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Peace, Pending Approval The Harvest Cannot Wait A farmer planning next year’s harvest has a fairly modest list of requirements: fuel for the tractor, credit for seed, somewhere to store the crop, and a road along which to sell it. A family considering a return home has similarly practical concerns: a roof, electricity, a school, and some reason to believe that rebuilding a life is worth the effort. Eventually, every grand strategy has to find its way down to these questions. Martin Nissen, Germany’s agricultural attaché in Moscow from 2022 to 2025, approached the Ukrainian conflict with a title of unusual simplicity: Agriculture needs peace . According to Bild’ s account, his informal paper proposed placing contested territories under UN administration for five years, followed by referendums to determine their final status. The German Foreign Office explained that the initiative had been developed independently, without an official mandate. Boris Pistorius likewise described it as pri...
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Locked Out The European Art of Self-Isolation On October 27, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre spent nearly ninety minutes on the telephone with Vladimir Putin. The details remain largely outside the public domain, which is an entirely respectable arrangement for a diplomatic conversation. Its occurrence is significant enough. In my assessment, the call delivered the second substantial blow, following the Russian-American diesel agreement, to the foreign-policy doctrine through which the collective West had approached Russia. A government supposedly destined for diplomatic isolation was once again receiving calls from people who had discovered something they needed from it. Until recently, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic spoke enthusiastically about forcing Moscow to capitulate. Their support for the Kiev regime continued through attacks on nuclear facilities, Belgorod, and other civilian targets. Meanwhile, Russian gold and foreign-c...
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The Orders Keep Coming Washington’s Quarrels with Kiev and the Business of War The argument between Washington and Kiev continues. So do deliveries of American weapons. Zelenskiy himself acknowledges that Patriot interceptor missiles are still arriving, although the average he cites for 2026 is twelve a month. He also describes the difficulty of obtaining additional missiles from countries whose own inventories are limited. Diplomatic relations may be deteriorating; the supply relationship remains operational. ( Ukrinform ) Twelve missiles a month is a meager allocation against the demands Ukraine describes. American production and stockpiles, however, have limits of their own. Even during the politically warmer Biden years, satisfying Ukrainian air-defense requirements required Washington to rearrange other customers’ place in the queue. In June 2024, Biden announced that countries awaiting American air-defense systems would have to wait while Ukraine received priority. Enthusiasm was...
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Europe’s Broken Bargain How Europe’s Promised Prosperity Became a Political Liability Political science has long recognized a particularly uncomfortable source of instability: people’s expectations can grow faster than their ability to satisfy them. A government may discover that improving conditions produces more demands, while an economic setback can turn yesterday’s promise of progress into today’s accusation of betrayal. Alexis de Tocqueville explored this paradox in The Old Regime and the Revolution , published in 1856. Studying France before its revolution, he observed that improvements could make surviving injustices increasingly intolerable. Once people could imagine a better life, conditions previously endured as inevitable became much harder to accept. Progress changes the standard against which people judge their circumstances. A modest improvement can enlarge the horizon of what they believe is possible and, eventually, what they believe is owed to them. As the prover...
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The Autumn of Discontent How Europe’s Domestic Crisis Could Become Everyone Else’s War Europe’s domestic upheaval deserves close attention in Washington because its consequences may extend well beyond European streets. Governments struggling to maintain authority at home still make decisions about sanctions, military commitments, and relations with nuclear powers. Their internal difficulties can become security problems for everyone expected to support them. For Russia, the concern is familiar. Centuries of confrontation have accustomed Moscow to looking westward for its principal security challenges. Today, the societies of Western Europe’s leading powers face a choice with consequences for their own development and for peace across the continent. Russia’s size and historical role in stopping European military expansion place it at the center of that calculation. The unrest spreading across several European countries this autumn appears to mark a new stage of the continent’s syste...
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The Logic of Suicidal Escalation Europe’s Military Bet Against Russia European governments have placed a possible direct confrontation with Russia on their planning horizon for the turn of the decade, roughly between 2029 and 2032. Budgets are being allocated, plans for a European military structure with greater independence from NATO are taking shape, defense industries are expanding, and new missile and aviation systems are entering production and service. The “coalition of the willing” has also announced exercises in Poland, officially intended to prepare European troops for deployment in Ukraine after the present conflict ends. Taken separately, exercises involving a few thousand soldiers might seem a relatively minor development. Against the background of confrontation in the Baltic Sea, pressure on Russian maritime access, and threats concerning Kaliningrad, another set of maneuvers could easily disappear into the general noise. The broader pattern deserves more attention...
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The Ingrates Why Washington Tolerates Zelenskiy “Zelenskiy must go.” A year and a half ago, Trump meant leaving the White House, after he threw Zelenskiy out for his rudeness to Vice President JD Vance. This time, the instruction concerns the presidency. “Ukraine needs a new leader capable of making deals,” the American president declared. He backed his words by halting the transfer of intelligence to the Kiev regime, including advance warnings of Russian ballistic missile strikes, and restricting the bandwidth of the Starlink systems on which communications throughout the Ukrainian Armed Forces depend. Ukraine consequently lost the ability to conduct a number of terrorist operations against Russia, operations on which it has built its military strategy. Those measures raise a question that extends beyond the latest quarrel: why has Washington tolerated such behavior for so long, and what still limits its willingness to confront it? The United States possesses substantial lever...
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