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This past Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down for an interview in which he yet again made clear that, despite the insistence of pro-diplomacy voices in the West, he was not ready to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, because Kyiv's uncertain battlefield prospects meant Russia could secure further advances by continuing the war. "It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it's running out of ammunition," Putin told interviewer Dmitry Kiselyov, according to one particularly viral and widely cited tweet by Wall Street Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov. Except that's not what Putin said. In fact, by reading the full text and seeing the quote in context instead of as a selectively edited soundbite, it's clear he was putting out the exact opposite message: "For us to hold negotiations now just because they are running out of ammunition would be ridiculous. Nevertheless, we are open to a serious discussion, and we are eager to resolve all conflicts, especially this one, by peaceful means."What is true is that Putin once more restated the more stringent conditions for peace talks he adopted last year, namely that Moscow will not give up the four regions it officially annexed in September 2022 and that, given the state of the battlefield, Ukraine will have to accept the loss of this territory. "Are we ready to negotiate? We sure are," he said. "But we are definitely not ready for talks that are based on some kind of 'wishful thinking' which comes after the use of psychotropic drugs, but we are ready for talks based on the realities that have developed, as they say in such cases, on the ground."This didn't stop the truncated version of the first quote from being spread far and wide on social media and being held up, often by reporters at top newspapers like Trofimov and other authoritative voices, as definitive proof that negotiations to end the war were impossible and that prolonged war is the only option. "Republican leadership of the House cutting off military supplies to Ukraine has made Putin drop his pretense about desiring peace talks. He wants it all," was Trofimov's summary of the interview. "Putin indicated he won't discuss surrendering territory annexed from Ukraine and appeared confident Russia's army could advance further," the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon reported, before offering the clipped quote as evidence. "Russia spreads rumors about negotiations. Uncritical people write naive articles. US cuts off aid to Ukraine. Putin says — thanks, with your help I'll win the war [and] destroy Ukraine," wrote historian Timothy Snyder, citing Trofminov's summary. "War criminal Putin doesn't want to negotiate, only to rape, murder & pilage innocent Ukrainians," tweeted Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. "The only way this war ends is if we step up and give Ukrainians what they ask for. Those in the West calling for negotiations serve this monster."Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) used it to claim the GOP's hold-up of military aid was "fueling Putin's aggression and the Russian war effort." Identical arguments — that the truncated quote showed Putin's talk of negotiations was a smokescreen, and that the only way to get to a peaceful end to the war is to double down on a military solution — were, and still are today, being spread by a wide variety of prominent, influential and often hawkish voices, largely piggybacking off Trofimov and Seddon's misrepresentation of the remarks. It's not been much better outside of social media. Putin's comments about negotiations were left entirely out of Western media reports on his interview at Reuters, the Associated Press, PBS and Voice of America. Only CNBC included the comments with the full quote; CNN also reported that "Putin said Russia would be willing to negotiate," though citing only his remark about "realities on the ground." Others double down on using the shortened quote for a misleading framing, such as this Washington Examiner headline, or this Telegraph report. The latter went beyond merely the headline and opened by telling readers that Putin "has ruled out opening peace talks with Ukraine," before putting together a composite quote from the interview that deliberately skipped over his remark that Moscow was open to talks and eager to resolve the conflicts diplomatically.Why is this important? Hawks would charge that simply daring to correct the record here is a sign of suspicious pro-Putin sympathies. But willingness to negotiate has nothing to do with moral virtue: the violently repressive Saudi government, which recently went on an execution spree, also eventually negotiated an end to its horrific war on Yemen despite the horror it had unleashed on the country. More recently, Hamas has shown a willingness to negotiate throughout the Israeli assault on Gaza, talks that bore fruit back in November with a ceasefire and hostage swap, none of which absolves it for the atrocities of October 7 or renders its members model citizens. Just as in those cases, one does not need to trust in Putin here, an authoritarian and practiced politician, to proceed with talks. Peace negotiations are, by their very nature, carried out between parties without ample reserves of faith in and goodwill towards each other, and part of any talks involves devising a mechanism with acceptable security guarantees for each party that removes the need to rely on mere trust. The surest way to verify if someone is serious about such negotiations is to actually try them. The fact that Putin insists he's open to negotiations, albeit with major territorial concessions from the Ukrainian side, should be encouraging news for anyone who genuinely cares about Ukraine. The RAND Institute argued in January last year that the economic and social damage caused by a longer war outweighed the possible benefits of military reconquest of lost territory. Indeed, the effects of prolonging the war in search of a morally satisfying military victory have been devastating for the country: tens of thousands killed and wounded, widespread destruction of infrastructure, a demographic crisis, and massive debt that will leave the country vulnerable to rapacious creditors. Many thousands of Ukrainians are desperately dodging conscription to avoid dying in the war, with a plurality of 48 percent of Ukrainian men admitting they are not prepared to fight. These remarks by Putin are only the latest signal that Moscow is ready to enter talks. Putin similarly told Tucker Carlson in February several times that Russia was "ready" to negotiate. More importantly, three separate reports in the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters have revealed behind-the-scenes overtures by Moscow, reportedly as early as last September, to Washington for peace talks, which the Biden administration has so far not acted on. We can't know for sure if Putin's remarks are serious until they're tested in negotiations. But that doesn't give journalists and commentators free rein to mislead the public that they don't exist, all for the purpose of undermining the possibility of peacefully ending a war that more and more Ukrainians don't want to fight in.

