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This week President Emmanuel Macron of France visited Washington and called Donald Trump “Dear Donald” four times. A photo of their meeting shows them smiling and clasping hands. We, of course, don’t know Macron’s true degree of affection for Dear Donald. But we do know that European leaders have noticed that the rules of diplomacy have changed and they are quickly adjusting.

First, European leaders sat through a speech from Vice President J. D. Vance at a security conference in Munich in which he criticized them and made clear that they could not rely on the United States in the same way they had before. Then Trump repeated Russian talking points, claiming that Ukraine started the ongoing war. And now there are reports that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is flying to Washington to discuss a deal with Trump in which Zelensky would give up national resources in exchange for security protections from the United States, an offer that staff writer Anne Applebaum describes this way:

You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor with whom you’d had cordial relations with a long time, who’d helped you fix your car and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that, you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you, I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Applebaum about what she calls the “end of the post–World War II order.” We also talk with staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are responding to this new posture from the Trump administration, and what this means for a group of allies that have long routinely shared intel with the U.S.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: When Donald Trump was running for his second term as president, last year, he gave plenty of hints that he didn’t care all that much about staying chummy with our European allies. For example, he once said if NATO countries didn’t pay their fair share, he would encourage Russia to, quote, “do whatever the hell they want.”

So maybe no one should be surprised a year later that he and members of his administration are spending their first few weeks in office offending their allies and shaking up the world order. But it is kind of surprising—at least, the speed of it and the dismissive tone: For example, Vice President J. D. Vance telling the EU leadership, some of whom he referred to as “commissars,” that their countries were suppressing free speech, or Donald Trump repeating Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump: You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal. I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we talk about what this shift in the world order might mean. In the second half of the show, we’ll be talking to staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are reacting to the changes.

But first, we talk to Anne Applebaum, author of the book Autocracy Inc. and host of the podcast Autocracy in America. Anne started her career tracking autocracy around the globe, and, with the rise of Trump, she started noticing it creeping up in her own country.

Anne Applebaum: I went around Germany, like, five years ago and did Cassandra-like lamentations, and nobody believed me, you know. And now, like, every German newspaper wants me to say, How do you feel about being right? And I’m like, I feel like shit, you know. What do you mean, How do I feel about being right? I feel terrible. I don’t want to be right.

[Music]

Rosin: Anne, this new administration’s shift in tone has been so sudden and so stark that I want to understand it better and figure out what its implications might be.

Applebaum: So No. 1: The language and body language that have been coming out—not just from the White House but from the defense secretary, from many people affiliated with Trump over the last few days, last couple of weeks—has been strikingly negative. The vice president went to a security conference in Munich, where generals and secretaries of defense and security analysts were gathered to hear the administration’s view of what it felt about the Russian military threats to Europe, and to the United States and to the rest of the world. And instead, he made a supercilious speech mocking them. That was No. 1.

No 2: Donald Trump announced a restart of conversation with Russia that wasn’t an attempt to find a solution to the war that would keep Ukraine safe and sovereign. It seemed to be an attempt to create a U.S.-Russian relationship of a new kind that seemed very sinister. And then, finally, I think it was the real turning point—and this, for many people, was a stunner, I think—was a UN vote. Ukraine and its allies around the world proposed a motion condemning Russian aggression.

The U.S. not only did not back the motion; the U.S. voted against it, together with Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, the Central African Republic, and a handful of other Russian allies around the world. And that package of things, put together, is an indication that the U.S. appears to be switching sides.

Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s the way to put it: “The U.S. appears to be switching sides.” I mean, I’m trying to think of the right way to characterize this. You immediately said the end of the post–World War II order—you declared that right after these things happened. You feel strongly—you feel definitively about that?

Applebaum: I feel definitive about it. That doesn’t mean other things aren’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean it’s not reversible. It doesn’t mean that Trump won’t get pulled in other directions. The Russians are famous for lying about what their plans are and for promising things they don’t deliver. He may find himself disappointed with the relationship he’s trying to build with Putin.

I’m not saying that there’s a straight line from here in a predictable direction. But I think I can safely say that no American administration—Democrat or Republican, since the 1940s—has talked the way the Trump administration talks. In other words, not just doubting its allies or criticizing its allies—I mean, that’s happened lots of times—but actually criticizing the fundamental premise of the alliance.

The impression Europeans have now is that that’s not true anymore. And because they were still pretty sure it was true three weeks ago, this is a very sudden and rapid change.

Rosin: Right. And this is not a good thing. I hear the alarm in your voice. Why is the post–World War II order important?

Applebaum: The post–World War II order—and, I mean, even calling it an order is too highfalutin. I mean, it’s really just a set of alliances that the U.S. built in Europe, and I should keep saying in Asia, as well, and Japan, South Korea, Australia are also part of the same world. It was a world the U.S. built in which a group of the world’s wealthiest countries agreed to work together to share their security, to develop similar and compatible economies.

The U.S., together with the Europeans and their Asian allies, created these real zones of prosperity and peace. And the U.S. was a beneficiary of that same prosperity. The U.S. was the major investor in these countries. The U.S. was allowed to lead in all kinds of ways. U.S. ideas about trade or about economics were genuflected to. I mean, although maybe that sounds too subservient. But, I mean, the people wanted U.S. leadership, the U.S. benefited from leadership, and the U. S. had those allies when it wanted to do other things.

When the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, American allies also went. When the U.S. wanted to fight terrorism in the Middle East or around the world, U.S. allies cooperated. They cooperated with intelligence. They sometimes cooperated militarily. They sent soldiers when they were asked to send them. So the U.S. had an unusual kind of power in the world.

So other countries, of course, have military power and economic influence, but the U.S. had a form of economic and military influence that persuaded other countries to join it. This has been true over many years, in many different ways. It means that when European countries are considering big investments, big power plants, they will sometimes choose U.S. companies over their own or over those of their neighbors because they want to maintain those good relations with America.

Rosin: I mean, I guess what’s rattling about this moment is: There isn’t a precipitating event. There isn’t a ratcheting up of hostilities, the way there has been, historically. It’s just Trump. It’s just, you know—he changed his mind, so there’s really no warning. However, he did signal during his campaign, you know, Russia should be able to do whatever the hell it wanted. Is what’s rattling, especially about this moment, the speed? Like, it all unraveled in a few weeks?

Applebaum: So I would go farther. I mean, Trump has been talking about his disdain for allies and alliances since the 1980s. In 1987, notoriously, he took out these huge newspaper ads, after a trip to Moscow, I should say, saying that alliances were a waste of money, and we shouldn’t, you know—at that time, Japan, people were particularly worried about. During his first term, he repeatedly looked uncomfortable with allies, attacked them, disparaged them, famously wanted to leave NATO. He told John Bolton that he wanted to leave NATO, on the way to a NATO summit. And he was talked down by Bolton and by Jim Mattis and by others. So in that sense, it’s nothing new.

Nevertheless, since the election, Trump mostly was talking in a normal way to allies. He had phone conversations with European leaders and Asian leaders. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying, Putin’s a loser. We need to put pressure on him, you know, to end the war. And then, suddenly, as you say, it was the speed—about 10 days ago, about two weeks ago, maybe. Suddenly, the tone shifted and switched.

Rosin: The whole thing brings up the forever question about Trump: Is he chaotic or intentional? Which I think is important here because intentional would imply that he is actively remaking the world order. Like, actively aligning the U.S. with Russia. Do you sense that’s the case?

Applebaum: I think it’s a possibility, yeah.

Rosin: You do?

Applebaum: I do.

Rosin: And why? What are the best guesses about why? To what end?

Applebaum: The best guesses include: He’s been convinced of wealth and riches to be had for the United States or, perhaps, for people in his entourage by a better relationship with Russia. He’s been convinced that putting pressure on Ukraine, rather than on Russia, will end the war quickly. He’s bored of the war; he doesn’t really know how to end it, and he’s looking for a shortcut. Those are the guesses that we have. I mean, whether there’s been a specific conversation or a specific offer, I don’t know.

I should have included this in my list: I mean, the fact that he has been repeating Russian propaganda—so saying things that aren’t true but that are the kind of thing that you hear from the Russian media and from the pro-Russian media in the United States—means that he’s hearing that from somebody. And so the best guess is that he’s been speaking to someone who has changed his mind or has convinced him that Russia is a better and more predictable ally than France or Britain or Germany or Japan.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, that’s the moment where I sat up and took notice, is the way he was talking about Ukraine, repeating such obvious lies about the origins of that war, and then, also, that document that the treasury secretary offered Ukraine. Can you describe that document? That one, for me, was a shocker.

Applebaum: Okay, so this is a document of a kind that I can’t think of a precedent for. It was given to President Zelensky of Ukraine, first by the treasury secretary, who went to Kyiv to do this. And, essentially, the document says Ukraine is supposed to sign away 50 percent of its natural resources, both rare earth minerals and other minerals and other resources and income from ports and infrastructure, to the United States indefinitely.

So the Ukrainians are meant to hand over half of their national wealth for the foreseeable future to Americans, and in an unclear way. It’s not clear to whom they would give this wealth and how the wealth would be extracted and how it would be measured and who would decide what 50 percent was—none of that is clear at all. And they would do that out of some kind of gratitude to Americans, or some kind of fealty to Donald Trump, perhaps. And they would not receive any clear security guarantees or anything else in exchange.

Rosin: And what’s unprecedented about that? That it’s unfolding like a real-estate negotiation? Or what is, you know, unusual about it?

Applebaum: An open-ended demand from a sovereign country that it hand over its wealth to another country—I mean, this is a kind of 18th-century, colonial way of dealing with a country. And this is, of course, a country that’s been an ally to the United States, that’s worked closely with U.S. intelligence, that’s been a part of an American security structure. You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor, with whom you’d had cordial relations a long time, who’d helped you fix your car, and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that—you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you—I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

Rosin: By the way, a few hours after recording this, there were reports that the proposed deal was updated. The new version apparently now includes a vague mention of security guarantees for Ukraine. And Zelensky is supposedly flying to Washington later this week to meet with Trump about it. We don’t have many more details, but Anne’s neighbor analogy still holds.

Okay. Back to the conversation.

