds of strikes without help from NATO countries. Now, there is a war going on and it was Russia that invaded Ukrainian territory, so it’s totally within the laws of war for Ukraine to attack inside Russia. (Yes, I know “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth thinks all this laws-of-war stuff is just sissy “woke” DEI nonsense, but still.)

Since Russia is pretty bogged down in Ukraine, I’m not especially worried that they intend to launch some full-blown attack on NATO and EU countries. But this kind of thing could also be a way for Russia to say, hey, if you NATO countries are helping Ukraine attack deep inside Russia, we have ways to make things uncomfortable on NATO’s eastern flank. If this stuff starts happening more in Estonia, Latvia, or especially Lithuania, things could get very sticky very quickly. Russia’s only land transportation corridor to its city of Kaliningrad is through the Suwałki Gap, aka the Suwalki Corridor, which is on the border between Poland and Lithuania and is mainly inhabited by Poles. If Russia tried to take control of that corridor, we would be in “NATO Article 5” territory. I would think at least Marco Rubio and maybe even J.D. Vance would know what that means.

There already was a drone incident in Latvia already in May. It even led to a change of government there:

Earlier this month, two drones entering Latvia from Russian territory crashed near oil facilities, intensifying public concern about whether the state could detect aerial threats.

Ukraine has launched an intensive long-range strike campaign against key Russian targets like air defense sites, refineries, pipelines, ports and strategic factories. Kyiv and NATO member countries accuse Russia of redirecting Ukrainian drones into allied airspace; they have also been spotted over Lithuania and Estonia.

The backlash over the Latvian incidents ultimately helped bring down the government of Prime Minister Evika Siliņa. Defense Minister Andris Sprūds resigned under pressure, and coalition tensions escalated into a broader collapse of the administration. (2)

Here we come back to the time-warp feeling that this war has been going on forever. It was true in February 2022 that Ukraine was not a member of NATO and that none of the NATO countries had a formal mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine. The EU Treaty also has a mutual defense clause, though it has never been formally invoked.

All that is still true today. The word “credibility” is probably the most overused word in the politics of international relations – often coupled with a superficial reference to the Munich Analogy. But if Russia did directly attack NATO territory, repelling that attack would have to take priority over supporting Ukraine. Especially now that the European allies can’t count on the US any more to play the role in mutual defense that it played until 2025.

Here is a discussion between Scott Lucas and Gilbert Doctorow, the latter apparently an advocate for Russia’s and Putin’s position on the Russia-Ukraine War. The informational blurb says the clip involves Lucas “[t]aking apart the pro-Kremlin propaganda of Russian-based Gilbert Doctorow, including his promotion of war crimes through targeted assassination of Ukraine’s leaders.” (3)

Lucas notes that Belarus has consistently refused Russian requests to enter the war with Ukraine as an active belligerent. That means, I suppose, that Belarus could somehow play a mediating role. But Belarus is siding with Ukraine.

Lucas sometimes seem to lean into an optimistic take in evaluating Ukraine’s prospects. He probably particularly emphasizes that here as a contrast to Doctorow’s position.

Notes:

(1) Beaumont, Peter (2026): Nato ready to defend ‘every inch’ of territory as Russian drone hits Romania. Guardian 05/29/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/29/russian-drone-romanian-apartments-wounding-two-people-and-starting-fire> (Accessed: 2026-29-05).

(2) Lunday, Chris (2026): No quick fix for Latvia’s drone crisis. Politico EU 05/2/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/no-quick-fix-for-latvias-drone-crisis/> (Accessed: 2026-29-05).

(3) Worried Kremlin Threatens to Obliterate Kyiv. Scott Lucas Worldview YouTube channel 05/29/2026. <https://youtu.be/yl6v3sINDfQ?si=h9-r9s8mdsYAqegp> (Accessed: 2026-29-05).

More peace news from the Peace President

The Peace President’s peace process seems to be a bit rocky at the moment:

The US has launched strikes on southern Iran in a test of the seven-week long ceasefire, as both sides played down hopes for an imminent peace deal even as negotiators from Tehran began new talks in Qatar.

US forces targeted missile launch sites and boats attempting to lay mines, US central command (Centcom) said on Tuesday, but stressed that the strikes did not indicate the ceasefire with Iran was over. (1)

Kind of like a ceasefire without the ceasing part?

Then in Lebanon, which Iran has been treating as part of the war that has to be a part of the peace deal: “Israel on Monday escalated its strikes on Lebanon, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he had ordered the military to ‘crush’ Hezbollah. Iran has been adamant that any agreement to end the war include Lebanon.“ (2)

Trump also insisted that a final settlement has to include a list of countries that have to approved the Abraham Accords formally recognizing Israel: Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye. He’s also demanding that Bahrain and the UAE join; both are already members.

The stakes in all this fumbling, remarkably incompetent Trump regime diplomacy are high, obviously:

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), as of May 13, the cumulative shortfall in global oil deliveries from the Gulf was roughly one billion barrels. This shortfall has been absorbed by reduced oil demand (a consequence of higher prices); increased production outside the Gulf; and by a drop in global oil inventories of roughly 250 million barrels, as these were released to hold down prices in the absence of new production from the Gulf coming to the market. However IEA head Fatih Birol warned last week that inventories were dropping at an unsustainable pace, particularly with summer driving season approaching in the Northern Hemisphere. (3)

Will we really have to wait until January of 2029 before there’s a President in the Oval Office who can actually do diplomacy and not just endless grifting?

Notes:

(1) Yerushalmy, Jonathn (2026): US strikes Iran missile sites and mine laying vessels as Trump’s promised peace deal remains elusive. Guardian 05/25/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/26/us-strikes-iran-missile-sites-vessels-trump-peace-deal-elusive> (Accessed: 2026-25-05).

(2) Matthews, Sean (2026): Trump calls for 'mandatory' adherence to Abraham Accords in Iran ceasefire talks. Middle East Eye 05/25/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-calls-mandatory-adherence-abraham-accords-iran-ceasefire-talks> (Accessed: 2026-25-05).

(3) Sankaran, Karthik (2026): More Iran war? There goes the neighborhood, and global economy. Responsible Statecraft 05/26/2026. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/economy-iran-war/> (Accessed: 2026-25-05).

The Republicans’ “trans” obsession

I haven’t commented much on the transgender issue, which seems to have been the main moral-panic obsession of the Republicans for several years now. Mainly because the yammering about “the trans” is normally so painfully dumb and mean-spirited.

“Transgender” is a real thing. Including an actual medical condition, “gender dysphoria.” This is how Karl Bryant in the Encyclopedia Britannica defines it in signature sober Britannica style:

gender dysphoria (GD), formal diagnosis given by mental health professionals to people who experience distress because of a significant incongruence between the gender with which they personally identify and the gender with which they were born. The GD diagnosis appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5; 2013), the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) official listing of psychiatric disorders. A clinical description of GID also appears in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10; 1992). (The ICD-10 does not use the term gender dysphoria.) Although the diagnosis of GD is usually made by mental health care providers, much of the treatment for adults is endocrinological and surgical in nature and often follows World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People (2012). (1)

He goes on to stress: “Although gender nonconformity is not a mental disorder, GD is characterized by clinically significant mental anguish.”

And he notes, “With the development of successful surgical techniques and hormone replacement therapy, several thousand transsexual adults with persistent GD [gender dysphoria] have undergone a permanent gender reassignment.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t specify how much of the world is included in those “several thousand” who have undergone gender-reassignment surgery. Even if all of them were in the US, physical gender-reassignment surgery is hardly part of the everyday routine. People who don’t want to be conned by dishonest bigots should actually try to keep a sense of proportion.

Analysts from UCLA found in 2025: “More than 2.8 million people now identify as transgender in the US, including an estimated 724,000 youth, according to a new data analysis that is the largest of its kind to date.” (2)

In other words, it’s not as widespread as the common cold. But it’s also not just some fad among people who Republicans considered to be weirdos. It needs to be seen as a real condition, not some fantasy in the heads of mean-spirited authoritarian types.

And, not surprisingly, there are legitimate controversies around gender aphasia and sex-tradition care – and by “legitimate” I do not mean hate-mongering nonsense from rightwing polemicists: “Although the revisions to DSM-5 have assuaged some criticism, it has been argued that the diagnosis of GD mistakenly categorizes a medical condition as a mental health disorder. These critics often point to recent research that may indicate a biological basis for transsexuality.”

The Mayo Clinic also has a website with basic information on gender dysphoria. (3)

Medical research has long since recognized that gender is more complicated than “boys are boys” and “girls are girls.” In Western science, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) were critically examining conventional assumptions about sexuality and recognizing that conventional heterosexuality is not a uniformly “normal” and healthy state for people.

