Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”

The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.

The response from Elon Musk arrived seven hours later on the social-media platform he owns, X. The billionaire Trump confidant leading the effort to slash the federal workforce wrote that afternoon that he was acting on Trump’s “instructions” and ensuring that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.”

The result was a government-wide email directing federal workers to detail their accomplishments over the previous week, in five bullet points. Musk wrote on X: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

The directive sent agencies scrambling to tell their employees what to do. Some instructed them not to respond. Others made clear that a reply was mandatory. And then there was the Department of Health and Human Services—an epicenter of the chaos engulfing Washington.

“This is a legitimate email,” read Sunday morning’s instructions from HHS, which advised employees to respond by the deadline set for 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday.

But later that day, the directions changed. Employees were told to “pause” answering the email, according to new guidance sent Sunday at 5 p.m., which pointed to concerns about the sensitivity of department business. HHS promised that updated guidance would arrive Monday at noon.

By late afternoon on Monday, many federal health workers had left their offices with no new guidance, uncertain about whether to respond to the email and whether ignoring it would jeopardize their jobs.

They didn’t know that the federal government’s main personnel agency, which had sent Saturday’s government-wide email, had quietly instructed agencies midday Monday that a response was voluntary. Those instructions effectively rescinded Musk’s threats.

For Musk, the episode was a setback. For federal workers struggling to get their bearings, they told us it was just one more reason to feel both fury and fear.

“This whole administration is a fucking train wreck,” a federal health official said.

The shifting and contradictory instructions divided Trump’s Cabinet, and for the first time, created daylight between Musk and the White House. Even before the administration formally conceded that responses were voluntary, Trump advisers had privately signaled support for agency heads who told their employees not to reply to the email, owing to the sensitivity of their work.

Most of the pushback to the Musk directive came from the country’s national-security agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. A senior official at NASA, which advised employees not to respond, called the request an “unprecedented ask and unprompted attack on our workforce” in a weekend email to employees that was described to us. A deputy commander at the Navy told people in his chain of command, “Please do NOT respond at this time,” accenting his order using bold red text.

The cascading series of contradictory guidance reflected the unusual balance of power between Trump and Musk, and the unpredictable consequences for millions of federal workers. “It’s a psyop,” said a senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, referring to a psychological operation, in this case intended to intimidate federal workers. “It’s a form of harassment. But there’s no one to complain to because no one knows exactly where it’s coming from or who’s behind it.”  

The president’s Saturday morning post spurred Musk to confer with his deputies at the Department of Government Efficiency and develop the hastily written email, according to a White House official. The email was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, now staffed at senior levels by Musk’s deputies. They told agency employees that they intended to use artificial intelligence to analyze the responses and develop reports about further changes to the federal workforce, according to an OPM official familiar with their comments.

Two senior administration officials said that the haphazard nature of Musk’s directive rankled some in the West Wing, as concerns grow that the billionaire’s authority is encroaching on the power of Cabinet secretaries.

Trump, for his part, publicly backed Musk’s effort. “I thought it was great because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government,” the president told reporters during an appearance Monday with French President Emmanuel Macron. “What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’ And then if you don’t answer, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also defended the actions: “This was the president’s direction to Elon, and it is being carried out as planned,” she said. “Everyone at the White House knew very well that it was coming.”

The same can’t be said for other parts of the federal government, where agency heads were caught off guard and many recipients mistook the email for phishing. Employees on leave or on vacation feared that they would lose their job. At HHS, department leadership was given just a five-minute warning before the email went out, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told his staff on Monday, according to people familiar with his account. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the agencies that advised employees to respond to Musk’s email sought to justify the request in guidance issued on Monday. John W. York, a senior counselor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, told employees, “The OPM message reflects an effort to increase accountability by the federal workforce, just as there is in the private sector. Given the voluminous and extremely important work that Treasury staff perform on a daily basis, we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time-consuming.”

