Ukraine May Be Just the Ally America Needs

By Michael Weiss

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv.

 

“It’s a very extraordinary weapon,” Trump said of the Patriot system in an interview with the Financial Times, and “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.” The implication was that Ukraine was not to be trusted.

 

Then, in another seeming reversal on August 8, Zelensky suggested in a post on X that Trump had agreed to grant the license: “We have now reached an agreement with President Trump that he will grant the licenses, but imagine if we had received them four years ago. By now, we would already be producing Patriots for everyone.” As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.

 

Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine has never been favorable, but every once in a while, he seems to be ready to do something positive for it. Then a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or a visit by Trump’s plenipotentiary Steve Witkoff to Moscow, appears to rekindle his hostility toward the embattled country, along with his wishful thinking that Putin is serious about pursuing peace. (U.S. intelligence consistently assesses that he isn’t.) Before the talk of a Patriot license, there was a much-hyped Ukrainian request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which Trump publicly weighed before unceremoniously declining during another Zelensky visit to the White House, in October.

 

But this time around, something has changed. The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.

 

These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a “model ally,” to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.

 

The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.

 

***

 

The past year has brought an encouraging turnaround in the war in Ukraine. Russia still terrorizes Ukrainian cities with ballistic-missile attacks, which grow deadlier as Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors dwindle. But Kyiv has successfully used drones to block major Russian offensive operations on the front lines. Moscow has opted for infiltration tactics instead, sending small groups of two to four soldiers through the gaps in Ukraine’s defenses to occupy abandoned trenches, buildings, or other positions from which to harass the defending army.

 

Ukraine is giving as good as it gets. It has struck oil refineries and export terminals as far away as Siberia—also air bases and strategic Russian industries, including Wildberries, an Amazon-style online retailer, some of whose inventory can be put to military as well as civilian use. These drone strikes have left smoking wreckage thousands of miles from Kyiv. They have also produced fuel rationing, pump closures, and long, snaking queues all over Russia, which is facing its worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow had to close its airports temporarily due to nightly Ukrainian-drone swarms, leading Zelensky to joke to reporters that the Russian capital was an unsafe venue for any peace talks.

 

On its own territory, Ukraine’s situation has gone from dire to manageable. Despite shortages of personnel and some shuffling of the military command, Ukraine has blunted the Russian advance in the Donbas, the eastern region that Witkoff, J.D. Vance, and Trump once urged Kyiv to consider lost. Russia’s rate of territorial advance has slowed in the past year. Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitor, calculated that Russian forces captured “nearly five times as much territory” last July as they did this July, and actually lost more ground than they seized in February and June of this year.

 

Russian logistics in southern Ukraine, particularly the transportation of fuel, weapons, and other combustible material, have been so disrupted that the Ukrainians have dubbed the main artery connecting Russia to occupied Crimea the “Highway of Death.” Ukrainian drones have intercepted maritime traffic to the peninsula as well, hitting 129 vessels associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and another 72 in the Black Sea in the past month of overnight strikes. Twenty-four-hour blackouts are now commonplace in Crimea because of Ukrainian attacks on substations and the regional energy grid.

 

Ukraine has gotten savvier about communications as well. Since last year, it has been deliberately delaying reporting its territorial gains, to avoid drawing Russian resources to parts of the front line that may be softening. Kyiv has similarly become more strategic in its approach to Trump. A Ukrainian official, who asked for his name to be withheld because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me that Kyiv now understands Trump as a transactional player, and its outreach aims to keep the American president from upending a status quo that’s working rather than appeal to humanitarian or moral imperatives.

 

***

 

If Trump once had the leverage to force a dismal peace on Ukraine, he has since relinquished it. The United States doesn’t pay for the war anymore—Europe does. Trump reduced new commitments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine by 99 percent in his first year back in office, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy determined. NATO has a mechanism that allows member states to fund the purchase of U.S. weapons for Ukrainian use, but this has so far accounted for only $6.7 billion in assistance, a fraction of the $127 billion that the Biden administration and Congress allocated to Ukraine.