How is the Trump movement, aka, the Republican Party, using the issue? Here’s how the Orange Anomaly himself has been using it, here in 2024 during the last Presidential race:

“No transgender, no operations — you know, they take your kid — there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.” (4)

This is a classic cult-like formulation. Sex-adjustment operations are a lot more complicated than going to the clinic to have a mole removed or a routine physical. Anyone with a minimal knowledge of gender-adjustment treatment knows it’s a lie that it can be done in a single day. No school district in the United States – or any other country I know of – can decide to send a student to a surgeon for a quickie sex change operation. In many school districts, the school nurse can’t even give a student an aspirin without parental consent.

There may some Trump cult followers who really are dim enough to believe what Trump says. But even I, with low expectations about the cognitive abilities of Trump cultists, find that hard to believe. He’s lying on this. (Like on so many other things.) And essentially all his supporters know he’s lying about it. But it’s a sign of loyalty to pretend they believe it. And even to repeat it.

Know-Nothing hysteria about real gender-related issues is harmful to real people and if often deeply mean-spirited. For the Trump cult, being mean-spirited is part of their identity. (5)

“Gender” is not equivalent to reproductive biology. There are a number of societies past and present that recognize more than two genders. (6) And, as the pioneering American feminist Margaret Fuller said in her 1845 Woman in the Nineteenth Century put it, “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” [my emphasis]

Ideas Democrats should consider in countering Republican demagoguery on “the trans”

• Call out cult-like lies on the issue from Republicans.
• Start using the medical term “gender dysphoria” to remind people that we’re talking about a real medical condition here.
• Straightforwardly slap down superficial slogans like “boys playing in girls’ sports,” which even Gavin Newsom has adopted.
• Since the Republicans and the occasional Democratic empty suit will keep yammering about “the trans” for Lord-knows-how-long, use it also as an opportunity to talk about the real issue of “gender dysphoria” a shame the Republicans for promoting petty bigotry over a rare but serious real medical condition.
• Remember that for American voters with the slightest willingness or inclination to vote for Democrats, “be a decent person” is still an appealing concept.
• Adopt Tim Walz’ 2024 label for Republicans as “weird” over their obsession with “the trans” and slogans like Trump saying the Democrats want “transgender for everybody.”
  

Notes:

(1) Bryant, Karl. "gender dysphoria". Encyclopedia Britannica 05/18/2026. <https://www.britannica.com/science/gender-dysphoria> Accessed 23 May 2026.

(2) Levin, Sam (2025): More than 2.8m people in US identify as trans, including 724,000 youth, data shows. Guardian 08/20/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/trans-people-us-data> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

(3) Gender dysphoria. Mayo Clinic 01/01/2025. <https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dysphoria/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20475262> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

(4) Dale, Daniel (2024): Fact check: Trump revives his lie that schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries. CNN Politics 10/26/2024. <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/26/politics/fact-check-trump-rogan-children-gender-affirming-surgeries> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

(5) Boerner, Heather (2022): What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows. Scientific American 05/12/2022. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/what-the-science-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-kids-really-shows/> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

How Junk Science is Being Used Against Trans Kids. Scientific American YouTube channel 04/09/2026. <https://youtu.be/GOIWyP5uqgM?si=4OMT_90XcOeGBvn2> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

(6) Britannica Editors. 6 Cultures That Recognize More than Two Genders. Encyclopedia Britannica 06/13/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders> (Accessed: 2026-23-05).

This weekend’s Administration pitch on the Iran War

It’s the weekend, and the stock markets will be shut down until Monday morning, so of course Trump is floating another garbled announcement about the Iran War being on the verge of a peace settlement.

Trita Parsi is obviously trying to be optimistic, and in this early response to the latest peace-agreement talk, he talks about how some of the concessions Iran is offering in this latest draft Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) could offer a big opportunity for a meaningful and durable peace settlement. (1)

We all need a good dose of optimism! And Trita does caution his audience not assume we’re on the verge of a big immediate breakthrough. But this is part of the dilemma with the Trump 2.0 regime: their diplomacy on the Middle east is chaotic in its best moments and has generally looked pretty incompetent. Even when Iran makes what looks like major diplomatic concessions, the Trump regime may not want to take it, and/or don’t know how to go about concluding a agreement even if they really want one.

Politico reports:

Trump did preview that the agreement would include a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a major priority for the White House and Gulf state allies after months of disruptions to global energy markets and commercial shipping traffic.

Trump revealed that he had a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “which, likewise, went very well.”

The announcement is the most significant moment in the war since he first announced a ceasefire early in April, bringing the most active and frenzied period of the fighting thus far to an abrupt but shaky close.

And it’s sure to frustrate influential figures within the GOP, who have urged the president to press on in his military campaign against Tehran and have expressed skepticism that Iran would truly relinquish its grip on the strait.

“A deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the Strait in the future will put Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shia militias in Iraq on steroids,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has long cheered the military action in the Middle East, wrote on X Saturday. (2)

The Guardian reports on Iran’s public position:

However, Iran’s Fars news agency, which is close to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported that the strait of Hormuz would remain under Iranian control, a red line for the US. The news agency reported on Telegram that “the management of the Strait, determining the route, time, method of passage, and issuing permits will continue to be the monopoly and discretion of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

It said Trump’s assertion that an agreement was nearly final was “inconsistent with reality”. (3)

It’s important to keep in mind that Iran has been insisting on including Israel’s war and occupation in Lebanon as part of the settlement of the current war.

Also, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State during his first term, complains the Trump’s latest announcement is too weak and looks too much like what Barack Obama did. Actually, as Trita Parsi notes, what the Iranians are proposing for nuclear controls in the new MOU actually goes farther than what Iran agreed to in the JCPOA agreement from which Trump breezily withdrew during his first term.

Notes:

(1) Trump’s Iran Deal Is America’s Biggest Defeat. Pyotr Kurzin YouTube channel 05/23/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/auvOADLjg50?si=uVaBaQSjUgbV9ECW> (Accessed: 2026-05-24).

(2) Johansen, Ben & Svirnovskiy, Gregory (2026): Trump says peace deal with Iran is imminent. Politico 05/23/2026. <https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/23/trump-peace-deal-iran-00935114> (Accessed: 2026-05-24).

(3) Olivares, José & Mackey, Robert (2026): Trump claims peace deal with Iran ‘largely negotiated’ with strait of Hormuz to open. The Guardian 05/24/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/23/trump-ceasefire-iran-strait-of-hormuz> (Accessed: 2026-05-24).

It may be time for the European allies to rethink their current policy on Ukrainian attacks in Russia

I posted earlier this month about Sergei Karaganov, a prominent Russian foreign policy intellectual who is reportedly taken serious by senior Russian authorities. He has been suggesting that the Russian government may need to send stronger signals to the European allies of Ukraine that there are limits to the attacks Moscow will tolerate on Russian territory.

John Mearsheimer spoke about these concerns recently in an interview. (1)

There are two broad areas of concern with the attacks inside Russia, both with drones and Ukrainian troops. They make for dramatic headlines, like this one from this past Monday: (2)

There was also a ground offensive of 2024-2025 into the Kursk area of Russian territory whose benefit for the Ukrainian war effort was always highly doubtful. And it ended with Ukrainian withdrawal:

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Russia's Kursk region have described scenes "like a horror movie" as they retreated from the front lines.

The BBC has received extensive accounts from Ukrainian troops, who recount a "catastrophic" withdrawal in the face of heavy fire, and columns of military equipment destroyed and constant attacks from swarms of Russian drones.

The soldiers, who spoke over social media, were given aliases to protect their identity. Some gave accounts of a "collapse" as Ukraine lost Sudzha, the largest town it held. (3)

That incursion provided some morale-boosting headlines for a few weeks. But it didn’t provide any obvious significant military advantage. And Ukraine, which has a far smaller pool of potential soldiers than Russia, took losses in that chapter of the war. As the BBC report cited above commented, “Western officials estimate that Ukraine's Kursk offensive involved about 12,000 troops. They were some of their best-trained soldiers, equipped with Western-supplied weapons including tanks and armoured vehicles.” The Russians drove the Ukrainian forces out in 2025.

The German Tagesschau news service reported in late 2025 on the results of the operation: „For the first time since World War II, a foreign army stood on Russian territory. For Ukraine, it was the first significant offensive in a long time in the war against Russia.” (4)

There’s no question that its perfectly legitimate in terms of the laws of war and the normal practice of it for Ukraine to attack targets in Russia. Russia occupied and illegally annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea in 2014. For years, they provided support, including some Russia soldiers, to pro-Russian secessionist forces in eastern Ukraine, particularly the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. And in 2022, Russia launched a full-on invasion of eastern Ukraine which continues with on-going combat today. The were illegal acts of aggression by Russia and Ukraine is still at war with Russia. So there’s no question that Ukraine can legitimately attack inside Russian territory.

How effective or advisable the attacks have been is another question.

Hitting the Russian “nuclear triad”

The Russians, like the US and other countries, have nuclear missiles based on the ground, on submarines based, and on planes. If – or rather, when – nuclear powers develop nuclear-attack drones, those would presumably be part of the aerial branch of the triad. (5)

Mearsheimer has been particularly critical of the June 1, 2025 Operation Spiderweb in which Ukrainian drones attacked several Russian airfields. An early analysis found:

The exact losses sustained by the Russian Aerospace Forces as a result of the Ukrainian drone attack have yet to be established, but they include at least seven Tu-95MS heavy strategic bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Several Tu-22M3 long-range bombers and at least one A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft were also destroyed. According to the Financial Times, the drones destroyed or damaged about 20 percent of Russia’s operationally ready long-range aviation.

Russia currently produces one strategic bomber per year, so it will take at least seven years to make up for the losses. The Tu-95MSs and Tu-22M3s were designed back in the Soviet era and are no longer in production, so as a carrier of cruise missiles, their destruction is a major blow to Russian long-range aviation. The loss of the A-50, meanwhile, will reduce the effectiveness of fighter and strike aircraft.

Operation Spiderweb was also a serious blow to Russia’s image. Strategic bombers, which only the United States, Russia, and China have in service, are a symbol of power and an important instrument for projecting force. It’s no coincidence that Russia resumed flights by strategic bombers back in 2007 in various regions of the world, including over neutral waters close to NATO countries.

Most importantly of all, the operation was an attack on one of the official elements of the nuclear triad: strategic aviation, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines. Nuclear weapons are the main symbol of Russia’s global greatness. Accordingly, Operation Spiderweb was undoubtedly a blow to the Kremlin’s pride. [my emphasis] (6)

Mearsheimer has stressed repeatedly that attacks on elements of the nuclear triad like this had been considered strictly taboo before then in the long-standing nuclear balance of terror. And the fact that the Russian triad was attacked and even seriously damaged by Ukraine that is actively being supplied and supported by Western countries, including the US, was a particularly risky move that could lead Russian strategists to conclude that their own nuclear deterrence capacity is insufficient.

I’m convinced he’s right on that issue. The Western allies should insist that Ukraine stay away from any such attacks like that on the Russian nuclear triad. We still live in very much a world of nuclear bombs and as of now, we have no international arms control treaties still in effect.

“Strategic” and “tactical” bombing

Since the early years of bombing from planes, there has been a conventional distinction among Western powers between “tactical” and “strategic” bombing strategies. Tactical air power means aerial support for operations by land and sea forces. Strategic air power means targeting sites and structures that support the war enemy’s war effort, such as munitions factories, transportation hubs, and energy supplies. Strategic air power has also been used with the goal of undermining the civilian morale on the enemy side, a goal that we see being applied in the current US-Israeli War on Iran. And the results of using bombing to destroy the enemy civilians’ morale and provoking them to overthrow their own governments continues the remarkable record of failure it has consistently had since the First World War. (7)

Ukraine and Russia have both been employing strategic bombing against military facilities and military-related infrastructure of the other side. Those attacks are also legitimate for Ukraine to use against Russia. But given the concentration of the war since 2022 on Ukraine’s eastern oblasts (provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia), and given the far greater resources in manpower and industrial capacity Russia has over Ukraine, it would seem that the value of focusing attacks on those four occupied provinces would be a more effective use of Ukrainian military resources that attacks on “strategic” targets deeper inside Russia. It may well be that some of those deeper strategic attacks have been effective in reducing some of Russia’s warmaking capacity.

And that effective usage may well include some of targets struck in Moscow and its vicinity. But if Ukraine’s strategists are expected such attacks to destroy the enemy population’s morale, they are almost surely going to be disappointed.

Scott Lucas is another political analyst who does solid evaluations of Donald Trump and some of the current war issues. Including in this current podcast. (8) But he does seem tempted to overestimate the possible damage to public morale that Russia may been experiencing right now. I suspect that the devout neocon belief that the war that the USSR had in Afghanistan was what brought down the Soviet Union is still having an outsized effect on the thinker of many about this. (Despite that belief having only a dim relation to the actual history.)

But he’s also cautious about predict immediate shifts in the military position of the two sides in eastern Ukraine. What we’re seeing there right now is a lot like a frozen conflict but with no armistice agreement to go with it.

Notes:

(1) John Mearsheimer: Toward All-Out War With Both Russia & Iran. Glenn Diesen YouTube channel 05/18/2026. <https://youtu.be/Dx7osj5gCmo?si=8abfvzD2pjzazY-h> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

(2) Melkozerova, Veronika (2026): Ukraine breaches Russia’s strongest air defenses to hit Moscow. Politico EU 05/18/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-breaches-russia-strongest-air-defenses-drone-attack-hits-moscow/> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

(3) Beale, Jonathan & Levchenko, Anastasiia (2025): 'Everything is finished': Ukrainian troops relive retreat from Kursk. BBC News 03/17/2025 <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q198zyppqo> (Accessed: 2026-20-05).

(4) Was von Kursk geblieben ist. Tagesschau 08/11/2025. <https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/ein-jahr-kursk-ukraine-russland-100.html> (Accessed: 2025-20-05). My translation from German.

(5) Serim, Esra (2025): Drone technology and the future of nuclear weapons. The Loop (from the European Consortium for Political Research [ECPR] 07/23/2025. <https://theloop.ecpr.eu/advancing-drone-technology-and-the-future-of-nuclear-weapons/> (Accessed: 2025-20-05).

(6) Starchak, Maxim (2025): Ukraine’s Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Aviation Has Broader Implications. Carnegie Politika 06/10/2025. <https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/06/russia-nuclear-force-shuffle> (Accessed: 2025-20-05).

The US Revolution and the Enlightenment

I’m going back to the well here on the historian Henry Steele Commager’s treatment of the American Revolutionary era and the early Republic in the context of Enlightenment thought.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously defined the concept in a short essay called “What Is Enlightenment?”

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. …

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom--and the most innocent of all that may be called "freedom": freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: "Do not argue!" The officer says: "Do not argue--drill!" The tax collector: "Do not argue--pay!" The pastor: "Do not argue--believe!" Only one ruler in the world says: "Argue as much as you please, but obey!" We find restrictions on freedom everywhere. But which restriction is harmful to enlightenment? Which restriction is innocent, and which advances enlightenment? I reply: the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind. (1)

This concept of the reason and right to self-determination of the individual was derived a concept of natural rights based on natural law. Natural law in the European philosophical tradition was originally based a Christian religious concept. John Locke, the English philosopher who was very influential in the thinking of political intellectuals in the US like Thomas Jefferson elaborated such an approach to inherent rights. But, as the quotation from Kant indicates, his concept did not involve individuals submitting their own thought to dictates from religious officials.

In fact, both David Hume (1711–1776) and Kant defined natural rights on a secular concept of Reason. (“Hume’s more conservative contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism…”) (2) Divine beings were not a necessary component of the democratic and American Revolutionary concept, although most Americans and Brits in 1776 were adherents of some form of the Christian religion. (Locke, btw, did not think that recognition of inherent rights based on Christian natural law extended to Catholics.)

This past Saturday, the faithful followers of Donald Trump staged a “Freedom 250” event specifically title “Rededicate 250:” A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving on the National Mall in Washington celebrating the Christian heritage of the US, Protestant fundamentalist version. Katherine Stewart wrote before the event:

The Trump Freedom 250 program is embedded with unvarnished Christian nationalist propaganda. It kicks off with a rally on the National Mall called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, which bills itself as “part of the broader Freedom 250 initiative.” The event, hosted by a private foundation in partnership with the White House, has been described by proponents as “a major faith gathering” that will “bring together faith leaders, public servants, music, prayer, and testimony to honor God’s hand in America’s story.” In fact, it will bring together leaders and representatives of the narrow but powerful Christian nationalist groups dedicated to replacing American democracy with a (supposedly) Christian autocracy. [my emphasis] (3)

She also notes, “Talk about moneylenders in the temple: For about $1 million, they can secure invitations to a reception with President Trump.”

Commager on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution

Commager looked at the political philosophies and ideologies that dominated the Revolutionary period as being deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, which also included enthusiasm and even reverence for modern science, e.g., Benjamin Franklin. But Commager saw the historical writing of that generation as sadly deficient in comparison to the legal theories and political philosophies. He wrote, for instance, “Of all that generation only the grotesque Parson Weems [Mason Locke Weems, known for his tale of Washington and the cherry tree] wrote histories that survive, and everyone acknowledges that he was not really an historian at all and that he belongs to the era of Romanticism, not to the Enlightenment.” (Weems is best known as the popularizer of the tale of young Washington and the cherry tree.)

However, he argues that the real, substantive historical writing of the Founders’ generation was found in the official documents and political polemics of the time:

For the great historical writings of this generation, we turn to John Adams, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Madison, Wilson, Rush, and their associates among the Argonauts; and the great historical treatises are not formal histories but such works as The Defense of the Constitutions, Notes on Virginia, The Rights of Man, The Federalist Papers, James Wilson's Lectures on the Constitution, and similar statements.

But he characterizes the basic approach to history embodied in such documents, adnthe Enlightenment understand of history, as follows:

What is clear, at once, is that the generation of the Enlightenment, European and American alike, thought of history not as we customarily think of it, as the reconstruction of the past, but as a moral enterprise. Perhaps it was not history at all; let us call it philosophy and be done with it. ...

In America too, perhaps especially in America, it was morality that was important [in the writing of history], not facts; it was wisdom and justice, and virtue. Here is the eminent Dr. Rush urging the trustees of the new Dickinson College to exchange a set of the Journals of the House of Commons for books on mathematics. "It would distress me" he wrote, "to hear that a student at Dickinson College had ever wasted half an hour in examining even their title pages. He would find nothing in them but such things as a scholar and a gentleman should strive to forget."

1969, the year of the Commager lecture, was nearly six decades ago. Commager was an active supporter of the civil rights movement, an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, an opponent of the Vietnam War, and was very outspoken against the authoritarianism and lawlessness of Richard Nixon’s regime, which is probably the most proximate American model of the Trump 2.0 regime. All of those perspectives were ones for which he also looked to history to advocate for democratic “virtue” in his own time. It’s worth adding here that one of the most important figures in McCarthyism was his witch-hunt Committee’s chief counsel who later went on to become the top Mob lawyer in New York and the political mentor of Donald Trump.

He also notes that liberty and tyranny were early themes in the new American Republic. Although few people today would have trouble recognizing both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as Founders whose actions and ideas deserved to be carefully understood, they became political enemies during the Adams Administration of 1777-1801. Jefferson and his partisans even regarded Jefferson’s Presidential election in 1800 as a second American resolution. A key point of dispute was the Adams Administration’s use of the Alien and Sedition Acts as an illegitimate excuse for political repression against critics of hist administration. It’s notable here that Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a key legal fig leaf for his deployment of the ICE Gestapo to terrorize and murder non-citizens and citizens as well in 2025-26.

Here it’s hard not to think of that apocryphal quote usually attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it often rhymes.”

Commager may have overstated his argument (or maybe not!) that historical facts as such didn’t much matter in the Enlightenment thought of the American Revolutionary leaders and thinkers. But he conveyed a good since of how the past can be used to understanding and acting on the present. It’s similar to the New Left notion from the 1960s of a “usable past.” And Commager understood history in that way, though he wasn’t advocating disregarding the actual facts of history.

His essay is also a reminder that the approach to understanding history evolves, and there are fads and trends in the mainstream approach to teaching history and a lot of diverse perspectives. The Enlightenment was a complex and contradictory phenomenon, as reflected in the title and the text of Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The Enlightenment was a key moment in defining and prioritizing basic human rights, including the secular grounding the Hume and Kant gave to it.

But Enlightenment thought also found justifications and alibis for colonialism and racism. There was a debate, for instance, between Kant’s concept of race which allowed for the notion of superior and inferior races, and the more egalitarian (and more scientifically accurate) view of the explorer and German revolutionary democrat Georg Forster (1754-1794). (5)

History is complicated. It’s also a moving target.

This is why it’s worth remembering the actual events and leaders and motivating ideas of period of the Revolution and the early Republic. Otherwise, there will be no shortage of religious and political crackpots pimping their own scam version of that history and heritage to the disadvantage of pretty much everyone.

Notes:

(1) What Is Enlightenment? English translation: Mary C. Smith, n/d. <https://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).

(2) Morris, William Edward and Charlotte R. Brown (2023): David Hume. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 11/01/2023. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/hume/> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).

(3) Stewart, Katherine (2026): A Very Authoritarian Semiquincentennial Celebration. New Republic 05/15/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/article/210373/trump-america-250-corruption-authoritarianism> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).

(4) Commager, Henry Steele (1975): The Past As An Extension of the Present. In: Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment. New York: Geoge Braziller. The essay was originally presented as an address in 1969.

(5) Strack, Thomas (1996): Philosophical Anthropology on the Eve of Biological Determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the Moral Qualities and Biological Characteristics of the Human Race. Central European History 29:3, 285-308. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/4546617>

More bombing of Iran coming tonight? Or not? Or maybe?

Rumors and leaks about the US-Israeli War on Iran are hard to evaluate because anything that depends on the current President of the United States to take an action he's threatening to take may change ten times before tomorrow morning.

Here's Trita Paris giving his reality-based take on the rumors of renewed bombing at the moment. (1)

Literally while I was typing the first lines of this post, the Orange Anomaly is now saying he's pausing a new attack: "Trump says he's pausing plan to attack Iran." That from Axios, which seems to be getting preferential treatment as the moment to for a lot of Trump regime leaks. 

President Trump said Monday that he'd planned to strike Iran "tomorrow" but was holding off to give negotiations another chance. He claimed he made the decision at the request of several Arab leaders. ...

I have been asked by the Emir of Qatar, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the President of the United Arab Emirates to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow," Trump wrote on Truth Social. (2)

In an article also before the change of plans just noted above, Tria Parsi also observes:

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner. Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades. (3)

Notes:

(1) Trita Parsi: Iran War Marks the End of American Primacy. Glenn Diesen YouTube channel 05/18/2026. <https://youtu.be/7QUx7GjIOBo?si=Qtu2ps0GLufCmNgG> (Accessed: 2026-18-05),

(2) Ravid, Barak (2026): Trump says he's pausing plan to attack Iran. Axios 05/1/2026. <https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/trump-iran-attack-suspend-nuclear-talks> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

(3) Trump appears poised to restart the Iran war. Responsible Statecraft 05/18/2026. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-trump-restart-war/> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

Netanyahu’s government is hot for more war – and wants the US to participate, of course

Bengamin Netanyahu is still beating the war drums for his decades-long dream of having the US turn Iran into a failed state with US military intervention.

Amos Harel, who seems to be a frequent recipient of planned leaks from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, writes:

The long waiting period is continuing. U.S. President Donald Trump left for a summit meeting in China without deciding on the continuation of the war with Iran. A narrow window for taking action in the Gulf may actually have been created. Trump has been consulting with his generals frequently in search of a military blow that would knock the Iranians off-balance. While meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Florida in 2017, Trump ordered a major American airstrike on Syria, mainly as a show of force.

This time, the window of the timing isn't particularly wide, and it's doubtful that Trump's plans include a return to full-scale war for an unlimited period. There's one main constraint in the background – the start of soccer's World Cup, for which the United States is the primary host – on June 11. At the moment, it's clear to the president that he hasn't managed to deter the regime in Tehran through current means (including a partial naval blockade), and he hasn't been terrifying Iran's supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. [my emphasis] (1)

Harel also writes, “Khamenei Jr. [?!?], who is still in hiding and isolated, has been communicating with his people using means out of the Middle Ages, and has apparently refrained entirely from using electronic communications where he is located.” (my emphasis)

So, Israel has state-of-the-art whiz-bang intelligence capabilities, but they can’t penetrate pre-1492 methods of communication? Seems like an odd claim to make! Then he goes on to refer to the information that Israeli security is putting out about the leadership’s intentions.

This claim seems to be easier to credit:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying for some time to convince Trump to return to war, and is seeking a massive initial attack on Iran's national infrastructure sites, particularly in the energy sector. It's possible that Trump is less attentive to the prime minister following the fiasco regarding the attempt to bring down the Iranian regime at the war's outset in late February.

More interesting is Harel’s report that Israel seems to be hosting an unusually large number of refueling planes, apparently as a replacement for such planes being hosted at American air bases in other Middle East nations that have come under effective attacks from Iran since the February 28 beginning of the current war. His comment on Lebanon is hardly news, “The cease-fire in Lebanon that Trump declared a month ago remains on paper only.” Israel has a habit of not honoring ceasefire agreements for very long, i.e., starting to ignore them almost immediately.

