America just skipped December’s NATO foreign ministers’ meeting. That’s a first in over two decades. Part of the reason is the alliance’s irrelevance to President Donald Trump’s personalized, high-stakes peace negotiation to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Another is likely the administration’s weariness over Europe’s anemic defense spending. The alliance’s current 2 percent of GDP benchmark has long been a source of transatlantic friction. It is also a dangerously simplistic metric that measures inputs, not outputs.  

The benchmark quantifies treasure, not strategic capability, and overlooks one of the most critical (and undervalued) contributions allies can make: maritime power—specifically, commercial sealift capacity. There is a solution. 

Future major conflicts won’t be won by fighter jets and armored brigades alone. Logistics will be the deciding factor. The ability to transport and sustain forces across oceans will be decisive.  

In this crucial domain, NATO faces a quiet but catastrophic deficit. A European conflict, such as defending the Baltic states from a Russian attack, would require a sealift operation on a scale not seen since World War II.  

The logistical backbone of the “Arsenal of Democracy” has atrophied. The U.S. Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Force (RRF), the core of America’s strategic sealift capacity, consists of a few dozen aging, steam-powered vessels, with an average age approaching 50 years. Their readiness is questionable, and the crews needed to man them are in short supply. Across Europe, the picture is similarly bleak, with national fleets having dwindled for decades. 

The Trump administration has recognized the parlous state of America’s shipbuilding and announced plans to revive the yards to rebuild the U.S. merchant marine. As my colleagues at the Hoover Institution recently concluded in The Arsenal of Democracy, “In our estimation, the U.S. military’s logistics system is the single weakest link in U.S. deterrence. The U.S. maritime logistics system is in dire condition in terms of its number of ships, its number of personnel, and its surge capacity.” Yet even on an optimistic schedule, new hulls, trained mariners, and expanded yard capacity are a generational project, not a quick fix for the next Baltic or Taiwan crisis.  

This decline contrasts sharply with China’s meteoric rise. Beijing is not just building a world-class blue-water navy; it is solidifying its dominance across the entire maritime domain. China is the world’s largest shipbuilder, accounting for nearly 50 percent of global output in 2023, while the U.S. languishes with less than 1 percent. China has the world’s second-largest commercial fleet, and its national security laws explicitly integrate this fleet into the state’s military strategy, mandating that many new ships be built to military specifications. In a crisis, Beijing can call upon a vast, state-directed logistical armada. What about NATO? 

This is where the strategic myopia of the 2 percent rule becomes most apparent. Consider Greece. The Hellenic Republic is one of the few NATO members that consistently exceeds the 2 percent spending target. In 2023, it spent around 3.76 percent of GDP, then the highest in the Alliance. Driven by regional security challenges, this commitment equips NATO with a formidable, modernizing military in the vital Eastern Mediterranean. Yet this figure fails to capture Greece’s most profound contribution to Western security. 

Greece is a maritime superpower. Greek shipowners control over 20 percent of the world’s commercial shipping tonnage and nearly 60 percent of the European Union’s fleet. This includes thousands of strategically vital vessels: crude oil tankers, LNG carriers, and bulk carriers essential for transporting fuel, grain, and heavy equipment. The Greek-flagged fleet is among the largest and most modern in the world. It is crewed by a deep pool of experienced personnel from the Hellenic Merchant Marine—a human capital asset nearly impossible to replicate. 

This is not merely a private-sector resource. Under long-standing principles of maritime law and national statutes, Athens can requisition Greek-flagged vessels into state service during wartime or national emergency. These ships are a de facto strategic reserve. In a kinetic conflict, Athens could, by law, mobilize a transport and logistics fleet dwarfing the dedicated sealift capacity of the entire NATO alliance combined. 

The potential is staggering. Imagine Europe’s reinforcement in a crisis. While the U.S. struggles to activate its handful of aging Ready Reserve Force ships, Greece could mobilize hundreds of modern vessels, providing tankers to fuel NATO’s air and ground assets, plus bulk carriers to transport munitions, supplies, and follow-on forces. This is not a theoretical capability; it is a tangible, legally accessible asset that addresses NATO’s greatest logistical vulnerability. 

Maritime capacity must be formally recognized and credited within NATO’s burden-sharing framework. NATO should devise a formula that allows maritime nations like Greece—and others such as Norway, with their significant fleets—to count a portion of the value of their requisitionable commercial tonnage toward their defense contributions. 

This is not an accounting trick or a ruse for allies to evade their responsibilities. On the contrary, it is a call for a more sophisticated, strategically relevant accounting for burdensharing. The current value of Greece’s 3.1 percent contribution would be even more significant in real terms, given its latent logistical power.  

Acknowledging this would do two things: first, it would give a more accurate picture of an ally’s actual contribution to collective defense. Second, and more importantly, it would incentivize the behavior the alliance desperately needs. By crediting the strategic value of national-flagged fleets, NATO would encourage member states to repatriate ships to their own flags, rather than “flagging out” to registries in Panama or Liberia. It would also incentivize investment in mariner training programs and the maintenance of strong legal frameworks for vessel requisition. 

Additionally, it would validate the core national security rationale for maritime cabotage rules, such as America’s Jones Act. These laws, often criticized in peacetime as mere protectionism, are designed precisely to ensure a nation retains a domestic fleet and experienced mariners for a national emergency. By formally valuing this capability, NATO would acknowledge a tangible contribution to the alliance’s collective security. 

History offers clear and costly precedents for the decisive role of commercial fleets. In World War II, Norway’s contribution was indispensable. When Germany invaded in 1940, Norway had the world’s fourth-largest merchant fleet. The Norwegian government-in-exile established the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission, or Nortraship, placing the fleet at the Allies’ disposal. These ships and their brave crews created a transatlantic lifeline, transporting fuel, food, and war materiel. Their contribution was so vital that Winston Churchill said they were worth more than a million soldiers. This came at a staggering cost: nearly 500 Nortraship vessels were sunk, and over 3,000 Norwegian sailors perished, but their sacrifice was instrumental to Allied victory. 

More recently, during the 1982 Falklands War, the United Kingdom’s rapid victory was enabled by the requisition of over 50 commercial vessels—“Ships Taken Up From Trade” (STUFT)—including the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, to transport troops and supplies 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic. 

Skeptics will argue that valuing such a contribution is complex. In 2016, I argued for in-kind donations for cyber defense and an “Erasmus Brigade” to defend NATO countries’ networks and data. Is this proposal any more complex than weighing cyber defense expertise or intelligence sharing? Defense economists can readily develop a credible methodology based on deadweight tonnage, vessel type, age, and readiness. A modern LNG carrier, available on 30 days’ notice, is a quantifiable strategic asset. Its value to the alliance in a crisis is arguably far greater than an equivalent dollar amount spent on legacy equipment. 

The 2-percent target—growing to a 5-percent benchmark by 2035—was designed to ensure the Alliance has the capabilities it needs. If NATO treats the benchmark as sacrosanct, it risks ignoring the very capabilities that could determine victory or defeat.  

The nature of warfare is changing, and the geostrategic landscape is being reshaped on the high seas. NATO, a fundamentally maritime alliance, must adapt its thinking. Recognizing the immense, untapped power of the Greek merchant marine—and that of its other shipping powerhouses—is the first, most logical step.  

The strength of the alliance is not just in its budgets but in its collective resources. Hulls in the water, ready to serve the cause of freedom, are a resource we can no longer afford to leave off the ledger. 

The post NATO’s Myopic Accounting Ignores Maritime Superpower Greece  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before Donald Trump began his second term, we knew he was a hypocrite on crime. He has posed as a law-and-order champion while being a criminal convicted of fraud and found by a jury liable for sexual assault—and overseeing a business convicted of fraud. In his first term as well as his second, he violated established procedures when pardoning unrepentant criminals without proper vetting, some of whom violated the law again. But Trump’s hypocrisy on crime is most jarring when it involves drug trafficking. As I wrote last June during the 2024 campaign, during his first term, Trump proposed giving drug dealers the death penalty, then three months later, he commuted the life sentence of cocaine trafficker Alice Marie Johnson.  

The African-American grandmother was a cause célèbre on the left—a personification of what’s wrought by mandatory minimum sentences and whose freedom was sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Kim Kardashian. Still, she spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, then, about two months before the election, Trump pardoned her. In turn, few contemporaneously complained about Trump’s crass attempt to woo Black voters. But it was a sign that Trump’s anti-drug tirades were insincere. 

An even clearer sign appeared in May 2024, when Trump stumped at the Libertarian Party convention by promising to free Ross Ulbricht, who was serving two life sentences for facilitating over a million drug deals through his Silk Road website. Libertarians—who, unlike Trump, support broad drug legalization—had been vigorously campaigning for Ulbricht’s release.  Once again, Trump was trading the freedom of a drug dealer—the sort of person he claims to believe deserves the death penalty—to win votes.  

The transactional offer appears to have worked. The 2024 Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver was shunned some of his own party leaders for eschewing anti-transgender rights policies among other issues, and the party chair openly opined for Trump’s victory. Oliver’s vote share was about one-third of his 2020 predecessor, as Libertarian voters presumably gravitated to Trump. Trump followed through on his convention promise and then some, issuing a full pardon to Ulbricht on his second day back in office.  

Coincidentally, one month after Trump addressed the Libertarian convention, Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for using the presidency of Honduras to, in the words of a federal prosecutor, “facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States…” As reported by The New York Times, “The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández ‘a two-faced politician hungry for power’ who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers.” 

This is the same Hernández whom, on Friday, Trump said he would pardon. 

Trump announced in a social media post that also endorsed Hernández’s ally Tito Asfura in this weekend’s Honduran presidential election. On Sunday, he asserted without evidence that Hernández was framed by a “Biden administration setup.” 

A pardon for Hernández (which doesn’t appear to have been formally issued yet) would be the most glaring and disturbing act of hypocrisy by Trump, especially after 21 military strikes on boats in waters off Central and South America, killing at least 83 people who appeared to be unarmed. Trump has asserted the crews were “narco-terrorists” and “combatants” subject to military force, but has not provided evidence. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have scaled back their intelligence sharing from the region with the U.S., since they don’t want to be accomplices to illegal murders. 

Even some congressional Republicans are expressing concerns that the strikes amount to war crimes following a Washington Post report that on September 2, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to kill all crew members of a boat off Trinidad. This prompted a second missile strike after the first left two survivors. The Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a joint statement announcing they have “directed inquiries” regarding “alleged follow-on strikes” to the Department of Defense. Their House counterparts released a similar statement. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CBS’s Face the Nation, “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act.” (On Sunday, Trump aboard Air Force One the president said of Hegseth’s alleged order: “He said he did not say that and I believe him.”) 

But while any spoken order to kill unarmed individuals could put Hegseth at legal risk, let’s not forget that the drug boat strikes are of dubious legality, and Trump’s commitment to them is bone-chilling. 

Presidents often feel compelled to issue military orders killing foreigners, such as to prevent a terrorist attack. Whether any order is truly necessary or legally executed can be debated. But in nearly every case involving previous presidents, the national security concern was genuine or at least plausible. While interdiction is a long-standing way of preventing drugs from entering the country, drug trafficking is not such a severe national security threat that warrants military force risking the murder of innocents who never got due process.  

Even as a crass political matter, Trump’s rationale is inexplicable. One can understand why Trump pardoned Johnson and Ulbricht to peel off African-American and Libertarian votes. But what political profit does Trump reap from killing Latin American boaters? He can’t run for a third term, despite what his merch says. There’s no reason to believe a drug interdiction effort would influence the 2026 midterm election when voters will likely prioritize the cost-of-living. And, as Trump knows well, there are ways to distract voters without deadly force. The boat strikes seem an attempt to paint Venezuela as a narcostate and justify ousting President Nicolás Maduro. While Maduro is no saint, Trump has no more political or moral duty to oust him than the dictators he embraces. 

Perhaps there’s more to Trump’s missile strikes than they appear. But based on what we can see, it seems murderously depraved. It’s sickeningly hypocritical: Trump’s plans to pardon a real narcostate president prosecuted by a Justice Department team that included one of his top lawyers (unlikely to have taken part in a Biden “setup”), and convicted by a U.S. jury.  

Comparing presidential scandals can be a fraught exercise. But a president killing boaters on specious claims of “narcoterrorism” while pardoning major drug traffickers is a scandal bloodier than Watergate. 

The post Trump’s Murderous Hypocrisy on Drug Trafficking Is Bone-Chilling  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A month after President Donald Trump abruptly ended trade talks with Canada over an anti-tariff ad featuring former President Ronald Reagan, the two countries have yet to resume negotiations. 

Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he’ll restart talks “when it’s appropriate,” telling Reuters that “he did not have a pressing issue to address with President Donald Trump.” Instead, Carney has been courting US rivals China and India to lessen Canada’s dependence on the United States, and the country has set a goal of doubling its non-US exports by 2035, according to the Washington Post.

The rift between America and its ally to the north is “the worst in modern history,” says former US Ambassador to Canada James Blanchard. And it’s no wonder. Trump has threatened to annex Canada as the “51^st state,” and mocked former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its “governor.” He’s blamed the country for flooding America with fentanyl and illegal immigrants, though neither charge bears resemblance to reality. And he’s levied punitive tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, among other exports, all the while accusing Canada of “cheating” on trade. 

Canadians, meanwhile, have rallied to the cry of “Elbows Up” and boycotted American products. Canada-US travel is down by nearly a third compared to a year ago, resulting in billions of dollars for US companies. They also elected Carney this spring, in part for his anti-Trump views, and rejected Trump-lite conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre, who also lost his seat in Parliament. 

Even after Trump’s eventual departure from office, these wounds will be hard to heal, says Blanchard, who served as Ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton. Blanchard also served two terms as governor of Michigan and four terms in Congress. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: You were the U.S. Ambassador to Canada during the Clinton administration—in fact, during the ratification of NAFTA, which was incredibly crucial time in the relationship between our countries. And before then, you served two terms as governor of Michigan, a state that also has deep ties to Canada. How would you characterize the current state of US-Canada relations, especially as compared to what you experienced as ambassador?

Amb. Blanchard:  US relations with Canada are the worst in modern history, and there’s no one who has studied it that would disagree with what I’ve said, especially the Canadians. It’s tragic. It’s not just trade disputes, it’s the rhetoric of the president—whether he wants to refer to them as the “51st state” or to say they’re nasty or, you know, Vice President Vance saying the Canadians have treated us very badly these last few decades. He hasn’t even lived long enough to know that. Or Howard Lutnick’s foolish statements. It’s the tone and the attitude which has Canadians losing total faith in us and wondering what’s going on in the United States.

I do a lot of Canadian interviews, and I mentioned to Canadians that most Americans consider Canada our best friend and ally and partner, and they should disregard the rhetoric from the top. 

Garrett Epps: I think a lot of people in this country got a kick out of the elections in Canada and the idea that the slogan was “Elbows Up”—which of course Americans didn’t know what it meant until then. But the question is whether “Elbows Up” is going to work for Canada in the long term, and whether they really can withstand what’s coming at them. We have a situation where a president, if he doesn’t like a commercial on TV, tries to slap a 10 percent tariff on all your goods. The United States is obviously economically much more powerful than Canada. How is this going to play out?

Amb. Blanchard:  Well, it’s hard to know. Let me backtrack just one moment, though, to say relations were very good during the Clinton years. The Canadians didn’t know him when he got elected, and they were a little worried he was a Southerner. And they really liked Bush and Reagan. But their natural inclination is to be liberal, and once they got to know Clinton, they loved him. So it was great being his ambassador there. We dealt with NAFTA, we dealt with Open Skies, we dealt with the Quebec referendum. It was a critical time, and Clinton was fabulous. It was probably the golden era now that we look back. 

By the way, I love the Reagan commercial. And I think if they don’t get a deal, they ought to start playing it again in some key markets because that obviously was getting the Republicans in Congress rattled. 

We have an integrated economy with Canada. It’s not just autos. It’s energy, it’s agriculture, it’s steel and aluminum, it’s everything. And we actually have a surplus on trade with Canada on almost everything really except energy. And we need that energy. We’re the largest producer of crude oil on the planet now, but our refineries can’t use our new light crude, so we export it.

Our refineries are set up for Canadian heavy crude, so we’re dependent on Canada for energy. Canada could cause power outages in New England if they pulled Hydro-Quebec back. So they have cards to play, but they don’t want to do that. I mean, they’re 10 percent of our population. We simply have a lot more leverage than they do, and that makes it hard.