 

The shortfall has become less salient as the dynamics of the war have changed, and as Ukraine has developed the capacity to manufacture its own weapons at scale. Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me that more than 80 percent of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, the bulk of which Ukraine produces itself. Last month, the Ukrainian government approved exporting weapons and defense tech for the first time since the full-scale invasion began, in February 2022. The reason, according to Politico, is that the country now produces more weapons than it can afford to buy from its own companies. Forty to 70 percent of what’s manufactured sits unused in warehouses.

 

Ukraine has become a global epicenter for military robotics. A single team of about 10 Ukrainians “eliminated” two mechanized NATO battalions in one day in an exercise in Estonia in May 2025, and “destroyed Sweden’s troops” in a war game on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea a year later. Zelensky estimates that Ukraine currently produces about 10 million drones a year; contrast that with the United States’ 100,000. Some of these munitions, such as Darts, cost as little as $1,000 to make but have taken out Russian targets worth millions.

 

Ukrainian technicians have upgraded some American products to achieve all of this. The Hornet is a $5,000 drone developed by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It carries an 11-pound warhead and can travel 124 miles. Ukraine’s Azov Corps MacGyvered the Hornet, the Kyiv Independent reported, by using commercial Starlink satellite terminals to expand its range and lower its susceptibility to Russian jamming.

 

So formidable is Ukraine’s drone game that even the country’s onetime detractors now want in on the action. One Florida-based drone company, Powerus, is looking for Ukrainian hardware and licenses and includes two noteworthy investors: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

 

Ukraine is only too happy to share its inventions and know-how. It came to America’s defense in a war of choice against Iran that many NATO allies have wanted little to do with. Early in the war, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf sustained significant damage from Iranian drone attacks, and Ukraine reportedly sent technical advisers to the region to install and operate Kyiv’s cutting-edge Sky Map system, which uses acoustics and AI to detect and down incoming drones. Ukraine has since signed security- and defense-cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

America’s offensive drone campaign against Iran now involves repurposing civilian technology for military use, much as Ukraine has done. One U.S. military officer who was deployed to the Persian Gulf until recently told me that the U.S. military has been buying Starlink terminals from local shopping malls and affixing them to aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels. The reason? They’re cheaper and easier to use than SpaceX’s “hard” Pentagon-controlled variant, Starshield.

 

As new reporting in The Atlantic disclosed on July 30, Zelensky has prevailed on Trump to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink when striking deep into Russia. The Ukrainians aren’t seeking anything that will cost U.S. taxpayers: just the go-ahead to use their homegrown munitions to greater effect and, in the absence of interceptors, take out Russian missile launchers before they fire their payloads. Granting this request could even bring a windfall to the Pentagon and the CIA.

 

The one thing the United States still provides free of charge, according to both American and Ukrainian sources, is intelligence, including the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia. Credit for this policy goes to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is said to impress the president on the golf links with eye-popping data about Russian losses on the battlefield, now in excess of 40,000 a month. Ratcliffe’s explanation for his success, one Western intelligence official told me, is that “Trump doesn’t like losers.” So long as Ukraine is seen to be winning and defying the conventional wisdom of those who insist it can’t, the president’s inclination to cut and run is mitigated.

 

Trump should also welcome the toll that Ukrainian strikes are taking on Russia’s energy economy. Moscow’s reduction in oil exports could leave countries such as India and China more vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. And the president has begged Europeans to end their dependency on Russian oil and gas since his first term in office, going so far as to sanction the Nord Stream pipeline. Zelensky calls his nightly salvos on Russian refineries “long-range sanctions.” Trump may even view bombing as a prelude to negotiations, much as he has in Iran. “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” he said of Ukraine’s deep strikes at the NATO summit in Ankara last month.

 

***

 

The intertwining of the wars in Iran and Ukraine has demonstrated that a recipient of U.S. security assistance can also be a provider of security assistance to the United States. But the one thing Ukraine can’t yet source domestically in sufficient quantities is ballistic-missile defense, and U.S. supplies of the Patriot systems used for this purpose are also strained.

 

The United States has burned through about two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot systems in the Middle East in the past six months, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia, which has been giving the Iranians targeting packages for use against U.S. soldiers in the region, knows this and continues to bombard Ukrainians with missiles, killing civilians in their homes. Last month, it fired 376 missiles, more than twice as many as it did in June, many of them aimed at Kyiv. Almost all are getting through, as Patriot batteries—most numerous around the capital—run out of interceptors.

 

“The Ukrainians have active development programs for almost everything they need, and their intention is to be totally self-sufficient in the future,” Colby Badhwar, an independent security analyst, told me. However, he said, “right now they are still almost entirely reliant on allies for interceptors.”

 

Even if the U.S. were to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, doing so at scale would take Ukraine years. That’s why Zelensky has been pursuing immediate resupplies of Patriot missiles in tandem with longer-term solutions. Zelensky reportedly asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at the Oval Office meeting on July 28; Trump refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks and U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

 

The Ukrainian journalist Tim Zadorozhnyy has reported that Zelensky first broached a Patriot license in the waning months of the Biden administration. Senior Ukrainian officials evidently put the proposal to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary at the time, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, but were rebuffed without explanation. (Zelensky has now claimed that he also requested a license from Biden in the first year of the war.)

 

Granting the license would make Washington both a guarantor of Ukraine’s security and a beneficiary of its productive capacity. The former industrial hub of the Soviet Union would pay good money to become a helpmeet to the U.S. defense industry. It’s one of the few nations in Europe still lining up to do so. When its war is over, Ukraine could manufacture surplus Patriots for U.S. use or for resale to U.S. allies and partners. Given its track record, Ukraine might even be able to produce surpluses while the war rages on. And that might be the problem.

 

Zelensky’s post on X on August 8 suggested that the main hold-up with the Trump administration was bureaucracy and “paperwork.” On the Hill_, one Republican official in favor of the license told me about an unreported hiccup in the deal. Raytheon and Lockheed, the makers of the Patriot system, “will officially frame their concerns around IP theft and tech transfer,” he said, but “their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do.

A Foreseeable and Dire Munitions Crisis

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

During the 1979–1980 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power.

 

Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances.

 

Back then, when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran, and a long-shot rescue operation ended in abject failure.

 

Now, with the U.S. military at its most proficient and professional in history, we have inflicted punishing blows against the regime but still haven’t been able to impose our will, in part because we are running low on the munitions necessary to prosecute the war.

 

Not only is this embarrassing, it is dangerous.

 

If Operation Midnight Hammer — last year’s lightning strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — demonstrated the prowess of the U.S. military and sent a useful deterrent message to our enemies, the Iran war is now doing the opposite.

 

We’re running low on missiles and interceptors in a monthslong conflict with a beleaguered second-rate power. What would happen in drawn-out war with a major adversary?

 

President Trump has posted a thunderous denunciation of leaks to the media about our depleted weapons stocks, and they are indeed irresponsible. But this problem is a matter of public record and has been tracked by outside organizations.

 

At the end of July, the think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated that out of an arsenal of 2,330 Patriot interceptors before the Iran war, we had roughly 800 remaining. We were down to roughly 250 THAAD interceptors from 450 of the ballistic-missile interceptors at the start of the war.

 

On top of this, news organizations are reporting that we are almost out of ATACMS — a ground-launched precision-strike missile — and Precision Strike Missiles, the newer, longer-range successor to ATACMS.

 

This isn’t comforting at a time when a war with China could be in the offing. Even before Operation Epic Fury, a war game involving a conflict in the Taiwan Strait conducted by CSIS had the U.S. running out of key munitions in days or weeks.

 

What happened? This is a crisis a long time in the making. As defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has warned for years, skimping on the acquisition of munitions was an easy way to meet constrained Pentagon budgets, and we relied on optimistic scenarios about potential wars to justify chronically insufficient production.

 

For some understandable reasons, we also emphasized sophisticated missiles and interceptors over “good enough” systems. This led to Iran, for instance, forcing us to use highly expensive, difficult-to-replace interceptors against cheap, bulk threats from drones.

