In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.

Given American conservatives’ recent rhetoric, their surrender to Musk’s vision of utopia is discordant, to say the least. Ever since the pandemic, the MAGA movement has decried the tyranny of a cabal of self-certain experts, who wield their technical knowledge unaccountably. But even as the right purports to loathe technocracy, it has empowered an engineer to radically remake the American state in the name of efficiency.

Trumpists might be surprised to know that they are fulfilling a dream first conceived by a 19th-century French crank, Henri de Saint-Simon. A utopian polymath who fought in the American Revolution and claimed to be a descendant of Charlemagne, he imagined a society in which engineers and industrial managers usurped the aristocracy at the top of the pecking order. The ruling cadre of engineers, he theorized, wouldn’t just solve social and economic problems, but serve as high priests, guiding society to efficiency, progress, and harmony. Technocracy and spirituality were intertwined in his doctrine, which he called the “New Christianity.”

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

In the last years of his life, Saint-Simon struggled to find a publisher for his books. His despair led him to shoot himself seven times in the head, a failed suicide attempt. Only after his death, in 1825, did he win cultlike devotion; his wider influence became unmistakable. Scholars dubbed him the “father of socialism,” and his veneration of the engineer ricocheted through the history of the left, especially in its faith in centralized planning. “Master technology,” Stalin famously implored his followers. “It is time that the Bolsheviks become experts.” (Eventually, Stalin murdered and imprisoned those who followed this command.)

The worship of the engineer is not confined to any single strain of ideology. It’s a modern impulse, and even ardent critics of the state have fallen victim to it. In Atlas Shrugged, every high-school libertarian’s favorite novel, Ayn Rand’s heroic protagonist, John Galt, is an engineer whose solitary capacity for invention and heterodox thinking make him a sort of über-mensch. And there are hints of this same heroic self-conception in the right-wing swatches of present-day Silicon Valley. Engineers are prophets of a new order because they promise inventions that will usher in the purest expressions of freedom: realms (cryptocurrency, space colonies) that are beyond the reach of the state.

One pivotal figure in American political history briefly embodied the noblest aspirations for technocracy—President Herbert Hoover, nicknamed the Great Engineer. After training at Stanford, he made a fortune in the mining business. Hoover believed ardently in scientific management: Any procedure could be simplified through studying the data. By monitoring workers, the engineer could cull waste from the productive process. Born a Quaker, Hoover delivered lyrical descriptions of his life’s work, which aren’t so far from Saint-Simon’s faith. Where other occupations were “parasitic,” in Hoover’s view, the engineer was the handmaiden of a humane social order because he “elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy] democracy

At his best, Hoover’s technocratic skills were something to behold. He was a genius at orchestrating responses to catastrophes; his coordination of food and supply shipments in Europe during World War I became the basis for his political mystique. Progressives were so enamored of his work that they desperately hoped he would run for president as a Democrat, so that they could preside over a new era of rational, well-organized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fan before he became a foe, tried and failed to draft Hoover to run as his party’s standard-bearer in 1920.

Elected as a Republican in 1928, Hoover was in the White House when the nation’s economy collapsed. History regards him with disdain, less for his policies than for his distinct lack of warmth and his disregard for human suffering. He treated food distribution as an engineering problem, yet he never managed to describe victims with compassion. According to his biographer Joan Hoff Wilson, “They all became statistics—by the same impersonal scientific engineering approach and temperament that was to shock and dismay his fellow Americans during the Great Depression and erode his political credibility with them.”

The problem with applying scientific management to the government is its hollow heart, as the former auto executive Robert McNamara later showed to horrifying effect. As the secretary of defense, he presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, deploying a data-driven approach that rendered casualties in the vernacular of statistics. (McNamara didn’t train as an engineer, but he self-consciously employed the mindset.) In his enthusiasm for optimization and efficiency, he paid no heed to the terrible human toll of his immaculate systems.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

In a far more benign way, Jimmy Carter, the only other engineer to become president, struggled to form human connections with the public. As the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker put it, he used an “engineer’s approach of devising ‘comprehensive’ programs on this subject or that, but repeatedly failed to mobilize public opinion in their support.” Carter’s brain was ill-equipped to process the irrationality of politics.

Despite this history of failure, Americans haven’t shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can’t. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too.

But in his short stay in Washington, Musk has already evinced the same moral shortcoming that afflicted Hoover and McNamara, the same inability to calculate the costs of cruelty. He has casually paused global aid programs that alleviate suffering; he has moved to destroy bureaucrats’ careers without concern for the rippling personal consequences. He has done this with an arrogance suffused with the spiritual self-certainity of Saint-Simon’s priestly caste of engineers. To a brain as rational as Musk’s, democracy is waste and inefficiency. The best system is the one bursting forth from his mind.

The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies.

Birthright citizenship is a shield of protection to anyone born in this country, as close to a national self-definition as we have; it is our legal DNA. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should be emblazoned on small laminated cards and carried in every American’s pocket. The language is amply clear:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

That language is as fundamental to the Constitution as any other provision, perhaps even more important to the survival and growth of our pluralistic republic than the First Amendment, which protects free speech, free press, the right of assembly, and the right to petition the government. It is as inherent to constitutional function as federalism itself.

[Read: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is a Big Test for the Constitution]

The Trump administration now scoffs at this history, purporting to end this guarantee with an executive order signed on Donald Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office and tragically titled, in a fantastic act of Orwellian doublespeak, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The administration makes a phony originalist argument based on the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee extended only to the freedmen and their descendants. Quite the contrary, the amendment’s authors explicitly envisioned the immigrant population and its descendants as part of their plan. Congressman John Bingham, Section 1’s author, defended the amendment by drawing on the authority of the Constitution’s Framers, who had “invited the workers and builders whose honest toil clothes and shelters nations,” and who hailed from “every civilized nationality” to become “citizens of the Republic.” This is why, in blocking Trump’s order last week, the Federal District Court Judge John C. Coughenour said without caveat: “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Section 1’s origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of equality among “these truths” in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred.  

Most profound, birthright citizenship is rooted in the blood of more than 700,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, a catastrophe that made possible what most historians now call the “second founding” of America. The rebirth harkened in the Fourteenth Amendment is the core of this phrase’s meaning. The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate birthright citizenship is part of a larger quest to undo most of this egalitarian tradition, to shift American history into a kind of permanent reverse gear back to an age of secure constitutional white supremacy.

[Read: The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship]

One cannot overstate the gravity of Trump’s proposed action, nor the historical ignorance on which it stands. The original Republicans who crafted birthright citizenship into the amendment were doing nothing less than harvesting the greatest results of the Civil War, making good on the promise of freedom for millions of any creed, color, or national origin at the time and for all time to come. Section 1 explained to the world what that war had meant. To erase any part of it now is to tarnish the legacy of William McKinley, Trump’s new favorite president, who fought in the Battle of Antietam. The Union victory there is what prompted the Emancipation Proclamation.

For Bingham, a deeply Christian abolitionist Republican from Ohio, this debate went back at least to the 1850s crises over the expansion of slavery. In 1858 he said, “Every man knows that under our free institutions, every person born of free parents within the jurisdiction of the United States … is a citizen of the United States.” Bingham, of course, overestimated such consensus, because Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford had ruled for a 7–2 majority of the Supreme Court the previous year that Black people possessed “no rights” whatsoever under American law. One of the grand purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to relegate the Dred Scott decision to history.

By the winter of 1866, as Congress debated the content of an amendment, it faced many overwhelming obstacles, especially bone-level, historical racism and the doctrine of federalism that fundamentally protected states’ rights. Congress had just fought an all-out war to restore the Confederate states to the Union and to end slavery with an overwhelming use of federal power.

But the Republicans, despite fierce debates, were confident. “I can hardly believe,” wrote Thaddeus Stevens, the radical floor manager for his party, “that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these proposals is just.” They knew exactly what they intended to achieve. Bingham defended the amendment as protection of the “in-born rights of every person.” Stevens thought they had to “fix the foundations of the government on principles of eternal justice.” Senator Lyman Trumbull saw them advancing principles “which the great Author of all has implanted in every human breast.” They believed that they were enacting justice and morality, not only for freed slaves but for the country’s immigrant future, a fact they deeply understood because they had lived through the recent waves of Irish and German immigration.

[Read: The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship]

As for states’ rights, Bingham had a constant answer. For “generations to come,” he announced, he sought to “arm Congress … with the power to enforce the Bill of Rights as it stands in the Constitution … in the states.” In the states, by federal power.

In floor debates, Bingham spoke with great eloquence about the purposes of the amendment. “The day of the freedman’s deliverance has come,” he declared, “not without suffering, not without sorrow, not without martyrdom, not without broken altars and broken hearts.” But now he saw potential days of glory, not only for ex-slaves but for the immigrant. The Constitution could now “provide that no man, no matter what his color, no matter beneath what sky he may have been born, no matter in what disastrous conflict or by what tyrannical hand his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter how poor, no matter how friendless … shall be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law.” Above everything, “all persons born” here were forever citizens.  

Trump and his allies have picked a fight over this crucial provision in the Constitution. Americans have to engage the fight, in the courts and with every mode of persuasion. Trump and his allies’ vision is an egregious abuse of real history and the new Constitution it forged in the 1860s. If they succeed, then Grant has surrendered to Lee at Appomattox.

Donald Trump, for reasons no one fully apprehends, is preparing for his looming second term by talking like a 19th-century imperialist. At a press conference this week, he pointedly declined to rule out the use of military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, while insisting on renaming the Gulf of Mexico. He also has repeatedly alluded to a takeover of Canada, including using his social-media platform to share an imagined map of the United States consuming its neighbor to the north.

Rationalizing these statements in either moral or strategic terms is challenging. But the conservative columnist Dan McLaughlin is up to the task. “In fact, Trump is sending a message to the world and America’s enemies: We’re serious about protecting the Western Hemisphere—again,” he writes. Trump, he explains, is shrewdly analyzing the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and Greenland and seeking to ward off Chinese influence, and is belittling the sovereign rights of American neighbors in order to scare them into cooperation. It’s all quite strategic. If Metternich had had a social-media account, he probably would have been binge-posting fake images of a European map with a gigantic Austrian empire.

This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.

Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.

Trump “starts a negotiation on his terms, starting with the most outlandish demands but with designs on a deal,” McLaughlin writes admiringly. During the first Trump term, some conservatives likewise insisted that his threats to obliterate North Korea were the prelude to some tough dealmaking. The deal turned out to be that North Korea was permitted to continue developing its missile program, but Trump got a prized collection of flattering personalized letters from Kim Jong Un.

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

McLaughlin is a longtime hawk, so his current stance is unsurprising. More remarkable is the support that Trump’s bout of unprovoked threats has gained from conservative thinkers who otherwise cast themselves as anti-interventionist. Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has written extensively about the failures of the Republican Party’s hawkish faction, notes that the case for invading Greenland is not “sufficient” to outweigh its moral and diplomatic costs. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to reject the notion. “I’m not a war-hawk expansionist,” he said recently on a National Review podcast. “But I don’t think it’s a totally insane idea.” Yes, he granted, “it would be an unjust, aggressive war.” However, “it would be far less costly or dangerous than regime-changing Iran.”

This is an interesting method for evaluating policy ideas: think of a much worse policy idea that is not an alternative, and ask whether it would be worse than that. Repealing the First Amendment might sound risky, but in comparison with, say, blowing up the moon, it seems downright prudent. (You may also recognize this form of reasoning from the periodic conservative argument that “Trump is less dangerous than Hitler.”)

The journal Compact is one of those magazines that have popped up during the Trump era with an apparent, if unstated, mission of reverse-engineering an intellectual superstructure for his populist impulses. Compact’s proprietary formula combines statist left-wing economic policy with social conservatism. And, although its authors don’t agree on everything, it has been fairly insistent about noninterventionism as a foundational principle. The bread and butter of Compact’s foreign-policy line is articles with headlines such as “No to Neoconservatism” and lamenting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave new life to American foreign-policy hawks. (You knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, has called for social conservatives to “cast off the ideology” of interventionism.

And yet, yesterday Compact published an essay celebrating Trump’s imperialist ideology. (Headline: “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.”) “Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Chris Cutrone writes. “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative.” Greenland, he explains, is strategically valuable, so we should take it. Canada is “the most European part of the Western Hemisphere,” and therefore deserving of geopolitical annihilation. The essay ends on this rousing note: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

It seems paradoxical that anti-interventionist conservatives (and horseshoe-theory Marxists, in Cutrone’s case) would be enthusiastic about naked imperialism, while even ultra-hawks such as John Bolton consider it bellicose and irresponsible. (“It shows Trump, again, not understanding the broader context that his remarks are made in, and the harmful consequences that this is having all across NATO right now,” he told CNN.) The ideological through line appears to be that intervention is wrong when it’s done to spread democracy (Iraq) or protect a democracy (Ukraine), but launching a war against a peaceful democratic ally is somehow reasonable.

The more likely explanation for this paradox is simply that the neoconservatives are the least loyal to Trump of all the conservative factions, and the anti-interventionists the most. And so if loyalty to Trump means developing reasons to favor threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland—none of which poses the slightest danger or was considered even vaguely hostile by Trump’s allies until Trump thought to target them—then, by jingo, reasons will be found.

Vice-president Elect J. D. Vance once said that he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. We will soon find out whether the American people share his indifference, because if there is not soon a large new infusion of aid from the United States, Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.  

This poses an immediate problem for Donald Trump. He promised to settle the war quickly upon taking office, but now faces the hard reality that Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukraine intact as a sovereign nation. Putin also sees an opportunity to strike a damaging blow at American global power. Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time. The choice he makes in the next few weeks will determine not only the fate of Ukraine but also the success of his presidency.

The end of an independent Ukraine is and always has been Putin’s goal. While foreign-policy commentators spin theories about what kind of deal Putin might accept, how much territory he might demand, and what kind of security guarantees, demilitarized zones, and foreign assistance he might permit, Putin himself has never shown interest in anything short of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Before Russia’s invasion, many people couldn’t believe that Putin really wanted all of Ukraine. His original aim was to decapitate the government in Kyiv, replace it with a government subservient to Moscow, and through that government control the entire country. Shortly after the invasion was launched, as Russian forces were still driving on Ukraine, Putin could have agreed to a Ukrainian offer to cede territory to Russia, but even then he rejected any guarantees for Ukrainian security. Today, after almost three years of fighting, Putin’s goals have not changed: He wants it all.

[Read: The abandonment of Ukraine]

Putin’s stated terms for a settlement have been consistent throughout the war: a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime; “de-Nazification,” his favored euphemism for extinguishing Ukrainian nationalism; demilitarization, or leaving Ukraine without combat power sufficient to defend against another Russian attack; and “neutrality,” meaning no ties with Western organizations such as NATO or the EU, and no Western aid programs aimed at shoring up Ukrainian independence. Western experts filling the op-ed pages and journals with ideas for securing a post-settlement Ukraine have been negotiating with themselves. Putin has never agreed to the establishment of a demilitarized zone, foreign troops on Ukrainian soil, a continuing Ukrainian military relationship with the West of any kind, or the survival of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government or any pro-Western government in Kyiv.

Some hopeful souls argue that Putin will be more flexible once talks begin. But this is based on the mistaken assumption that Putin believes he needs a respite from the fighting. He doesn’t. Yes, the Russian economy is suffering. Yes, Russian losses at the front remain staggeringly high. Yes, Putin lacks the manpower both to fight and to produce vital weaponry and is reluctant to risk political upheaval by instituting a full-scale draft. If the war were going to drag on for another two years or more, these problems might eventually force Putin to seek some kind of truce, perhaps even the kind of agreement Americans muse about. But Putin thinks he’s going to win sooner than that, and he believes that Russians can sustain their present hardships long enough to achieve victory.

The frontline city Bakhmut faces shelling day and night.(Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Are we so sure he’s wrong? Have American predictions about Russia’s inability to withstand “crippling” sanctions proved correct so far? Western sanctions have forced Russians to adapt and adjust, to find work-arounds on trade, oil, and financing, but although those adjustments have been painful, they have been largely successful. Russia’s GDP grew by more than 3 percent in 2023 and is expected to have grown by more than 3 percent again in 2024, driven by heavy military spending. The IMF’s projections for 2025 are lower, but still anticipate positive growth. Putin has been re-Sovietizing the economy: imposing market and price controls, expropriating private assets, and turning the focus toward military production and away from consumers’ needs. This may not be a successful long-term economic strategy, but in the long term, we are all dead. Putin believes Russia can hold on long enough to win this war.

It is not at all clear that Putin even seeks the return to normalcy that peace in Ukraine would bring. In December, he increased defense spending to a record $126 billion, 32.5 percent of all government spending, to meet the needs of the Ukraine war. Next year, defense spending is projected to reach 40 percent of the Russian budget. (By comparison, the world’s strongest military power, the U.S., spends 16 percent of its total budget on defense.) Putin has revamped the Russian education system to instill military values from grade school to university. He has appointed military veterans to high-profile positions in government as part of an effort to forge a new Russian elite, made up, as Putin says, exclusively of “those who serve Russia, hard workers and [the] military.” He has resurrected Stalin as a hero. Today, Russia looks outwardly like the Russia of the Great Patriotic War, with exuberant nationalism stimulated and the smallest dissent brutally repressed.

[Read: What makes Russia’s economy so sanctions-resistant?]

Is all of this just a temporary response to the war, or is it also the direction Putin wants to steer Russian society? He talks about preparing Russia for the global struggles ahead. Continuing conflict justifies continuing sacrifice and continuing repression. Turning such transformations of society on and off and on again like a light switch—as would be necessary if Putin agreed to a truce and then, a couple of years later, resumed his attack—is not so easy. Could he demand the same level of sacrifice during the long, peaceful interlude? For Putin, making Russians press ahead through the pain to seek victory on the battlefield may be the easier path. The Russian people have historically shown remarkable capacity for sacrifice under the twin stimuli of patriotism and terror. To assume that Russia can’t sustain this war economy long enough to outlast the Ukrainians would be foolish. One more year may be all it takes. Russia faces problems, even serious problems, but Putin believes that without substantial new aid Ukraine’s problems are going to bring it down sooner than Russia.

That is the key point: Putin sees the timelines working in his favor. Russian forces may begin to run low on military equipment in the fall of 2025, but by that time Ukraine may already be close to collapse. Ukraine can’t sustain the war another year without a new aid package from the United States. Ukrainian forces are already suffering from shortages of soldiers, national exhaustion, and collapsing morale. Russia’s casualty rate is higher than Ukraine’s, but there are more Russians than Ukrainians, and Putin has found a way to keep filling the ranks, including with foreign fighters. As one of Ukraine’s top generals recently observed, “the number of Russian troops is constantly increasing.” This year, he estimates, has brought 100,000 additional Russian troops to Ukrainian soil. Meanwhile, lack of equipment prevents Ukraine from outfitting reserve units.

Ukrainian morale is already sagging under Russian missile and drone attacks and the prolonged uncertainty about whether the United States’ vital and irreplaceable support will continue. What happens if that uncertainty becomes certainty, if the next couple of months make clear that the United States is not going to provide a new aid package? That alone could be enough to cause a complete collapse of Ukrainian morale on the military and the home front. But Ukraine has another problem, too. Its defensive lines are now so shallow that if Russian troops break through, they may be able to race west toward Kyiv.

Putin believes he is winning. “The situation is changing dramatically,” he observed in a recent press conference. “We’re moving along the entire front line every day.” His foreign-intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, recently declared, “We are close to achieving our goals, while the armed forces of Ukraine are on the verge of collapse.” That may be an exaggeration for now, but what matters is that Putin believes it. As Naryshkin’s comments affirm, Putin today sees victory within his grasp, more than at any other time since the invasion began.

[Read: The only way the Ukraine war can end]

Things may be tough for Putin now, but Russia has come a long way since the war’s first year. The disastrous failure of his initial invasion left his troops trapped and immobilized, their supply lines exposed and vulnerable, as the West acted in unison to oppose him and provide aid to a stunningly effective Ukrainian counterattack. That first year of the war marked a peak moment of American leadership and alliance solidarity and a low point for Putin. For many months, he effectively fought the entire world with little help from anyone else. There must have been moments when he thought he was going to lose, although even then he would not give up on his maximalist goals.

But he clawed his way back, and circumstances today are far more favorable for Russia, both in Ukraine and internationally. His forces on the ground are making steady progress—at horrific cost, but Putin is willing to pay it so long as Russians tolerate it and he believes that victory is in sight.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s lifeline to the U.S. and the West has never been more imperiled. After three years of dealing with an American administration trying to help Ukraine defend itself, Putin will soon have an American president and a foreign-policy team who have consistently opposed further aid to Ukraine. The transatlantic alliance, once so unified, is in disarray, with America’s European allies in a panic that Trump will pull out of NATO or weaken their economies with tariffs, or both. Europe itself is at a low point; political turmoil in Germany and France has left a leadership vacuum that will not be filled for months, at best. If Trump cuts off or reduces aid to Ukraine, as he has recently suggested he would, then not only will Ukraine collapse but the divisions between the U.S. and its allies, and among the Europeans themselves, will deepen and multiply. Putin is closer to his aim of splintering the West than at any other time in the quarter century since he took power.

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

Is this a moment at which to expect Putin to negotiate a peace deal? A truce would give Ukrainians time to breathe and restore their damaged infrastructure as well as their damaged psyches. It would allow them to re-arm without expending the weapons they already have. It would reduce the divisions between the Trump administration and its European allies. It would spare Trump the need to decide whether to seek an aid package for Ukraine and allow him to focus on parts of the world where Russia is more vulnerable, such as the post-Assad Middle East. Today Putin has momentum on his side in what he regards, correctly, as the decisive main theater. If he wins in Ukraine, his loss in Syria will look trivial by comparison. If he hasn’t blinked after almost three years of misery, hardship, and near defeat, why would he blink now when he believes, with reason, that he is on the precipice of such a massive victory?

Avdiivka, Donetsk. 2023. Avdiivka was the site of an extended battle, falling to Russian forces in February, 2024. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

A Russian victory means the end of Ukraine. Putin’s aim is not an independent albeit smaller Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine, or even an autonomous Ukraine within a Russian sphere of influence. His goal is no Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine,” he has said, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin does not just want to sever Ukraine’s relationships with the West. He aims to stamp out the very idea of Ukraine, to erase it as a political and cultural entity.

This is not a new Russian goal. Like his pre-Soviet predecessors, Putin regards Ukrainian nationalism itself as a historic threat that predates the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s and NATO enlargement in the 1990s—that even predates the American Revolution. In Putin’s mind, the threat posed by Ukrainian nationalism goes back to the exploitation of Ukrainians by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the machinations of the Austrian empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to the leveraging of Ukrainian nationalist hatred of Russia during World War II by the Germans. So Putin’s call for “de-Nazification” is not just about removing the Zelensky government, but an effort to stamp out all traces of an independent Ukrainian political and cultural identity.

[Read: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine]

The vigorous Russification that Putin’s forces have been imposing in Crimea and the Donbas and other conquered Ukrainian territories is evidence of the deadly seriousness of his intent. International human-rights organizations and journalists, writing in The New York Times, have documented the creation in occupied Ukraine of “a highly institutionalized, bureaucratic and frequently brutal system of repression run by Moscow” comprising “a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements” across an area roughly the size of Ohio. According to a June 2023 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly all Ukrainians released from this gulag reported being subjected to systematic torture and abuse by Russian authorities. Tortures ranged from “punching and cutting detainees, putting sharp objects under fingernails, hitting with batons and rifle butts, strangling, waterboarding, electrocution, stress positions for long periods, exposure to cold temperatures or to a hot box, deprivation of water and food, and mock executions or threats.” Much of the abuse has been sexual, with women and men raped or threatened with rape. Hundreds of summary executions have been documented, and more are likely—many of the civilians detained by Russia have yet to be seen again. Escapees from Russian-occupied Ukraine speak of a “prison society” in which anyone with pro-Ukrainian views risks being sent “to the basement,” where torture and possible death await.

This oppression has gone well beyond the military rationale of identifying potential threats to Russian occupying forces. “The majority of victims,” according to the State Department, have been “active or former local public officials, human rights defenders, civil society activists, journalists, and media workers.” According to the OHCHR, “Russia’s military and their proxies often detained civilians over suspicions regarding their political views, particularly related to pro-Ukrainian sentiments.”

Putin has decreed that all people in the occupied territories must renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and become Russian citizens or face deportation. Russian citizenship is required to send children to school, to register a vehicle, to get medical treatment, and to receive pensions. People without Russian passports cannot own farmland, vote, run for office, or register a religious congregation. In schools throughout the Russian-occupied territories, students learn a Russian curriculum and complete a Russian “patriotic education program” and early military training, all taught by teachers sent from the Russian Federation. Parents who object to this Russification risk having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools in Russia or occupied Crimea, where, Putin has decreed, they can be adopted by Russian citizens. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian officials had verified the names of 19,000 children relocated to schools and camps in Russia or to Russian-occupied territory. As former British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly put it in 2023, “Russia’s forcible deportation of innocent Ukrainian children is a systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.”

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

So is the Russian effort to do away with any distinctively Ukrainian religion. In Crimea, Russian authorities have systematically attacked the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, harassed its members, and forced the Church to give up its lands. The largest Ukrainian Orthodox congregation in Crimea closed in 2019, following a decree by occupation authorities that its cathedral in Simferopol be “returned to the state.”

These horrors await the rest of Ukraine if Putin wins. Imagine what that will look like. More than 1 million Ukrainians have taken up arms against Russia since February 2022. What happens to them if, when the fighting stops, Russia has gained control of the entire country? What happens to the politicians, journalists, NGO workers, and human-rights activists who helped in innumerable ways to fight the Russian invaders? What happens to the millions of Ukrainians who, in response to Russia’s attack, have embraced their Ukrainian identity, adopted the Ukrainian language, revived Ukrainian (and invariably anti-Russian) historical narratives, and produced a nascent revival of Ukrainian culture? Russian-occupation authorities will seek to stamp out this resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism across the whole country. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will flee, putting enormous strain on Ukraine’s neighbors to the west. But thousands more will wind up in prison, facing torture or murder. Some commentators argue that it would be better to let Ukraine lose quickly because that, at least, would end the suffering. Yet for many millions of Ukrainians, defeat would be just the beginning of their suffering.

This is where Ukraine is headed unless something changes, and soon. Putin at this moment has no incentive to make any deal that leaves even part of Ukraine intact and independent. Only the prospect of a dramatic, near-term change in his military fortunes could force Putin to take a more accommodating course. He would have to believe that time is not on his side, that Ukraine will not fall within 12 months: that it will instead be supplied and equipped to fight as long as necessary, and that it can count on steady support from the United States and its allies. It’s hard to see why anything short of that would force Putin to veer from his determined drive toward victory.

April 2022. An Orthodox priest presides over a burial for a woman whose husband disappeared in early March in Bucha, which was occupied by Russian troops. His body was not discovered until a month later. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Which brings us to President-Elect Donald Trump, who now finds himself in a trap only partly of his own devising. When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.

Compounding Trump’s basic miscalculation is the mythology of Trump as strongman. It has been no small part of Trump’s aura and political success that many expect other world leaders to do his bidding. When he recently summoned the beleaguered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Mar-a-Lago and proceeded to humiliate him as “governor” of America’s “51st state,” Trump boosters in the media rejoiced at his ability to “project strength as the leader of the U.S. while making Trudeau look weak.” Many people, and not just Trump’s supporters, similarly assumed that the mere election of Trump would be enough to force Putin to agree to a peace deal. Trump’s tough-guy image and dealmaking prowess supposedly gave him, in the view of one former Defense official, “the power and the credibility with Putin to tell him he must make a just, lasting peace.”

[Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin]

It’s dangerous to believe your own shtick. Trump himself seemed to think that his election alone would be enough to convince Putin that it was time to cut a deal. In his debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said he would have the war “settled” before he even became president, that as president-elect he would get Putin and Zelensky together to make an agreement. He could do this because “they respect me; they don’t respect Biden.” Trump’s first moves following November 5 exuded confidence that Putin would accommodate the new sheriff in town. Two days after the election, in a phone call with Putin that Trump’s staff leaked to the press, Trump reportedly “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Beyond these veiled threats, Trump seems to think that something like friendship, high regard, or loyalty will facilitate dealmaking.

That Trump, the most transactional of men, could really believe that Putin would be moved by such sentiments is hard to credit. Days after the phone call in which Trump “advised” him not to escalate, Putin fired a hypersonic, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine, and he’s been escalating ever since. He also had his spokesmen deny that any phone call had taken place. Even today, Putin insists that he and Trump have not spoken since the election.

Putin has also made clear that he is not interested in peace. As he observed in the days before the missile launch, “Throughout centuries of history, humanity has grown accustomed to resolving disputes by force. Yes, that happens too. Might makes right, and this principle also works.” In a message clearly aimed at Trump’s pretensions of power, Putin suggested that the West make a “rational assessment of events and its own capabilities.” His spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Putin has no interest in “freezing the conflict,” and that anyone who believes Moscow is ready to make concessions at all has either “a short memory or not enough knowledge of the subject.” They have also warned that U.S.-Russian relations are “teetering on the verge of rupture,” with the clear implication that it is up to Trump to repair the damage. Putin is particularly furious at President Joe Biden for finally lifting some of the restrictions on the Ukrainian use of the American long-range ATACMS missiles against Russian targets, threatening to fire intermediate-range ballistic missiles at U.S. and allied targets in response.

Trump has since backed off. When asked about the phone call, Trump these days won’t confirm that it ever happened—“I don’t want to say anything about that, because I don’t want to do anything that could impede the negotiation.” More significantly, he has begun making preemptive concessions in the hope of getting Putin to begin talks. He has declared that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. He has suggested that Ukraine will receive less aid than it has been getting from the United States. And he has criticized Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use American-made ATACMS to strike Russian territory. Putin has simply pocketed all these concessions and offered nothing in return except a willingness to talk “without preconditions.” Now begin the negotiations about beginning the negotiations, while the clock ticks on Kyiv’s ability to endure.

[Read: Trump to Russia’s rescue]

So much for the idea that Putin would simply fold and accept a peace deal once he saw Donald Trump in charge. But what can Trump do now?

Quite a bit, actually. Putin can be forced to accept less than his maximal goals, especially by an American president willing to play genuine hardball. Trump’s reference in his phone call to the superiority of American power and its many troops and facilities in Europe was obviously designed to get Putin’s attention, and it might have if Putin thought Trump was actually prepared to bring all that power into the equation. The thing that Putin has most feared, and has bent over backwards to avoid provoking, is the United States and NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict. He must have been in a panic when his troops were bogged down and losing in Ukraine, vulnerable to NATO air and missile strikes. But the Biden administration refused to even threaten direct involvement, both when it knew Putin’s war plans months in advance, and after the initial invasion, when Putin’s troops were vulnerable. Trump’s supporters like to boast that one of his strengths in dealing with adversaries is his dangerous unpredictability. Hinting at U.S. forces becoming directly involved, as Trump reportedly did in his call with Putin, would certainly have confirmed that reputation. But Putin, one suspects, is not inclined to take such threats seriously without seeing real action to back them. After all, he knows all about bluffs—he paralyzed the Biden administration with them for the better part of three years.

Trump has a credibility problem, partly due to the Biden administration’s failures, but partly of his own making. Putin knows what we all know: that Trump wants out of Ukraine. He does not want to own the war, does not want to spend his first months in a confrontation with Russia, does not want the close cooperation with NATO and other allies that continuing support for Ukraine will require, and, above all, does not want to spend the first months of his new term pushing a Ukraine aid package through Congress after running against that aid. Putin also knows that even if Trump eventually changes his mind, perhaps out of frustration with Putin’s stalling, it will be too late. Months would pass before an aid bill made it through both houses and weaponry began arriving on the battlefield. Putin watched that process grind on last year, and he used the time well. He can afford to wait. After all, if eight months from now Putin feels the tide about to turn against him in the war, he can make the same deal then that Trump would like him to make now. In the meantime, he can continue pummeling the demoralized Ukrainians, taking down what remains of their energy grid, and shrinking the territory under Kyiv’s control.

[Read: How Biden made a mess of Ukraine]

No, in order to change Putin’s calculations, Trump would have to do exactly what he has not wanted to do so far: He would have to renew aid to the Ukrainians immediately, and in sufficient quantity and quality to change the trajectory on the battlefield. He would also have to indicate convincingly that he was prepared to continue providing aid until Putin either acquiesced to a reasonable deal or faced the collapse of his army. Such actions by Trump would change the timelines sufficiently to give Putin cause for concern. Short of that, the Russian president has no reason to talk about peace terms. He need only wait for Ukraine’s collapse.

Putin doesn’t care who the president of the United States is. His goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the U.S. and break its global hegemony and its leadership of the “liberal world order” so that Russia may resume what he sees as its rightful place as a European great power and an empire with global influence. Putin has many immediate reasons to want to subjugate Ukraine, but he also believes that victory will begin the unraveling of eight decades of American global primacy and the oppressive, American-led liberal world order. Think of what he can accomplish by proving through the conquest of Ukraine that even America’s No. 1 tough guy, the man who would “make America great again,” who garnered the support of the majority of American male voters, is helpless to stop him and to prevent a significant blow to American power and influence. In other words, think of what it will mean for Donald Trump’s America to lose. Far from wanting to help Trump, Putin benefits by humiliating him. It wouldn’t be personal. It would be strictly business in this “harsh” and “cynical” world.

Kurakhove, Donetsk. 2023. A 59th Brigade artillery unit fires a rocket. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Trump faces a paradox. He and many of his most articulate advisers and supporters share Putin’s hostility to the American order, of which NATO is a central pillar. Some even share his view that the American role in upholding that order is a form of imperialism, as well as a sucker’s bet for the average American. The old America First movement of the early 1940s tried to prevent the United States from becoming a global power with global responsibilities. The thrust of the new America First is to get the United States out of the global-responsibilities business. This is where the Trumpian right and some parts of the American left converge and why some on the left prefer Trump to his “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” opponents. Trump himself is no ideologist, but his sympathies clearly lie with those around the world who share a hatred of what they perceive to be the oppressive and bullying liberal world order, people such as Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s problem, however, is that unlike his fellow travelers in anti-liberalism, he will shortly be the president of the United States. The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?

Unfortunately for Trump, Ukraine is where this titanic struggle is being waged. Today, not only Putin but Xi, Kim, Khamenei, and others whom the American people generally regard as adversaries believe that a Russian victory in Ukraine will do grave damage to American strength everywhere. That is why they are pouring money, weaponry, and, in the case of North Korea, even their own soldiers into the battle. Whatever short-term benefits they may be deriving from assisting Russia, the big payoff they seek is a deadly blow to the American power and influence that has constrained them for decades.

[Read: How Trump can win the peace in Ukraine]

What’s more, America’s allies around the world agree. They, too, believe that a Russian victory in Ukraine, in addition to threatening the immediate security of European states, will undo the American-led security system they depend on. That is why even Asian allies far from the scene of the war have been making their own contributions to the fight.

If Trump fails to support Ukraine, he faces the unpalatable prospect of presiding over a major strategic defeat. Historically, that has never been good for a leader’s political standing. Jimmy Carter looked weak when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which was of far less strategic significance than Ukraine. Henry Kissinger, despite his Nobel Prize, was drummed out of the Republican Party in the mid-1970s in no small part because of America’s failure in Vietnam and the perception that the Soviet Union was on the march during his time in office. Joe Biden ended an unpopular war in Afghanistan, only to pay a political price for doing so. Barack Obama, who moved to increase American forces in Afghanistan, never paid a political price for extending the war. Biden paid that price in part because the exit from Afghanistan was, to say the least, messy. The fall of Ukraine will be far messier—and better televised. Trump has created and cherished an aura of power and toughness, but that can quickly vanish. When the fall of Ukraine comes, it will be hard to spin as anything but a defeat for the United States, and for its president.

This was not what Trump had in mind when he said he could get a peace deal in Ukraine. He no doubt envisioned being lauded as the statesman who persuaded Putin to make a deal, saving the world from the horrors of another endless war. His power and prestige would be enhanced. He would be a winner. His plans do not include being rebuffed, rolled over, and by most of the world’s judgment, defeated.

Whether Trump can figure out where the path he is presently following will lead him is a test of his instincts. He is not on the path to glory. And unless he switches quickly, his choice will determine much more than the future of Ukraine.

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