Anne Kim: What has been the impact of the tariffs on the Canadian economy? My understanding is that the Canadian economy is actually suffering fairly badly and that U.S. automakers are beginning to move production out of Canada back into the United States. What is the impact you’re seeing and is that going to affect the strategy long term for Canadians?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, I think it’s causing inflation in Canada and here, despite what the president says. There may be some movement from Canada to the U.S. There’s always shuffling back and forth. But when you have a totally integrated economy in terms of parts and suppliers, as well as assembly, a lot is still going to happen in Canada.

I don’t think you’re going to see any auto company wanting to build a new plant in the United States at the expense of Canada, because it takes several years, and the president, Mr. Trump, is not going to be there. It’s hard to believe any future president would be so foolish to deal with our number one customer that way. It’s just unrealistic. We’re too integrated.

And that’s not going to change. Geography is not going to change. Manufacturing is changing, but the major reason for the reduction in auto workers has been automation and to some degree bad management. It wasn’t nearly as much trade.

Garrett Epps: For all of the negative effects, Trump has really benefited some people. For example, Jimmy Kimmel, I think, is extremely grateful to the president. And another one might be Mark Carney, who was considered not to be a very strong candidate until Trump decided to involved himself in Canadian affairs. How do you rate his performance as prime minister in dealing with what is obviously a very serious crisis for that country?

Amb. Blanchard: It’s hard to find fault. “Steady as you go” is probably his motto, and I think that’s what Canada needs to do—not overreact to every little thing that comes up. It’s true he would not be prime minister but for Trump’s attacks on Canada. The Liberal Party last December was slated for a major defeat, and whoever was going to succeed Trudeau in the Liberal Party was going to lose by 20 points. 

But then Mr. Trump started attacking Canada and making jokes, saying they’re a national security threat—which of course is baloney—and all these other stupid remarks. Then Mark Carney gets the nomination at the Liberal Convention and his numbers just skyrocket. 

I don’t think there would have been a Liberal prime minister in Canada, but for Trump’s craziness. How’s he doing? He’s got a weak hand actually, just because we’re 10 times bigger, but I think he’s doing okay. I’m not sure I would have apologized, however privately, about the Reagan commercial because [Ontario Premier] Doug Ford has been his ally.

On the other hand, if they don’t get an agreement, they could start running that ad in New York and Florida and Texas and all over. It’s devastating, and they know it. I almost wish they would, but I think wiser minds say to let things cool off. 

The problem is that we have people around Trump who feed him so much misinformation. It’s crackpot economics. Trump is still out there trying to tell people that other countries pay the tariffs when of course we pay the tariffs as consumers.

He’s also still trying to act like Canada is a national security threat, which nobody believes. Or that the European Union was formed to take advantage of the U.S., which of course is not true. So, we have a problem.

Garrett Epps: Well, imagine what the trade situation would be today if the Blue Jays had won the series. 

Amb. Blanchard: Trump would have gone crazy. He would have called up the commissioner and asked him to remove the Blue Jays from the MLB. He would have gone nuts.

Garrett Epps: Exactly. He’d also ask for a recount. He’d say, you know, they counted the runs wrong.

Amb. Blanchard: It’s sad. It’s humorous. It’s tragic. I tell Canadians, you feel bad? What do you think we feel here in the United States? We have a guy who is not well. And even when he was well, he was acting crazy all the time. He doesn’t speak for us.

Anne Kim: How do you see the end game for the trade relationship, at least with the US and Canada? During his first term in office, Trump renegotiated NAFTA into what’s now USMCA, the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. That agreement expires in 2036 unless the three countries agree to extend it next year for an additional 16 year period. Given everything that’s happening, what’s your expectation about the fate of those negotiations next year and the USMCA in general?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, no one really knows. The responsible officials, including our trade rep, know better. But it’s the whims of the people who prod Mr. Trump that are the problem. I think they’ll settle down and get what is a similar agreement to what they currently have. I think they will cite some U.S. auto companies who say they’re expanding in the U.S. And they’ll announce several billions of dollars of investment that he will hold up as a major victory, even though they probably were going to make those investments anyway. And we’ll get back to what I hope will be the normal trading relationship, which is very positive and very productive.

The big thing would be for them to drop the tariffs on steel and aluminum currently because all that’s doing is adding costs to the auto companies and car prices. It’s totally unnecessary. 

Garrett Epps: Are these tariffs helping anybody in the United States? Let’s leave Canada for one side because supposedly, we’re America first. The tariffs, from what you said, are not helping the auto industry. Is anybody benefiting?

Amb. Blanchard: No, they’re not helping consumers or the auto companies at all. And they’re probably going to end up hurting the auto workers because sales will drop and then layoffs will occur. I have heard from respected sources that steel workers, perhaps in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, will gain some thousands of jobs. But that will be offset by hundreds of thousands of layoffs and increased costs elsewhere. It’s bad. 

But I think Trump has convinced himself these foreign countries actually pay the tariffs, not us. 

Anne Kim: What will it take to rebuild the US-Canada relationship? Will the departure of Trump be enough to flip a switch so we’re back to the way things were? And what would your advice be to the next president, assuming it’s not JD Vance and that the restoration of US-Canada relationship is one of their goals?

Amb. Blanchard: The next president is going to have to get on a plane right away and fly to Ottawa, and say, “We’re back.” Now, Biden tried to do that with Europe right after he won, but people were worried that he would be the aberration, not Trump. 

And unfortunately, Canadians and Europeans and all of our friends everywhere are saying they’re worried about the American voter. We can have the best president on the planet go up there in three years, and they’re going to say, “We believe you, we love you, we’re glad you’re back, but we’re still going to worry about your voters until we see some continuity here of policy.” They loved Biden, but it’s the voters they worry about. 

The post US-Canada Relations Have Hit Rock Bottom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

George P. Shultz, the late Secretary of State, regularly reminded me and my Hoover Institution colleagues that in diplomacy, “trust is the coin of the realm.” Trust is even more critical in intelligence sharing. Without it, even the most sophisticated satellites, signals intercepts, and cyber tools are just expensive toys.  

For decades, the Five Eyes alliance—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—has relied on trust as its currency across oceans and governments. Born of World War II code-breaking cooperation and formalized in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946, the network of English-speaking nations and bilingual Canada became the world’s most durable intelligence partnership, fusing shared values with shared secrets. But the trust account now looks overdrawn on our side of the ledger. The shortfall isn’t just an accounting technicality—it threatens the alliance’s utility and credibility. 

Washington’s trust deficit is partly self-inflicted. The 2023 Discord leaks, where an enlisted U.S. airman at a Massachusetts base shared classified Pentagon assessments on gaming servers, embarrassed national security institutions and exposed operational details about Ukraine’s defense. The American response has been predictable: tighten the aperture; stamp more reports NOFORN—no foreign dissemination. The label, meant for rare use, increasingly appears on frontline intelligence about Russia’s war against Ukraine, denying even the closest partners critical insights. Classification, once a scalpel, risks becoming a bludgeon. When everything is restricted, collaboration atrophies. 

British caution adds another strain. London has now completely suspended intelligence sharing in the Caribbean, asserting that the U.S. sinking boats off South America is illegal. Further, the U.K. might now be unwilling to believe anything American officials say following FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent broken promises to MI5 to protect a bureau operative in London who was helping counter Chinese surveillance. Such caution isn’t betrayal—it’s accountability. The message to Washington is unmistakable: British officials want clarity on operational intent and legal limits before reopening British intelligence’s legendary vault. 

Canada and New Zealand face their own reckonings. Ottawa has spent two years investigating credible allegations of Chinese interference in its elections. Wellington, with its economic dependence on Beijing and Pacific partnerships under scrutiny, calibrates every data exchange. Meanwhile, Australia, the southern anchor of Five Eyes, doubles down on defense integration through AUKUS—a trilateral pact with the U.K. and U.S. that strengthens cooperation on nuclear submarines and in emerging technologies—but must still soothe regional neighbors anxious about militarization in their backyard. 