 

All this means that we’ve expended ordnance that will take us years to build again. According to media reports, we’ve used about half our supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, when we’ve been manufacturing fewer than 100 a year.

 

We need to put missile production on a wartime footing and leverage hungry new defense firms to produce cheaper precision missiles and interceptors at scale.

 

In World War II terms, it’s the difference between the easy-to-maintain and mass-produce Sherman tank and the exquisite and powerful, but ultimately impractical, Tiger. Whatever advantages the Tiger had in armor and punch, you’d still rather be the U.S. with 50,000 Shermans than the Germans with 1,500 Tigers.

 

The Trump administration has been talking the right game, and there have been encouraging moves. It has signed agreements to acquire 10,000 cruise missiles over three years at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each, far less than a Tomahawk at more than $2 million.

 

Wars always bring surprises. It should have been a shock to no one, though, that contemporary military conflict is largely missile warfare, or that we’d have trouble sustaining prolonged hostilities given that we started out with inadequate stocks.

 

The American way of warfare is often to mess it up before adjusting and getting it right. The course correction here should be considered the most urgent priority of U.S. national security.

Biden’s $7 Billion Taliban Weapons Tab Is Still Coming Due

By Michaell Baumgartner

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

Nearly five years after President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, American-funded military equipment left behind is making terrorists more lethal across the border in Pakistan.

 

I recently traveled to Islamabad to meet with military boss Field Marshal Asim Munir to discuss the conflicts raging across the region, including more than 1,000 terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year — it’s now more affected by terrorism than any other country in the world is. Joining me on the trip was Representative Ryan Zinke. Neither of us approached the trip with illusions about the challenges of the region. Zinke is a former Navy SEAL Commander. I previously worked as an embedded adviser on an Afghan-government counternarcotics team in Helmand Province and occasionally lectured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan program at the U.S. National Defense University.

 

Field Marshal Munir predicted that Pakistan’s fighting with both terrorists and the Taliban government in Kabul is likely to grow. Last February, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Islamabad, killing 31 and wounding more than 200. A few weeks later, Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul in an attack that killed nearly 300. The Field Marshal also made clear his frustration that Pakistani counterterrorism forces are confronting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) — fighters equipped with American-origin night-vision devices and sophisticated sniper weapons left over from the chaotic Biden pull-out.

 

Congressman Zinke and I both sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Task Force. The FMS process is mired in red tape that can make partner nations wait years to acquire U.S. weapons systems they’ve already paid for. The consequences are visible in Pakistan: China provided 81 percent of Pakistan’s major arms imports between 2020 and 2024. When America cannot deliver, we drive potential partners toward Russia and China, while weakening our industrial base. During our meetings in Islamabad in July, Munir noted a bitter asymmetry — that he has been unable to purchase U.S. attack helicopters to defend against terrorist forces using U.S. weapons to attack his troops and police.

 

This is not simply an allegation from Islamabad. United Nations monitors have reported that the TTP possesses NATO-caliber weapons obtained in Afghanistan and that its access to night-vision equipment has increased the lethality of attacks on Pakistani border posts.

 

The equipment is part of the dangerous military inheritance of the Afghan collapse. According to the Department of Defense inspector general, $7.12 billion in American-funded military equipment remained in the former Afghan government’s inventory when it fell in 2021. This was principally materiel previously transferred to Afghan security forces; departing American troops removed or destroyed nearly all the major systems they used directly.

 

More than 316,000 weapons, including specialized sniper rifles, remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately 42,000 pieces of specialized equipment, including night-vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning devices.  The Afghan air force had roughly 40 American-funded UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and the Taliban captured and returned several to service. Those aircraft are not being used in the terrorist attacks now confronting Pakistan, but their presence illustrates the extraordinary scale of the military arsenal that the Taliban now control. The condition and precise disposition of this arsenal remain uncertain, but there is now mounting evidence that some of the equipment captured after the collapse has migrated into terrorist hands.

 

During America’s war, the Afghan Taliban exploited sanctuaries in Pakistan to attack Afghanistan. Today, the conflict has partly reversed direction: The TTP operates from sanctuaries in Afghanistan and mounts increasingly lethal attacks inside Pakistan.

 

The TTP and Afghan Taliban are distinct but closely connected organizations. Their relationship operates through the Pashtun belt straddling a permeable border, where tribal, familial, and commercial ties long predate the modern frontier.

 

President Trump’s strong rapport with Munir — they met in person twice last year and speak frequently — creates an opening to broaden cooperation. The United States should negotiate a tailored counterterrorism and security-assistance framework, with Pakistan focused on mutually defined threats, particularly the TTP and ISIS-K. Washington should streamline access to carefully selected night-fighting equipment, intelligence and surveillance support, counter-drone systems, and border-monitoring capabilities. Such cooperation must be mission-specific, rigorously vetted, and subject to strong end-use monitoring. It should be conditioned on measurable Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation and structured to prevent diversion or misuse. It should also be limited to capabilities that do not materially alter the conventional military balance with India.

 

Congress must also confront the underlying equipment problem. The No Equipment Left Behind Act of 2026, for example, would require the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that a partner government receiving American equipment could collapse, so a debacle like Biden’s Taliban weapons bonanza doesn’t happen again.

 

A more capable TTP threatens more than Pakistan. It strengthens a regional terrorist network in which the TTP, al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, and other groups maintain overlapping networks, compete for recruits, and exploit many of the same ungoverned spaces. Instability along the Afghan-Pakistani border also carries obvious dangers in a nuclear-armed country. Counterterrorism should be the beginning of renewed engagement with Pakistan, not its outer limit.

 

Pakistan’s 250 million people make it the fifth-most populous country in the world. Its relatively young population — about 60 percent of Pakistanis are younger than 30 — means that it will probably grow in economic importance. It’s also home to immense mineral wealth; a high-end estimate of $8 trillion of copper, gold, and critical technology minerals lie in Pakistan’s mountains. In September of last year, the U.S. and Pakistan announced a $500 million mining agreement, the first of its kind between the two nations, although actual production is still likely years away. By comparison, China is already actively mining in Pakistan but doing little value-add processing in the country as it prefers to ship bulk material straight back home. The challenge is that much of the mineral wealth downstream is located in the same border regions undergoing regular terrorist attacks by Baloch militants. So far, there is no evidence that left-behind American-origin weapons have been used in attacks on mineral projects, but this region borders Afghanistan, and if those weapons spread more widely, they could make an already dangerous operating environment even harder to secure.

 

The question is whether Pakistan can establish enough security and stability for American companies to invest, mine, and process minerals there. Surging demand for copper in an increasingly electrified world and critical minerals needed for the AI supercomputing race make Pakistan enticing. Biden’s $7 billion blunder leaving weapons to the Taliban certainly complicates any decision to invest in the region.

 

The central lesson is not just about cleaning up the past administration’s mess. It is that security is a necessary prerequisite of economic engagement. Terrorists may kill people and damage buildings, but their real target is the stability of society and government. America’s Pakistan policy should therefore begin with counterterrorism, but extend to the investments, trade, technology, and mineral partnerships that give both countries a stake in a growing, safe, and prosperous Pakistan.

Trump Got NATO to Rearm. Now to Continue the Momentum . . .

By John Noonan

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

In 1950, the Truman administration and America’s newly minted NATO allies convened at The Hague to lay the foundation for the alliance’s first defense plan. The result was an integrated defense architecture, coordinated military planning, and a Western alliance determined to prevent another European war by means of credible deterrence.

 

Seventy-five years later, President Trump returned the alliance to The Hague for a historic summit, where its members committed to generational defense investments. Nearly every ally pledged to move toward spending 5 percent of its GDP on national security.

 

One year later, NATO is beginning to reap the benefits. From Lisbon to Tallinn, NATO members are accelerating a long overdue rearmament. As Secretary General Mark Rutte has proudly declared, the alliance has never been stronger.

 

Today, nearly every NATO member meets the 2 percent defense spending floor and has a pathway to 5 percent. Europe has shaken its dependence on Russian energy; European NATO members and Canada have committed approximately $1.2 trillion in defense spending since President Trump’s first term.

 

But defense spending hikes tell only part of NATO’s comeback story. To monitor the Trump administration’s NATO successes and remaining gaps, Polaris National Security has released a NATO assessment project, which chronicles the alliance’s remilitarization, its renewed deterrence posture against Russia, and its value for American power projection. The report classifies NATO countries in tiers, assessing their military contributions and strategic alignment.

 

Tier 1 members are NATO’s leaders. They don’t just meet alliance expectations — they exceed them. Poland is illustrative of this cohort: it spends the highest percentage of GDP on defense, rallies its neighbors around deterrence efforts, sacrifices for Ukraine’s defense, and consistently supports American security operations. Poland leads where other nations follow.

 

Tier 2 allies are significant contributors and where the bulk of members fall.  Their defense spending usually falls along the NATO median; they support alliance programs, align with NATO on threat assessments, and largely cooperate with the United States on security priorities. But they have room to grow by increasing defense spending, modernizing their militaries, weaning off Russian energy, increasing their strategic alignment, or backing American military action.

 

Tier 3 allies are the NATO members that require the most attention. These countries aren’t merely slow to align with NATO’s revitalization; their actions actively harm it. While important partners, they often stall increased defense spending, overly engage with adversaries like Russia and China, or obstruct American and NATO operations. Although they bring significant value to the alliance, the actions of these nations — Spain, Turkey, and others — undermine alliance cohesion and NATO’s strength.

 

The task before Washington now is capitalizing on Trump’s successes to finish the revitalization of the world’s strongest alliance.  America’s stick was always there for presidents to wield, but previous administrations were indeed too reluctant to use it.  

 

As the Trump administration builds out its NATO 3.0 plans, it will need to diversify its burden-sharing approach for effective alliance management.

 

Tier 1 allies are the administration’s vanguard — and should be rewarded as such. While other countries complain about high standards, these allies make no excuses — all the more impressive considering that many are smaller and have limited resources. These allies should be given priority access to advanced defense technology, prioritization for U.S. basing, greater say in NATO political and command positions, enhanced security assurances, and favorable trade arrangements. Rewarding Tier 1 countries will accelerate their remilitarization, provide positive reinforcement to those investing in their national defense, and generate goodwill toward the United States.

 

Tier 2 countries are the backbone of NATO: capable, dependable, and strengthening. While they may require more pushing from Washington to continue their positive trajectory, by and large these allies are constructive partners — and the Trump administration’s response should reflect that.  Cooperation with these countries should reflect our dual interests: getting them to commit more while affirming their role as needed partners. That means tying progress to advanced co-development and co-procurement, tying U.S. force presence to alliance contributions, establishing Ukraine aid floors, and encouraging them to aspire to Tier 1 status with incentives.

 

Managing NATO’s Tier 3 countries is the most challenging and will require calibrated pressure: diplomatic accountability, clear benchmarks, force-posture adjustments, and formal contribution reviews. These nations are important to NATO, but that doesn’t make their free-riding acceptable. The challenge will be to pull them up instead of pushing them away,

 

Critics who predicted that pushing NATO members to step up would fracture the alliance are being proven wrong. NATO is stronger, more capable, and more committed than it has been in decades. But the work is not finished — and the next phase of NATO’s great awakening will require both hammer and chisel.

 

By rewarding those who carry the burden, encouraging those with room to improve, and challenging those who lag, Trump can succeed where his predecessors failed, build on his burden-sharing successes, and position the West for long-term security.

AOC’s Latest Dual-Loyalty Hoax Is a Doozy

By Seth Mandel

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her fellow Democrat and prospective presidential candidate Ro Khanna in elevating a dual-loyalty smear that will have longstanding consequences for American Jews.

 

While the idea didn’t originate with AOC (what idea has?), the socialist star’s endorsement of it, at a moment of increased institutionalized suspicion toward Jews and Israel, promises to amplify it and perhaps solidify its place in the mainstream narrative.

 

The concept has to do with the annual defense bill, which just passed the House and still has to go through the Senate. The bill contains language that addresses the fact that the U.S. is changing the form that its military aid to Israel will take in the future. Instead of money that Israel must use to purchase supplies from American defense manufacturers, the two allies will undertake more joint development projects. To oversee this process and to certify it is taking place properly, there will be a coordinator in charge of all affected cooperative programs.

 

Such joint-defense programs are normal, but Israel’s critics are incapable of matching that normalcy. Instead, they have created a very strange talking point that the bill would “merge” the two countries’ militaries.

 

While one is tempted to laugh, unfortunately a mark of our era is that the dumbest, least-believable conspiracies become instant ideological dogma. Khanna added to this ridiculousness the idea that the bill represented a loss of American “sovereignty,” thus placing those who support it in the category of turncoats and traitors.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former GOP congresswoman who has been embraced by the left for her critiques of President Trump and of Israel, has said exactly that. So has left-wing commentator Cenk Uyghur. The rest of the tinfoil hat brigade stuck with slightly less bloodthirsty terminology.

 

“This amendment is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

 

How did we get here? The lie seemed to get off the ground in late May thanks to folks at the Quincy Institute, the isolationist activist forum, though it didn’t at first use the term “merge” but rather “integrate.” That word is important, because it also appeared in one of the sentences in the defense bill. Of course, the bill doesn’t say the militaries will be integrated, but conspiracy theorists decided it was one of the few straws they had in reach, so they’re grasping it.

 

A second conspiracy theory around the bill, pushed by the folks at Dropsite, the podcasters who were last seen trying to bully Ro Khanna into approving of October 7, is that a letter sent by Benjamin Netanyahu claims the bill was his idea.

 

In fact, Netanyahu sent a letter to a congressman who had written up a resolution that just said the two countries would move toward cooperation instead of the old aid model and called for a new Memorandum of Understanding. Netanyahu has been pushing this change for years, and he wrote that he was happy the two allies would now move in that direction.

 

So when you combine the two lies, you have: Israel is dictating U.S. laws, and the council of the Elders of Zion—Sorry, the Jewish state—now runs our military. Oh, and everyone who supported the U.S. defense bill is a traitor.

 

The purpose of this conspiracist fanaticism from AOC, Greene, Khanna, and the others is twofold. First, they are trying to close off any possible iteration of U.S.-Israel cooperation. No aid, no joint projects—they just want the alliance of democracies to fail. Russian and Qatari propaganda outlets have echoed their claims because they, too, want the alliance of democracies to fail.

 

The second reason is to take advantage of what we might call the Mamdani Moment, in which it is considered acceptable in polite company to question the loyalty of American Jews and anyone who works with them.

 

You can see why America’s enemies love this so much: If the final bill passes, they can now just blame literally everything the U.S. does on the Jews.

 

As for the American Jews who will be the target of violence inspired by such manic hallucinations: They will continue to fortify their houses of worship and educational institutions, and hopefully they will remember exactly who it was that made such measures necessary.

We Still Need More Ships

By Jim Talent

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for these pages called simply “We Need More Ships!” It was a cry from the heart — a lament for the fact that the number of U.S. Navy ships, which then stood at 275, had sunk to its lowest level since before World War I.

 

Well, we did and do need more ships, and the government finally has a real plan, backed up by real money, to do something about it, in the only way it can be done: by undertaking the enormous but necessary task of rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base.

 

President Trump signaled his priorities in his first address to Congress in March 2025, when he announced that a shipbuilding office had already been established in the Executive Office of the President. The next month, he issued his “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” executive order, which called for the drafting of a Maritime Action Plan that would expand every vital aspect of the maritime sector, including commercial shipping, shipbuilding, ship maintenance and repair, the maritime workforce, and port infrastructure.

 

Crucially, those announcements were immediately backed up by money. Last year, Congress included funding for 82 new vessels in the defense appropriations bill and the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Navy got 35 new ships; the other 47 were for the Coast Guard.

 

This year, the administration asked for $65 billion for its shipbuilding accounts, which, if approved by Congress, will be an increase of more than $20 billion above last year’s budget and the biggest increase in appropriations for shipbuilding since the Korean War. The request contained money for 18 new battle force ships for the Navy but also 16 non-battle force vessels, including additional sealift and supply vessels, a tanker, a hospital ship, and five fire boats — to prevent another catastrophe like the incineration of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego in July 2020.