Around 5 p.m. Monday, HHS finally issued new guidance affirming that a reply was not mandatory but warning employees who did detail their professional activities to protect sensitive data. “Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” the guidance stated.

Meanwhile, there were signs that OPM was working to make parts of the Musk directive permanent, at least within the agency. In an email to employees Monday evening, OPM’s acting director wrote that he had asked the chief human capital officer to “operationalize this exercise” so that employees continue to “submit weekly accomplishment bullets.”

In certain corners of the federal government, workers made light of the Musk request. One Pentagon official told a colleague that his reply would include time spent on Fox News, Truth Social, and X—more reliable sources of information about the terms of his employment than his own bosses.

“Who are we taking orders from?” the Pentagon official said. “No one really knows.”

In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.

To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves. The Central Bank of Russia held more than $630 billion in assets, making it the largest sanctions target in modern history. If any entity was too big to sanction, this was it. Maintaining the bank’s teeming coffers was Putin’s attempt to “sanctions-proof” his economy, ensuring that Russia could prop up the ruble and pay for imports even under financial attack. Yet about half of the bank’s reserves were in dollars, euros, and pounds, which in practice left them vulnerable to Western sanctions. At the stroke of a pen, U.S. and European leaders could order their banks to block the accounts of Russia’s central bank, rendering much of Putin’s cash pile inaccessible.

This essay has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

“Big nations don’t bluff”: This mantra, which Biden was fond of reciting, rang in Singh’s ears the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia, Singh believed, would put Biden’s credo into action. The option was so extreme that it had never received thorough vetting on either side of the Atlantic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was concerned that freezing the central-bank reserves would push other countries away from using the dollar as their go-to reserve currency. The dollar’s global dominance allows America to absorb economic shocks, borrow cheaply, and run large deficits. Yellen was uncomfortable risking these privileges for the sake of punishing Putin.

But in Europe, a momentous political shift was under way, with street protests against the Russian invasion drawing out hundreds of thousands of people. Singh’s European counterparts assured him that if the White House was ready to sanction Russia’s central bank, their governments would follow. Yellen was hard to convince until a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, her old colleague from his tenure as head of the European Central Bank, persuaded her to relent. Within hours, the United States was on board.

Just two days after the invasion began, the members of the G7 issued a statement committing to target Russia’s central bank. “You heard about Fortress Russia—the war chest of $630 billion of foreign reserves,” Singh told reporters in a background briefing. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth.”

Three years on, the sanctions against Russia’s central bank stand as both a triumph and a warning. In narrow terms, they worked exactly as Singh hoped: They caught Putin off guard and deprived him of his deepest pool of hard currency. The frozen reserves, valued at nearly $300 billion, have also helped underwrite tens of billions in Western aid to Ukraine. As Donald Trump embarks on his much-anticipated peace negotiations, they will provide important leverage—Putin will be desperate to recover them, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will press to redirect them toward his country’s reconstruction.

[Read: The sanctions against Russia are starting to work]

But the sanctions failed in one crucial way. The fact that Moscow was blindsided by them suggests it grossly underestimated the severity of the penalties it would face. Although the U.S. and its allies had developed an extensive menu of possible sanctions before the invasion, they never reached consensus on how far they were willing to go. They left Putin to divine the meaning of “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed,” and Putin—as he so often did—read Western ambiguity as weakness.

If Biden and other world leaders had committed ahead of time to the actions they would eventually take, they might have had a much better chance of staving off Putin’s invasion. Deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act. Putin never saw the sanctions coming—and that was precisely the problem.

“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Economic warfare has always offered nations a way to advance their interests without resorting to violence.

For most of history, imposing serious economic pressure required the deployment of military forces: ships blockading ports, armies laying siege to cities. As recently as the 1990s, the United Nations embargo on Iraq relied on warships patrolling the Persian Gulf. But over the past two decades, America has pioneered a more potent and nimble style of economic warfare. In a world where finance and supply chains are deeply globalized, Washington learned to leverage economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar and advanced semiconductor technology—against rivals. Now, by merely signing documents in the Oval Office, the president can impose economic penalties far more severe than the blockades and embargoes of old.