Across the broader Pacific, the picture grows more complex. The Solomon Islands’ 2022 security pact with China and Fiji’s vacillation over maritime surveillance cooperation have complicated regional monitoring and raised alarms in Canberra and Wellington. In the Caribbean, overlapping efforts by U.S., U.K., and Canadian law enforcement struggle with intelligence deconfliction amid anti-narcotic operations around Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, testing the alliance’s ability to synchronize protocols across distant theaters when the U.S. acts unpredictably and, perhaps, possibly unlawfully by taking out boats. 

The breakdown in trust among these close English-speaking allies echoes in domestic divisions. As Washington increases power through expanded ICE operations and even the National Guard, it fosters suspicion and resistance among state and local officials. Across the country, officials and citizens worry that sharing data with the Department of Homeland Security or federal law enforcement could be used against vulnerable groups, enabling surveillance or enforcement actions that conflict with local values and priorities. This creates growing hesitation to cooperate—even on essential public services—because the fear of federal overreach undermines the mutual trust needed for information sharing, creating an environment similar to the “NOFORN” mentality that hampers allied cooperation. 

California stands at the front lines of this trust crisis. Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed SB 361, expanding state oversight of data brokers by requiring new disclosures about whether data is furnished to federal agencies and imposing stiff penalties for noncompliance. State leaders cited evidence of federal agencies skirting privacy laws by acquiring information on residents indirectly, raising fears that state-originated data could enable federal actions such as ICE raids or enforcement sweeps despite local opposition. The rollback of a data-sharing initiative designed to expand CalFresh food aid captured the impact: outreach ended not only because of funding constraints, but also because of apprehension that federally accessible data could undermine trust and harm California’s most vulnerable populations. California agencies and community organizations are reluctant to share much beyond the minimum, wary that federal scrutiny could turn collaboration into exposure. 

The stakes go well beyond bureaucratic boundaries. Transnational threats—ransomware gangs, fentanyl cartels, money-laundering syndicates—seize on gaps between jurisdictions. When allies hesitate to share, those gaps widen into avenues. Consider the FBI–Australian Federal Police’s 2021 ANOM sting: agents built a fake encrypted-device platform that criminal syndicates used for years, leading to over 800 arrests and major narcotics and weapons seizures. That success depended on precise, timely collaboration—showing that when trust is strong, five democratic eyes see clearly. 

Today, authoritarian rivals face no such coordination dilemmas. Russia and Iran have integrated battlefield intelligence in Ukraine, from drone production lines to jamming tactics. China expands technological and data-sharing ties with Russia and Pakistan, weaving its “Digital Silk Road” through surveillance networks and telecom infrastructure. Autocracies don’t answer to privacy commissioners or courts; they centralize, coordinate, and deploy. The West’s answer must never be to imitate consolidation, but to outpace it through lawful, verified trust. Voluntary suspension of sharing among democracies becomes an own goal. 

Domestic politics have worsened the situation. The Trump administration’s 2017 disclosure of highly classified Israeli-gathered intelligence to Russian officials inside the Oval Office shook allied confidence. Populist rhetoric that treats alliances as disposable or undermines faith in professional intelligence heightens suspicion even among friends. The result is corrosive: shared information now passes through more channels of doubt than it does through encryption firewalls. 

Repairing this breach requires no surrender of sovereignty. The United States can limit NOFORN use to exceptional cases while developing releasable intelligence tailored for coalition needs. Allies can establish more precise limits on secondary use, with auditable oversight and joint after-action reviews to ensure compliance. Public transparency—within reason—can restore faith that the machinery operates within law and purpose. 

Five Eyes became the gold standard not because its members always agreed, but because they trusted each other enough to argue without rupture. Allowing that collaboration to dissolve into three blind mice chasing shadows would be a historic self-inflicted wound. In a world where adversaries coordinate faster than democracies deliberate, seeing together is not a luxury. It is survival. 

The post Five Eyes Become Three Blind Mice appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump may have personally run exclusive clubs, but America, under his presidency, is dropping its membership in global clubs left and right. His administration recently severed our ties to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as well as other organizations where countries collaborate on addressing borderless challenges and opportunities. In the last week, the Trump administration has been absent from the COP 30 Climate Summit in Brazil. It has no plans to attend the upcoming G-20 meetings in South Africa, which will bring together the world’s largest economies. 

In this moment, as America retrenches from global leadership, cities and states need to step up and join as many multinational organizations as will have them. Whether staying in the Paris Agreement on climate or coordinating with global health organizations to head off the spread of bird flu, measles, and AIDS, subnational actors need to fill the vacuum Washington is creating. Moving fast and breaking things has consequences.  

In response, while the Trump administration withdraws from multilateral accords, international organizations, and global institutions, the U.S. federal system allows for individual states to fill the gap. States need to step up their global engagement in the face of American retrenchment, treaty nullification, and alliance abandonment to enhance America’s global posture and foster economic growth.  

This is not a new idea.  

During the first Trump administration, no sooner had the White House decided to withdraw from the Paris Accords than California, New York, and Washington formed the United States Climate Alliance and pledged to uphold their environmental obligations. Whether they enhance and align with the federal government or pursue policies that seek to maintain traditional alliance relations and established commercial, climate, and cultural ties, American states have the legal means and political incentives to engage in global relations. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is actively and assertively testing the case by seeking to expand strategic international trade relationships in light of the Trump tariffs. As Newsom puts it, “California is not Washington, D.C.” 

During the first Trump administration, American diplomats countered foreign countries’ anti-Trump narratives by quietly highlighting the independence of states and the nation’s broader policy pluralism. In global capitals critical of Trump’s policies, American embassies could push back and demonstrate that some of the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant states have maintained good foreign relations and favorable environments—in tourism, for students studying abroad, through independent energy policies, and a variety of COVID-19 mitigation measures.  

States also have strong brand equity. California is a highly respected global brand. Hollywood has seared the easy-going, free-spirited state’s sea, surf, and sun lifestyle into the worldwide imagination. And the state can bring its considerable wares to the global marketplace. For his part, Trump hasn’t hesitated to let the states loose on the world stage when it suits him. During the pandemic, his administration forced every state to fend for itself in a bidding battle to secure limited supplies of PPE and compete against each other for critical equipment on the global market. 

Every state has something to offer and a place to land. States matter. Oil-rich Texas, for instance, could consider joining OPEC+ to bring an American voice to the table and assert a role in the globalized energy market and transition. New York, the nation’s financial center, could seek admission to the World Bank and the IMF.  

In this light, the global economic powerhouse of California should be admitted into the G7, given that the state’s $4.1 trillion GDP and throw-weight are greater than those of five of the current members. 

California’s participation would be good for the state, the G7, and America. It would allow America’s foremost economic entity to represent the nation’s interests and explain economic trends, from AI and biotechnology to fintech and quantum computing. All from a state that is on the bleeding edge of technological and cultural development. California would be able to help shape policy and bring back to Washington early warnings about G7 plans in the offing 

There is some good news for California—a state that makes up around 20 percent of America’s GDP and would now be the world’s fourth-largest economy if it were a sovereign nation-state. The G7, made up of democracies that are economic powerhouses, already allows for “non-enumerated members”.  

Thanks to whiplash policy reversals by the Trump administration, the long-standing G7 organization is confronting a massive challenge to its survival and relevance. The dominant American voice, a strong American dollar, and traditionally stabilizing American economic policies have served as an anchor for the G7 to coordinate nations in developing stabilizing global financial policies, addressing geopolitical tensions, and issuing critical joint communiques.  

No more.  

No sooner had the previous Oval Office occupant moved out than the new occupant floated the idea that fellow G7 members have tariffs imposed on them, questioned their sovereignty (hello, Canada), and reasserted that Russia should rejoin the group and return it to a G8.  

Traditionally, these multilateral institutions have only admitted sovereign nations as members; however, there are exceptions in the multilateral universe where quasi-states are granted either observer or special status, making this concept neither new nor unique. Hong Kong and Macau, for example, are members of the WTO—despite not being sovereign entities. The United Nations and some of its specialized agencies allow non-state actors to participate as observers.  

These exceptions are not only valid on the global stage, but also within our own country. Entities that are territories are given special status in the Congress, within national political parties, and on the world stage (think Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and Washington, D.C.). These players are often referred to as subnational actors.  

Subnationals, whether sovereign or not, have a voice and enough independence to make a difference in the new, revised, and revisionist world order. Canada has been devolving its federal power to its native tribes, sovereign entities that reside within federal boundaries but are granted greater autonomy. State policies now need to reckon and reconcile with their unique status as assertive native councils pursue global energy policies and partners against Ottawa’s wishes. 

America is set up for its states to operate independently, thanks to the founders’ concepts of states’ rights via federalism. In recent history, Supreme Court decisions and administration actions have reinforced the importance of state independence and autonomy. From controversial healthcare issues like abortion to climate policy, states have been increasingly given a free hand at deciding how they will govern, with whom they will associate, and where to allocate their resources.  

Decades of globalization and the freer flow of capital, trade, people, and ideas have further devolved power from Washington, D.C., and given states more say, standing, and supremacy over their internal and international affairs as the Trump administration seeks to withdraw from international conventions, treaties, organizations, and overall engagement. 

Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., seems more concerned with quitting, renegotiating its relationship, or entirely undermining nearly every multilateral organization to which it is a party—and even some where it is not.  

Groucho Marx once said he would never want to belong to a club that would accept him, but California should be a member of a club that has not yet invited her. If the state joins, it will make the G7 club more appealing and maybe even more relevant than ever. 

The post Make California a G7 Member  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last week, U.S. Special Operations forces launched deadly strikes against two vessels in the Eastern Pacific off the coast of Colombia. The attacks, against what the Trump administration claimed were narcotics traffickers, represent an expansion of an aggressive new campaign the administration began in early September that had been limited to boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela.  

Efforts led by Senate Democrats to block the administration’s unauthorized military actions have themselves been blocked by Republican lawmakers. A broad range of experts in military use of force, including former George W. Bush justice official John “torture memos” Yoo, have said the strikes are illegal because the military is barred from targeting civilians not engaged in hostilities toward the United States, even if they are criminals. Previous administrations had dealt with drug trafficking vessels by boarding them, arresting their crews, and confiscating their contraband—actions that are permitted under international law.  

What exactly is the Trump administration’s goal with this deadly new policy? What are the risks and the chances of success? To learn more, I spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. defense and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.  

What do you think of these latest strikes in the Eastern Pacific? 

This is a significant escalation of this whole campaign of theirs. It’s unclear why they’re doing it. When it was limited to the Caribbean, I thought it was a pretext for military action against Venezuela. It wasn’t clear to me why they were doing that either, by the way. Maduro didn’t seem to bother Trump during his first administration. Why’s he bothering him in the second one? Payback for all the migrants? I don’t know. But at least we have a history of starting wars on pretexts that didn’t hold water. So, this would be in that tradition. 

But now, going after shipping in the Eastern Pacific, where Venezuela doesn’t have a coastline, but Colombia does, it’s clearly not just a Venezuela thing.  

On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the redeployment of a Navy aircraft carrier battle group from the Mediterranean to waters off the coast of Latin America to aid in this drug interdiction effort. What does that tell you? 

At a strategic level, it looks like Hegseth is beginning implementation of the new national defense strategy, which has not been publicly released, but its contents and thrust are starting to leak to the defense press. It basically codifies our policy of appeasing Russia and telling the Europeans you’re on your own—which I think everyone has seen for a while. Most people just attributed it to Trump’s unrequited love affair with Putin. But apparently, what is new in this strategy is that we’re now abandoning all our Asian allies as well. Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Australia—sounds like you guys are now on your own, and we’re going to retrench from the Pacific. The fig leaf, at least that I’ve heard, is, well, we’ll still be focused on countering China, but on their presence in Latin America. But the Chinese presence in Latin America is through trade, commerce, foreign aid, and diplomacy. It really has nothing to do with the military. China does not pose any military threat to the continental United States or to any nation in this hemisphere. So that’s a very thin fig leaf that you’re using to cover up your military retreat from both your allies in the East and your allies in the West. 

Well, the threat Hegseth identifies in Latin America is what he calls “narco-terrorism.” 

Calling these guys narco-terrorists is clearly perverting the definitions of terrorism and narco-trafficking to get around legal restrictions. These traffickers are criminals. They’re not terrorists. They’re not trying to overthrow the United States government. They have no ideology or religious purpose. They’re not enemy combatants. They’re not enemy soldiers. They’re not enemies of anything. They’re common criminals.  

The official reason given by the president and the defense secretary is to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. 

Yes, I understand that. But there are big holes in their story. Trump claimed the boats we sunk off the Venezuelan coast were carrying fentanyl to the United States. But the fentanyl we get doesn’t come by ship or from Venezuela, but by land from Mexico, from precursors made in China. And the drugs that do get trafficked along the Venezuelan coast are mostly headed to Europe.  

We do get a lot of cocaine from Colombia, and some of that comes by boat, right?  

Yes, but if they’re genuinely thinking they’re going to impact the flow of cocaine in the United States by doing this, they are sadly mistaken. 

Why is that? 

Because we have decades of history telling us this, the Defense Department has been in the anti-narcotics business since Congress directed it to be the lead agency in the 1989 Defense Authorization Act. At the time, the Pentagon had many good reasons for not wanting to do that job. But it now has 35 years of experience in drug interdiction and 35 years of data on drug trafficking. The U.S. Southern Command conducts its Caribbean counternarcotics operations out of the Joint Interagency Task Force—South (JIATF-S) in Key West, Florida. Years of data on the routes and conveyances that drug traffickers use—by airplane, by go-fast boat, by fishing boat, by land, and by smuggling in commercial maritime shipping containers. There are thousands and thousands of records of radar tracks and other interdiction events. And what we know from our history is that traffickers are very smart and patient. If you deny them or raise the costs of smuggling drugs in a certain way, they’ll back off that for a while and do other things.  

They have a hierarchy of preferences for how they move drugs. We know that because when they first started transporting cocaine into the United States, there were no defenses whatsoever, and so what they did was fly it from northern Colombia right into Dade County, Florida. It makes sense because with general aviation aircraft, they always have the drugs in their possession. They’re not relinquishing control of them. And these flights take only a few hours, so your risk of interdiction is low. So that’s their preferred mode, and everything after that is just a cascade of less optimal conveyances they will use if denied ones that are preferable.  

If you look at the history of Colombian cocaine trafficking, you can literally watch it ebb and flow for three decades based on what we’re doing. When we pushed them out of general aviation into South Florida, they started flying into the Bahamas and other Caribbean nations. When we pushed them out of the air there, they started flying, working their way up into Mexico, and then using maritime. Maritime takes longer, so they prefer not to do it. As for smuggling in commercial maritime containers, it can take days, and it’s stuck in the port of Miami, the port of Baltimore, or God knows where. So, they really don’t like using that way, but they can.  

They went to Mexico as one of their last resorts because they basically split their drug loads in half with the Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Once it gets into Mexico, you have all your underground tunnels.  

It’s an endless game of cat and mouse. It’s been going on for years. Anyone with any history of how the counterdrug interdiction works will tell you this is how it goes. And obviously, we’re still flooded with cocaine, and now we’re flooded with fentanyl. So, by definition, it hasn’t worked. And we have thrown the kitchen sink at it over the years, with extensive use of Air Force AWACs aircraft, Navy P-3s upgraded with high-tech surveillance sensors, an armada of surface vessels, Over-the-Horizon radars which can monitor the entire Caribbean and portions of South America, all of it. DOD has probably spent between $20-$30 billion on this effort. And for what? Ever hear of a shortage of cocaine in one of America’s cities or towns? Unlikely.  

But can’t the Trump administration say we’ve operated with one hand tied behind our backs for all these years by observing international law, and it hasn’t worked, so now we’re going to try this more aggressive approach? 

Sure, they can say that. But you need to weigh the chances of success against the risks. I think the chances of success are basically zero, for the reasons I’ve said. The traffickers use all the conveyances—by air, sea, land—all the time, and they just flex and move based upon what we’re doing. If you blow a few boats out of the water, they will back off that tactic and do something else for a while. They track our assets very, very carefully.  

For instance, across the Southwest border and in places on the East Coast and in the Caribbean, we have a whole string of ground-based aerostats. These are like big, tethered blimps that float a few thousand feet in the air. They typically have radars or other sensors on them. They are costly as hell, and the traffickers simply monitor when they are up or down—and they are down a lot for maintenance, bad weather, and so on. When they see our aerostats are down or when they see our ships are out of the area, they’ll just go back to what they were doing.  

So, you’re justifying this whole operation by stopping the wrong drug coming from the wrong place, using methods that are outside international law, and that years of history will tell you are destined not to work. So why don’t you look back at some of that history before you blast boats out of the water? 

Won’t bringing in this aircraft carrier group help? 

It’s precisely the wrong instrument to use for these kinds of counterdrug purposes. It’s enormously expensive. You’ve already demonstrated you have plenty of capability to identify and strike these boats. Most likely, they’re using MQ-9 Reaper drones to take them out. That’s a far cheaper way to do things than a carrier battle group intended to fight wars and deter strategic enemies. It’s like grabbing for a sledgehammer when you just need a screwdriver 

Is it possible that these are the first steps of a major new military operation the Trump administration has in mind to go directly after the drug lords, regardless of what the governments of these countries say? 

We’ve had U.S. military participation in counterdrug operations on a cooperative basis with countries in Central and South America literally for decades. You’ve had Marines in Peru doing riverine operations. You’ve had special forces in Colombia and Bolivia on training missions. The Air Force has had ground-based radars in Colombia and Peru. Our Navy has extensive exchanges with its counterparts. So, there’s nothing new about the U.S. military participating and helping host nations counter drug activities. Its utility over time was obviously very limited, or we wouldn’t be where we are today. But it was always with the cooperation of these countries.  

So, if we’re going to embark on something without their cooperation and not at their invitation, then obviously, one could consider that an act of war and an invasion. And it’s hard for me to imagine you’ll be much more effective when you’re going in there over the opposition of the government than you were when you were there at their invitation.  

Short of U.S. troops getting killed in an anti-drug quagmire in Latin America, which is obviously speculative, what are the risks of the policy we’re already seeing? 

A couple of things. Of course, if you keep attacking boats, you will eventually hit the wrong vessel; it is just a question of time. You will get bad intel, or someone will make a mistake in targeting, etc. These are human acts, and humans make mistakes. That is a certainty. 

But that’s actually not the thing I’m most concerned about. What most concerns me is the complete disregard for law and international law and the total erosion and corruption of these terms, the terrorists and the narco-traffickers. Those things are really important because terms and the legal status associated with them establish how business is done throughout the world. And if we can just disregard it any time we want, then so can everybody else.  

That’s why the Pentagon really does not like the idea of shooting down civilian aircraft, because the joint staff would say, Who do you think has the most civilian aircraft in the world? We do. The United States does. So, we are the most at risk when we move to a system where we say we can ignore all international bans, international laws, and international definitions of who is a terrorist and who is an enemy combatant, because it invites everybody else to do that. Hey, I don’t like that person. I just whacked them. Yeah, that was a narco-terrorist. Wow, really?  

Lastly, with the news reporting that the administration has now conducted more than ten of these strikes, I have another worry, and that is this: the Full Motion Video (FMV) clips of these attacks can be exhilarating and addictive (no pun intended). Each strike compels the next. Pretty soon, the hunt is on; we turn on the TV to see if there were any new strikes today. The strikes become an end in themselves. Over time, we lose sight of the fact that these strikes are illegal and are destined to fail to impact illegal drug flow. The only ones being diminished are ourselves.  

The post Sinking Boats Off Venezuela, Colombia. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The war in Ukraine has transformed Western European thinking about defending itself against its giant neighbor, Russia. The latest push, proposed last week by the European Union, is a blueprint for a better coordinated military buildup—procuring and manufacturing weapons together rather than separately, country by country. It’s an ambitious plan, in line with other pending continent-wide reforms—deregulation and a single capital market—and like them, it promises increased efficiency and scale in pursuit of shared European goals. What’s unclear is whether the 27 EU members and their allies, including Britain, can put aside national interests for the common good. The stakes could hardly be higher, but the evidence is mixed. 

Much has changed in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with countries across the continent talking a much different game than four years ago. After decades of hoping for good relations with Moscow, most leaders now see their eastern neighbor as an aggressive, revanchist power, preparing potentially for a hot war and already menacing nearby nations with an array of gray-zone weapons—from disinformation and cyberattacks to sabotage of critical infrastructure. Uncertain if an increasingly fickle and isolationist U.S. will stand by them, many Europeans recognize they must prepare to face the enemy alone, and defense is now Topic A in political circles. 

Many countries are actively preparing. National defense budgets have increased dramatically—from €218 billion in 2021 to a projected €392 billion in 2025. A generation of innovative startups is competing with seasoned contractors to develop cutting-edge weapons. The most concerned capitals are discussing mandatory conscription, and some have mounted national programs to teach civilian defense. 

Still, for all this progress, many across the continent, concerned about the pace of change, wonder if Europe will succeed in translating its bold talk into action. 

 The problem starts with defense spending. In 2014, shortly after Russia annexed Crimea, all NATO members agreed to increase defense outlays to 2 percent of national GDP. But by 2021, only six had. Last year, driven by President Donald Trump’s bullying and fear of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO set a new goal of 5 percent. But only part of that total—3.5 percent of economic output—must be spent on weapons and ammunition, with countries allowed to use the remaining 1.5 percent for “critical infrastructure,” and many proposed infrastructure projects, like a much-ridiculed bridge between Sicily and the Italian mainland, hardly meet the laugh test.  

 Along with these national commitments, in 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set a €500 billion goal for EU defense spending over the next decade. Officials across the union lauded the idea, and some spoke ambitiously about including €500 billion in the next EU seven-year budget. That now seems unlikely, but Brussels has moved to make good on von der Leyen’s goal with the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative, borrowing €150 billion to finance low-interest loans for member states working to boost defense production. The bloc has also enacted a four-year rule change, the “national escape clause,” that could make it easier for capitals to spend an estimated €650 billion from their own budgets on defense. 

If this money comes through, it will be a huge increase—according to one estimate, leaked to the press this weekend, it could amount to as much as €2.4 trillion over four years. European funding is unlikely to match the U.S. defense budget, which totaled $997 billion in 2024, but it could rival Russian and even Chinese spending, estimated at $149 billion and $314 billion, respectively, in 2024.  

The problem: It will be up to national leaders to take advantage of the new EU incentives, and many may hesitate for financial and political reasons—neither the far left nor the far right is on board in many countries. Meanwhile, the EU has struggled to pass the much smaller €1.5 billion European Defense Industrial Strategy, proposed in 2024 but still not formally approved.  

So too with European aid for Ukraine. Already in the first year of the war, many in Europe talked a better game than the U.S.—shrewder about Putin and with a better understanding of Ukraine’s needs. These European voices have grown stronger with time, making up for Americans, who have grown hesitant, if not reluctant, to help. According to one estimate, in 2022, Europe provided €16.5 billion in military aid—compared to Washington’s €24 billion. But by 2024, the ratio had reversed: Ukraine received €42 billion from Europe and €16.5 billion from the U.S. Washington has allocated no new aid since Trump took office in January, while Europe provided €24 billion in just six months in 2025.  

This aid has been crucial for Ukraine, sustaining it—indeed, guaranteeing its survival—even as Russia’s military grew stronger and Moscow learned from its mistakes in the early months of the war. But European aid dropped dramatically this summer to less than half the monthly average earlier in the year, and the continent still devotes only a tiny fraction of its annual GDP to Ukraine. From 2022 to 2024, the biggest donors, including Germany and Britain, allocated just 0.2 percent of economic output, while smaller countries in southern Europe spent less than 0.1 percent. 

It isn’t hard to understand why. National budgets are tight. Two of the bloc’s biggest member states—France and the United Kingdom—face crippling debt crises. Until recently, Germany was constrained by a constitutional “debt brake,” barring Berlin from accruing a deficit of more than 0.35 percent of GDP.  

Still, the math is straightforward: when it comes to military spending, Europeans’ actions do not match their rhetoric—on their own defense or aid to Ukraine. 

Nor is money the only issue. Even more challenging than budget constraints, the EU is hamstrung by a deep-rooted inclination to put national interest first—at the expense of collective interest. Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta illustrated the problem metaphorically in a much-cited 2024 EU report on European competitiveness. Letta had hoped to gather input for his paper in cities across the continent, traveling from capital to capital by high-speed rail. But he could not make the trip by rail because national railway systems run most European high-speed trains, and few connect to high-speed trains in neighboring countries. 