So the obvious thing to read into this betrayal of Ukraine is: There is no sanction for autocrats who want to invade other countries. Do you think that is the intended message?

Applebaum: I don’t know whether Trump understands that as the message and also, because I still don’t understand what the endgame is, how exactly he thinks the war will end. I don’t want to say something terrible has happened before it’s happened, right? But yes, if the war ends in such a way that Ukraine loses its sovereignty or is forced into some kind of humiliating situation or is unable to defend itself in the future against a rebuilt Russian army two years from now, then yes—the conclusion will be that might makes right.

Big countries are allowed to invade small ones and get away with it. And not only will the U.S. not help you if you’re a democracy being invaded by your dictatorial neighbor; the U.S. might side with the invader. That would be the lesson. And that, too, I mean—there are cascading consequences.

Rosin: Yeah. And, you know, during the Ukraine war, you’ve talked about the importance of us standing up for Ukraine, because there are consequences for Estonia. I mean, there are consequences for lots of countries.

Applebaum: There are consequences for Germany. There are consequences for Britain. You know, maybe there are even consequences for the United States. I mean, if we won’t, you know—what are we prepared to defend?

Rosin: Yeah. As things are realigning quickly, I mean, French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to indicate in his visit to Washington this week that, in fact, Europe should be less dependent on the U.S. and more in charge of its own defense. That’s what Trump says he wants. Could that be a neutral shift? Like, is that necessarily a terrible shift? How should we think of that kind of shift, where Europe is more in charge of contributing to security for its own region?

Applebaum: I think it’s a fine shift and one that I’ve been arguing for, for a long time. But it’s not a shift that you can do in two weeks, and so there is a very dangerous moment coming.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Applebaum: Well, when, you know—if the U.S. is serious about withdrawing from Europe, or if that’s the way that Trump wants to go, then there will be a moment when Europe is not yet prepared for that scenario.

Rosin: I see. So it just can’t happen this quickly. Like, the same as DOGE—it’s just sort of “come and burn everything down,” but it’s not, like, an intelligent or useful way—

Applebaum: No, it’s not an intelligent solution.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: As I said, I don’t know whether Trump or people around him have thought this through. I mean, the U.S. gains a lot of advantages by being the leading security power in Europe. And will European countries still want to buy U.S. weapons? Will they want to buy U.S. security products? There would be consequences for the U.S. too. I mean, it’s not like the U.S. just withdraws, and Europe takes over, and everything’s fine. No. There would be, as I said, this kind of cascading series of economic and political consequences that might turn out to be quite dramatic.

Rosin: Yeah. Last thing: I know you were in Munich with defense and security officials, people who help with Ukrainian defense. I’m curious what the mood is of people who have to think on the ground about strategy and defense, and how quickly they’ve been able to adjust.

Applebaum: People are adjusting very fast. The new chancellor of Germany, who was elected on Sunday—Friedrich Merz—one of the first things that he said: We have to prepare for a new world in which we are independent of the United States. And I can’t tell you how dramatic that is. He’s been pro-America. He’s been an advocate for close relations between Germany and America, and Europe and America. And to have him say that means that people are thinking fast.

So it will take a long time, of course, for military production cycles and strategic planning to change, but the beginning of the mental change has already started.

Rosin: Well, Anne, thank you so much for joining us and for naming everything that’s happening so clearly. It’s so helpful.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: spies. We talk to Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris about how these shifting alliances are affecting the intelligence community, and what that might mean for American security down the road.

[Break]

Rosin: So in the first half of the show, we talked about the shifting world order and the political issues it causes. And now I kind of want to talk to you about operational issues, like sharing of intelligence, spycraft, you know—the things that happen between nations that make the world run. So from your reporting, are you finding that any agencies, governments are wondering how much they can trust the U.S.?

Shane Harris: I think that has been a question that has been simmering for a lot of the country’s allies since even before the election, when they looked to the possibility that Donald Trump might come back to office. How much could they trust the United States to be a reliable partner in protecting secrets, protecting intelligence that they might share? I should say it wasn’t, like, a “five-alarm fire” kind of worry. But people are really starting to ask this because Donald Trump had a history of disclosing other countries’ information, disclosing the United States’ own secrets, in some cases, and notably was criminally charged for mishandling classified information.

So I think with his election, those anxieties rose, and now what we’re seeing is kind of compounding that is this even more, I might even say, kind of existential question of not just, Can we count on the United States to protect our information and be a good security partner at the kind of tactical level? but, Can we count on them to be a good partner strategically at all anymore?

And I think all of these questions are kind of colliding right now and really undermining what had been decades of confidence that European allies, in particular, had had in the United States, regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat was sitting in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Right. Can you actually explain how intelligence sharing works? Like, who are our critical partners? Who provides intelligence? Who provides the most intelligence? Just so that we understand what could change.

Harris: Yes. So the most important intelligence-sharing arrangement that the United States has is something that is referred to as the “Five Eyes.” And that refers to five countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—that have this long-standing kind of pact, where they share highly sensitive intelligence and information on a routine basis with one another that’s of interest to their mutual security.

And really, sort of the big, big, big players in this often are the United States and the United Kingdom. I’m just going to give you an example of how closely we share information with the U.K. When it comes to signals intelligence—which is like electronic eavesdropping, intercepting emails and other digital communication—the physical infrastructure, you know, literally the technology, the kit that these two countries rely on, is intertwined in some locations. It is that closely enmeshed.

On the level of human intelligence, so information that an agency gets from spies in the field or from assets that it has, the U.S. and the U.K. routinely share the fruits of that kind of intelligence with each other as well. And all the other partners do that on a pretty regular basis too.

And then the United States does share, maybe on a less exclusive, maybe a bit more restricted basis, but certainly shares with other NATO allies—you know, France, Germany. The United States, you know, for decades has depended extensively on German intelligence to tell us information about terrorist organizations and particular threats that are brewing in Europe that might be of interest or a threat to the United States.

So this is the kind of on-the-ground, if you like, level of sharing that goes on just routinely. And it happens, importantly, via channels and via career employees that are in place, regardless of who the heads of government, the heads of state are in the various member countries.

Rosin: By the way, the term Five Eyes. It’s so good. Like, it’s a little on the nose, but it’s so good. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a movie, or no one’s written a novel called The Five Eyes, in which one of them betrays each other or something like that happens.

Harris: I’ve always loved it because, you know, it’s: They’re all watching. And importantly, I should say, and interesting to follow on that: In the Five Eyes, in that agreement, what’s important, too, is they do not spy on each other, right? That is something that’s also very special to the relationship in those five countries.

Rosin: I mean, I’m reading in the lines of what you’re saying. So we don’t know the degree of mistrust yet. It’s probably brewing, but it sounds like, from what you’re saying, it makes everybody less safe. Like, it makes us less safe, too, because these are how, you know, terrorist threats are detected, and these networks are very intertwined, so it feels a little precarious, dangerous.

Harris: I think that’s right. And you’re right to say that it makes everyone less safe, because if any country is holding back on information, arguably, that is potentially making everybody less informed and less aware, which could have real-world implications. And I should stress that no one has said to me, Well, we’re just going to stop sharing information with the United States, because we don’t trust you.

The real concern now is that (A) the United States might just start cutting off information flows to other countries. We did see, this week, the Financial Times had a very interesting report that Peter Navarro, who is sort of an aide to Donald Trump—who is known for saying some pretty outlandish things, I should say—was raising the idea that Canada should be kicked out of the Five Eyes arrangement. And presumably, this is some kind of coercive measure that would be used to try and get more-favorable trading terms from Canada. Now, Navarro came out and said there was nothing to this; it was a made-up story.

But we have heard rumors of this. I’ve heard chatter about it before, about whether or not Trump was considering doing that. The mere idea that the United States would be using Five Eyes membership and access to national-security intelligence to protect the country’s citizens as a coercive measure to try and get more favorable trading terms, you know, strikes people I’ve talked to as appalling, but totally in keeping with what they would expect Donald Trump to do, which tells you just how far we’ve deviated from the norm.

Rosin: So what else are people bringing up that makes them nervous? You mentioned, you know, Trump has leaked secrets before. Like, I think he famously tweeted a top-secret image of an Iranian rocket-launch site. I mean, he’s known for being a little lax with other people’s intelligence. So that’s one thing. Is that on people’s minds?

Harris: That’s definitely on people’s minds. You know, there was a famous incident in the first year of his first term where he seemed to disclose a top-secret source of information we were getting from Israeli intelligence during a meeting he had with two Russian officials, which didn’t go over great. So there is that kind of general concern about Trump himself and the people around him being very leaky and using intelligence in a way that is to their own benefit and interest. That’s been a worry.

You know, another, I think, less-appreciated concern has been: This intelligence-sharing relationship, while it is ostensibly a two-way street, really, it’s the other four Five Eyes that are depending on the United States for most of the information. I mean, the British security service, while very capable, is much smaller than the United States, and they really depend on the information they’re getting from the Americans, and it’s less about how much the Brits are giving to us.

And several people I’ve talked to in the Five Eyes community worry that as agencies—particularly, like, the FBI, which routinely shares information with the Five Eyes partners—as they’re going through this sort of chaotic period where they’re being taken over by political loyalists, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the new deputy director, and Trump has gone through and fired these sort of upper echelons of the career establishment, or is trying to, those are the people, the individuals with whom these different allied countries interact with on a regular basis.

And some of them have said to me, Look. You know, while you guys, basically, can’t get your stuff together, and you’re kind of in chaos, we worry that that’s going to have a downstream negative effect on us, because you’re so distracted by politics and internal witch hunts and, you know, personnel matters that maybe you’re taking the eye off the ball, and we’re not getting the usual high quality of intelligence that we depend on.

Rosin: Right. You know, some leaders in Europe have talked about—like, Emmanuel Macron hinted at this in his meeting with Trump—that actually, being less dependent on the U.S. for their security might be a good thing for Europe. I wonder if there’s a version of that for intelligence. Like, We don’t want to be as dependent on the U.S. There’s some advantage to switching up the way that we’ve been doing things.

Harris: I think that there is. And certainly, intelligence officials I speak to aren’t quite there yet in proposing it, but everyone is aware that the nature of the alliance is shifting—and perhaps not irrevocably, but at least for the foreseeable future.

You know, if you take some intelligence agencies in Europe right now—you know, take the British intelligence service and the security service right now, for instance. They have been very aggressive and far more kind of at the front line of the action in Ukraine than the United States has. They’ve developed certain capabilities and networks and sources of information that are very useful to them.

The European countries, the U.K. included, really do see the threat from Russia, I think, differently than Americans do. They see it as something that is very much kind of in their backyard. And because of that, I think that they have been devoting more resources to beefing up their own intelligence on Russia. And could that push them, you know, in a direction where maybe they say, Look—we’ve got to start being less dependent on the United States and beef up our own capabilities and share with each other? I think that’s quite possible.

What the United States has to offer is, you know, technical reach. I mean, we’re talking about electronic information. We’re talking about just a constellation of satellites that can capture imagery and all kinds of other information. So the United States still has that bulk and has those numbers, but that does not mean that these other countries can’t develop even more specific and tailored ways of collecting information that suit their own interests and make them less dependent on the United States. I think that could happen.

Rosin: Yeah. And that’s, I suppose, value neutral? Like, we don’t know if that’s good or a bad thing.

Harris: Well, look—count me on the side of people who believe that the alliances have been very much in the interest of the various members, and that this information sharing is just a culture that now pervades among these countries. There’s a belief that more sharing, you know, and a kind of mutual—not dependence but, you know—feeling of we’re all in it together is generally good for the collective whole.

I don’t want to overstate this. The United States is the dominant intelligence force in the West. Could it go off on its own and probably be okay? Yeah, it probably could be for the near term. But you never want to be missing that one key piece of information that tells you about, you know, a bigger threat. And I just don’t see any reason, particularly, other than Trump being Trump, why we need to blow up those alliances. But, you know, this is where we are right now, isn’t it?

Rosin: A last thing: I’m thinking about Trump signaling his closeness with Vladimir Putin, you know, how he recently repeated some Russian talking points. I wonder how those kinds of signals get received among the people you talk to—intelligence officials, the people who are guarding these alliances. What’s the result of those kinds of actions?

Harris: I think that they hear that, and, honestly, they think, We’ve heard this before. Everyone talks a lot about J. D. Vance’s speech in Munich, and some of the statements that Donald Trump has made about Zelensky being a dictator, and this affection for Putin. And all of this has been happening in the past month.

My mind goes back to 2018, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki—and listeners may remember—the question of Russia’s interference in our elections in 2016 came up. And Trump—in front of the audience, in front of the world—said that he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies when Putin said that Russia didn’t interfere in the election. And I think that was as stunning of a single, jaw-dropping moment as I can remember in my career covering intelligence—that the president of the United States was standing there next to an ex-KGB officer and saying, I believe him and not the U.S. intelligence community.

Our allies heard that. And really, ever since then, when I talk to people, you get a range of opinions, from, Donald Trump is just a businessman, and he likes Putin’s tough-guy attitude, all the way toward people thinking, I can’t prove it, but I’ve always suspected the Russians are either blackmailing him, or somehow, he’s secretly an agent. Like, you get the range of opinions from people.

So I think that they have just always, generally—the security services in these ally countries—have always seen that relationship that he has with Putin as a significant problem. And it’s one that they have to manage. So what they’re hearing from him now, with this affection for Putin, is not new. The difference is that now Trump is actually breaking these alliances with the West. And he is talking about a settlement in Ukraine that does not necessarily appear to be either in the interests of Ukraine or other European countries. And that has intelligence officials in Europe extremely nervous.

Rosin: I see. So this erosion of trust is long and slow. And what’s been shocking to the rest of us, the intelligence community has been monitoring for a while, those who are keeping close tabs.

Harris: I think that’s right.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you so much for joining us today. You always teach us so much about worlds that we don’t know a lot about.

Harris: It’s great to be with you. Thanks, Hanna.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

“Having the best spies, the best collection systems, and the best analysts will not help an intelligence service if it leaks like a sieve,” the former CIA speechwriter Charles E. Lathrop remarked in The Literary Spy, a book of quotations about espionage that he compiled. Lathrop, who wrote under a pseudonym, was making a point about counterintelligence—the flushing out of enemy spies and leakers who might compromise a spy agency’s precious secrets. Counterintelligence, Lathrop observed, “is the kidneys of national security: necessary, but unheralded until something goes wrong.”

These days, something looks to have gone very wrong—with the kidneys and maybe with the brain, too.  

To protect secrets, people who will be handling classified information or assuming positions of trust within intelligence agencies are vetted, often by law-enforcement agents, who interview friends and co-workers, review travel histories, and analyze financial information to determine whether someone might make an attractive recruit for a foreign intelligence service. Perhaps he’s in debt and would be willing to sell sensitive information. Or maybe she harbors some allegiance to a hostile country or cause and might be willing to spy for it. Looking for these red flags is counterintelligence 101, an imperfect, laborious, and invasive process that American presidents of both major parties have nevertheless accepted as the cost of doing intelligence business.