This new age of economic warfare began innocuously enough: with Stuart Levey, a little-known lawyer who led a brand-new division of the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, trying to prove President George W. Bush wrong. Iran’s nuclear program was racing forward in the mid-2000s, and Bush lamented that America had “sanctioned ourselves out of influence” with the country. The only options, seemingly, were to go to war or let Iran join the ranks of nuclear-armed states. Levey set out to show there was another way.

In the years that followed, Levey and his colleagues overhauled U.S. sanctions policy. They drew on their legal expertise and their understanding of the financial sector’s risk calculus to conscript multinational banks into a campaign to isolate Iran from the world economy. Prodded by Congress, they tested the limits of their new economic weapons—they even found a way to freeze more than $100 billion of Iran’s oil money in overseas escrow accounts. Over time, this economic pressure helped spur political change in Iran and opened a path to the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had managed to put Iran’s nuclear aspirations on hold—as Barack Obama boasted, “without firing a shot.”

The Iran deal had its critics, but one thing was beyond dispute—sanctions worked. In fact, the deal’s toughest opponents argued that America had traded them away too soon: The pressure was working so well that if the U.S. had just kept it up, the Iranian regime might have permanently relinquished its entire nuclear program or, better yet, collapsed. But a key reason the sanctions were so successful—winning grudging acceptance even from the likes of China, India, and Russia—was that Obama expressly deemed them a means to an end. They were intended to pressure Iran to concede to nuclear constraints and then be lifted. This is just how things played out.  

As the Iran deal was being negotiated, Putin shocked the world by sending “little green men” into Crimea and swiftly annexing the territory. Determined to punish Russia for this flagrant imperial land grab, but unwilling to risk war with a fellow nuclear power, U.S. officials again reached into their economic arsenal. Russia was a trickier target than Iran: It was much bigger and more integral to the world economy. European countries depended on Russian oil and gas. If sanctions wreaked too much havoc on Russia, the fallout would quickly reach Europe and then the United States. As a result, the Obama administration stitched together a sanctions coalition with the European Union and the rest of the G7. This alliance imposed sanctions that, surgical though they were, quickly sent Russia’s economy spiraling. The collapse of world oil prices in the second half of 2014 supercharged their impact, and by early the following year, Putin was eager for a truce.

Up until that point, the United States had used its economic arsenal wisely. But then it made a costly error. The unexpected severity of Russia’s economic crisis frightened European leaders, who feared it would spill over into their own countries. Instead of insisting that the West press its advantage, Obama endorsed a European-brokered cease-fire to freeze the Ukraine conflict and refrained from ratcheting up pressure—even after Russia violated the cease-fire and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin drew a lesson from this experience: Western leaders lacked the stomach to sustain real economic pressure on Russia—and even if they proved him wrong, he could just wait them out.

[Watch: ‘War and cheese’]

That assumption held up when Trump came to power. Far from strengthening sanctions on Russia, he allowed them to atrophy. Meanwhile, he ripped up the Iran deal and tried to bludgeon Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump’s policies on Russia and Iran gravely undermined the strategic value of American sanctions. Putin had done little to concede to U.S. demands, yet he was rewarded with a reprieve. Iran, by contrast, had complied with a deal to dismantle core parts of its nuclear program—only for the U.S. to reimpose penalties two years later. World leaders drew another troubling lesson: Even if they did exactly what Washington asked of them, they might still face the brunt of America’s economic arsenal.   

U.S. sanctions policy grew more arbitrary under Trump. With the exception of Russia, he was as sanctions-happy a president as America has ever had. He levied so many sanctions—against Iran, Venezuela, China—that countries all over the world took steps to shield themselves. The Russian central bank traded most of its dollars for euros and gold. China sought new ways to promote its own currency internationally, releasing a digital version of the renminbi and creating a homegrown financial-messaging-and-settlement platform.

U.S. officials often initiate sanctions campaigns in the heat of a crisis and scramble to react to unfolding events. The latest iteration of American economic warfare, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been different: U.S. officials knew months ahead of time that Russia was gearing up to invade. They had the opportunity to use sanctions to deter Russian aggression rather than punish it after the fact. But following years of deploying economic weapons in an erratic and incoherent manner, the opportunity went to waste.

After the central-bank freeze that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions were a disappointment. If Moscow didn’t foresee the one big sanction that might have deterred the invasion, it certainly did foresee the smaller ones that were coming—and had plenty of time and resources to prepare.

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

In December 2022, months after the move against the central bank, the United States and its allies made their first serious attempt to target the lifeblood of Russia’s economy: oil sales. Under the new regulations, known as the “price cap,” U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 a barrel.

The price cap was not as extreme as the central-bank freeze, but it packed a punch. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: Its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

But as with the central-bank sanctions, America and its allies were too worried about economic blowback to act decisively. They took nearly 10 months after the start of the invasion to impose the price cap. As a result, Russia raked in a whopping $220 billion from oil exports in 2022, contributing to the highest single-year energy revenues the Kremlin has ever collected. Perversely, this was almost as much hard currency as the West had frozen when it sanctioned Russia’s central bank. To make matters worse, the West also built loopholes into the policy to avoid even the slightest possibility that it could cause an oil-supply crunch and exacerbate inflation. Russia took full advantage, amassing a “shadow fleet” of secondhand oil tankers and designing state-backed insurance schemes—and the impact of the price cap eroded. Today, with Trump back in the White House, the prospects of strengthening the policy look slim.

The United States uses sanctions a lot, and yet it has hardly perfected the art of economic warfare. Compared with the way the Pentagon prepares for conventional war—including recruiting and training professional troops, devising plans, and rehearsing them repeatedly—the U.S. agencies responsible for economic war are still playing in the minor leagues, using ad hoc processes and a rudimentary policy apparatus.

Sanctions are like antibiotics: They work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. For some purposes, they’re simply the wrong tool; sanctions didn’t change the regimes in Iran or Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the last Trump administration, nor could they be expected to.

In other cases, sanctions have the potential to work, but only if they’re administered in strong enough doses over a long enough period to avoid resistance. This is the problem the United States has faced in confronting Russia: Washington and its allies ratcheted up sanctions incrementally, giving Russia time to adapt and build resistance along the way. As a result, Biden failed to deliver a knockout blow to Russia’s economy—and Putin, yet again, seems confident he can get a reprieve, no matter what he does in Ukraine.     

This article has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

The scene in Kyiv earlier this month recalled the darkest days of oligarchic rule. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped a piece of paper across the table to Volodmyr Zelensky. “You really need to sign this,” Bessent told the Ukrainian president, according to The Wall Street Journal. The document was a deal to give the United States the rights to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Ukraine’s minerals. When Zelensky said that he needed time to consider the proposal, Bessent pushed the paper closer to him and warned that “people back in Washington” would be very upset.

The Trump administration was operating in the old spirit of the kleptocrats who built fortunes in Ukraine and Russia at the dawn of the post-Communist era, wielding veiled threats to bully the nation’s leader into hastily handing over precious resources in a shady deal.

To Zelensky’s credit, he did his best to resist Bessent’s pressure. “I can’t sell our state,” he explained. It was as if he had actually internalized the message that American diplomats from the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations had attempted to drum into Ukraine’s collective psyche: Ukraine’s democracy depends on it resisting powerful business interests that seek to plunder its wealth on terms highly unfavorable to the Ukrainian public. Zelensky’s willingness to stand up to President Donald Trump, holding true to American values in the face of American intimidation, was a perverse trading of places.

[Anne Applebaum: The end of the postwar world]

The moment recalls another episode in Ukraine’s recent past. Three years ago today, Russian troops streamed across the nation’s borders, assassins descended on the capital in search of its president, citizens decamped to the subways in search of shelter. Western intelligence agencies predicted Ukraine’s imminent demise. And in that moment of despair, Zelensky strode out into the empty streets of Kyiv, in the dark of night, to record a video reassuring the world, “We are still here.”

In those early days of the war, Zelensky began to pose as a defender of liberalism, fighting on behalf of global democracy. Whether he actually meant it wasn’t clear. Before the war, his record of curbing corruption was spotty at best. With his political inexperience, and his strange unwillingness to prepare his country against the looming Russian threat, the former comic actor hardly had the makings of a sturdy bulwark against autocracy.

But he became one in the face of an unrelenting assault. Having preserved his nation’s independence, however, he’s now facing not one but two of the world’s most powerful illiberal leaders, conspiring in tandem. For reasons both petty and pecuniary, Trump seems intent on fulfilling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian sovereignty. The American president is pressing for Russia’s favored resolution to the war, without even allowing Zelensky a seat at the negotiating table. And the resource deal he’s pursuing amounts to World War I–style reparations, but extracted from the victim of aggression. It would force the Ukrainians to hand over the wealth beneath their ground, without any guarantee of their security in exchange. The extortion that Trump proposes would deny Ukraine any possibility of recovering economically, and consign its people to a state of servitude.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA has found a new model]

In this new moment of crisis, Zelensky is reverting to the role he played in the war’s earliest days. Confronted with blunt force, he’s bravely resisting. Squaring up to the bully, he accused Trump of swimming in disinformation. Despite all the pressure the United States has applied on him to accede to the mineral deal, he’s refused. On Sunday, he said, “I am not signing something that ten generations of Ukrainians will have to repay.” Knowing that Trump will never set aside her personal animosity toward him, he offered to resign in exchange for a Western security guarantee.

He has resisted the administration’s demands despite the fact that has no leverage in his dealings with the U.S., other than moral suasion and a limited ability to get in Trump’s way. Ukraine’s military is entirely dependent on American arms, and its European allies can do almost nothing, at this late date, to fill the void. In the end, given Ukraine’s tenuous existence, Zelensky might have little choice but to accept whatever Trump imposes, but at least he’s shown that there’s a course other than immediate surrender.

[Quico Toro: Brazil stood up for its democracy. Why didn’t the United States?]

Once upon a time, the United States poured diplomatic resources and military aid into Ukraine so that it wouldn’t descend into Russian-style autocracy. Now it’s the United States that’s headed in that direction. In the form of Elon Musk, an oligarch has captured the power of the American government, through which he can invisibly advance his own interests. The president is attempting to intimidate (and sue) the media into complying with the administration’s agenda. The norms of the administrative state have been shattered so that Trump can reward cronies and punish enemies. And in the most literal sense, the United States is collaborating with Russian autocracy so that the foreign policies of the two regimes are more closely aligned.

American institutions have largely faltered amid Trump’s assault, and European allies have aimlessly panicked. But Zelensky’s very presence reprimands the West for its futile opposition; his resoluteness shames Republicans, who once admired him as a latter-day Winston Churchill, for their own abject capitulation. Although he arguably has more to lose from a Trump administration than anyone on the planet, he’s kept pushing back, with resourcefulness that recalls Ukraine’s guerrilla tactics in the earliest days of the Russian invasion. When the history of the era is written, Zelensky will be seen as the global leader of the anti-authoritarian resistance, who refused to accept the terms that the powerful sought to impose on his nation. He clarified the terms of the struggle with his heroic example. He reminds despairing liberals, “We are still here.”

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.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.

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Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

Related:

The hidden costs of Musk’s Washington misadventure The government’s computing experts say they are terrified.

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Top representatives from Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia to discuss strengthening economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries and assembling a team to start peace negotiations in the Ukraine war. The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary federal workers over the weekend in departments including the FAA, Health and Human Services, and Energy. The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after DOGE requested access to sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

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Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right.

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Saturday Night Live Played the Wrong Greatest-Hits Reel

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Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

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During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

The UK's highest court has rejected the Treasury's attempts to intervene in the landmark case.

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Throughout everything that happened during Donald Trump’s first term in office—the abuses of executive power, the impeachments, the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—the administration never outright defied an order of the court. Now, less than a month into Trump’s second term, the president and those around him seem to be talking themselves into crossing that line.

The crisis began—where else?—on X, where the administration’s unelected chancellor Elon Musk began spitefully posting about a court order limiting the ability of his aides to rampage through sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department. Within the locked, echoing room of the X algorithm, Musk’s outrage bounced among far-right influencers and sympathetic members of the legal academy until it found the ear of Vice President J. D. Vance, who posted on Sunday: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Vance’s post is somewhat tricky. The vice president didn’t say outright that the administration would defy a court order, but he hinted at it by implicitly raising the question of just who determines what constitutes a legitimate use of executive authority. Is it the executive branch itself, or the courts? Since the Supreme Court handed down Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, the answer has emphatically been the latter. But if the Trump administration decides that the president himself—or Elon Musk—gets to choose whether or not to obey the courts, then the country may cross into dangerous and unknown territory. Legal scholars can’t agree on just what defines a constitutional crisis, but pretty much everyone would recognize intentional executive defiance of a court order as one.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

The good news, such as it is, is that the administration doesn’t yet seem to have taken the plunge. The bad news is that this seems like a live possibility, and nobody really knows what will happen if it does. To some extent, there is a road map—but beyond that, not so much.

Already, the cascade of litigation against Trump’s executive actions has resulted in several instances in which courts have scolded the administration for noncompliance. Most notably, almost two weeks after Judge John McConnell ordered the administration to halt its broad freeze of trillions of dollars in federal funds, 22 Democratic attorneys general filed a motion to enforce compliance with the order, alerting the court that funding for many state programs remained halted. The Justice Department responded that it had abided by its own, narrower reading of the temporary restraining order. Judge McConnell swiftly issued another order declaring the federal government to have violated the terms of his initial ruling, demanding that it comply with the more expansive reading of his order going forward—and hinting at the possibility of legal penalties if the administration defied him.

I will admit to watching these proceedings unfold with a pit in my stomach, waiting for Musk, Vance, and Trump to spin themselves up into outright disobedience. So far, though, that hasn’t happened. Instead, the Justice Department appealed Judge McConnell’s order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—which, despite some procedural oddities, is the normal rule-of-law process for when the government doesn’t like a court order and wants to change it. (The First Circuit denied the appeal.) An ongoing scuffle over whether a certain stream of FEMA funding could be turned off under Judge McConnell’s order has not so far resulted in J. D. Vance tweeting “Come and take it!” Rather, the Justice Department filed requests for clarification from the court about the scope of the order, which the judge provided. Likewise, rather than just disobeying the temporary restraining order that bothered Musk so greatly concerning access to Treasury systems, the Justice Department requested and received a limited carve-out from the court.

None of this is good, but it’s not outright defiance. As the legal journalist Chris Geidner has written, “DOJ lawyers do appear to be seeking a way to advance Trump’s claims in courts while trying to then implement courts’ orders if and when those claims fail.” It’s important that these cases are being litigated by Justice Department attorneys who don’t want to get in trouble with the courts or legal bar authorities for lying or disobeying an order, and have strong incentives to play by the rules. Elon Musk may not care, but lawyers need to worry about their ability to practice law—under future administrations as well.

But what happens if the Trump team decides to push things further? Take the funding-freeze case again—if the standoff continued, the judge might convene a hearing, or plaintiffs could push for one, to determine why the court shouldn’t hold the government in contempt. What then?