But it sounds like Israel may be cracking down on its military discipline! IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir toured the occupied West Bank and made a shocking discovery:

One of the soldiers [at an army post] was wearing a patch with the word "Messiah" on his uniform, contrary to regulations. Zamir commented about it to the brigade's commander, Col. Arik Moyal, and ordered judicial proceedings against the chain of command. The soldier was sent to an army lockup for 30 days.

Because, as Israel has been telling us for a long time, the Israeli military is the most moral army in the world! Since they don’t have worry about their soldiers engaging in torture, murder, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, they can focus on cracking down on violations of the code on military uniforms!

Meanwhile, the IDF and the Israeli intelligence are supposedly pushing for a new offensive against Gaza, “this time presumably with fewer limitations over the use of force because Hamas is no longer holding hostages.” Which sounds like a resumption of intensive genocidal operations even worse than that of 2023-2025. Harel also informs us that Netanyahu “has a major interest in keeping the fronts active during the election campaign,” which is already going on.

The human-rights organization B’Tselem reported in March on conditions the West Bank:

Since 7 October 2023, military attacks and settler violence in the West Bank have led to the displacement of Palestinians on a scale not seen since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967. As of 16 March 2026, Israel forcibly displaced 59 Palestinian communities, home to more than 4,003 people, in Areas C and B, and 507 more residents were forced out of their homes in 16 partially displaced communities. At least 9 additional communities were displace[d] before 7 October 2023. In early 2025, at least 32,000 people were displaced as a result of military attacks on refugee camps in the northern West Bank. As of February 2026, none have been permitted to return to their homes, many of which were deliberately destroyed in the attacks.

In the southern Jordan Valley, and areas east of the city of Ramallah, Israel has “cleansed” the entire area of the Palestinian communities living in it, including repeat expulsion of communities that moved to Area B after being forced out of their homes in Area C.

In the northern Jordan Valley, the proliferation of settler outposts and the surge in violence they bring have accelerated the forcible displacement of local Palestinian communities. In a complementary effort, the military has begun constructing a separation fence set to cut off the northern Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank. The fence would facilitate land takeover in the Jordan Valley and help force local Palestinian communities to relocate to more densely populated areas in the West Bank.

The sword of demolition is hanging over the heads of thousands more Palestinians living in dozens of communities that suffer daily attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers, as well as ongoing, systemic abuse by state institutions. [bolding in original] (2)

In related news:

• Meron Rapoport reports on another aspect of the steadily increasing pressure against Palestinians in the West Bank on the agricultural front. (3)
• Jonathan Shamir looks at how the US-Israeli war on Iran is connected to Israel’s Palestinian policies. (4)
• A far-right Israeli group called Uri Tzafon has been actively agitating for Israel annexing parts of Lebanon. (5)
• The Guardian has this news report on the Lebanese front of the US-Israel war on Iran: (6)

Notes:

(1) Harel, Amos (2026): Between China Visit and the World Cup, Trump Still Has a Narrow Window to Attack Iran. Haaretz 05/15/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-05-15/ty-article/.premium/between-china-and-the-world-cup-trump-still-has-a-narrow-window-to-attack-iran/0000019e-2811-d336-a9be-285519f50000?gift=93ba26bf511b4fa988c33c15ad8aec2d> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

(2) Settler Vilence = State Violence. B’Tselem 03/16/2026. <https://www.btselem.org/settler_violence_updates_list?importance=1> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

(3) Rapoport, Meron (2026): Israel’s war on the West Bank comes for Palestinian greenhouses. +972 Magazine 05/07/2026. <https://www.972mag.com/jayyous-greenhouses-israel-demolition-west-bank/> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

(4) Shamir, Jonathan (2026): The Iran War Is About Palestine. Jewish Currents 03/24/2026, <https://jewishcurrents.org/the-iran-war-is-about-palestine> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

(5) Rose, Maya (20026): Support for Settlement of Lebanon Goes Mainstream in Israel. Jewish Currents 04/14/2026. <https://jewishcurrents.org/support-for-settlement-of-lebanon-goes-mainstream-in-israel> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

(6) Lebanon divided: Hezbollah, Israel and the cost of resistance. The Guardian YouTube channel 05/14/2026. <https://youtu.be/6BrCgcjtzks?si=jiUFUnn000sOX-uI> (Accessed: 2026-15-05).

Henry Steele Commager on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution

Henry Steele Commager (1902- 1998) was a prominent American historian who wrote in what was known broadly as the Progressive tradition of the early half of the 20th century.. His first major book, The American Mind (1950), was an intellectual history that built on the tradition of the literary historian Vernon Parrington (1871-1929). Commager wrote a lot on intellectual history, particularly on the influence of Enlightenment thought on American political concepts.

He was also known for his timely engagement with political developments and become a critic of McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the repression of political dissent, especially since Nixon’s Presidency. That is, he was sharply critical of the illiberalism that led eventually to Trumpism. He retained an enthusiastic focus on the Enlightenment core of the American revolutionary tradition. But he also expanded the scope of his work over the years to give increasing focus to the role of minorities in the US.

The 1977 edition of one of his widely used histories, co-authored with Samuel Eliot Marison and William Leuchtenburg, reflects the greater emphasis on diverse history that continued to development. A 1976 book of which he was the main editor, The West: An Illustrated History, also reflects this broader view. Although the title of the chapter on the Native Americans was “The Indian Tragedy,” which reflects the liberal view of US Indian policy as an inevitable result of the clash of an advanced American civilization with a less developed one whose technology and strategies had to inevitably give way to the more “backward” one.

But Commager’s view of the democratic-Enlightenment tradition as being central to the American Revolution and to the democratic constitutional order still provides important critical insights to understanding the American Revolution in both a historical and sentimental sense. Lydialyle Gibson describes his late view this way:

... Commager asserted his thesis:

Americans of the late 18th and early 19th centuries took the Enlightenment principles that Europe had envisioned and “tentatively” experimented with - principles such as religious and intellectual freedom, constitutional order, commitment to reason, progress, humanitarianism - and “wrote them into law, crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work. That, as much as the winning of independence and the creation of the nation,” he wrote, “was the American Revolution.” …

In the 1930s, Commager defended Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and he was an early advocate for American involvement in the Second World War. He supported John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. He warned against sending US troops to Indochina and called the Vietnam War a moral catastrophe. In April 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his searing condemnation of the Vietnam War to an overflow crowd at New York’s Riverside Church, Commager stood beside him on the dais. [emphasis in original] (1)

A 1975 collection of his essay on topical political controversies including the Vietnam War was called The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character. It contains this description of American nationalism of the Revolutionary era and the ensuring early years of nation-building (of itself, not of various other countries around the world):

Culturally as well as socially the American asserted that he was a "new man." No sooner had the Declaration separated America from Britain than Americans threw themselves, almost convulsively, into the task of creating, or vindicating, an American culture. As Thomas Paine wrote, "A new era for politics is struck, a new method of thinking hath arisen." Now there were to be an American culture, an American language, American philosophy, American law, American arts and letters. "America is an independent empire," wrote young Noah Webster [1758-1843], "and ought to assume a national character," and he urged his fellow-countrymen to "unshackle your minds and act like independent beings." [emphasis in original]

And he observes, “soon Jefferson had substituted the decimal system for pounds, shillings and pence.” Okay, a distinctive currency is something obvious. But it may not have been Jefferson’s best idea to flush the metric system of physical measurements!

Those observations come in a chapter titled, “Myths and Realities in American Foreign Policy”, originally from 1968, a year that became its own kind of mythical image. That essay expresses a very critical perspective on the contradictory nature of two broad assumptions of American patriotism and nationalism.:

First is the assumption, or the myth, of American uniqueness - a myth which justified and encouraged the habit of isolation. Second is the assumption of the political, social and moral superiority of America - a myth which rationalized Manifest Destiny, mission, imperialism and, in our own time, the imposition on the rest of the world of something that can be called, without stretching analogies too far, a Pax Americana. [my emphasis in bold]

We hear these assumptions still, not only in jingoistic posturing but in the standard politicians’ line that “America is the greatest country in the world.” One of an endless number of examples was Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in a speech for Hillary Clinton: “’Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country is not great, that somehow we need to make it great again,’ she said. ‘Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth’.”

In a contemporary review of Commager’s The American Mind, Marian Irish said of him, “As an American he believes this is ‘the best of all countries’ but he is doubtful that this is ‘the best of all times’.” (2)

This is a recording of Commager from 1955 talking about the importance of the American tradition of freedom of speech and the press with some comments on how he looks at the position of the US in the world of that time. With 2 ½ minutes of advertisement at the end. (3)

Notes:

(1) Gibson, Lydialyle (2017): All American. University of Chicago Magazine Spring 2017, 52-57. <https://mag.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/issues/UChicagoMag_1705-2017_Spring.pdf> Also: <https://medium.com/the-university-of-chicago-magazine/all-american-f7f6631a8e54>

(2) Irish, Marian (1951): American Political Science Review 45:1, 284. <https://doi.org/10.2307/1950915>

(3) Longines Chronoscope with Henry Steele Commager. PublicResourceOrg YouTube channel 04/05/2011. <https://youtu.be/yH1-6eHGmBA?si=WFgoRGAPDfLAGIdx> (Accessed: 2026-14-05).

Crackpot rightwing theorists, then and now

I’ve been thinking the last few days about trying to write some pieces about the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary year in a way that wouldn’t sound dorky. I’m still thinking that one out. But earlier this week I came across an interview with Curtis Yarvin, who is kind of a celebrity for being a dystopian political guru of sorts to TechBro fascist set. It was in the Vienna daily Der Standard and conducted by Eric Frey, a very good political reporter, including on American politics.

The paper’s subhead describes Yarvin as “leading thinker of the techno-rightists.” The main headline describes him as a “rightwing extremist,” which seems accurate enough. (1)

Yarvin in the interview shares his certifiably crackpot version of some aspects of American and other history, which is why I connected it to retrospectives on the American Revolution. Because history is not a documentary replay of past times. I heard someone recently comment that what happened in the past are facts, while history is our narratives about the past. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need honest and accurate history. But our understanding of past history is by definition selective.

Financial wealth and being born rich can tempt people within those categories to assume that their opinions and insights have special value. And they often expect everyone else to share that view. As John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

But he wasn’t implying that such often-crackpot insights are harmless. He says before and after that:

[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. … I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. (2)

In other words, people who should know better often take crackpots from characters like Curtis Yarvin as serious descriptions of reality.

The New Yorker did a 10-page article on Yarvin last year if you want an extended look at what this particular TechBro crackpot is about. (3) I’m tempted to describes what he says as sophomoric nonsense. But that would be insulting to college sophomores everywhere.

The Standard interview isn’t much better. Yarvin’s comments there are superficial gobbledygook from an arrogant twit who is obvious more interesting in being provocative than in doing anything so normal as to try to organize his ideas (or half-ideas) in a meaningful way. I’ll quote this part:

The Kennedys were a type of monarchs, and so was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). He had an abundance of power that Donald Trump does not have and never will. Trump cannot push through many things in the Senate, the Republican leadership despises him. He may have ten times more power than he did in his first term, but FDR had ten times more power than he did. Every few decades, there is a dictator in the USA who can steer the country in a certain direction. That's how America has become the country it is. In other times, the USA is ruled by oligarchies. …

[Trump] has a number of strengths and weaknesses. He has a lot in common with FDR, as he is a very intuitive thinker and not a logical, almost instinctive one. But unlike FDR, he does not come from the American ruling class. He doesn't speak their language, he almost seems like an outsider. This is a serious problem, because you can't govern without elites. Trump is a populist rebel. A rebellion of the lowly against the upper crust. [my translation to English]

The garbled comments about FDR and the kooky usage of populism, reminded me of something that Yarvin may be partly aping. There was an active group of Hitler sympathizers in the US in the 1930s and early 1940s. The one who stood out and was generally recognized as the chief ideologist of “National Socialism” in the US was a guy named Lawrence Dennis. His take on Roosevelt is that his government was fascist. But it was a “bad fascist” one. What was needed was a brand of “good fascism,” along the Hitler-Mussolini lines.

Lawrence Dennis was a really strange character. Unknown to those who admired him as the chief American Nationalist Socialist theorist, Dennis was an African-American. The superior North American White Race couldn’t even produce their own top Nazi ideologue! They had to find a black guy to do it.

Gerald Horne wrote a biography of him: The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (2006). It includes a description of an even better-known Hitler admirer, Charles Lindbergh, when he met Dennis. Lindbergh, who made it a habit to not shake hands with black people:

The controversial aviator, who had fascist leanings all his own, was taken aback when he laid eyes on the silken Dennis. It was “rather a shock, when one sees him for the first time, especially in a room in Washington,” a city of rigid racial segregation, “for one is so unprepared for his type. He would seem more in place at some frontier trading post along the eastern border of Europe.” Lindbergh, who had firmly held ideas about white supremacy and racial purity, “tried” as they “talked” to “fathom the nationality of his ancestors.” But Dennis, a product of Exeter and Harvard, could perform “whiteness” with the best of them, with his elegant manner,

Surrendering to Dennis’s bedazzling performance of “whiteness,” Lindbergh “concluded that some” of his “ancestors” “might have come from the Near East” …

“Lucky Lindy” came to agree with Dennis more and more. In fact, says one biographer of the charismatic man who for a time defined celebrity, Lindbergh’s “arguments and phraseology had some striking parallels with Hitler’s and even more those of Lawrence Dennis” with whom he was to be in “frequent contact.” There was “no doubt that the flier had read and been strongly influenced by Dennis’ books” [according to Lindbergh biographer Kenneth Davis]. [my emphasis]

Just a reminder of what crackpot weirdos even leading US Hitler admirers of the time were. Even if they were sometimes accidently “multicultural,” like with Lindy and Lawrence Dennis.

Whether today’s TechBro fascists have yet succeeded in out-weirding characters like Lindbergh and Dennis is hard to tell. They’re certainly giving it a try!

Notes:

(1) Frey, Eric (2026): Rechtsextremer US-Blogger Curtis Yarvin: "Das Schlimmste an Trump ist seine Unsicherheit". Der Standard 12.Mai.2026. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000319756/rechtsextremer-us-blogger-curtis-yarvin-das-schlimmste-an-trump-ist-seine-unsicherheit?ref=rss> (Accessed: 2026-12-05).

(2) Keynes, John Maynard (1936 [2013]): In: Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 7, 383. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(3) Kofman, Ava (2025): Autocracy Now! New Yorker 06/09/2025, 28-38.

Peace President Trump’s not-so-glorious war in Iran

We’re well into the third month of the US-Israel war on Iran.

In one sense, the story has been monotonous. Sundays Trump posts something optimistic about the war. Monday after the stock market has opened and speculators have taken their profits from the effects of Trump’s Sunday announcement, he goes back to blustering and threatening. Then it’s a series of contradictory and often incomprehensible blustering and threats and promises.

None of it makes much sense. Sometimes he contradicts one sentence’s message with the immediately following one. He’s stuck in a losing situation in the war where Iran has “escalation dominance” for at least the next few months. And his diplomacy is incompetent and incoherent – although calling it “diplomacy” at all is giving it too much credit.

Larry Wilkerson just shared his thoughts on the current situation with Breaking Points. (1)

Our co-belligerent in the Iran War, which also considers Israel’s attacks on Lebanon part of the war, doesn’t seem to be leaning toward de-escalation:

The Israeli military currently controls 68 locations in southern Lebanon, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam confirmed to DPA on Monday. Before the recent war, there were only five locations occupied by Israel, Salam said.

"Israel now controls 68 villages," he stated. This amounts to nearly half of the territory south of the Litani River, which is situated approximately 30 kilometres (about 18.5 miles) north of the Israeli border.

When asked for comment, the Israeli military justified its actions by citing the security of northern Israel. The objective of these operations, it stated, is to eliminate "the acute threat" to the residents of northern Israel and to prevent a renewed entrenchment of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. (2)

Nir Hasson comments on what he sees as the widespread obsession of the Israeli armed forces and Israeli society more generally with revenge, or at least with murderous violence that they considered revenge:

If there were any doubts that revenge has become the official [sic] doctrine, along came the selection of Avraham Zarbiv – who became a culture hero due to acts of vengeance he carried out – for lighting a torch on Independence Day. As explained by journalist Yehuda Schlesinger on Channel 12: "We should have seen much more revenge there, with rivers of Gazan blood." Broadcasters on Channel 14 were obsessed with vengeance. This also cropped up in sermons by rabbis, in interviews by politicians, in statements by the prime minister, who used the Biblical term Amalek, by the defense minister who talked about "human animals" and in the new hit wedding song, "May your village burn."

Revenge isn't something new in Israeli discourse. It underlaid the motivation for reprisal attacks in the 1950s, the demolition of the houses of the families of suicide bombers, the targeted and not-so-targeted assassinations. But until October 2023 and the current government, official Israel saw revenge as something to be condemned, not admitted publicly and definitely not boasted about. The beaten and humiliated Israel following the October 7 massacre felt a need to restore its self-confidence rapidly and recklessly, and the way to do this was to take revenge against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. The result was killing, destruction, deliberate starvation and uprooting at an unprecedented scale in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [my emphasis] (3)

Hasson uses this explanation for what he sees as such an extreme phenomenon:

To understand this, argued Prof. Sara Helman from Ben Gurion University, one needs to use the concept of "permanent security" coined by the genocide researcher Dirk Moses. This was the basis of most genocidal acts throughout history. "Permanent security" is the idea that there is a need to nullify and efface any hint of threat, real or imaginary. According to this approach, an entire population, including women and children, is perceived as a permanent threat to the security of a dominant group – "there are no innocent people in Gaza," some said. [my emphasis]

Wilkerson in the video above mentions an article by arch-neocon Robert Kagan, who surprisingly writes, “Defeat for the United States [in the Iran War], therefore, is not only possible but likely.” (4)

And Kagan sketches out probable consequences for the international order. For instance:

The new status quo in the strait [of Hormuz] will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran. As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.

Wilkerson comments, seriously and a bit cynically, that Kagan’s aim with the article is to shame Bush into making a much more intensive military campaign against Iran. But he nevertheless notes that Kagan’s analysis in the article is right in his description of the implications of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s criminal war against Iran.

Notes:

(1) Larry Wilkerson Responds: Is US Checkmated in Iran? Breaking Points YouTube channel 05/11/20226. <https://youtu.be/zQhijX4lYFY?si=Dg5HPJY4Fu62WBj1> (Accessed: 2026-11-05).

(2) IDF controls 68 locations, nearly half of southern Lebanon, PM Salam says. DPA/Haaretz 05/11/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-05-11/ty-article-live/netanyahu-says-iran-war-not-over-signals-indefinite-fighting-with-hezbollah/0000019e-14a8-d969-adff-14ed27ff0000?liveBlogItemId=1368144122#1368144122> (Accessed: 2026-11-05).

(3) Hasson, Nir (2026): It Wasn't Just Revenge That Israel Was After in Gaza. Haaretz 05/11/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-05-11/ty-article-opinion/.premium/it-wasnt-just-revenge-we-were-after-in-gaza/0000019e-132e-d73c-a99e-df7f3e160000?gift=efcdd72320e54cc48377eedb31d176aa> (Accessed: 2026-11-05).

(4) Kagan, Robert (2026): Checkmate in Iran. The Atlantic 05/10/2026. Gift link: <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/iran-war-trump-losing/687094/?gift=y5KN3gqTuS3mRKehlt83lpwfsOV2AQHsBA4T6-_0wuA&fb> (Accessed: 2026-11-05).

Sergei Karaganov, a hawkish Russian advocate on the war with Ukraine

Sergei Karaganov was described in 2023 by the BBC as a “Russian foreign policy strategist and sometime Kremlin adviser.” Project Syndicate on its author’s page identifies him as “Dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and Honorary Chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.” His last article there is from March 2018. (1)

Karaganov, in other words, is someone who is taken seriously by the Russian government but is not necessarily speaking for its present official policy. But his public pronouncements can also be taken as something that could be feasibly adopted by Putin’s government. Lawrence Freedman wrote about Karaganov in 2023, commenting, “It is worth making some effort to try to understand Russian perspectives if only because otherwise we are left with rumours, speculation, and inferences.” He also notes that Karaganov “is very much part of the Russian elite” and that he “developed some of the core themes of Putin’s foreign policy.” (2)

Karaganov was recently interviewed by Glenn Diesen, a political scientist specializing in Russian affairs at the University of South Eastern Norway. He tends in the interviews I’ve heard him do a “neorealist” view of foreign policy and sounds at least somewhat sympathetic toward Putin’s foreign policy perspective – whether from personal preference of in an effort to understand and explain the Russian strategic perspective, I can’t say.

But the current Wikipedia entry for Diesen references numerous reasons to assume that he is, shall we say, not especially critical of official foreign policy positions of Putin’s government.

In other words, this interview should be taken as representing a basically uncritical view of Putin’s policies. (3)

Karaganov treats the current world situation as something that might be considered a fourth world war. He counts the Napoleonic Wars including the invasion as Russia as the first of the four. A more likely candidate for that label could be the Seven Years War which was fought in Europe and North America and was known as the French and India War in the British colonies in America.

He includes the current Russia-Ukraine War and the US-Israeli war against Iran as being what he’s suggesting is a fourth world war, a metaphor with implications that it could greatly escalate in scope and intensity. Imperialist wars would seem to me to be a more meaningful label at this point. Karaganov takes the posture of being a critic of Putin’s government for “tolerating the Western aggression for too long.” He advocates that Russia should “escalate and … punish our, this time, European enemies for conducting an all-out war against Russia.”

Just to state the obvious, the Russia-Ukraine War, whatever else it may be, is not “an all-out war against Russia” by the European NATO members.

He argues that the Western assistance to Ukraine, the Iran War, and an unnamed situation in Southwest Asia as being element of a US world war against Russia. After ten minutes or so he starts talking about how Russia needs to think about military strikes against Europe and even the use of a nuclear weapon. The use of nukes was something he also discussed in an article in 2023, well into the second year of the Ukraine War. (4)

I’ll add that Karaganov’s presentation here fits well with a standard American stereotype of Russian spokespeople: a surly attitude, heavily accented English, and over blown characterizations.

Over-the-top propaganda? Part of a propaganda psyop? A grumpy old professor shooting his mouth off? Hard to say, exactly. He himself claims to be speaking for an opinion now support an “overwhelming majority” in the Russian government, the military, and society.

There is a new, UK-based academic journal that apparently appeared in the digital world very recently called Global Geopolitics. I can’t vouch for its soundness, quality, or perspective and I don’t recognize any of the names of its editorial board members. But for what it’s worth, it presents a recent online article without information on the specific author(s) on Karaganov’s ideas. (5)

A 2021 article by Karaganov before the start of the current Russia-Ukraine War is called, “On a Third Cold War.” It also uses a somewhat quirky periodization, considering the First Cold War to have begun in 1917 and the second soon after the end of the Second World War. He’s not quite so specific about when the Third Cold War began but apparently thinks it was the mid-2000s at the latest. (6)

Karaganov lists various Kremlin talking points on how the West misbehaved toward Russia in the post-1989 period, all of which are subject to various interpretations. He describes the general Russian grievances against Western democracy in conservative-reactionary terms that have become fairly standard under Putin’s authoritarian and very capitalist government:

This, of course, does not mean that any kind of authoritarianism, let alone totalitarianism, is more effective than democracy. There are more than enough examples of failed authoritarian political systems. Russia has yet to prove that its modern political regime is indeed modernizing authoritarianism.

It’s not clear there whether Karaganov is arguing that it’s not right to call Russia authoritarian, or that Putinist Russia hasn’t yet achieved the ideal type of authoritarianism to which it aspires. He goes on to make a Trumpist-style, Russian Christian nationalist argument about the decadence of the West:

The erosion of basic human values is accelerating due to a number of objective cultural reasons and partially conscious policies pursued by the transnational (liberal) ruling circles of the United States and many European countries, which are losing their positions. Hence all manifestations of LGBTisms, multisexuality and ultrafeminism; denial of history, roots, and faith; and support for black racism, including its anti-Christianity and anti-Semitism. The list also includes democracy as a religion and not simply as a way of governing, and it can go on and on.

Notes:

(1) Sergey Karaganov: Is Putin placing bets he cannot win? BBC Interview 02/03/2023.<https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct32h4> (Accessed: 2026-10-05).

(2) Sergei Karaganov Tries to Find a Way to Win Russia’s War. Comment is Free 10/11/2026. (Full article is behind paywall. <https://samf.substack.com/p/sergei-karaganov-tries-to-find-a> (Accessed: 2026-10-05).

(3) Sergey Karaganov: How Russia Will Win the New World War. Glenn Diesen YouTube channel 05/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/2Gd5jdl36cg?si=jcoxzoTxUHvArpxM> (Accessed: 2026-10-05).

(4) A Difficult but Necessary Decision. Russia in Global Affairs 06/13/2023. <https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a-difficult-but-necessary-decision/> (Accessed: 2026-05-10).

(5) How Russia Wins the New World War. Global Geopolitics 05/06/2026. <https://globalgeopolitics.co.uk/2026/05/06/how-russia-wins-the-new-world-war/> (Accessed: 2026-10-05).

(6) Karaganov, Sergei (2021): On a Third Cold War. Russia in Global Affairs 19:3, 102-115. <https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/102-115.pdf>

The Russia-Ukraine War on Victory Day, 2026: It’s hard to negotiate peace without, you know, actual diplomacy.