For a conflict discussed in starkly moralistic terms, the ways the Ukraine war is talked about by its most enthusiastic Western supporters can be remarkably cynical about the human carnage involved. "Aiding Ukraine, giving the money to Ukraine is the cheapest possible way for the U.S. to enhance its security," Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, recently told the Daily Show's Jon Stewart. "The fighting is being done by the Ukrainians, they're the people who are being killed." This view is not unique to Beddoes. It's been widely expressed by those most in favor of an open-ended, prolonged war and most against the kind of peace negotiations that would shorten it. "Four months into this thing, I like the structural path we're on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person," said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) early into the war, accidentally voicing what the war's critics have often said about the war — that the U.S. will fight it "to the last Ukrainian." Later, Graham called it the "best money we've ever spent." "It is a relatively modest amount that we are contributing without being asked to risk life and limb," Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Associated Press last year. "The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It's a pretty good deal." "I call that a bargain," North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has said about the war funding, pointing to the damage Ukrainian forces had inflicted on the Russian military. "No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We're rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that," U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) remarked.Americans "should be satisfied that we're getting our money's worth on our Ukraine investment," wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), because "for less than 3 percent of our nation's military budget, we've enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia's military strength by half," and "all without a single American service woman or man injured or lost." But politicians aren't the only armchair warriors who look at the enormous death and destruction suffered by Ukraine by prolonging the war as akin to a brilliant business decision. Hawkish think tanks have made similar arguments. "When viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment," Timothy Garten Ashe wrote for the weapons maker-funded Center for European Policy Analysis. "Support for Ukraine remains a bargain for American national security," wrote Hudson Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia Peter Rough. "For about 5 percent of total U.S. defense spending over the past 20 months, Ukraine has badly degraded Russia, one of the United States' top adversaries, without shedding a single drop of American blood." And major U.S. newspapers have likewise published similar perspectives. "We have a determined partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to do so ourselves in the future," former top George W. Bush officials Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates celebrated in the pages of the Washington Post. "For all the aid we've given Ukraine, we are the true beneficiaries in the relationship, and they the true benefactors," wrote Bret Stephens at the New York Times, pointing to the fact that NATO is paying in only money, while "Ukrainians are counting their costs in lives and limbs lost." What's distasteful about this is not just the flippant way it treats the unimaginable scale of loss of life, permanent disability and emerging long-term crises being experienced by Ukrainians — as mere abacus beads to be moved around in a cost-benefit analysis centered on the United States and its NATO allies. It's also the fact that, far from being "willing," "determined" and ready to "fight to the last person," many Ukrainians have demonstrated that they do not want to risk their lives in this war — a share of the population that is getting larger and more vocal the longer the war has gone on. Since the start of the war, when many fleeing Ukrainian men were stopped at the border and ordered to return to potentially fight, thousands of Ukrainians have defied the government's ban on men aged between 18 and 60 leaving the country — to the point of spending large sums of money and even risking their lives to get out. Many hunkered down in their homes to dodge enlistment officers, while tens of thousands signed a petition opposing increasingly aggressive conscription practices. Early last year, Ukraine's parliament upped the punishment for desertion, which soldiers have this year admitted is still a growing problem. By November 2023, the BBC determined that a total of nearly 20,000 Ukrainian men had fled the country to avoid being drafted, while the State Border Service revealed a month later that more than 16,500 had been stopped from leaving. At one point, the country's law enforcement uncovered a massive scheme across nearly a dozen regions that gave out falsified medical certificates declaring someone unfit for military service in return for as much as $10,000. This phenomenon has only intensified as Kyiv has dramatically expanded its conscription plans to make up its disadvantage in manpower, including proposals for lowering the draft age and creating a central database of potential recruits, all while resorting to more aggressive drafting tactics and recruiting increasingly older and less healthy men. These plans have engendered massive opposition, with protests by soldiers' families that have taken place around the country since last year calling for a cap on the length of military service continuing and intensifying; earlier this month. One hundred women blocked a road and mistakenly attacked another woman due to rumors of draft officials coming to take the village's men away. "I don't see the 500,000 more people ready to die," admitted a former Ukrainian government minister and current army captain last November. It increasingly appears that many of those who are most enthusiastic to keep the war going and avoid a negotiated end aren't, as we keep being told, the Ukrainians who are most likely to be killed or wounded in the fighting. Instead they are politicians and commentators far, far away from the front line in other countries who view its attendant death and destruction as akin to a board game — or, in their words, as a "good deal," a "bargain," and a satisfying "investment" for their own countries.In other words, it looks increasingly like all too many other U.S.-led wars.

Where are the Ukraine partisans? After nearly two years of intense emotional investment in fueling the war aims of Kyiv, activists have seemingly fled to other battlestations in the Middle East — and at precisely the moment when the military effort needs public pressure most.
In other words, pro-Ukrainian activists — and the U.S. government — pumped up expectations for a military solution, only to leave their benefactors high and dry when the war started taking a turn for the worse and the conflict in Gaza started demanding more and more attention.
For the past five months, more than $60 billion of military and economic aid to Ukraine has been held up in Congress, with Ukrainian leadership and frontline troops as well as U.S. officials and analysts all warning the country's war effort will face a serious setback, if not outright defeat, without it. The aid has been stuck for a number of reasons, not least of which is growing GOP opposition to further assistance for the war.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin "is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine," with the White House previously insisting that a drop in aid would "kneecap" the country's battlefield chances.
Last week, after months of wrangling, the funding suffered yet another setback when the Senate GOP voted down a border security deal that had been included in the package at Republicans' request to win their support. And while the rest of the package may be voted on in a stand-alone bill, it's unclear whether that will have any better luck — raising the very real possibility that U.S. aid to Ukraine, by far the largest single source of its military funding, completely dries up.
This state of affairs has not come about suddenly or unexpectedly. Congress has been hemming and hawing over the package for nearly six months, and technically even longer, while it's been clear since early last year that U.S. funding was due to run out in September 2023, and that Republican opposition to further assistance was growing, making the passage of further aid a likely intense political slog.
Yet aside from some angry op-eds and finger-pointing, the funding package has ultimately withered with little popular anger. MSNBC host Al Sharpton even asked one of the bill's authors if there was any effort being made to "get the public to really rise up in various states, to say to their senators that they really want to see the border issue resolved" in order to get the bill passed. But no such public uprising came.
The opposite is happening on the Gaza issue. Unlike the lukewarm pressure being put on Congress to pass Ukraine aid, the Palestinian cause is enjoying an outpouring of grass-roots activism at all levels of American society, mostly on the left, not unlike the Ukrainian cause two years ago.
Since October, pro-ceasefire protests have taken place in major U.S. cities nearly every week —even multiple times a week. At times, they've targeted specific Capitol Hill lawmakers, to the point of protesting outside their offices and even homes. A "tent city" has been set up outside Secretary of State Antony Blinken's residence in Arlington,Virginia, for 24-7 demonstrations.
In some cases the protests have been deliberately disruptive, occupying and shutting down public spaces and major roads. Activists have organized mass pressure campaigns on recalcitrant lawmakers, to the point that congressional offices are being deluged with unprecedented amounts of emails and phone calls.
Meanwhile, voters sympathetic to the Palestinians in key states have effectively threatened to withhold their votes and scuttle the president's re-election chances, while activists now regularly interrupt his campaign rallies and speeches. At least 48 cities have officially called for a ceasefire, calls that themselves were the products of intense public pressure and official opposition.
Furthermore, there have been unprecedented expressions of dissatisfaction with U.S. policy on the war from within the federal government itself, with congressional interns, fellows and staffers all engaging in their own public pressure campaigns. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was publicly urged by more than 300 former campaign staffers to back a ceasefire.
One would think — given the intense emotion attached to Ukraine's war effort across the political spectrum these past two years, the ubiquity of Ukrainian flags in U.S. cities and social media profiles, and the widespread support for it expressed by public figures and institutions, even during non-political events — that the ongoing hold-up of aid would occasion something similar.
Instead there's been nothing of the sort. Aside from taking potshots at those questioning the transparency of efficacy of continued aid, we are largely moving toward complete radio silence on the Ukraine front.
The irony is that support for Ukraine's war effort was loudest and most intense when Kyiv appeared to be winning and when it had lockstep support from Congress. Now at the precise moment its military campaign looks shaky, when Congress is wavering on further aid, and when some grass-roots pressure is finally needed to get it over the line, it's nowhere to be found.
It's hard to say what exactly explains this phenomenon. Was it a war-fever-by-proxy that briefly revived the U.S. self-image as a virtuous global hegemon that evaporated over time? Was Ukraine's war effort the temporary recipient of emotional, financial, and military investment born of years of anti-Russian animus that has dominated domestic U.S. politics?
Was Ukraine really just the "current thing," one of a never ending series of fleeting political causes that became the subject of hyper-social media activism and public branding?
Whatever the case, what the U.S. government and its handmaidens in the foreign policy establishment did was far worse.
Channeling increasing Ukrainian discontent with its Western partners, Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, recently charged that Ukraine had "defeated the regular Russian army and thwarted their invasion plan on our own, with minimal help from the West," and that the "war could have ended with the Istanbul agreements." But, as reporting backs up, Western governments had "promised us, Ukraine, real support for waging a real, big war," encouraging Kyiv to scuttle negotiations with Moscow. Support for a large-scale war never came — and "we paid a huge price for it," Arestovych declared.
How many times have we heard calls for "total victory" and smears for those urging a negotiated resolution? In the process, these voices have not only proven to be fair-weather friends, but have helped lead Ukraine into a vastly worse position than it was in at the start of the war.
There are lessons here, many of which are becoming evident in real time. We can only hope to learn from them. But for the Ukrainian people, it's likely far too late.