[David Deming: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

But the legion of Elon Musk acolytes who have set up shop inside federal agencies in the past few weeks do not appear to have been subjected to anything approaching rigorous scrutiny. President Donald Trump has also nominated to key national-security positions people whose personal and financial histories contain at least caution flags. This deviation from past practice has created a new kind of counterintelligence predicament, officials and experts have told me. Rather than staying on high alert for hidden threats, the counterintelligence monitors have to worry about the people in charge.

The public knows very little about how, or if, staff at the new Department of Government Efficiency that Musk runs were vetted before they obtained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system or the files of millions of government employees at the Office of Personnel Management. These two databases could help U.S. adversaries uncover the identities of intelligence officers and potentially their sources, people with knowledge about how the systems are set up told me.

Precisely what the DOGE teams are doing with this information, whom they’ve shared it with, and whether they have adequately protected it from falling into the wrong hands remains unknown. But the risks posed by this direct access to the government’s central nervous system are entirely foreseeable.

“The fact that people are getting access to classified and personally identifiable information who are not being vetted by our national-security system means it is more likely that there are going to be damaging leaks,” Tim Naftali, a counterintelligence expert and presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me.

Why would President Trump, who is the ultimate arbiter of who gets to see classified information, take such risks? One answer is rooted in his historic distrust of the FBI, whose agents traditionally conduct background investigations of senior administration officials as they assume their posts. Trump views the bureau as a hotbed of disloyal conspirators. During the presidential transition, he reportedly resisted efforts to allow FBI background checks, and how thoroughly members of his administration were vetted, if at all, is still not clear.

Animus and mistrust likely guide the president’s decisions here. He has publicly seethed at the agents who searched his Florida home, as part of an investigation that led to felony charges for mishandling national-security information after he left office. The agents who worked on that case are assigned to a counterintelligence squad at the FBI’s Washington field office, and the White House is trying to fire them. These agents routinely investigate threats to U.S. national security, and removing them would at least temporarily stall their efforts.

“In his dark passion for retribution, Trump is making his own government, which is our government, more vulnerable to adversarial penetration,” Naftali said.

Security risks now pervade the federal government, thanks largely to a cadre of youngsters, some barely out of high school, whom Musk has deployed inside federal agencies, ostensibly to identify wasteful government spending. In addition to the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE agents have reportedly accessed information networks at the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, and the Energy Department, among others. Musk has further plans to send teams to other major organizations, including the Pentagon.

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

As his teams fan out, the kidneys of counterintelligence are backing up.

At Treasury, a security team warned that DOGE employees’ access to a central government payment network presents an “unprecedented insider threat risk,” The Washington Post reported last week. The government defines an insider threat as “someone with regular or continuous access” to a computer system who could exploit the information for criminal purposes, leak it to unauthorized parties, or sell it to a foreign government. Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed classified information about NSA surveillance to journalists and who now lives in Russia, is the classic modern example.  

Two intelligence officials told me that the Treasury system, which processes more than $5 trillion in payments each year, contains sensitive national-security information. It could be used to uncover the identities of U.S. intelligence officers—who are after all paid from the Treasury—as well as people or organizations who are paid to spy on behalf of the United States.

These names are not explicitly identified as intelligence assets in the Treasury network, but an adversary with the time and know-how could use the Treasury data, possibly in concert with other information, to discover classified identities, the officials indicated. According to the Post, a senior career official at the department raised such concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The official recommended some unknown mitigating steps that Bessent reportedly approved.

At the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE employees gained access to information, including addresses and salary history, about Treasury and State Department employees working in “sensitive security positions,” the Post also reported. Personnel data are another puzzle piece that could allow an adversary to identify who works for the intelligence community, and potentially in what country they’re stationed.

“Little pieces of information matter a lot when they’re put together with other little pieces of information,” Joel Brenner, who was in charge of U.S. counterintelligence policy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me. This is standard intelligence tradecraft. “That’s how we do it. That’s how every intelligence service does it,” Brenner said.

The Office of Personnel Management is not known for its counterintelligence prowess. A decade ago, Chinese hackers breached the agency’s computer networks and stole the records of millions of U.S. government employees, in one of the great espionage coups of recent history. As I reported at the time, officials had earlier resisted a plan to merge a system known as Scattered Castles, which contained the records of intelligence-agency personnel and others who held security clearances, with OPM’s system, fearing exposure in just this scenario.

Their concerns proved prescient, and today, Scattered Castles remains segregated from OPM’s systems—fortunately, given recent reports that Musk’s team has connected its own server to OPM’s systems, which could open a gateway for foreign hackers to again burrow in.

Yet intelligence-personnel records may still be at risk. Last week the CIA sent OPM a list of names of new CIA officers via an unclassified email, people familiar with the matter told me. The CIA sent only the officers’ first names and the first initial of their last names. But even those fragments of information could be useful to foreign spies.

Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service. The former official was undercover at the time as a State Department employee. If a foreign government had known even part of his name from a list of confirmed CIA officers, his cover would have been blown. The cover of a generation of young intelligence officers now appears to depend on whether Musk’s DOGE kids are, with no obvious experience in such matters, properly handling and protecting the information that the CIA sent them.  

How trustworthy are Musk’s employees? Early reports suggest that if they had been subject to traditional background checks, which they apparently were not, some of them would have had trouble passing. One standout in this regard, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE member who has used the online handle “Big Balls,” was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing proprietary information with a competitor, Bloomberg reported. After he was dismissed, the former intern bragged on an online chat platform that he “had access to every machine” and could have deleted crucial data from the company’s servers. “I never exploited it because it’s just not me,” Coristine reportedly wrote. This is the textbook definition—indeed, the U.S. government’s definition—of an insider threat.

The cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs has written that Coristine was affiliated with a community of chat channels “that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.” Coristine, who was first identified not in a government announcement but by investigative reporters at Wired, founded a company that “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” the publication reported. Coristine has recently been named a senior adviser at the State Department, according to the Post.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Government computer-security experts are worried that DOGE members could corrupt vital technology systems. “Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors,” my colleagues wrote in The Atlantic last week. An insider need not even behave maliciously to cause havoc. DOGE agents, who are overwhelmingly young with little professional experience or familiarity with older government systems, “may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo.”

The counterintelligence risks don’t extend only to unchecked young people with the keys to the government’s kingdoms of data. Some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—including those for two national-security positions—raise classic red flags.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to run the FBI, was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S.-Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin, the Post reported. Receiving money from a foreign government is a basic risk factor because it raises questions about whether a government employee’s favor or influence can be bought.

The resulting six-part documentary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online network, itself a reliable conduit for Kremlin propaganda. In the film, Patel made his now infamous pledge to shut down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and “open it up as a museum to the ‘deep state.’” The FBI is one of the Russian intelligence services’ main targets for espionage.

On his disclosure forms, which were made public only after he testified in his Senate confirmation hearing, Patel describes the payment as an “honorarium.” That term traditionally implies a nominal or even negligible sum of money, which this was not. He also listed consulting work for clients that include the Qatari embassy and said that he would keep his stock in the Cayman Islands–based parent company of the clothing brand Shein, which was founded in China.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Health and Human Services Department, is saddled with up to $1.2 million in credit-card debt. Owing money is another risk factor because it might induce people to accept funds in exchange for sensitive information. Investigators examine bank records, credit-card statements, and other financial documents to determine how much debt a security-clearance applicant carries and its proportion to his level of income.

Allegiance or even sympathy to a hostile power is yet another warning sign. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, has drawn widespread criticism for her statements supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as her 2017 meeting with Syria’s then-president, Bashar al-Assad. More alarming, the Post found evidence that Gabbard tried to obfuscate details about the nature of her encounters with the Syrian dictator from congressional investigators and may have lied to her staff. Having a history of shady meetings with any foreign national, much less the head of a country, is a great way not to be approved for a security clearance. (Just ask Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose own opaque interactions with foreign officials temporarily stopped him from obtaining a clearance in the first Trump administration.)

During her confirmation hearing, Gabbard resisted entreaties from her fellow Republicans and Democrats—with whom she used to caucus when she was a member of Congress—to condemn Edward Snowden’s leaks and label him a “traitor.” Gabbard, who has long praised Snowden as a courageous whistleblower and called on Trump to pardon him, would say only that he “broke the law,” an obstinate position that left the distinct impression she approves of what Snowden did. Nevertheless, today the Senate voted largely along party lines to confirm Gabbard’s nomination as the nation’s top intelligence official.

Traditionally, counterintelligence officials have judged people whose ideology mirrors that of an adversarial state, or who have financial conflicts of interest, to be at higher risk of becoming spies or leaking secrets. “At the moment, that’s the population from which President Trump is selecting his most powerful and influential members of his administration,” Naftali told me.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Trump’s assault on the country’s national-security agencies stems from a distrust that millions of Americans share, Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence historian at the University of South Florida, told me. Trump has repeatedly said—accurately—that the intelligence community often falls short of its basic obligation of keeping the United States from being taken by surprise by the country’s adversaries. And the agencies have failed several times to root out their own insider threats. Those counterintelligence debacles shake public confidence and bolster Trump’s critique that the intelligence agencies are dysfunctional and even corrupt.

At the same time, many career intelligence officers don’t trust the president or the people he has chosen to lead. They believe that Trump has misled the public about what the intelligence agencies are really there to do. And these, too, are accurate complaints, shared by many Americans.

Intelligence agencies depend on trust, both in their own employees and from the public. That confidence is disintegrating. As Rogg told me, “This is where we’re going to be our own worst enemies.”

Two years ago, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, in unusually emphatic language, that a mysterious and debilitating ailment known as “Havana syndrome” was not the handiwork of a foreign adversary wielding some kind of energy weapon. That long-awaited finding shattered an alternative theory embraced by American diplomats and intelligence officers, who said they had been victims of a deliberate, clandestine campaign by a U.S. adversary, probably Russia, that left them disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills. The intelligence report, written chiefly by the CIA, appeared to close the book on Havana syndrome.

Turns out, it didn’t. New information has come to light causing some in the intelligence community to adjust their previous conclusions. And a new report reopens the possibility that a mystery weapon used by a foreign adversary caused Havana syndrome. At the White House, senior Biden-administration officials are more convinced than their colleagues in the intelligence agencies that Havana syndrome could have been the result of a deliberate attack by an American foe. The geopolitical consequences are profound, especially as a new president prepares to take office: If Russia, or any other country, were found culpable for violent attacks on U.S. government personnel, Washington would likely feel compelled to forcefully respond.