May 9 is the day Russia celebrates as Victory Day to commemorate the end of the Second World War in Europe. That was the day the Germans formally surrendered on the easter front. V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is celebrated by the onetime Western allies on May 8, when the German surrender in the west occurred. Peace President Trump is claiming credit for arranging a three-day cease fire around the commemoration:

Earlier both sides [Russia and Ukraine] said the other had continued to attack their positions and Moscow's mayor said the city had been targeted by drones overnight.

In his post Trump said he had personally requested the three-day truce and "I very much appreciate its agreement by President Vladimir Putin and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy".

Putin had announced a ceasefire for 8-9 May ahead of Victory Day celebrations on Saturday. Kyiv had earlier called for an indefinite truce, starting 6 May.

Russia has warned Ukraine not to try to attack the Victory Day parade in Red Square.

Its defence ministry has threatened to launch a "retaliatory, massive missile strike" on the centre of Kyiv if Moscow is attacked. It has warned foreign diplomats to leave the Ukrainian capital ahead of 9 May. (1)

Anatol Lieven discusses the state of affairs with the wars in Ukraine and Iran. (2)

The US has really been suffering from a lack of adequate diplomacy and strategic policy. It’s hard not to imagine that the Biden Administration couldn’t have made more active efforts to achieve a stable ceasefire of some kind in Ukraine. That war has been going on longer than the German-Soviet war of 1941-1945. Ukraine successfully resisted the initial Russian push toward their capital Kiev in early 2022. But their 2023 counteroffensive stalled out. And we’ve been seeing a war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine ever since. In theory, Russia is better positioned to win a war of attrition than Ukraine. But four years of continuous war is a long time. Lieven notes that the US is still providing intelligence to Ukraine.

My assumption is that any near-term cessation of the war, whether it’s an extended ceasefire or a Korea-style armistice, would leave Russia still in control of more-or-less what they have now, i.e., Crimea, the Luhansk Oblast (state/province), and parts of the Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Donetsk Oblasts. The Institute for the Study of War provides this map of the situation as of May 6:

The portion of Donetsk still controlled by Ukraine is particularly important, because there are fortified areas there that would be important in resisting any new Russian thrust toward Kiev. Lieven in the interview above notes that Russia is still putting a strong emphasis on the importance of taking all of Donbas, i.e., Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

Korea and China-Taiwan are two important examples of long-term, unresolved conflicts that have been stable for decades. But they are also not resolved. Another case is Argentina and the Falklands/Malvinas occupied by Britain since the early part of the 19th century. The UN considers the latter an unresolved colonial issue. We could also include British-controlled Gibraltar whose status Spain still disputes. And Türkiye still controls part of the island nation of Cyprus, which has been unresolved really since 1974.

But here is where the current US incapacity under the Trump 2.0 regime to conduct normal diplomacy. Because Russia would surely insist on a US buy-in of some kind on any such armistice arrangement, which would have to cover demarcation lines for troops on both sides, the return of Ukrainian children kidnapped and sent to Russia, international sanctions, stationing of foreign troops in Ukraine, clearance of land mines, and reconstruction plans, and Ukraine’s formal affiliation to the EU and to NATO. The status of Crimea is especially complicated. There’s no question that in international law that Crimea belongs to Ukraine. But Russia also has their key base for their Black Sea fleet there. Those are very complicated issues, which would require a serious strategic vision and competent diplomacy on the American side.

John Mearsheimer recently noted, with particular reference to the Iran War:

[I]t’s hard for me to imagine the United States and Iran reaching a deal on these different issues anytime soon. …

And then when it comes to negotiations, there are two big problems there. One is the trust issue. Do you think the Iranians trust the United States at this point in time? The last time the two sides were negotiating, we all of a sudden launched a war against Iran. In the middle of the negotiations. Can the Iranians trust the United States?

And then, moreover, do you really think the Trump Administration is really capable for executing a negotiation that leads to a meaningful settlement? This is the gang that can’t shoot straight. They couldn’t settle the war in Ukraine. They can’t end the genocide in Gaza. This is not a highly competent administration that’s filled with top-rate diplomats. Instead they have people like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in charge. (3)

The Laurel-and-Hardy team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witcoff are not going to be able to pull off anything like that. The idea of the United States being unable to conduct serious, substantive diplomacy on issues like Ukraine and Iran until 2029 at the earliest is not an encouraging one. As Lieven says in the video, “Who’s to negotiate peace in Ukraine?” He also comments that Laurel and Hardy don’t understand how to negotiate with Iran either.

And there is no end currently in sight for the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. Which is currently pushing the world toward a global recession.

Gerhard Mangott, a Russia expert from the University of Innsbruck, recently discussed the internal situation in Russia on a podcast for Austria’s Die Presse. The news service provides this summary of part of his presentation:

The dissatisfaction with Putin – among the people as well as among the elite – is not homogeneous, but rather it comes from completely different sides that had different expectations of him. What does not seem to suit everyone is the economic weakness on the one hand, and the unclear situation in the Ukraine war on the other. And finally, according to Mangott, the dominant position of power of the secret services and the military. What has happened here in recent years is absolute-control mania and repression: "The secret services have free rein." (3)

It’s not at all surprising that after four years plus of a war of attrition that there would be irritation and unhappiness over the sacrifices Russians and especially soldiers are being called upon to bear. The chronic optimism by American hawks in the potency of economic sanctions to force countries to bow to American desires is really quite a phenomenon. When countries like Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Russia see their national interests and the survival of their regimes at risk if they given in to sanctions, they have shown a great ability to sacrifice and adapt.

But optimistic hawks have been predicting Russia’s economic collapse since the current war began in early 2022. It hasn’t happened yet. And Russia, which is still a petrostate, is getting a direct boost from the higher oil prices resulting from the US-Israel war on Iran. The Trump regime even relaxed the sanctions aimed at preventing Russia from selling oil after Iran asserted greater control over the Strait of Hormuz shipping route.

Another obsession of US Russia hawks is the idea that the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam,” in the hopeful thinking of neocons. That plausible enough if we completely ignore Russia’s economic problems, much of which had to do with their dependency of oil sales and thus their vulnerability to oil price swings, their inability to modernize their industry fast enough, and the economic burden of maintain the economies of the Warsaw Pact states. Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet leader who accepted de facto defeat and withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan. But it wouldn’t fit easily into the neocon narrative to say the USSR fell because citizens were so outraged at Gorbachev’s failure to continue that war.

I’m still convinced that part of the strategic thinking of both the US and the European allies on Ukraine was this was a war that would severely weaken Russia and was therefore something that would benefit them geopolitically. And, as a practical matter, it has meant heavy costs for Russia. But it has been over four years in which the Russian army has gained a lot of combat experience. Much more so than the US or EU nations have accumulated recently.

With wars and tangled diplomatic situations, the superficially banal observation that several things can be true at once is particularly important to keep in mind. NATO’s diplomacy toward Russia over the question of expanding it to include Ukraine was reckless. And it was illegal and unnecessary for Russia to seize Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, to subsidize and arm pro-Russia rebels in the Donbass (along with direct Russian participation) from that point on, and invading Ukraine and occupying their territory since 2022. It’s certainly questionable what much advantage Ukraine has gained by its direct attacks on Russian territory but it is completely legitimate to attack the invading country.

It’s true that Ukraine stands for the defense of liberal democracy. It’s also the case that the widely used V-Dem think tank ratings currently describe both Ukraine and Russia as of 2025 as “electoral autocracies.” Belarus, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are all in the lower category of "closed autocracies." (5)

Wars and other forms of politics can be complicated and confusing …

Notes:

(1) Greenall, Robert (2026): Trump says Russia and Ukraine to observe three-day ceasefire. BBC News 05/08/2026. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c202zn5gg0lo> (Accessed: 2026-08-05).

(2) Anatol Lieven - Russia, Iran, Europe, and the Remaking of World Order. Armenian News Network-Groong Podcast 05/08/2026. <https://youtu.be/bnwKcnMSZTk?si=3zPCd-qMsnYTgMKy> (Accessed: 2026-08-05).

(3) 'IRAN WILL NOT SURRENDER' – TRUMP STUCK IN A LOSING WAR WITH NO OFF-RAMP. Rachel Blevins YouTube channel 05/09/2026. (14:00ff in the video) <https://youtu.be/5Do9bE1gMxk?si=upRcR3aTokHd5sGm> (Accessed: 2026-09-05).

(4) „Putin ist in seiner Elite angeschlagen“, sagt Experte Mangott: „Die Geheimdienste haben Narrenfreiheit“. Die Presse n/d (05/08/2026?). <https://www.diepresse.com/22329933/putin-ist-in-seiner-elite-angeschlagen-sagt-experte-mangott-die-haben> (Accessed: 2026-09-05). My translation to English.

(5) V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, p. 15. <https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf>