The West’s Frontline Partners Are Awesome

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 02, 2025

 

We are beset by professional pessimists. Rarely is that unfortunate condition more apparent than when America’s foreign partners enjoy successes in their struggles against our shared adversaries.

 

Among a bipartisan cast of fatalists, the notion that the West is a spent force is all but conventional wisdom. You’ve heard it all before. We are culturally exhausted and too unsure of ourselves to defend our heritage. We lack the wherewithal to safeguard our interests. Our adversaries possess the determination and skill we’ve lost in the decades we spent languishing in comfort. We are atrophied and insecure. They are stolid and unyielding. Those who insist otherwise are lost in nostalgia for a bygone age. The best we should expect from any responsible leadership class is managed decline.

 

Occasionally, our allies and partners abroad intervene to expose the fallacy in this popular defeatism.

 

The Israeli operation that put thousands of tiny explosive devices inside the pockets of as many Hezbollah fighters, eliminating or disabling much of the terrorist group’s manpower in advance of airstrikes that neutralized its leadership, was one such success. It took years to plan and execute. It all but foreclosed on the prospect of collateral damage. Hezbollah even paid cold, hard cash for the privilege of having their communications devices explode in their pants.

 

To this, the West’s depressives responded with typical self-doubt. If Israel could pull that operation off, many asked, why couldn’t Beijing? How many communications devices manufactured in East Asia are on your person right now? And how will Iran react to this audacious assault on their asymmetric capabilities? Has Israel’s reckless unilateral alteration of the regional balance of power compelled Iran to risk an all-out war with its neighbors and even the United States?

 

Little thought was spared for the potential positive outcomes that would flow from that operation. Subsequently, Israel Defense Forces swept Hezbollah from its borders, allowing the return home of the Israelis ejected from their homes in the country’s north after the 10/7 massacre. Hezbollah’s implosion in Lebanon subsequently weakened Iran’s hand in Syria, which collapsed entirely just a few weeks later. Iran’s retaliation against Israel was dangerous but manageable. It was limited by Iran’s own depleted capabilities and its understanding that Israeli intelligence had thoroughly penetrated much of the country’s defense establishment. Today, the window to neutralize the Iranian nuclear program is wide open.

 

By defaulting to doom and gloom, Western pessimists missed the story unfolding right in front of their eyes. A similar reaction greeted the news this weekend that Ukraine had pulled off a spectacular coup inside Russia.

 

Accounts of the operation read like a science fiction thriller. Over the course of 18 months, Ukrainians constructed hundreds of low-cost quadcopter drones armed with explosive devices, smuggled them into Russia, and piled them into modified mobile cabins. Those cabins were loaded onto trucks where they were ferried to locations adjacent to several Russian airbases. There, the trucks opened remotely, releasing a fleet of suicide drones that executed simultaneous strikes on more than 40 strategic Russian military aircraft.

 

The strikes were wildly successful. Ukraine claims that roughly 34 percent of the aircraft used to deliver ballistic and cruise missiles to Ukrainian targets were damaged or destroyed — an assessment we shouldn’t gainsay since Ukraine did most of the intelligence gathering ahead of this strike. The U.S. did not provide support, Washington insists. Ukraine targeted airfields as far away as Irkutsk, thousands of miles from home. Ukrainian operatives had already been withdrawn from Russia ahead of the strikes, which Volodymir Zelensky claims were prepared right under the noses of Russian security forces. “What’s most interesting, is that the ‘office’ of our operation on Russian territory was located directly next to FSB headquarters in one of their regions,” he said.

 

This is a success on par with Israel’s pager attacks, and it has been received with the same negativity that followed Israel’s coup. Just think about how exposed our own bomber fleet is to that sort of attack, the handwringers mourned. Could the U.S., too, see its strategic air force grounded in the opening hours of a war with a near-peer power in the same way? After all, if Ukraine was able to negotiate the entire Russian Federation despite its wartime posture, how easy would it be to smuggle weapons of war into the American landscape?

 

And how will Russia respond to this incredibly successful attack on one of the pillars of its nuclear triad? Anything that alters the nuclear-deterrent dynamic that typifies stable relations between Moscow and the West is inherently dangerous. Have Ukraine’s attacks on the systems that Russia employs to deliver nuclear attacks made the Kremlin’s trigger fingers a little itchier? Do we have more to fear from a Russia that is on the backfoot than one that’s confident, extroverted, and eagerly gobbling up sovereign territory in Europe?

 

These questions and worries are valid. They should be of great concern to Western strategists and war planners, but they should not obscure the prospects for positive outcomes.

 

The aircraft Ukraine disabled — supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses, A-50 early warning warplanes, etc. — are not easily repaired or replaced. This isn’t the first time Ukraine has targeted Russian military infrastructure and brought Russia’s war of choice home, but it is the most comprehensive of those attacks. Vladimir Putin’s capacity to sustain his expansionist war depends to some extent on the Russia military’s ability to absorb its losses. The more losses, the harder they are to absorb, and the closer we get to a just settlement to this conflict.

 

The Ukrainian operation has already had other clarifying effects. Russia’s insistence that any threat to its nuclear-delivery vehicles could trigger a nuclear response has been revealed as just one more of Moscow’s illusory red lines. The vivid illustration of the threat that low-cost drone swarms pose to sophisticated arial assets should and will light a fire under Western efforts to harden its defenses and speed counter-drone innovation. And the contrast the Ukrainian operation strikes with Russia’s conduct of its war is instructive. While Moscow rains rockets, drones, and missiles down on Ukrainian population centers, Ukraine goes to extended lengths to limit its activities to legitimate military targets. Just as Israel’s pager attacks could not have been more discreet, Kyiv’s circumspection accentuates the glaring moral distinction between the aggressor in this war and the target of its aggression.

 

America has many reasons to celebrate Ukraine’s battlefield successes. Among them, that it provides yet more evidence that America’s partners abroad are not the burdens their detractors make them out to be. They are clever and brave, ambitious and steadfast. Their fight against our mutual enemies represents a profound contribution to our own safety and the preservation of the geopolitical order we take for granted. America’s frontline partners are awesome. They put their doubters to shame.