Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.

Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.

This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.

The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.

The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”

But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:

The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.

The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.

[Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.

The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.

But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.

During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.

Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.

[Read: ‘What the hell is happening to your country?’]

The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.

As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.

Hitler regretted the deal he made with Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. What he actually wanted was war—his goal was to conquer all of Czechoslovakia by force as a first step toward the conquest of all of Europe.

He didn’t imagine that the British and French governments would be so craven as to give him everything he publicly asked for, including the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the occupation of the Sudetenland by the German army. When they did, Hitler found himself trapped into accepting, but he was unhappy. Within five months he ordered the military occupation of all Czechoslovakia, in violation of the Munich Agreement, and six months after that, he invaded Poland.

Today the Trump administration is offering Vladimir Putin a Munich-like settlement for Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators have offered Putin almost everything he has publicly asked for without demanding anything in return. They may assume that if they give him everything up front, he will agree to a cease-fire and some kind of deal that will save face for President Donald Trump, allowing him to claim the mantle of peacemaker, just as Chamberlain did, albeit for only a few months.

Will Putin accept? At the moment, thanks to Trump’s anti-Ukraine maneuvers, he has the luxury of watching Washington and Kyiv wrangle over terms while he pummels Ukraine’s population and energy grid and brings the country closer to collapse. But so far, Putin has been clear about the terms he is willing to accept to achieve peace. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, his offer is this: nothing.

No security guarantee; no independent, sovereign Ukraine; perhaps not even a cease-fire. Putin’s goal, as it has been from the beginning, is the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, language, and culture. He will gladly accept Ukraine’s surrender whenever Kyiv is ready to concede, but short of that he is going to keep the war going until he takes everything.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Let’s start with security guarantees. Putin has never agreed to them for Ukraine—in any form. Putin and his spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Moscow will never accept European troops on Ukrainian soil as part of a peace deal. To accept European troops in Ukraine is no different in Putin’s mind than to accept NATO—as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as recently as last week.  

Nor is Putin’s refusal hard to understand. Any deal that put Western troops on Ukrainian soil would leave Russia in an objectively worse strategic situation than before the invasion. After three years of conflict, as many as 1 million casualties, and widespread economic suffering, Putin would have succeeded only in tightening the circle of containment around Russia, including the admission to NATO of Sweden and Finland; bringing hostile forces closer to Russia’s border; and substantially increasing even peacetime defense requirements. His broader ambitions in Europe would be blocked, perhaps forever. If Trump could see past the aura of his own dealmaking genius, he would see that for Putin to end the war with European troops on Ukrainian soil for any purpose would be a colossal strategic failure.

Putin has also rejected the idea of an international guarantee of Ukraine’s security even without troops on the ground. Early negotiations in 2022 broke down precisely over that point. Ukraine wanted an international commitment to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event that Russia launched another attack—something equivalent to the Article 5 guarantee in the NATO treaty. This would not have meant foreign troops on Ukrainian soil—or even any official relationship between Ukraine and NATO—but rather a commitment by signatory states to come to a “neutral” Ukraine’s aid if it was invaded. Putin rejected this, insisting on a Russian veto over any such action.

Putin has even insisted that Ukraine should not be permitted to maintain a military capable of resisting another Russian invasion. He has demanded strict limits on the number of Ukrainian forces and rejected any notion of allowing the U.S. or Europe to continue providing weapons to help Ukraine defend itself against future attack. In short, Putin’s unwavering demand in any peace settlement has been to leave Ukraine essentially defenseless.

Further, Putin has from the beginning demanded an end to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a prior condition before any agreement. That he ever expected this demand to be met is doubtful: What nation agrees to the toppling of its government as the price for peace, except as terms of surrender? Yet he’s sticking to this demand. According to reports, Trump officials are right now working to force Zelensky from power and replace him with someone presumably friendlier to Moscow. Judging by the reaction of most Ukrainians to the ambush of their president in the Oval Office, this effort will not succeed. But the fact that Trump officials are trying shows that Putin has not budged an inch in response to Trump’s many concessions.