Defense investment is similarly fragmented. Europe makes five different types of main battle tanks. At least seven countries produce artillery. French defense giant Thales competes head-to-head with Sweden’s Saab and Germany’s Hensoldt to sell defense electronics and sensors to developing countries worldwide, to cite just one example.  

It’s hard to find a policymaker or defense expert who doesn’t extol the virtues of cooperation. Coordinated planning, collective procurement, and joint production would allow the continent to produce much more for less and accelerate its urgently needed military buildup. But age-old habits and ingrained interests argue against the collaborative action that’s needed. 

No project illustrates the challenge more clearly than the sputtering partnership between France’s Dassault and Germany’s Airbus to build a sixth-generation fighter jet, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS). Launched in 2017 by Berlin and Paris and later joined by Madrid, the €100 billion initiative is meant to be an equal collaboration—one country, one vote—delivering a state-of-the-art, AI-enhanced fighting platform by 2040.  

But long-running tensions between the industry partners erupted publicly this fall when Dassault announced it wanted a freer hand to complete the project’s next phase. If Germany couldn’t agree, the company would go it alone. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron are eager to resolve the conflict, but the manufacturers seem to be at an impasse, and by all accounts, the high-profile collaboration is on the verge of collapse. 

The new EU proposal, the Defense Readiness Roundup 2030, will be debated this week at a meeting of the bloc’s 27 national leaders. It attempts to address this entrenched fragmentation. The document identifies nine “priority areas”— including ground combat, artillery, drones, and air and missile defense—and urges member states to tackle them collaboratively. Countries are encouraged to collaborate on producing and purchasing weapons. Recommended approaches include joint ventures and “capability coalitions.”  

“There is a clear need,” the report states, “to invest more, invest together and invest European” rather than buying off-the-shelf products from American or Asian defense contractors. Building on the €150 billion set aside for low-interest SAFE loans—funding available only for joint production by two or more EU or allied countries—the report suggests there may be more money to come for collaborative projects.  

The roadmap is not naïve. Its authors know better than to ask member states to cede national control, particularly of defense. But the paper sets an ambitious goal: that by 2020, 40 percent of European defense production—more than double the current share—will be collaborative. 

The obstacles to collective action start with history—80 years of European dependence on American leadership for all things defense-related. Since the launch of the transatlantic alliance in 1949, Washington has been responsible for NATO command and control, and members have rarely cooperated except at the direction of the U.S. The EU’s collective decision-making process poses a second major hurdle. Virtually all big bloc decisions require unanimity, now routinely stymied by pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and other populist, far-right leaders. Also problematic: the continent’s lack of a single credit market, slowing the flow of capital and inhibiting cross-border investments. 

What’s needed is the political will to cut through these thickets, advancing difficult political and financial reforms and subordinating national interest to the common good. Can Europe pull this off? Will it do so quickly enough? Western intelligence services predict the Kremlin could be ready for full-scale war in Western Europe by 2030 and possibly as soon as 2027. Meanwhile, the gray-zone war that escalated dramatically last month with aerial incursions in a half dozen countries is all but certain to get hotter. A robust defense buildup is the only way to fend off a possible Russian attack, preserving European peace and prosperity. 

There is reason for hope. In contrast to the U.S., European leaders and much of the public are aware of the threat, and many countries have made impressive strides. But nothing has come easily. There are objections and obstacles at every step, and the pace of change has been painfully slow.  

This week will bring two critical tests as Europeans debate the commission’s defense spending proposal and respond to Trump’s latest pendulum swing on Ukraine—another strong tilt toward Moscow. EU founding father Jean Monet’s often quoted remark has rarely seemed more apt: “Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” Few crises in the continent’s post-World War II history have seemed as urgent as the potentially existential challenge it faces today, and the outcome is far from clear.  

The post Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s almost as difficult to say something new about Russia as it is to write an original biography of Abraham Lincoln. To her credit, Julia Ioffe comes close with Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, which looks at the country’s turbulent 20th century, and its inauspicious first quarter of the 21st. It does so by employing the novel lens of women’s role in Russian society, which often alights on figures—tragic, heroic, imbued with conviction—largely unknown in the West. Motherland is also a memoir of her family, which emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1980s when she was seven.

In less expert hands, Motherland could have ended up just another clever but vapid conceit of the Manchego: The Cheese that Explains Spain variety. (That’s not a real book; at least, I very much hope it isn’t.) Women really were at the vanguard of Bolshevism, and their elevated role in the workers’ paradise was intended to show how serious communists were about gender equality. 

This isn’t entirely an aberration. Before the Revolution, Russia “had the highest number of female radicals of any country in Europe,” Ioffe writes. Our own Western imaginations tend to default to the Stalinist version of the Soviet Union: sanguinary, hungry, grim. But before that, Vladimir Lenin allowed something of an intellectual and artistic hothouse to flourish in Moscow and the city then known as Petrograd, now St. Petersburg (where I was born and raised when it was called Leningrad). True enough, Lenin may never have been the ferocious yet avuncular leader of official Soviet lore, but until his 1924 death, the Soviet project retained a measure of idealism—in which women were welcome.

To do their part in creating the socialist paradise, women would be liberated from the demands of the family. “I hate marriage. It is an idiotic, meaningless life,” the influential political theorist Alexandra Kollontai wrote (the Soviet Union was one of those rare societies that minted many political theorists whom it actually valued). But as Ioffe points out, Kollontai and other women in the vanguard had little in common with Western feminists, such as American suffragettes, who were agitating in a somewhat different way, and in a somewhat different direction, at least ideologically.

“The paramount distinction for socialists was not gender or nationality or religion; it was class. Everything else was secondary,” Ioffe writes in this, her first book. That made me think of the modern-day socialist thinker Adolph L. Reed Jr. and his seminal No Politics but Class Politics. Today’s left has vociferously rejected such unity of purpose for an intersectional approach, which explains why we have a President Donald Trump to contend with once again.

The breadth of progress for Soviet women was truly remarkable, if ultimately fleeting. “By 1917, Soviet women had the (increasingly irrelevant) right to vote, years before their Western peers,” Ioffe points out. “They had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave, and free higher education, including in the sciences, by 1918. By 1920, they had the right to abortion, provided by the state for free.” In fact, the USSR was the first nation to legalize abortion.

But it’s not all heady freedom, of course. War, alcoholism, and political violence haunt this book’s heroines from start to finish, often leaving them as household heads and sole providers. This was true during the political repressions of the late 1930s and after the ravages of World War II, the Great Patriotic War that cost the Soviet Union over 20 million lives. And it remained true through the demise of Communism. “By 1991, Russian women were exhausted from all the things that the previous decades of Soviet rule had required of them,” Ioffe observes. “But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not allow women to return to their womanly mission, as [Mikhail] Gorbachev had proposed. Faced with hunger, instability, and salaries that weren’t paid for months, millions of Russian men lay down on the couch and took to drink.” The Russian woman, in these pages, is ambitious but exhausted, idealistic but saddled with grim day-to-day realities. Coming from a family of strong Russian women, I tend to agree with Ioffe’s assessment. 

Ioffe acknowledges that, under the reign of Vladimir Putin, conservative quasi-Christianity dominates, with American evangelicals helping to implement new abortion bans. Ioffe retains a deep love for her native land, but returning to Moscow on a Fulbright scholarship in 2009, she finds that Russia has adopted gender roles that borrow the worst of both the Soviet Union and the West.

“This situation when a woman is strong, and not in a feminine way but a masculine one, and a man is weak, this role reversal is what has led to women’s unhappiness,” one woman lectures Ioffe. “This is what leads to diseases like breast cancer, uterine cancer—because of this lack of acceptance of her own femininity.”

Ioffe is in an unusually strong position to tell this story. Born in Moscow, into an unusually prosperous and accomplished family by the standards of Soviet Jewry, Ioffe lived a comfortable life in the capital—worlds away from my own childhood. The grim postwar apartment blocks of Leningrad, where I was born and raised, may as well have been on Mars. Nor did penury follow her to the United States, as was the case for so many of us diasporists. Her family settled in Maryland; Ioffe eventually made her way to Princeton and, after graduation, moved to New York and became a writer for some of the country’s most prestigious media outlets, including The New Republic, where she spent several years, and Politico, which she left after a brief stint and an off-color joke about Donald and Ivanka. The extent to which her family has apparently chronicled its manifold peregrinations is unusual, for Soviet Jewish families in particular. Sometimes, it could seem that little was worth remembering other than survival itself. It was oddly refreshing to step into this richer, happier world. 