Federal courts have broad powers to hold those who defy their orders in contempt. This can take the form of financial penalties or even incarceration, either to strong-arm the contemner into compliance or to punish them for noncompliance after the fact. Those financial penalties can be steep. In one extreme 2014 case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hinted at its willingness to impose fines of $250,000 on Yahoo for noncompliance with a government surveillance program—an amount that would have doubled every week, quickly bankrupting the company. (Yahoo complied.)

[Peter M. Shane: Presidents may not unilaterally dismantle government agencies]

Yet a broad survey of litigation by Nicholas R. Parrillo, a law professor at Yale, reveals that federal courts have in many cases been reluctant to turn the screws when the federal government itself is the party that might be held in contempt. Instead, Parrillo writes, courts have tended to wield the threat of contempt—relying on the norm that executive officials generally don’t want to be found in violation of a court order. But that norm is exactly what Trump and those around him are now toying with trying to erode.

If a court did try to levy sanctions against a defiant official or agency, that would also bring up the question of who would enforce them. The agency responsible for judicial enforcement is the U.S. Marshals, which is under the control of the Justice Department. By statute, marshals are required to carry out court orders. But while we’re spinning out hypotheticals, what would happen if Attorney General Pam Bondi, or Trump himself, ordered them not to comply?

The answer to that question lies outside the courtroom. It is located instead in the halls of Congress, the pages of newspapers, the boardrooms of businesses and civil-society organizations, and finally the streets. It’s not a struggle that can be resolved by law itself, but rather by whether Americans care enough to demonstrate as a polity that the rule of law matters to them and that they will defend it.

“After a long illness, the world as we know it has passed away,” a European friend recently said. A slightly premature obituary, perhaps, but not by much. The world has changed in fundamental ways, of which the Trump administration is both symptom and cause. There is no greater evidence than its emerging policy of imposing a cease-fire, which it incorrectly believes will bring peace, on Ukraine.

To a degree surprising for those who think of the Trump administration as a mere composite of malice, nihilism, and chaos, its Ukraine policy seems orchestrated, with three big pieces dropping yesterday alone.

The first was a speech from Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth at the 50-nation meeting of the Ukraine-defense-support group. Uncharacteristically, perhaps, his words deserve careful parsing, particularly because they have caused spasms of despair—some justified, most not—among supporters of Ukraine.

[Read: The day the Ukraine War ended]

He began by uttering the uncomfortable truth that it is unrealistic to expect a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. That is unfortunate but ineluctable, given the balance on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both the Biden administration and the current one to pour in the military resources that would give Ukraine a chance of defeating Russia. Unfair, tragically unnecessary, but true.

Hegseth ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a negotiated settlement—also unfair, but also inevitable. Ascension to NATO membership is a long process, and in any case, Russia’s surrogates in NATO—Hungary and now Slovakia—would almost certainly block Ukraine. Hegseth’s statement matters less than many suppose, however, because a new administration could just as easily reverse this policy.

The peace deal—which he insisted would be brokered by the United States but not, apparently, with Europeans as part of the negotiation—would have to be guaranteed by “European and non-European” military forces in Ukraine; U.S. forces, he emphasized, would not be stationed there. Left unsaid was whether, say, American combat aircraft and missiles might be permanently based in neighboring countries.

In one of the more interesting sections, he said:

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

To European ears, it was probably blotted out by what came soon after:

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this, Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

Not unreasonable, although, in fact, Europe has provided almost as much military aid to Ukraine as has the United States, and more humanitarian aid.

This was not a speech about abandoning Europe or, for that matter, Ukraine. Rather, Hegseth insisted that the United States has to focus on securing its own border and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”:

Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades. And we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But this won’t just happen.

It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent.

The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.