Starting about a decade ago, a small number of Americans, mostly federal employees and many of them working in intelligence, reported similar experiences in Havana. In an instant, they heard a painful ringing in their ears, followed by intense pressure on their head and disorienting vertigo, which was often followed by nausea. Some of the victims developed long-term problems with fatigue or mobility. Other officials later reported similar symptoms while in Russia and other foreign countries, and many concluded that they had been the victim of a deliberate attack with some kind of acoustic weapon.

Early signs of a fracturing consensus on Havana syndrome emerged this past November, when half a dozen victims—all current or former intelligence personnel—gathered in the White House Situation Room at the invitation of senior staff members on the National Security Council. The officials hosting the meeting had read the same intelligence that underpinned the earlier assessment, published in 2023, and thought that the authors had been too quick to rule out a deliberate attack. They also felt that the victims had been maligned, misled, and not given adequate medical care for their ailments, which had caused some of them to stop working, several people who attended the meeting told me. In a sign of respect, the hosts invited one man, regarded as the first known victim of Havana syndrome, to sit in a chair at the head of the Situation Room conference table, which is normally reserved for the president.

[Read: The case of the sick Americans in Cuba gets stronger]

The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to help write a guidebook for the incoming Trump administration on cases of “anomalous health incidents,” the anodyne label that the intelligence community has adopted for the syndrome. But the officials also had an update to share: New information undercut the 2023 assessment and would leave the victims feeling “vindicated,” Maher Bitar, a senior NSC official responsible for intelligence matters, told the attendees, according to some people who were present.

The attendees stressed that Bitar never disclosed any classified information, nor did he specify exactly what new intelligence had been discovered. The White House officials didn’t explicitly say a foreign power was responsible for Havana syndrome. But the victims felt that the president’s team believed that this was possibly the case, and that they intended to push the intelligence agencies to reconsider their position.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA officer injured in Moscow in 2017, who attended the meeting, praised the NSC as “a long-standing champion” for victims, and credited them for their doggedness. Part of what had led to the intelligence community’s earlier, decisive conclusion about Havana syndrome was the assumption that the existence of an energy weapon—a device that could cause the kind of injuries Havana-syndrome victims suffered—was implausible and not supported by evidence. But the officials and victims assembled in the Situation Room considered whether this assumption was really valid. An independent panel of experts, convened by the intelligence community, had suggested that an energy weapon could use “pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range” to cause these symptoms. Some NSC officials have long believed that the experts’ opinion didn’t get enough attention and was unduly overshadowed by the CIA-led report.

I was briefed on that intelligence report when it was released in 2023, and at the time I was struck by how unequivocal the analysts were in their judgments. In my experience, analysts are reluctant to draw definitive conclusions and try to leave some wiggle room. The analysts in this case were more declarative than any I’d ever heard.

However, they did allow that the intelligence community remained open to new ideas and evidence that might emerge. For example, if a foreign adversary were seen making progress developing an energy weapon, or the technology to build one, that might change analysts' thinking.

That appears to have happened. Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an update to the 2023 report. The intelligence agencies aren’t saying a foreign actor is to blame for Havana syndrome. But they are no longer so confident that one is not.  

[Read: How the U.S.-Russian relationship went bad]

Two intelligence agencies have now “shifted their judgment to reflect a greater possibility” that a small number of cases indeed were “caused by a foreign actor,” an intelligence official told reporters in a briefing. The agencies have examined new information that “foreign actors”—he didn’t say which—“are making progress in scientific research and weapons development.”

One of these intelligence agencies—again, he didn’t name them—determined that the chances that a foreign actor has used some novel weapon, or a prototype, to harm a small number of U.S. government personnel or their family members are “roughly even” with the odds that one had not. The other agency identified a “roughly even chance” that a foreign actor has developed a weapon that could have harmed people, but determined that any such device was unlikely to have been deployed yet.

This change may seem subtle. But it is significant. To move from the earlier position that no weapon existed, and no deliberate campaign targeted American personnel, to a 50–50 chance that these things might have happened, is a remarkable if narrow development. Five of the seven agencies that contributed to the report did not change their position, so the shift reflects a minority opinion. Sources close to the issue told me that one of the agencies that changed its tune is the National Security Agency, suggesting that intercepted communications may have revealed something about this “foreign actor’s” research efforts.

White House staffers and a few intelligence agencies aren’t the only ones who think there’s more to the Havana-syndrome story than previously understood. Last month, Republican Representative Rick Crawford released another report following an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that “foreign adversaries aren’t responsible for targeting U.S. personnel [is] dubious at best and misleading at worst,” the report said.

The Trump administration will have to decide how to respond to the new analysis, if at all. Concern about foreign attacks, and particularly care for victims—regardless of who or what made them sick— has broad bipartisan appeal. But in the closing days of the Biden administration, intelligence officials are making clear that they aren’t all on the same page.

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

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

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

[Read: The abandonment of Ukraine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin]

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump to Russia’s rescue]

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

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

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

[Read: How Biden made a mess of Ukraine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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