When her sister became an oncologist, Ioffe writes, she extended the lineage of female doctors in the family to a fourth generation. Yet Americans wanting to celebrate this as a #GirlBoss triumph are quickly checked by the author. “Measured against the history of their own country, the Soviet Union, the women from whom I descend were perfectly average people,” Ioffe argues. “They were ordinary women who happened to be the subjects—and products—of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person.” 

The dream was never realized, but even the fleeting experiment with true gender equality comes off here as impossibly enticing, a plangent hint of what could have been. I’m glad that Ioffe has the intellectual nuance to see the Soviet Union as more than just a failed experiment that ought to be forgotten, like the cinematic oeuvre of Pauly Shore. We had free health care! But that, truly, is another story…

Soviet women fought in World War II, becoming some of the Red Army’s finest fighter pilots (Polina Gelman) and snipers (Lyudmila Pavlichenko). To read of their exploits while the bilious Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth prattles on about lax fitness standards (which do not, in fact, vary by gender in the American military, his embittered assertions notwithstanding) is a sobering experience.

A founding partner at Puck, the journal of politics and culture, Ioffe continues to show vestiges of The New Yorker’s understated writing style and its comfort with power and its handmaidens. “I was leaving a cocktail reception at the Munich Security Conference,” one sentence goes. There, she happens to run into Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late dissident Alexei Navalny. Ioffe reported extensively on Navalny’s rise to political stardom; though she describes Yulia as lacking her husband’s charisma, the 49-year-old widow is yet another Russian woman who has been forced into carrying out her fallen husband’s work. Ioffe also chronicles the plight of the female punk group Pussy Riot, whose persecution by the Kremlin was, in retrospect, a warning the West should have taken more seriously.

Ioffe’s own family history acts like a tributary to the main narrative, constantly nourishing it with a personal quality. Family members were hounded during the Stalinist terrors, perished in the Holocaust, and made the difficult decision to emigrate. It’s easy to forget that history is more than just a procession of great and terrible men. Their vanities and cruelties inevitably take their toll on ordinary people wanting to lead ordinary lives.

Motherland ends on an unsettled note, in an unsettled world, with Russia a pariah state that has traded closeness with the West for ties with North Korea and Iran. “I dream of Moscow almost every night,” Ioffe writes in the conclusion of Motherland. Now that, thanks to its barbaric invasion of Ukraine, Russia is essentially in a proxy war with much of Europe and the United States, Ioffe, who showed extraordinary physical bravery in covering the 2014 Russian assault on Crimea, isn’t able to go home again or even visit. She has turned her homesickness into an original and impassioned work. I imagine that the women in her family would be proud, even if she didn’t become a doctor. 

The post Russia Through a Feminist Lens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Venezuela’s tragic collapse from petrostate to failed state has a name: Nicolás Maduro. His first stolen “reelection” in 2018, dismissed globally as neither free nor fair, sealed the fate of a nation now hollowed out and starving. It’s time for him to go. Whether by negotiated exit or the combined weight of domestic defiance and American pressure, his departure is both morally justified and strategically essential.

Donald Trump’s second administration has revived its first-term push for regime change, adding clandestine tools to the diplomatic arsenal. The CIA is now authorized to conduct publicly unspecified covert operations in Venezuela, increasing pressure on Maduro. But anything resembling gunboat diplomacy or the CIA intrusions of the Allende era could be catastrophic—rekindling Latin America’s darkest memories of American heavy-handedness and erasing what moral authority the United States still claims.

This caution becomes even clearer relief given President Trump’s recent remarks: The U.S. naval buildup off Venezuela, primarily tasked with curbing drug trafficking, is “looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” Such statements underscore the temptation toward direct military intervention or violent CIA dark ops. But the risk of overstepping—with boots on the ground or overt military ground offensives—could provoke backlash, undermine the moral case, and strengthen Maduro’s grip by rallying nationalist sentiment. The Trump administration must balance pressure with prudence, using intelligence, sanctions, diplomacy, and regional allies to increase the cost of repression without igniting a kinetic catastrophe.

Washington’s earlier attempts defined the battle lines. In 2019, it recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president, marshaled more than 50 nations behind a constitutional transition, and suffocated state oil producer PDVSA, the regime’s cash conduit. The United States also indicted Maduro on narco-trafficking charges, a symbolic but significant marker that criminality would carry a cost. Those efforts didn’t topple Maduro, but they tightened the vise—squeezing oil revenues, limiting global banking access, and isolating Caracas.

Inside Venezuela, the real struggle continued. It’s been waged not by diplomats or spooks, but by millions desperate for dignity. Years of mass protest, the bravery of opposition leaders, and an exiled diaspora still sustaining families at home are the nation’s lifelines. I’ve commented on these developments for the Washington Monthly over the years, as an observer and co-author with opposition leader-in-exile Leopoldo López. Few channel the opposition’s strength and spirit more sharply than this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who remains in undisclosed locations inside Venezuela. Her clarity and courage have turned despair into direction. Machado says the Nobel is “an impetus to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom.”

Machado and a popular movement have inspired a democratic awakening that may finally topple the Maduro regime. A bonus: A successful democratic restoration would stem the tide of Venezuelan refugees to the U.S. The Venezuelan opposition’s demands—for monitored elections, safe pathways out for insiders, and guarantees against vengeance—offer the only peaceful path to restore constitutional order.

Yet every autocrat needs their patrons, and for years, Vladimir Putin performed that role—fueling Maduro’s survival with arms, oil deals, and political cover in international forums. Russia’s state oil giant Rosneft helped Caracas evade sanctions, while Kremlin advisors whispered strategies for outlasting unrest. Fast forward to 2025: Putin’s mired in Ukraine, hemorrhaging resources and legitimacy. Russia can no longer bankroll its strongman protégés abroad. Ask Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin’s reach now stops at its own battlefield lines. Moscow once promised to prop up its friends; today, it can barely sustain itself. For Maduro, that means the cavalry will never come.

Iran long acted as another lifeline for Maduro—providing financing, technology, and networks to evade sanctions, further binding Caracas to Tehran’s geopolitical ambitions. But Tehran’s regional overreach, combined with crippling sanctions and internal pressures, has thankfully sapped its ability to project power abroad. Venezuelan regime change, while unwelcome to Tehran, is no longer preventable by its illegitimate, diminished, and aging leadership. A democratic transition in Caracas would deal Tehran another setback—losing an ideological partner and foothold in the Americas, further isolating the regime against mounting global pressure.

American power can and should amplify Venezuela’s democratic push, not replace it. Supporting continental diplomacy, defending human rights, and imposing targeted sanctions can raise the cost of repression while preserving moral legitimacy. This is the balance Washington must strike: pressure without pretense, influence without too much overt interference. Questionable air strikes on Venezuelan pleasure boats allegedly ferrying drugs to the U.S. haven’t strengthened Trump’s hand.

Beyond Caracas, others are watching. Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, where democracy is dismantled by design, and Cuba, surviving on repression and nostalgia, both feel the tremors. Any transfer of power in Venezuela would broadcast a warning across the hemisphere—autocracy carries an expiration date, and outside enablers can’t always save their proxies.

The global stakes are no less tangible. China’s multi-billion-dollar love affair with Chávez and Maduro—funded by oil-for-loans deals—has left Beijing deeply exposed. A post-Maduro government determined to audit, renegotiate, or even default on opaque Chinese obligations would puncture that dependency. Venezuela, freed from kleptocracy, could remind China that foreign investments anchored in corruption are ultimately bad business.

The most powerful instrument for change remains Venezuelan. Their courage—magnified but not manipulated by U.S. intelligence, diplomacy, and media strategy—holds the key. Anything smacking of direct or violent American intervention risks staining this moment of liberation with an old imperial dye.

Washington’s role must be catalytic, not commanding. The CIA’s job, this time, is to quietly tip the scales toward freedom, not pull them down.

The last thing Venezuela needs is to be rescued by ghosts of the past.

The post Venezuela’s Best Chance for Freedom appeared first on Washington Monthly.