As U.S.-China tensions have risen the past few years, several U.S. and Taiwanese officials have made alarming warnings that Beijing will launch an invasion of the island by 2027 or as early as 2025, potentially triggering a disastrous war between the two powers. So NBC News' report Wednesday filling in some of the details of the November meeting between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping should have been a cause for hope that this conflict could be avoided. According to the report, Xi told Biden that Beijing plans to reunify China and Taiwan and that it prefers to do so peacefully — the position China has held for decades, and which has helped lay the basis for peaceful relations between the two states. Maybe more importantly, Xi assured the U.S. president that predictions of an impending invasion of Taiwan "were wrong because he has not set a time frame," NBC News reported.In other words, Xi reiterated that he remained committed to long-standing Chinese policy that had underwritten decades of peace and regional stability, and that contrary to some headline-grabbing speculation, there were no plans to change that anytime soon. It should have inspired a collective sigh of relief from all those concerned about the security of Taiwan, let alone anyone worried about a direct U.S.-China war. But tell that to the hawks who dominate U.S. discourse on China, who quickly seized on the report to irresponsibly make the exact opposite claim: That Xi's statement was tantamount to a declaration of war. Sen. Lindsey Graham immediately called the report "beyond unnerving," and said it would inspire him to link up with senators to ply Taiwan with more military aid and weapons and to "draft pre-invasion sanctions from hell" against China — both actions that Beijing could view as provocative. GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley charged that according to the report, "Xi Jinping told Joe Biden that China will take Taiwan" and that as a result, the United States needs "a president who will stand up to our enemies," rather than treat such an announcement as "business as usual," as Biden allegedly had. Other lawmakers had similar reactions. "Xi Jinping wants to take Taiwan. The United States must project strength," wrote Rep. Mark Green, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security and sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "Xi Jinping feels emboldened enough by President Biden's weakness to tell him to his face that Communist China believes that it's only a matter of time before they take Taiwan," wrote Sen. Katie Boyd Britt, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "It's time to replace appeasement with deterrence."Other China hawks, like former Donald Trump advisor Elbridge Colby, former Josh Hawley advisor and current Heritage Foundation policy advisor Alex Velez-Green, journalist Bari Weiss, and former National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina, spun the story in a similar fashion. The latter painted a particularly alarmist picture, warning that "China will first paralyze the U.S. with cyber attacks on critical infrastructure resulting in panic and little appetite to assist Taiwan."Readers glancing at some of the headlines of the stories re-reporting the NBC news would come away with the same kind of impression — that Xi had effectively told Biden that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was inevitable in a major show of disrespect: "Xi warned Biden he plans to take Taiwan — by any means necessary" (New York Post) "Xi straight-up told Biden that China is going to take over Taiwan: report" (Business Insider) "China Will Take Taiwan, Xi Warned Biden During Meeting" (Washington Free Beacon) "Xi Told Biden To His Face That Beijing Will Reunify Taiwan With China: REPORT" (Daily Caller) "Xi warned Biden during summit that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with China" (MSNBC News)One Bloomberg News anchor, meanwhile, called it a "nightmare scenario" and a "bombshell story." This confusion about the meaning of Xi's reported comments appeared to extend to the very reporters who broke the story. The NBC report frames the remarks as part of a trend of "saber-rattling" by the Chinese president on Taiwan, while one of the reporters on the byline, Kristen Welker, said in a TV appearance that the statement "lands differently when [Xi] is speaking to a president and against the background of these tensions" and when "the whole purpose of this meeting was to bring down the temperature." Yet if anything, Xi's words should have served that very purpose of lowering tensions, by denying U.S. suspicions of a planned Chinese invasion in the next few years.It's a measure of the anti-China climate in Washington that a story about the Chinese president effectively tamping down recent alarming headlines in the United States about impending war was widely painted by commentators and politicians as the exact opposite — and used to justify still more policies of deterrence instead of diplomacy.

"The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently made headlines by warning.

"You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population," he said. "And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat."

Austin's remarks, made at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December, should be sobering for the sizable cohort of Israeli and Western officials and commentators who insist that a "military solution" to Hamas is the only way for Israel to ensure its long-term security. While the horrendous civilian death toll of Israel's military campaign is regrettable, this line of thinking goes, the threat from Hamas means Israel has no choice but to prosecute the war until the group is eliminated, as long as it takes, and no matter the cost.

If it's allowed to survive, it will simply choose another moment in the future to attack, and Israeli citizens will never know peace.

Yet Austin is only one prominent voice in recent months that has pointed out the faultiness of this logic, and reminded the world that when a state battling terrorism leaves a trail of human carnage in its wake, the resulting rage, bitterness and despair fuel the very problem it's fighting, and many times over.

When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. was asked directly if he feared that high civilian casualty numbers would create future Hamas members, he replied, "Yes, very much so." "We'll be fighting their sons in four or five years," former Shin Bet chief Ya'akov Peri told the New York Times.

"Israel Is Fostering the Next Generation of Hatred Against Itself," read the headline of a recent column by Haaretz's Gideon Levy, as he warned readers to "look what hatred was sown in the hearts of almost all Israelis by one barbaric attack," and consider what an even worse, prolonged slaughter might do to the Palestinian population. "These children will never forgive the soldiers. You're raising another generation of resistance," one Palestinian father, his young son killed by Israeli soldiers, told Levy.

Former UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace recently warned, with reference to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, "that radicalisation follows oppression" and that "a disproportionate response by the state can serve as a terrorist organisation's best recruiting sergeant."

Security services in the United States and around the world have already backed up these warnings. FBI Director Chris Wray cautioned last month that U.S. support for Israel's war had led multiple terrorist organizations to call for attacks against Americans and the West, and had significantly "raised the threat of an attack" inside the United States.

That's on top of advisories and intelligence findings by various U.S. government agencies warning of credible threats by groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah over U.S. support for the war. Both the German and British spy agencies have likewise sounded the alarm over the war potentially fueling militant radicalization, citing specific threats being made by jihadist groups and those sympathetic to them.

There's good reason to believe them. Earlier this month, a 26-year-old French man killed one man and injured two others in a knife and hammer attack in central Paris, before telling police he was upset that "so many Muslims are dying in Afghanistan and in Palestine" and that he thought France was complicit in what was happening in Gaza. A day after Hezbollah called for a "day of rage" in retaliation for the October 17 explosion in Al-Ahli hospital, two people threw petrol bombs at a Berlin synagogue. Just last week, German authorities arrested suspected Hamas members who had allegedly been tasked with drawing on a secret weapons depot in Europe for attacks on Jewish sites on the continent.

Taking Tunisia as a bellwether for the rest of the region, a series of Arab Barometer surveys of the country found that the proportion of Tunisians favoring armed resistance to Israeli occupation had shot up dramatically in the three weeks after Hamas' October 7 attack and the onset of Israel's military offensive. Already, U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked a total of 97 times since October 7, while the Houthi rebels who control most of Yemen have launched a series of successful attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, prompting possible U.S. military strikes in response.

Meanwhile, the war has been a boon for Hamas, despite — or arguably, because of — the human devastation caused by the war provoked by the group's horrifying October atrocities. Polling shows that the group's popularity has risen in both Gaza and, especially, in the much larger West Bank, where its standing has been bolstered by the events of the past few months and its popular support has risen by more than 30 points. At the same time, the position of more moderate forces has weakened, with an overwhelming majority of Palestinians favoring the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas and a smaller, nearly two-thirds majority preferring the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority he governs.

None of this should be surprising or controversial. The United States' own, more-than-two-decade-long attempt to bomb and shoot terrorism out of existence has demonstrated the counter-productive nature of such a strategy. Domestic terrorists have regularly pointed to U.S. and other Western governments' military operations in the Middle East over the years to explain the motivations for their own violence. A decade or more after assassinating Osama bin Laden, as well as killing or capturing a spate of other 9/11 plotters and terrorist leaders while neutralizing terrorist groups like ISIS, U.S. forces continue to engage in ground combat against terrorists in at least nine countries, while taking part in counterterrorism training in a total of 73.

Meanwhile, terrorist attacks in Africa have exploded by 75,000 percent since the U.S. started conducting counterterrorism operations there two decades ago, and the number of transnational terror groups there has gone from zero at the time of September 11 to dozens, with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point declaring the continent "the new global epicenter of jihadi violence" as of summer 2021.
All of this should inspire extreme skepticism of the Israeli leadership's claims that taking out a few top Hamas leaders and killing the group's fighters at the cost of causing extreme human suffering will end its security problems. Indeed, all evidence quite clearly suggests the opposite. And that means the only real solution is the long-term political settlement that Israeli officials reject and Netanyahu now boasts of having blocked for decades.
Otherwise, Israel and its U.S. supporters may only succeed in destroying an entity called "Hamas," and face the exact same problems from one or more groups that have a different name, but the exact same violent designs.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to deny the war in Ukraine could have been ended mere months into the Russian invasion — and that the U.S. and U.K. governments worked to prevent this from happening. The latest piece of corroboration comes courtesy David Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky's "Servant of the People" party who led the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks with Moscow. Arakhamia told journalist Natalia Moseichuk in a recent televised interview that "Russia's goal was to push us to take neutrality," meaning to commit to not joining NATO, and that "they were ready to end the war if we accept neutrality."There were several reasons the negotiations ultimately collapsed, he said, including the need to change the Ukrainian constitution (which had been amended in February 2019 to enshrine the country's NATO aspirations), and the fact that Johnson had come to Kyiv to inform Ukrainian officials the West wouldn't sign any agreement with Moscow, instead urging: "let's just fight."Arakhamia also said that Kyiv's lack of trust in the Russian side to fulfill its end of the bargain meant that the peace deal "could only be done if there were security guarantees" — suggesting, obliquely, that negotiations could have borne fruit had they received the backing and involvement of NATO states. Western governments' provision of security guarantees for Ukraine have long been part of the discussion for how to ensure the sustainability of a post-war peace deal, and in fact, Arakhmia himself disclosed in the same interview that "the Western allies advised us not to agree to ephemeral security guarantees."The interview corroborates claims first reported in May 2022 by the broadly Western-aligned Ukrainska Pravda outlet — which reported that Boris Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the West wouldn't support any peace deal regardless of what Ukraine wanted, and they preferred to keep taking the fight to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was less powerful than they had thought. Johnson had himself confirmed, albeit not in so many words, in a phone call to French President Emmanuel Macron that he had urged Zelensky against peace.All of it lends further weight to multiple accounts over the course of the past 21 months that have claimed Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of peace, but were blocked by NATO states eager for a prolonged war that would weaken Russia and possibly destabilize it.Former U.S. national security official Fiona Hill reported the two sides had reached a tentative peace deal the same month of Johnson's surprise visit to Kyiv, while former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and several Turkish officials — all of whom were involved at various times in the talks — have said that NATO officials stopped or undermined negotiations. Multiple U.S. reports documented a divide in NATO, with the United States and U.K. reportedly heading a faction of states who preferred a longer war than a sooner peace. Historian Niall Ferguson reported overhearing an unnamed U.S. official say in March 2022 that "the only end game now is the end of Putin regime [sic]."What's particularly notable is how dramatically these disclosures contrast with the overwhelming thrust of two years' worth of mainstream discourse on, and analysis of, this war. Until recently, both NATO officials and commentators across the political spectrum insisted that negotiations with Moscow were impossible and that the war could only be ended by pursuing victory on the battlefield, usually by pursuing Kyiv's maximalist aims of reconquering all of the territory it had lost since 2014. (According to reports, the tentative agreement reached last April would have seen Ukraine exchange neutrality for a Russian withdrawal to its pre-February 2022 borders). Voices who called for a diplomatic resolution were ignored or viciously smeared, as was anyone who said that Ukraine's possible entry into NATO was at the heart of the conflict, and that adopting neutrality could help end the war. There is now a mountain of evidence backing both of these claims. In fact, Arakhamia's interview further drove home the point about NATO membership. "They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality," he said in the interview. "That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about 'denazification,' the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah." There are several key takeaways here. One is that Americans, and indeed all Western publics, should be far more skeptical in future of claims from officials and commentators that diplomatic solutions to conflicts and negotiations with adversarial governments are impossible or ineffective, and that military solutions are the only answer. Indeed, we've seen virtually the same arguments deployed against peace talks between Israel and Hamas — a conflict that recently saw a successful temporary ceasefire and hostage exchange — just as we saw them deployed in previous conflicts that likewise ended with successful negotiations. Another is the carnage that could have been prevented. It was only a few months after negotiations were scuttled that Zelensky admitted Ukraine was losing between 60 and 100 soldiers every day. By August this year, U.S. estimates of Ukrainian casualties, which are an official state secret, stood at nearly 200,000, including 70,000 killed. Amputations among Ukrainians have already reached a comparable scale to that suffered by Germans and Britons over World War One, in a fraction of the time. Besides this death toll, the prolonging of the war has meant profound economic, demographic, and even territorial losses for Ukraine. Finally, the effort to prevent peace talks from bearing fruit put not just more Ukrainians in danger, but the entire world. After assuring the U.S. public in February that they needn't fear nuclear war with Russia, by September, President Joe Biden was privately warning that the world was the closest it had been to "Armageddon" in sixty years. The nineteen months that followed the failure of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks saw several near-misses that could have turned the war into one between Russia and NATO, one that would likely escalate to a nuclear confrontation.The decision not to seriously pursue a viable diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine has been a disaster for that country and its inhabitants. The only mild consolation is that it could offer a vital lesson for the United States and other NATO states to apply to and prevent future conflicts — if we dare learn it, that is.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!

This past weekend saw the publication of a disturbing report from Axios, following a phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Israeli counterpart.According to unnamed sources, the outlet reports, there are growing fears within the Biden administration that the Israeli government wants to provoke Hezbollah into starting a wider regional war that would envelop Lebanon and other nearby countries, as well as the United States.It's a powerful reminder that the Biden administration's current policy of unconditional support for the Israeli government's war on Gaza carries with it no upsides and only downsides in regards to U.S. interests. Avoiding another Middle Eastern war is a core priority for President Joe Biden, who both campaigned on ending "forever wars," and has expressed concern about the U.S. capacity for a future military confrontation with China. In fact, according to Axios, Austin's weekend phone call was precisely to register his concern over the Israeli attacks in Lebanon and "the need to contain the conflict to Gaza and avoid regional escalation." U.S.officials have been reportedly trying to prevent this outcome from the start of the conflict. Short of a full-blown war, Washington's support for the war is already leading to U.S. casualties. As of Monday, U.S. and coalition forces have suffered at least 52 attacks since October 17, injuring 56 troops in Iraq and Syria. In a classic case of tit-for-tat, four of those attacks took place this past Sunday alone in response to U.S. airstrikes on Iran-linked facilities, which were themselves a response to earlier militia attacks on American targets in the region over Washington's backing for Israel.At one point, a drone launched by an Iran-backed drone crashed into the U.S.barracks at an Iraqi air base, failing to kill U.S.troops only because it was defective.There are few greater interests of a nation than ensuring the safety and security of its citizens. The Biden administration certainly thinks so, since it has repeatedly invoked the U.S. citizens taken as hostages by Hamas and made clear the importance it places on their safe return. Yet U.S. citizens remain trapped in Gaza, their lives threatened by not just Israel's relentless bombing campaign, but by the siege that has created a devastating humanitarian crisis in the territory. The longer the war goes on, the bigger the risk to these Americans' lives.At the same time, administration officials are already warning the war is going to inflame terrorism, the very thing the United States spent the past two decades, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars trying to combat. The U.S. State Department issued an alert early on in the war that there was an increased "potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests." A leaked intelligence bulletin around the same time warned that Hezbollah and Al Qaeda affiliates were calling for attacks on U.S. citizens and interests over the conflict, and that the October 17 blast at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City — responsibility for which is still undetermined — would "likely continue to draw public backlash and organized responses." (The Israeli military has since repeatedly attacked multiple hospitals in Gaza).Similar warnings abound. The Department of Homeland Security has cautioned that the United States is "in a heightened threat environment" as a result of the war. FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that "multiple foreign terrorist organizations have called for attacks against Americans and the West," and that "the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole 'nother level." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown has said the unprecedented rate of civilian slaughter will likely create more militants, stressing that " the faster you can get to a point where you stop the hostilities, you have less strife for the civilian population that turns into someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas."Meanwhile, the war is doing profound reputational damage to the United States, according to both officials from the region and inside the administration itself. A diplomatic cable obtained by CNN stated that U.S. diplomats in Arab countries had warned the White House National Security Council, CIA, and FBI that Biden's support for the war "is losing us Arab publics for a generation." This almost exactly echoes what unhappy State Department officials told HuffPost they were hearing from their Arab government counterparts. A dissent memo organized by State staffers reportedly warns that U.S. failure to publicly criticize Israeli violations "contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide." Indeed, the Washington Post recently reported, based on the words of analysts and Arab officials, that U.S support for Israel's actions "risks lasting damage to Washington's standing in the region and beyond" and has been a "constant source of friction" as Secretary of State Tony Blinken has toured the Middle East. Arab leaders have repeatedly, publicly criticized the United States. "Arab and Global South officials are bewildered by Biden's indifference to how his blocking of a ceasefire is plummeting America's standing globally," says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. "Arab officials have told me that Biden has done more damage to America's standing in the region than George W Bush did with his illegal invasion of Iraq." "All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost," one senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times early on in the war. "Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won't ever listen to us again." Yet Biden and other U.S. officials have repeatedly set as a high priority the defense and rebuilding of this very global order, which the administration says underpins U.S. security and prosperity. Steadfast U.S. support for Israel has been typically justified on the basis that, for all the criticism leveled at the United States over it, it holds more benefits than drawbacks for U.S. interests. But it is impossible to make that argument for the Biden administration's support for Israel's current war, which is doing profound reputational damage to the United States and risks the deaths of untold numbers of Americans.

It's easy to forget now, but the shocking and horrific violence that set off the current hostilities in the Middle East, where Hamas militants slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israeli civilians, was predicted. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed.
Trump's DHS didn't claim it was because, in President Joe Biden words, of "sheer evil" from those who exist only "to kill Jews." Rather, it pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which Trump claimed would shift the course of Middle Eastern history from "decades of division and conflict" and which the Biden administration claimed would make the region "safer and more prosperous."
So how did we end up with the exact opposite?
For decades, the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the provision of an independent state for the Palestinian people and the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, was central to the task of engineering peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. This was a problem, since between successive Israeli governments steadily chipping away at the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict and dwindling U.S. interest in pressuring the Israeli state to follow through on the commitment, that resolution started to look increasingly impossible.
But over time, the priorities of the Arab states shifted away from the Palestinians, too. Their largely authoritarian leadership became more preoccupied with matters like maintaining political control in the wake of the Arab Spring protests — for which support from an advanced military power like Israel might prove useful — and an increasingly assertive Iran, which then-newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called a "much more urgent and more important" issue.
This shift dovetailed with the Trump administration's ultra-Israel-friendly stance and its own goal of further isolating Iran in the region. The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of "genius." Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it.
The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government's Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world's program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.
The new normalization agreements' foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region's governments and the broader international community. Both the Trump administration and, reportedly, bin Salman, pressured Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to assent, while the states that signed continued paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, claiming this normalization push would halt Israel's annexation plans for its illegal West Bank settlements.
In reality, the text of the agreements barely mentioned Palestinians, outside of a few vague assurances to keep working toward a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Morocco maintained a "coherent, constant and unchanged position" on the matter. This was, to put it mildly, far short of what both Palestinians and their supporters in the U.S. Congress demanded.
As Arab states began gradually deepening ties with Israel, they increasingly backed away from their historic positions. Bin Salman declared (and subsequently walked back) that Israelis "have the right to have their own land," effectively sanctioning the loss of what the Muslim world viewed as Palestinians' historic land. When violence broke out in April 2021 at the Al-Aqsa mosque, with Israeli forces raiding one of Islam's holiest sites, the UAE response was notably muted. That the normalization process continued despite what would earlier have been viewed as an unacceptable provocation against both Palestinians and Islam itself was celebrated by the accords' supporters, as proof that ongoing repression of Palestinians could indeed be safely ignored.
But the Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7. The vast majority of the populations of Israel's Arab neighbors opposed the accords, as did some leaders, like Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who charged that the signers had "lost their moral compass," and Jordan's King Abdullah, who declared that "no architecture for regional security and development can stand over the burning ashes of this conflict."
So did Palestinians themselves, across opinion surveys, with both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calling it a "betrayal," a "treacherous stab," and "grave harm." Hamas also called for "an integrated plan to bring down normalization." Protests against the accords erupted in Morocco, one of the signers.
The signing of the Accords was particularly fraught in Saudi Arabia. The country's powerful clerics continued to oppose Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But beyond that, the Saudi leadership's internal legitimacy and its standing as the region's leader of the Islamic continued to rest in part on its commitment to the Palestinians. Regional rival Iran quickly stepped in to fill this vacuum left by Saudi support for the deals, sharply criticizing the normalization effort as a "betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom."
Meanwhile, Israeli policy didn't change as promised, and in fact, only hardened. Since 2020, when the accords were signed, illegal settlements have expanded and even ramped up alongside settler violence. The Netanyahu government has now advanced a record number of settler housing units, and transferred administration of the occupied territories from military to civilian hands, widely interpreted as signaling plans for annexation, even as figures like former Abbas adviser Ghaith al-Omari claimed the accords had "already delivered to the Palestinians" by stopping this policy. This past September, the UAE's ambassador to the United States admitted annexation hadn't actually stopped.
The Biden administration could have reversed Trump's efforts, and placed pressure on Israel to halt these plans, as well as end its settlement expansion while making good on its promises and obligations under the peace process. Instead, the president continued Trump's normalization efforts while breaking from presidential precedent and not even attempting to advance the peace process, all while issuing little to no criticism of the Israeli government's violations. He has in fact escalated the issue, pushing for an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, with the only concession to Palestinians the mere preservation of the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace — an agreement that would also entail further nuclear proliferation in the region and giving Saudi Arabia security assurances. Even so, Biden's secretary of state continues to claim that this could "be used to advance" such a peace.
So while Hamas had reportedly planned this operation for two years, and claimed it was motivated by years of violence at Al-Aqsa, its attack also can't be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians' expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.What is clear — from Hamas's extraordinary violence, the wider regional war it threatens to spark, as well as the major pro-Palestinian protests across Arab countries in response to Israel's bombing campaign — is that almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East.

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we've been told that the issue of NATO expansion is irrelevant to the war, and that anyone bringing it up is, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, at worst, apologizing for or justifying the war.So it was curious to see NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this month say explicitly that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine, and the alliance's refusal to swear it off — not once or twice, but three separate times."President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement," Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. "That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.""He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite," Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin's invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, "demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact opposite."It's not clear if Stoltenberg was referring to the draft treaty Putin put forward in December 2021 and simply mixed up the seasons (the provisions of each are the same), or if he's referring to an earlier, as-yet-unreported incident. In any case, what Stoltenberg claims here — that Putin viewed Ukraine's NATO entry as so unacceptable he was willing to invade to stop it, and put forward a negotiating bid that might have prevented it, only for NATO to reject it — has been repeatedly made by those trying to explain the causes of the war and how it could be ended, only to be dismissed as propaganda.The only logical conclusion, if we're to listen to the hawks, is that the man in charge of the very alliance helping Ukraine defend itself from Putin is, in fact, working for the Russian leader and spreading his propaganda.This isn't the only instance from a member of the NATO establishment. Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May this year, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said, alongside Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, that "we assess that Putin probably has scaled back his immediate ambitions to ... ensuring that Ukraine will never become a NATO ally." Earlier in her testimony, Haines had said that Putin's invasion had backfired by "precipitating the very events he hoped to avoid such as Finland's accession to NATO and Sweden's petition to join."Likewise, in a March 2023 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Russia expert Fiona Hill — who served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump — told the paper that "it was always obvious that NATO's enlargement to Ukraine and to Georgia was a provocation for Putin." Yet the opposite claim, that the invasion was entirely "unprovoked," has become such an article of faith in Western discourse that this word is ubiquitous in news reports and official statements on the war.On a similar note, an August 2022 Washington Post report based on "in-depth interviews with more than three dozen senior U.S., Ukrainian, European and NATO officials" reported four separate instances of high-ranking Russian officials telling their U.S.counterparts in the lead-up to the war that NATO expansion was a core part of the grievances motivating Moscow's threatening troop build-up. That included Putin himself, who told President Joe Biden in a December 2021 video call "that the eastward expansion of the Western alliance was a major factor in his decision to send troops to Ukraine's border," according to the report.To some extent, this isn't surprising. As the analysts, journalists, politicians, and others pointing to NATO expansion as a leading cause of the war have copiously documented, the decades before the invasion saw countless members of the Washington national security establishment, from famed Cold War strategist George Kennan and current CIA Director William Burns to a parade of diplomats, military officials, NATO leaders and even Biden himself, warn that the alliance's eastward creep was a fundamental source of Russian unhappiness and that it would provoke Russian hostility and aggression — or even spark war. But what was once uncontroversial and widely acknowledged before the invasion has become verboten since it started in February 2022, as debate or dissent on the matter of the war and U.S. and European policy toward it have been clamped down on, often via vicious McCarthyite tactics. The topic has become verboten, that is, unless you happen to be a U.S. or NATO official.It's not just individual officials, either. Elements of this supposedly Kremlin-originating argument also pop up in major U.S. government documents. Take, for instance, the Annual Threat Assessment put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a year after the invasion started. Meant to reflect the "collective insights" of Washington's various intelligence agencies, the report states that it expects Moscow to continue "to insert itself into crises when it sees its interests at stake, the anticipated costs of action are low, it sees an opportunity to capitalize on a power vacuum, or, as in the case of its use of force in Ukraine, it perceives an existential threat in its neighborhood that could destabilize Putin's rule and endanger Russian national security." Yet today, anyone else saying that Putin or the Russian establishment genuinely view Ukraine's growing integration into NATO as a security threat is liable to receive all manner of scurrilous accusations.As with officials' words, you can find similar points in documents before the war. A 2020 U.S. Army War College paper states that "future admissions to NATO for states in Russia's near abroad will likely be met with aggression." A 2019 paper from the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation — and sponsored by the Army Quadrennial Defense Review Office — states explicitly that the Kremlin's fear of a direct military attack by the United States is "very real," plus that "providing more U.S. military equipment and advice [to Ukraine in the war on the Donbas] could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it," including by "mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory." The 2017 National Security Strategy states outright that "Russia views the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) as threats."It's the central paradox of the current war discourse: What is widely acknowledged by Western policymakers and officials in the halls of power, who rely on an evidence-based understanding of the world to shape foreign policy, is unspeakable anywhere outside of them.What's at stake is more important than just finger-pointing and apportioning guilt. By steadfastly refusing to understand one of the foundational causes of the war and the U.S. and NATO role in it, we will continue to fail to end it and to secure a lasting peace, leading to many more Ukrainian deaths, and to many more years of living in the shadow of global catastrophe.

Last week saw former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin retire from politics after a poor election showing, and join the Tony Blair Institute, where she will be "advising political leaders on their reform programs." The news raised some eyebrows for several reasons.For one, former British Prime Minister Blair's long history of advising authoritarians for money, as well as the Institute's own funding from the Saudi government, already sits awkwardly with the non-profit's original rationale of at "articulat[ing] a vision of liberal democracy that can garner substantial support," as well as "progressive values." Also there is Blair's leading role in the invasion of Iraq, which sits squarely at odds with Marin's hawkishness on Russian President Vladimir Putin's similarly illegal and disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Over her tenure, Marin rejected U.S. President Joe Biden's suggestion of giving Putin an "off-ramp" to end the war, offered to transfer fighter jets to Kyiv, and declared she would back Ukraine's war effort for as long as 15 years, because a lack of military victory would lead to "decades of this kind of behavior."But there's also the fact that Blair's institute was until recently at least partly funded by sanctioned Russian billionaire Moshe Kantor, a figure with close ties to the Kremlin and the largest shareholder in the strategically significant Russian fertilizer company Acron. As prime minister, Marin was one of the leading supporters of Western sanctions on Russia, calling for them to impact "the everyday lives of ordinary Russians," and vowing that Finland would grit its teeth through the "long winter" their blowback would cause. Thanks to those sanctions, Fins paid €5 billion more in electricity costs over 2022 and the country tipped into a recession, even if a mild winter meant predictions of blackouts didn't materialize. This was all meant to be worth it to defend the "values of a free and democratic world." Yet here Marin is, taking a paid position with an institute partly funded by a sanctioned, Kremlin-connected billionaire, and run by someone responsible for an illegal invasion of his own. Marin is not the only Western hawk who has displayed such hypocrisy. Since August, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has been embroiled in a potentially career-jeopardizing scandal over her husband's business interests, when it was revealed a trucking company he co-owned continued to do business in Russia long after Moscow's invasion began. Worse, the company was part of the supply chain providing Russian security forces with tear gas — which means Kallas and her husband were indirectly profiting off the Kremlin's repression of anti-war protesters. Yet Kallas has been a strident hawk on the war. She has labeled calls for negotiations "very dangerous," has repeatedly called diplomacy to end the war mere "appeasement," banned tourist visas for ordinary Russians while urging others to do the same, and demanded tighter sanctions while admonishing local companies to find a "moral compass" and avoid deals that would let Moscow circumvent sanctions. Thanks to those sanctions, Estonia saw the EU's single biggest price hikes for food and fuel.Others may not have financial ties to Russia, but have histories of cozy relations with Kremlin-connected oligarchs or even Putin himself. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson took a hardline position on the war, insisting it could only end through total military victory instead of peace talks, vowing to "squeeze Russia from the global economy, piece by piece," and traveling to Kyiv to scuttle a reportedly tentative peace deal in the war's early months, preferring to inflict more military damage to Russia. Johnson, whose party received a deluge of Russian-connected donations since he became prime minister in 2019, has long been close with Russian oligarchs. He helped make the UK a destination for oligarchs to park their cash free from accountability, and had several personal relationships with them. That includes Evgeny Lebedev, son of an oligarch and former KGB spy who helped Putin win power and tried to help him win Western support for annexing Crimea. Johnson personally intervened on the younger Levedev's behalf to get him peerage in the House of Lords, despite a security risk warning from MI6. Johnson isn't alone among British prime ministers. Blair himself has engaged in hawkish rhetoric on the war, arguing for military defeat of Moscow as a way toward peace. Yet he had a close and friendly relationship with Putin when he was in 10 Downing Street, tacitly backing and admitting to sympathizing with the Russian leader's war in Chechnya, and even refusing to rule out advising him in exchange for money.In the United States, Hillary Clinton has been a vocal liberal hawk, suggesting early on that Ukraine be turned into an Afghanistan-like quagmire for Russia, and declaring the best way for the war to end "is for Ukraine to win." Clinton herself was once embroiled in a Russia-related scandal: while her office was responsible for helping approve a deal that gave Russian state atomic agency Rosatom control of large percentage U.S. uranium reserves, her husband, former president Bill Clinton, received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Kremlin-connected bank that promoted the stock of the Canadian mining company being purchased by the Russian firm.Putin, whom Clinton visited at his home on the trip, personally thanked Clinton for the speech. Back in 2006, he himself lamented that, even as he expressed unease about Putin's authoritarianism, the U.S. government was being too critical of the Russian leader. Even some ultra-hawkish columnists once started out with far less strident positions on Putin. Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum, who recently wrote that "even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin," once wrote about the Russian leader's "bold and unexpected decision" to ally himself with the United States after September 11 and argued that the Russian military's friendliness with U.S. adversaries and Putin's disinterest in a free press didn't mean "we shouldn't cooperate with Russia." Chess champion Garry Kasporov, who recently all but accused Biden and his team of being in cahoots with Putin for being nominally open to the idea of negotiating, once called Putin and his coterie "people with whom the West could do business," and explicitly justified his Chechen war. Explaining that the Chechen rebels were "bandits" and needed to be cracked down on for the government to "win support for painful economic reforms," he urged the West to "not demand that Mr. Putin immediately halt the Chechen operation" or threaten cutting off financial assistance over it. It's striking that at a time when McCarthyite accusations are rife in Western debate on the war and on the subject of diplomacy specifically, so many of those who have taken the most uncompromising positions publicly either have a history of more pragmatic stances, or of their own financial and personal connections to Kremlin-linked figures and Putin himself. It raises the question of how sincere the maximalist rhetoric and drive for escalation over diplomacy really is, and whether at least some hawks are engaging in risky and reckless behavior they don't fully believe — perhaps as a form of overcompensation in a jinogistic climate.

