American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Vice President JD Vance is the first sitting vice president since George HW Bush to serve during wartime. And at a commencement speech at the US Naval Academy’s 2025 Commissioning Ceremony, Vance delivered a coup de grace to the outdated yet still dangerous notions of American unipolarity that have animated US foreign policy for the past thirty plus years.

Today, many strategists in Washington are talking about Kissinger’s adroit diplomatic maneuver. administration supporters hope Donald Trump can orchestrate a so-called “reverse Kissinger,” wooing Russia away from China.

One of the mysteries of the Ukraine endgame is that President Donald Trump did not issue an executive order on January 20 withdrawing all support for Ukraine. That would have been the easiest way to end the war. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced that Germany, and perhaps other Western allies, would be removing range restrictions on Western-supplied missiles to Ukraine.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz inaugurated a groundbreaking German brigade in Lithuania that is meant to help protect NATO’s eastern flank and declared Thursday that “the security of our Baltic allies is also our security” as worries about Russian aggression persist.

Russia has established escalation dominance in Ukraine in November 2024 by raising the bar on the military capabilities it is willing to use. Merz’s comments on western cruise missile use haven’t changed that calculus and, instead, have illustrated his weakness.

Peace negotiations often appear stalled due to public posturing, but real progress happens quietly through back channels. Diplomatic theater—like symbolic disputes—masks ongoing bargaining. War and diplomacy coexist until both sides reach exhaustion or shifting interests favor peace. Ultimately, peace emerges when those profiting from war see more gain in its end.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday, May 26, that Germany, along with Ukraine’s other key Western backers, had lifted range restrictions on weapons they send to Kyiv to fight against Russia. Merz, who took office early this month, also vowed that “we will do everything in our power to continue supporting Ukraine, including militarily,” in close coordination with other supporters.

German journalist Patrik Baab explains the origins and current reality of the Ukraine crisis.

While tariffs make wars more likely, embargoes make wars difficult to avoid. Senator Lindsey Graham’s Sanctioning Russia Act calls for 500% tariffs on dozens of countries and essentially amounts to an embargo.

The freethinking Soviet dissidents who tried, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, to make space in their society for opinions and activities not authorized by the ruling Communist Party included a few genuine giants, most notably the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many others remain largely unknown, but dozens of them appear in Benjamin Nathans’s history of the dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. In the struggles they waged for more than twenty years against a repressive dictatorship and its relentless political police force, the KGB, they won no memorable victories. Only the transformations of Soviet society initiated or permitted in the 1980s by a new and unexpected leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, brought the liberalization they had long advocated.

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, its surprisingly strong economy has enabled the government to continuously replenish its military forces without implementing unpopular mass mobilization.

It is an inevitable right of passage in Washington: every outgoing administration’s senior officials have a chance to shake off the loss, find a golden sinecure, and then start crafting the narrative that they prefer, rather than the history that exists.

Doug Macgregor talks with the Deep Dive podcast on Trump’s delusions of leverage over Russia.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia and Ukraine will “immediately” begin ceasefire negotiations, President Donald Trump said Monday after separate calls with the leaders of both countries meant to spur progress toward ending the three-year war. The conversations did not appear to yield a major breakthrough.

Theodore Roosevelt said: “Speak softly but carry a large stick.” European leaders are doing the opposite yet offended when not invited to Russo-Ukraine negotiations. Instead, and from the side lines, Europeans have been insisting that Russia accepts ceasefire conditions that neither they nor the Americans have the political or the military means to impose. So, it’s no surprise that Russians continue patiently to insist on their own conditions, nor that Americans may be slowly coming round to Russia’s position. Yet European leaders are affronted. Why?

President Donald Trump announced he’ll be speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin — and then with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly after — as he looks to broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine.