The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post-World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent to what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.”  

[David Frum: A cautionary tale for Trump appointees]

In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes.

This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.

Vance, a leading member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.

A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment, nothing. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.

The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence mixed with malignity]

Trump made this new policy even clearer during a press conference on Tuesday, when he made a series of false statements about Ukraine that he later repeated in social-media posts. No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s. No, Zelensky is not a “dictator”; Ukrainians, unlike Russians, freely debate and argue about politics. But because they are under daily threat of attack, the Ukrainian government has declared martial law and postponed elections until a ceasefire. With so many people displaced and so many soldiers at the front line, Ukrainians fear an election would be dangerous, unfair, and an obvious target for Russian manipulation, as even Zelensky’s harshest critics agree.

I can’t tell you exactly why Trump chose to repeat these falsehoods, or why his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once made a TikTok video of herself repeating them, or why they directly echo the Russian propaganda that has long sought to portray Zelensky, along with the nation of Ukraine itself, as illegitimate. Plenty of Republicans, including some I met in Munich, know that these claims aren’t true. American allies must draw a lesson: Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whoever he wants—Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.

In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. Zelensky knows this already: It was he who originally proposed giving Americans access to rare-earth metals, in order to appeal to a transactional U.S. president, although without imagining that the concession would be in exchange for nothing. Zelensky is trying to acquire other kinds of leverage too. This week he flew to Istanbul, where the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reaffirmed his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, in defiance of the U.S.

Europeans need to act in the same spirit and acquire some leverage too. At the start of this war, international financial institutions froze $300 billion of Russian assets, mostly in Europe. There are sound legal and moral arguments for seizing these assets and giving them to Ukraine, both to reconstruct the country and to allow Ukrainians to continue to defend themselves. Now there are urgent political reasons too. This is enough money to impress Trump; to buy weapons, including American weapons; and to spook the Russians into fearing the war will not end as quickly as they now hope.

Europeans also need to create, immediately, a coalition of the willing that is prepared to militarily defend Ukraine, as well as other allies who might be attacked in future. Deterrence has a psychological component. If Russia refrains from attacking Lithuania, or indeed Germany, that is in part because Putin fears a U.S. response. Now that the U.S. has become unpredictable, Europeans have to provide the deterrence themselves. There is talk of a defense bank to finance new military investment, but that’s just the beginning. They need to radically increase military spending, planning and coordination. If they speak and act as a group, Europeans will have more power and more credibility than if they speak separately.

Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, or Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change now underway, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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