He has also not budged from his broader demand for “de-Nazification,” by which he means the suppression of Ukrainian as the official language of Ukraine, to be replaced by Russian, and of Ukrainian culture and nationalism, which Putin sees as tantamount to resistance to Moscow’s domination. If anyone wants to know what Putin hopes to do with Ukraine once he has control, they have only to look at what he is already doing in the territories Russia occupies, where Ukrainians are being forced to become Russian citizens, and any resistance leads to imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Everyone in the West seems to agree that there will be a cease-fire in Ukraine at some point. But one person who never talks about a cease-fire is Vladimir Putin. He does not talk about a cease-fire with his own people. He has at no time offered a cease-fire to the Ukrainians or the Americans. People assume he wants a cease-fire because his losses are staggering and his economy is suffering. But, as I and others have argued, Putin has to believe only that Ukraine is closer to collapse than he is, and that though he is suffering, the Ukrainians are suffering more. Trump’s latest moves to paralyze Ukraine’s defenses against missile and drone attacks by denying vital U.S. intelligence sharing can only bolster that assessment.

Putin might be tempted to strike a Munich-like deal with Trump just to strengthen an American president who seems determined to give Putin what he may never have imagined possible—a complete American capitulation in the global struggle, the destruction of the NATO alliance, the isolation of a weak Europe, and an open field for further actions to fulfill Putin’s overarching goal, which is the reconstitution of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern and Central Europe. This is where the Munich analogy breaks down, because whatever else Chamberlain’s appeasement was, it did not include changing sides in the ongoing European crisis and joining Hitler to carve up the continent.  

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Yet Putin may calculate that he is getting that for free already. The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable. The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least. But Trump is mercurial and could reverse course, at least partially, at any time. That’s a reason for Putin to seek victory as quickly as possible. He may never have a chance as good as this one to complete the task he set out to achieve when he launched his invasion three years ago.  

One thing is certain: Trump is no poker player. Thanks to his actions so far, Putin hasn’t had to reveal any of his cards. Trump claims to know what Putin wants, but his own actions show that he actually has no clue. One day Trump says Russia wants peace for reasons “only I know.” The next, he warns Putin that he’ll impose more sanctions. Putin must be laughing up his sleeve. He’s weathered American sanctions for the better part of three years now; more of the same is not much of a threat. If that’s the only card Trump intends to play, Putin will soon be cashing in, and Ukraine will soon be doomed. Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler wouldn’t violate the Munich deal because Hitler respected him. Trump shares that delusion about Putin. We may all pay the price.

Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.  

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

Updated: 2025-03-08 07:00:00
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days]

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

[Read: Russia is not winning]

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

[Read: What Europe fears]

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.

Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The telepathy trap

America’s cultural revolution

Trump is breaking the fourth wall.

The Culture Survey: Shane Harris

The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]

If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.

Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.

Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.

The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.

That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.

The Week Ahead

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)

Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

By Shayla Love

What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Read the full article.

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Cling to your disgust.

When a celebrity offers a “harsh reality check”

The nicest swamp on the internet

“Dear James”: My husband is a mess.

Coaching is the new “asking your friends for help.”

A thriller that’s most fun when it’s boring

Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Mitch McConnell and the president he calls “despicable”

Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet

Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post

Photo Album

Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.

Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.

But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.

Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.

That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.

Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government job and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”

Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.

The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.

[Read: Fear of flying is different now]

When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.

At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.

“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”

The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement.  The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.

“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”

The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”

The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.

In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.

So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.

Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys have signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.

Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”

SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”

In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”

When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.

“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.

Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.

“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”

Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”

For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin’s global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States.

In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia’s 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite’s choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin’s pick, not the other way around.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the ’90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable.

But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia’s 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: “Why not?” Putin answered when asked this in 2000. “I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush’s idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan.

Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia’s economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky’s oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia’s independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels.

Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, “One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin’s favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia’s election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for “Russia without Putin.”

[Read: The Putinization of America]

Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using “fifth column” agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin’s regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals.

After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia’s economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, “Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states.

After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West.

He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia’s ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country’s supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election.

Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, “I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.” In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.”

At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American “imperialism” on Russia. Putin’s closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants.    

In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini’s Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin’s government supported Farage’s Brexit campaign.

Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin’s relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country’s accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin’s man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014.

For the past decade, however, Putin’s most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia’s foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the “globalists,” the “neocons,” the “gays,” and the “woke.”

Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and help the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear.

During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump’s team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,“This is between me and my friend.”

Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin’s full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump’s senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American “deep state” for Trump’s failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed.

After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other’s “strong” leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return?

After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump’s concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was “strongly considering” new sanctions and tariffs.

To use Trump’s favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever “cards” played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time.

Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin’s dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad.

Many Americans likewise reject Trump’s ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country’s foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump’s historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear.

The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin’s illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace.

In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary.  

Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO’s embrace of Poland’s Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now.  

This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon.

The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

The pair have been accused by Russian security services of "intelligence and subversive activity".