The bottom line is that the administration will broker, and possibly coerce, a deal that is bad for Ukraine: a cease-fire along current lines, the deployment of European and other forces, and no chance of NATO membership in the near future. There was, however, talk of economic pressure on Russia, of security arrangements for Ukraine, and of an American interest in seeing the war end permanently. What was not mentioned, however, is also important. There was no talk of regime change in Ukraine or of limiting Ukraine’s armed forces and their development. There was no talk of abandoning or fundamentally restructuring NATO and the European security system. All of these contradict Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims.

None of this will assuage the fears of those who believe that Donald Trump is eager to sell Ukraine to Russia, bend to Putin’s every whim, and destroy NATO. But that view disregards some important evidence.

[Charles A. Kupchan: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]

The second big piece of the Trump peace initiative was the president’s statement—a blurt rather than a formal release—on Truth Social declaring that he had had a long conversation with Putin and that they would at some point meet with each other. Reading it, one is reminded, once again, that Trump is a politician who is cunning but semiliterate and ignorant. The statement, unfortunately, assumes a commonality of interests and experiences that simply does not exist between Russia and the United States.

In a meeting, one has to expect that Putin, a former KGB case officer, will be far better at manipulating the vain and erratic Trump than the other way around. Moreover, when Trump said that he was just about to call Volodymyr Zelensky to brief him on the conversation, he revealed that he had already violated what should be a cardinal principle: no attempt to make a deal on Ukraine without Ukraine. His mistake is dangerous, possibly disastrously so. That said, however, it is clear from other statements (including Hegseth’s) that Trump believes that he is the one with economic leverage (true), that the war is stupid (true), and that Russia is in substantial difficulty (true).

The third initiative—curiously missed by much of the American press—was the first visit of a Cabinet-level official to Kyiv. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented a deal, the outlines of which are unclear, to give the United States access to Ukrainian minerals, and the Ukrainian government, unsurprisingly, responded positively. Crass and unworthy, no doubt, but a good thing. The United States has strong interests in securing a supply of rare earths from a friendly, aligned country rather than from China. If a deal goes ahead, the U.S. will have large security as well as economic interests in an independent Ukraine. And the mood music was good: “By increasing our economic commitment through a partnership with the government and people of Ukraine, that will provide—once this conflict is over—it will provide a long-term security shield for all Ukrainians,” Bessent said.

There were always two possible Trump Ukraine policies: the bad and the catastrophic. At the moment, this seems bad—but not yet catastrophic. A peace deal that leaves Ukraine with 80 percent of its territory and its independence, economic stability, and military potential unimpaired, and that stations European troops inside its territory while giving the U.S. a large economic interest in its future, is an acceptable if unfortunate and avoidable outcome.

Responsibility for this war arriving at a bad outcome rests with the Trump administration, which is nakedly transactional and, worse, either does not understand or does not care that this war is about a Russian bid to restore its imperial status. But others are to blame as well.

The Biden administration warned of the war but botched the provision of aid to Ukraine. It held back the quality and quantity of weapons needed for victory, decided to have no strategy for success other than “standing by Ukraine,” and inexcusably failed to explain to the American people why this war was, and is, central to American security interests. The Biden administration set the conditions for the current situation.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

The other players responsible for this situation are America’s European allies. Not all of them, to be sure—the Nordic and Baltic states and Poland have stepped up, as Hegseth openly acknowledged. For more than a generation now, American leaders have insisted to Europe as a whole that Americans will not indefinitely bear the burden of Europe’s security. By and large, their European counterparts have smiled politely and ignored them. No wonder then, that the secretary of defense said:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense—nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

Pete Hegseth? No, Robert Gates—who served as secretary of defense more than 14 years ago in the Obama administration—diagnosing the illness that has brought about this crisis. The good news, such as it is, is that the patient needed, and may yet respond to, the blunt truths about its condition that Secretary Hegseth expressed. Sometimes shock therapy, however inexpertly administered, can be part of the cure.