Analysis

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The release of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) coincides with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to India, offering a perspective on the Ukraine-Russia conflict often missing in Western media: a Russia whose influence is not waning, coupled with an America that is pivoting away from Europe.

To be sure, even limited military conquest by Russia and China along their borders should be deplored. The fact remains that the United States and its NATO allies did not intervene when Moscow crushed uprisings in its Warsaw Pact sphere of influence during the Cold War. Throughout the course of the conflict in Ukraine, a major proxy war, the United States and its NATO allies have refrained from sending troops and limited their military and economic aid to Ukraine. The mission of deterring Russia and China from limited local revanchism cannot justify the development, much less the use, of the American nuclear arsenal, or massive U.S. naval and air forces, for that matter.

The war has taken a decisive and irreversible turn.

A former senior Biden administration official admitted during a recent interview with who she thought were aides to Ukraine’s president that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have been averted if Kyiv had agreed to stop seeking NATO membership.

Ukraine would join the European Union as early as January 2027 under the latest US plan to end the war with Russia, a senior source told Agence France-Presse on Friday. “It’s stated there but it’s a matter for negotiation, and the Americans support it,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. The complicated EU accession process usually takes years and requires a unanimous vote from all 27 members of the bloc. Some countries, most notably Hungary, have consistently voiced opposition to Ukraine joining.

The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require the president to “give notice of the denunciation of the North Atlantic Treaty for purposes of withdrawing the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The bill would also prohibit the federal government from contributing funds to NATO budgets.

​It is all very well to offer this perspective like Joubert does, but anybody who would like to see peace in Ukraine should at least also take the Russian perspective on the conflict into account – as well as those of authoritative Western critics of the mainstream liberal European perspective.

“Half the country is on the run.”

A major difficulty in making peace in Ukraine today is that neither Ukraine nor Russia in fact possesses all the territories they claim to possess.

This open access book examines the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins. Based on analysis of a large number of primary and secondary sources, it provides a systematic analysis of this crucial war, its nature, outcome, possibility of peaceful settlement, violence against civilians, and origins. The book examines the role of such factors as the NATO accession of Ukraine, Russian imperialism, democracy, genocide, and the far-right in the start of the war and traces the conflict escalation ladder, which culminated in this war, to preceding violent conflicts in Ukraine, in particular, the Euromaidan, the Maidan massacre, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas.

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte says that “We [NATO] are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way”, does he actually believe it? If he does not, then he is deliberately lying to Western democratic electorates, and poisoning the Western public debate. If he does, then this is even more dangerous; for it would be evidence that European security elites themselves have fallen into a condition of paranoid hysteria that is impervious to evidence and rationality.

On the whole, I would prefer to hope that he does not believe it. For while the method of inspiring this may be illegitimate, European states do need to strengthen their defences; and a case can be made that given European economic stagnation and acute budgetary pressures, the only way to get European electorates to spend more on the military is to convince them that otherwise the Russian bear will come to eat their children.

Even when it comes to rearmament however, there are dangers in exaggerating the imminent Russian threat. For this encourages a rush to spend money quickly; and as the tragicomic history of British military procurement over the past generation demonstrates, the reasons for our problems with manufacturing arms go well beyond lack of money.

Leaving aside staggering levels of carelessness and incompetence (and the seeming inability of our systems to hold even one senior officer or official responsible), the UK and most European countries have let our wider industrial bases shrink to the point where they cannot support efficient military sectors. To rebuild our industries will take many years. In the meantime, to throw huge amounts of money at weapons will mean huge amounts of waste and delay, or simply buying them from the US.

And this is unnecessary. For the idea of a deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on NATO “within five years” is simply nonsense. President Putin has repeatedly denied any desire or motive to attack NATO – unless NATO attacks Russia – and on this at least we can believe him.

Russian officials and experts have emphasized to me that Russia’s threats against NATO were intended to deter NATO from going to war with Russia over Ukraine, since that would have faced Russia with a choice between defeat and nuclear escalation: “Look, the whole point of all these warnings to NATO has been to stop NATO from joining the fight against us in Ukraine, because of the horrible dangers involved. Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO and bring these dangers on ourselves? What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”

And where is Russia supposed to get an additional army from? Unless Ukraine collapses completely, the size of the peacetime Ukrainian army being proposed by Moscow is 600,000 men, presumably backed by numerous reservists. If Russia attacks NATO, then Ukraine will certainly take the opportunity to try to recover its lost territory, and Russia would have to guard against this.

Moreover, any such attack by Russia would completely contradict Russia’s political strategy towards the West, which is to encourage further the growing divisions both between the US and Europe, and between European establishments and the populist oppositions of Right and Left. Any direct Russian attack on NATO would wreck this strategy by reuniting the West in opposition. Why would Moscow have spent such efforts wooing Trump only to face him or his successor with a choice between war or humiliating retreat? Why would Moscow throw away the chance of future reconciliation with a French government under Le Pen and a British one under Farage?

And what could Russia hope to gain compared to the huge risks involved? Apart from the danger of escalation to nuclear war, the Ukraine War has demonstrated the immense contemporary superiority of the defensive. Russia has developed new weapons and tactics, but not ones that produce a breakthrough, but only help Russia in a war of attrition – and Moscow cannot possibly hope to win a war of attrition with NATO countries whose combined GDP is more than twenty times that of Russia.

One of the key reasons for Russia’s failures in Ukraine is that Putin has never dared to demand the public sacrifices required for mass conscription and mobilisation, even in a war whose outcome he regards as a truly vital Russian interest. Why would he dare this for the sake of a probably doomed war of choice with NATO? Rutte has warned that “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured” but it is obvious that Putin does not think that the Russian people are prepared for this.

It is thus entirely within the capability of NATO – without hugely increased military spending – to build defensive lines in the Baltic States and eastern Poland that would deter Russia by demonstrating that any attack would make very limited progress at immense cost. Do our military analysts really think that the Russian establishment has learned nothing from the bitter experience of the Ukraine War?

All that said, there is of course a real risk that clashes or accidents could lead to an unintended spiral towards direct war between NATO and Russia. This could for example begin with European seizure of Russian cargoes on the high seas, leading to naval clashes and a NATO blockade of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. But that is an argument for prudence, not paranoia.

The wild exaggerations uttered by Rutte and his like act against such prudence. By suggesting that a few incursions by Russian (unarmed) drones and aircraft flying over the sea (not, as Rutte claims “over Estonia”) mean that “we are already at war with Russia”, Western security and officials perilously blur the critical distinction between real war and the sort of limited, non-lethal “hybrid” actions that Western countries too have frequently employed (we should remember in this context that by far the greatest act of sabotage in recent European history, the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, was carried out against Russia). If, God forbid, people like Rutte ever do lead us into real war with Russia, we will all come to understand that difference very well indeed.

The “axis of authoritarianism” isn’t real and it never was.

Since its creation in 1949, NATO has been the keystone of U.S. foreign policy in Europe.  Indeed, the alliance has been the most important feature of Washington’s overall strategy of global primacy.  America’s political and policy elites have embraced two key assumptions and continue to do so.  One is that NATO is essential to the peace and security of the entire transatlantic region and will remain so for the indefinite future.  The other sacred assumption is that the alliance is highly beneficial to America’s own core security and economic interests.

ACURA’s James W. Carden spoke this week with Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

***

JC: I’d like to start with your thoughts about the new National Security Strategy (NSS). It seems to me that there was some good stuff and some not-so-good stuff in there. I’m curious to get your overall take and then maybe we can drill down a little bit….

PK: The thing about it is that the Trump administration is quite schizophrenic. They’ve got bonafide neocons and then they’ve got the MAGA base, which wants to not only avoid Forever Wars, but wants to avoid overseas involvements.

It is very concerned about what’s going on in the Caribbean now, and very concerned about Trump’s blind support for Israel. But if you look at the NSS, it makes clear that the US is going to remain the world’s hegemonic power. It’s very clear we’re going to be the strongest militarily and economically. If you look at it, a new Monroe doctrine, that’s not what the MAGA base wants. They don’t want a new Monroe doctrine with the US intervening repeatedly Latin America like we used to do. 

But where the NSS is somewhat positive is in its criticism of the Europeans for their policies toward Ukraine.

JC: The NSS also talks about the Indo-Pacific, can we talk a bit about that?

PK: The NSS does talk about the US policy in the Indo-Pacific in a more honest way than most American leaders have. Biden said on four occasions that the US would come to Taiwan’s rescue militarily—but as Admiral Davidson said a few years ago, most US forces are 5,000 miles away. It would take the US three weeks to get there. The US depends upon Japan and South Korea to get there first. In the event of war, the US military gets operational control over the South Korean military, so not only are there the 28,500 American troops, there’s a vast South Korean military that can be deployed. 

But the overall picture is that the US is going to maintain its hegemony. What it wants is empire on the cheap. So Trump says, we want the Europeans and the Asians to spend 5% of GDP on their militaries so that the US doesn’t have all that responsibility.

Even though the NSS criticizes NATO and criticizes the Europeans over Ukraine. Trump, I think, sincerely, would like to end the war in Ukraine, not only to get the Nobel Peace Prize that he so covets. But Trump does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter what he does in terms of Ukraine or for the other conflicts that he says he settled. We see the fighting going on between Thailand and Cambodia breaking out again, the Middle East is not resolved. The Indians are furious about his claims that he settled that conflict.

JC: Armenians I’ve spoken to are furious about the deal that they’ve made with regard to the Zzi corridor. They’re very unhappy about it.

PK: So the good things are in a sense that he says that he wants to end the war in Ukraine and he is very critical of the Europeans, as am I, as are their own publics. Have you seen the latest approval ratings for the European leaders?

Merz’s approval ratings now are 23%. The second leading hawk, Starmer is at 19%, but Macron’s approval ratings are between 11 and 15%. Meloni’s are at 36%, Zelensky who just a few months ago was at 67% is now down below 20% thanks to the latest negotiations and the corruption scandal. You know that Putin’s approval ratings are over 80%. 

JC: So Trump looks pretty good in comparison because last I saw Trump was at 38 or something like that…Anyway, the NSS is a puzzling document because like you say, they’re trying to  square a circle: If you start your document off by saying it’s a Jeffersonian policy that we’re after— a predisposition to non-intervention—and then you proclaim a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and you’re basically declaring, as you say, hegemonic ambitions from the Caribbean to the Indo-Pacific. That doesn’t seem to non-interventionist to me….

PK: No, it’s not, but look at it. Vance had foreshadowed some if this already in his speech in Munich last February where he criticized the Europeans for undermining democracy. This new NSS also echoes Vance in that regard, and calls for supporting the patriotic parties, meaning the extreme right-wing parties in Europe.

The European stuff is really bizarre. 

He talks about civilizational in Europe, and he talks about the impact that immigration is having in undermining European democracy and Europe’s sense of direction at this point. He’s obsessed. The immigration stuff is such an obsession. I mean, you can understand it in the United States, and you can understand it somewhat in Europe. Yeah, the US policy in Latin America and Central America specifically ensures that desperate people are going to want to come to the United States. 

But the US played a part in all this: Back in the eighties, the Reagan policy in Central America supporting all these right-wing governments and death squads destroyed any chance that the Latin Americans would have to rebuild their economies and prosper. I mean, so many Syrians and Afghans and others refugees are largely a result of US policy, whether it’s Timber Sycamore or the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which drove those refugee flows.

The thing that concerns me is if a million North African or Middle Eastern refugees can create such strong fascist movements in Europe, what’s going to be the effect when we’ve got billions of climate refugees escaping from parts of Africa and Asia later this century? I’m not going to be around to see it, but I am terrified at what the prospect is going to be, and so one of the things that Trump says in this NSS, is that we’re going to get away from dealing with issues like global warming. But the thing about being a pathological narcissist is you not only don’t care about the past, you don’t care about the future. Trump doesn’t see beyond himself and his family, his immediate circle.

JC: The other parts of the NSS that stuck out at me was the reference to the Golden Dome and the references to AI which were sort of like, this is something that we need to harness and encourage. I look at AI and see something on the order of a nuclear danger. In other words, I think our policy towards AI should be non-proliferation, stop feeding this beast. What do you think?

PK: Yes, I agree that we need strict regulation of AI. If you leave this in the hands of the tech bros and the billionaires, it could be a disaster. I mean, one of the things that I’m glad is that there seems to be some recognition to not let AI into the chain of command when it comes to nuclear command and control. As you know, we’ve averted several World War III scenarios because there  were human beings in the chain who intervened to stop launching retaliatory strikes based on faulty radar intelligence. (see, for eg., https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/19919-national-security-archive-doc-21-william-odom) 

So AI worries me a lot. And the Golden Dome is another loony idea because it’s so much easier to overwhelm these missile defense systems with decoys, you can’t shoot ’em all down. We say it’s hitting a bullet with a bullet, but it’s hitting a bullet and all these decoys too. Also, it is a waste, another waste of more than a couple hundred billion dollars, and then the cost overruns always skyrocket. So it’s a fantasy. It’s an illusion just like it was when Reagan proposed Star Wars, it’s an illusion now.

JC: Over the past couple of weeks, you can see from certain stories published by the mainstream media about Ukraine that reality is now starting to slowly dawn on these people. Ukraine is corrupt. Well, that’s not news to people like you and me. Ukraine is not doing so well on the ground. That’s also not news. Ukraine has a population problem, also not news, but all of the sudden now we’re seeing stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, and amazingly the Telegraph (because Britain has the worst, most irresponsible media in the West) that things aren’t as rosy as the American people have been led to believe. With regard to Ukraine, what is your sense? We’re getting reports now that Russia is making gains slowly in the east, while Ukraine is having trouble fielding and raising an army.

PK: Yeah, I know they’re picking up people off the streets and forcing them to serve. We know that morale is very low and the desertion rates among Ukrainian troops is very, very high. They’re just totally outmanned, outgunned, out-strategized at this point. The New York Times just had a very extensive article about the extent—and also how close to the corruption scandal Zelensky is; how he has intervened to try to dismantle or weaken the agencies that try to monitor corruption. When Yermak resigned, that was a real sign of a significant problem. Even if Zelensky is not personally implicated, everybody around him has been implicated.

Plus, as you say, the support for Ukraine was based on several myths. The first myth is that it was a full scale Russian invasion, which it wasn’t for a long time. The second myth is that it was unprovoked. How many times have we read about an unprovoked invasion? It was the most highly provoked invasion imaginable going back to 2013-14; the third myth was that if we kept on giving enough support, Ukraine could win on the battlefield and claw back the territory that Russia had taken. That hasn’t been possible. We’ve known this for more than two years already, but they repeated it constantly. Then the last huge myth to me is that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, it’s going to gobble up one piece of Europe after another.

That is not what this is about. 

That is not Putin’s mindset. If Putin has this much difficulty gaining more than 20% of Ukraine in four years, does he really want to take on NATO? Even if the US security guarantee is not ironclad, this is not what Russia needs and it’s not what the Russian people want. 

I was in Russia in April. I spoke to hundreds of Russian people. And what I heard was that they all wanted the war to end either on principle, because they hated war, or because they were weary of the war. They were not critical of Putin because they thought that Russia was forced into this position, but they were very ready and eager for this to end, even if Russia has to make some compromises that many of the leaders don’t want to see.

But I also know from friends of mine who have spoken to Putin recently that Putin sees himself as a kind of in the middle here. He’s got nationalists and hawks to his right who think he should be much more aggressive. It’s not just Medvedev—there are a lot of others who are putting pressure on Putin to be much more aggressive. 

JC: So one last question. How do you see this thing ending? My own guess is that this goes on through the the spring and summer of next year. Russia finally frees the rest of the Donbas and then they call it a day. I don’t foresee any big push to Odessa or anything like that. How do you see this thing wrapping up?

PK: Yesterday was December 7th Pearl Harbor Day. When I look at the world and I see the rearming of Japan and Germany and them being so hawkishly aggressive again, I wanted to cite something that Khrushchev said, something he explained to an American journalist some years ago during the 1960s. He said, 

…I can understand how Americans look at Germany somewhat differently than the way we do. We have a much longer history with Germany. We’ve seen how quickly governments in Germany can change and how easy it is for Germany to become an instrument of mass murder. It’s hard for us even to count the number of our people who were killed by Germany in the last war. We have a saying here, give a German a gun, sooner or later he’ll point it at Russians. This is not just my feeling. I don’t think there’s anything the Russian people feel more strongly about than the question of the armament of Germany.

You like to think in the United States that we have no public opinion. Don’t be so sure about this on the matter of Germany. Our people have very strong ideas. I don’t think that any government here could survive if it tried to go against it. I told this to one of your American governors, and he said he was surprised that the Soviet Union, with all his atomic bombs and missiles, would fear Germany. I told your governor that he missed the point. Of course, we could crush Germany in a few minutes, but what we fear is the ability of an armed Germany to commit the United States by its own actions. We fear the ability of Germany to start a world atomic war. What puzzles me more than anything else is that the Americans don’t realize there’s a large group in Germany that is eager to destroy the Soviet Union.”

How many times do you have to be burned by fire before you respect fire? And I think that’s still true. I mean, I look at [German Chancellor] Merz and the things he says and what he’s doing, and it’s frightening to me. 

Just a few weeks ago, Sergey Naryshkin who is the head of the Russian SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency, said that this is the most fragile moment for international security since World War II. And he’s right.

Trump is not big on follow-up. He is interested far more in signing or touting anything he can label as a peace agreement, regardless of its effectiveness. He is likely to value anything new on Ukraine or Iran more than the work required to bring real peace to Gaza.

At the heart of the public debate over the latest twists and turns in the Trump administration’s ongoing discussions with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators is a fundamental moral question on which there is no consensus: Is it wrong to seek a compromise to end the war in Ukraine? To judge from the anguished reactions to the leak of the White House’s “28-point plan”—which was not really a plan so much as a rough snapshot in time of what US negotiators thought might bridge the gaps between Ukrainian and Russian demands—much of the Western commentariat believes the answer is yes.