The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the "continuous deterioration of the security situation" plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel "have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO's hazardous adventure in Libya." Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same. The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.There was little dissent at the time. As Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces battled anti-government rebels, politicians, the press and anti-Gaddafi Libyans painted an overly simplistic picture of unarmed protesters and other civilians facing imminent if not already unfolding genocide. Only years later would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were "not supported by the available evidence" and that "the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element" that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. "I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can't do something rather than why you can," complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka said it would be "an important humanitarian step." The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who's who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that "inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later."Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, "limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion" could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that "the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion." (Despite Gaddafi's ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where "even a small deployment could have stopped the killing," and insisted U.S. intervention would "change the image of the United States overnight." In one email, she dismissed counter-arguments:"People will say that we will then get enmeshed in a civil war, that we cannot go into another Muslim country, that Gaddafi is well armed, there will be a million reasons NOT to act. But all our talk about global responsibility and leadership, not to mention respect for universal values, is completely empty if we stand by and watch this happen with no response but sanctions."Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter ("bravo!"; "No-fly! Brava! You did it!"), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin ("your efforts ... will be long remembered"). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi's ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. "defeat," and criticizing those saying Libya wasn't a vital U.S. interest.NATO's undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn't regime change, while others said Gaddafi "needs to go." It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons' letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a "limited intervention" that wouldn't involve regime change, to professing "I don't see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going."After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. "There is no mission creep," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.The episode was considered a triumph. "We came, we saw, he died," Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the "success." "As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done," wrote then-U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis in October 2011. "Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change." That same month, Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared "Libya's victory" as she flashed a peace sign."It was the right thing to do," Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was "proud to play a decisive role" in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having "at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities," then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to "extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need," citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.Others disagreed. "Libya has given [the mandate of 'responsibility to protect'] a bad name," complained Indian UN Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, echoing the sentiments of other diplomats angry that a UN mandate for protecting civilians had been stretched to regime change.It soon became clear why. Gaddafi's toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the "Tesco" of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi's ouster "opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem" across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.Things are scarcely better in "liberated" Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton's pre-intervention fear of Libya "becoming a giant Somalia." By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading.Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.Only five years later, Clinton, once eager to claim credit, distanced herself from the decision to intervene. "It didn't work," Obama admitted bluntly as he prepared to leave office, publicly deeming the country "a mess" and, privately, "a shit show." The New York Times collected the damning verdicts of those involved: "We made it worse"; "Gaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave"; "by God, if we can't succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts."Libya offers numerous cautionary tales about well-meaning U.S. military interventions, from the way they rapidly escalate beyond their initial goals and limited nature, to their penchant for unforeseen knock-on effects that are hard to control and snowball disastrously. As Obama's "success" in the country now threatens to spark a regional war in Niger that could even drag the United States into the fighting, it should remind us that the consequences of military action and rejection of negotiated solutions last much longer than, and look very different years after, the initial period of triumphalism.

A forever war seems to be brewing in Ukraine.


Last week, I argued that given the failure of Kyiv's summer offensive to reclaim significant territory from Russia and given the maximalist rhetoric that the U.S. government and NATO allies had been using since last year to sell the public on open-ended military support, the war in Ukraine was in danger of being prolonged again, well past the date that the Biden administration had appeared to set last year.


This increasingly looks to be the case. On Saturday, the Financial Times reported that "U.S. officials are privately girding for what increasingly looks like a war of attrition that will last well into next year," echoing an earlier Wall Street Journal report that "military strategists and policymakers across the West are already starting to think about next year's spring offensive" and about "how to prepare for a protracted conflict."


It may well become "a protracted struggle that lasts several more years," the Journal warned on Sunday, noting that Ukraine's goal of retaking all the territory it lost now "appears a distant prospect."


Writing in POLITICO, former Democratic congressman and Obama administration State Department official Tom Malinowski — now a senior fellow at the McCain Institute — argues that "for the war in Ukraine to end on terms consistent with American interests and ideals, Ukraine must be seen to have won, and Russia's invasion must go down in history as a decisive failure."


In particular, Malinowski points to President Joe Biden's declaration in February this year that "Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — never."


On Aug. 10, an unnamed senior official told CNN that "we don't know how much longer this war is going to go on," but that the White House "won't be bashful about going back to Congress beyond the first quarter of next year if we feel like we need to do that."


In other words, the United States and NATO are moving the goalposts again in a war that has already been characterized by steady mission creep. At least some of their Russian counterparts appear to feel the same, with former Russian President and Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev recently saying that "should it take years or even decades, then so be it."


Yet this begs the question of when it will ever be considered a good time to wind down the war. The Ukrainian government and its supporters maintain that it's a lack of advanced military weapons that have hobbled its offensive, even as military experts insist no weapon would be a "magic bullet" against the dug-in Russian defenses and that the reasons for Kyiv's military failures run deeper. This is not an unreasonable take given the significant amount of Western-supplied heavy weaponry destroyed in the offensive's opening weeks alone.


If the next offensive similarly fails, will a ceasefire be pushed back again? How many years might this go on for?


Even if Kyiv does stage a successful operation against Russian forces in the future, it's not clear it will lead to an end of the war. For one, Moscow may decide to launch its own counter-offensive to erase whatever gains Ukrainian forces have made, starting perhaps an endless cycle of military toing-and-froing. Or we could have a repeat of last fall, when Kyiv and its NATO backers, emboldened by the major gains made in Ukraine's September counter-offensive, rejected the idea of talks to insead pursue "total victory," at ultimately disastrous cost.


Even now, Ukrainian leaders and many of its Western supporters still maintain the maximalist goals of restoring the country's pre-2014 borders, which includes retaking Crimea.


Ironically, a prolonged war is exactly what at least some NATO officials had hoped for from the start in order to trap Russia in its own Afghanistan-like blunder, with the New York Times reporting in March 2022 that the administration "seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire."


But a prolonged war will not be good for Ukraine, which has already suffered breathtakingly vast human and economic costs from a protracted war, and which falls further and further into debt with every month. And it will not be good for the rest of the world either, feeding into worldwide cost-of-living shocks while carrying the already twice-averted possibility of a catastrophic NATO-Russia war that could turn nuclear.


Meanwhile, should the war drag on into next year, it may become a sore political issue in the 2024 election. President Biden came into office promising an end to "forever wars" and to launch a new era of "relentless diplomacy," while his likely opponent, Donald Trump, has staked out a pro-diplomacy position on the war, making a protracted war in Ukraine a potential political liability.


Meanwhile, as the U.S. public and Republican lawmakers increasingly sour on more military aid to Ukraine, the president risks having U.S. involvement in the war end not on his terms, but with Congress cutting off further funding. All the while, there is the unpredictability of war policy during the campaign season, potentially raising pressure on the administration to escalate Washington's involvement, lest a perceived defeat threaten Biden's chances for re-election.


Even U.S. officials are now quietly admitting that Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley "had a point" when he called for Kyiv to make the most of its gains by suing for peace late last year, and that "we may have missed a window to push for earlier talks." Now may not be too late to do so.


But if the administration continues to drag its feet, it risks trapping not just Russia but the United States and Europe into yet another endless conflict, guaranteeing ongoing horror for the Ukrainian people and keeping the specter of nuclear catastrophe looming above the rest of the globe.