 

That big a buy for the Navy was itself extraordinary, but the request also included funding for non-naval ships: Coast Guard cutters, an Arctic research vessel for the National Science Foundation, two maneuver support ships for the Army, and — believe it or not — a ferry for the U.S. Park Service. The objective was not just to get ships for every government agency that needed them, but to grow the industrial base by sending business to smaller shipyards that cannot build naval vessels.

 

Then in February of this year, the administration released its promised Maritime Action Plan.

 

The plan is the product of a year of solid work: a comprehensive yet detailed strategy to rebuild the shipyard industrial base, grow the skilled workforce necessary to sustain it and man both commercial and naval vessels, and strengthen the security and resilience of the maritime sector.

 

While the shipbuilding office was compiling its action plan, it was canvassing the statutes to determine where it needed additional legal authorities to execute the plan effectively. That list of necessary statutory changes was sent to Congress several weeks ago; it could be included in the National Defense Authorization Act or, if necessary, in separate legislation.

 

So in the last year and a half, the administration has established maritime dominance as a presidential priority, created a shipbuilding office to coordinate activities across agency lines, submitted budgets with large increases in the shipbuilding accounts, developed a comprehensive plan to address the range of deficiencies in the maritime sector, and asked for the additional authorities it needs to carry out the plan.

 

It’s a whole-of-government approach designed to trigger a whole-of-nation response. We may be thankful for that, because nothing less has a chance of success. To explain why, a little history is necessary.

 

After the Berlin Wall fell, the George H. W. Bush administration did a thorough evaluation of the military force structure that would be necessary to protect America’s interests in the post–Cold War world. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney projected that the Navy would need 451 ships. This was during the most peaceful time in recent history, when China was weak, Russia was friendly (or at least neutral), North Korea had no nukes, narco-terrorism was not a significant problem, Islamic radicalism was in its early stages, and Iran had no nuclear program, no proxy networks, and very little ballistic missile capability.

 

It’s a big world, and most of it is ocean. Even in that relatively stable era, naval planners thought we needed 450 ships to adequately protect America’s interests, advertise our power, and support our diplomacy around the globe.

 

In calculating the necessary size of the fleet, it’s important to remember that the Navy can only deploy approximately one third of its vessels at any given time, because ships need time in maintenance depots, and sailors need time at home to rest, see their families, and keep their training current. A greater fraction of the fleet can be surged in times of emergency, but if too much of the Navy is consistently at sea, it leads inevitably to a “material death spiral” — the cascading decline in naval readiness as a result of the stress on ships and men that results from long deployments.

 

Unfortunately, after the first President Bush left office, the requirement for the fleet was reduced to 346 ships, and even that number was never adequately funded. The number of ships went down and down, except for a small increase during the first Trump administration. Currently, there are 293 ships in the Navy.

 

Even worse, the shipbuilding industrial base declined as well — the inevitable result of consistently underfunding ship acquisition. When the Navy buys only a few ships annually over a long period of time, shipbuilders consolidate and shipyards close. As I wrote at National Review five years ago, the United States had nine major shipyards during the Cold War; today there are only five.

 

Here’s a fact that will focus the mind: There is a single Chinese shipyard with more capacity than all of America’s yards combined.

 

While the focus up until now has been on naval shipbuilding, the commercial sector is no better off. In the 1970s, the United States produced 5 percent of the world’s commercial seagoing vessels. The number today is around 0.2 percent.

 

So the government must not only buy ships; it must also grow smaller shipyards, create new ones, and increase depth and resiliency in maritime supply chains and the maritime labor force. Which is the point of all this furious activity by the Trump administration. The administration hopes that the private sector will respond with the necessary investment, in energy and creativity as well as money, to rebuild the maritime sector, just as the government’s similar focus on drone production has produced a surge of investment and activity in that industry.

 

In short, the President’s Maritime Executive Order, coupled with the sizable budget requests last year and this year and the announcement of a clear plan for the future, are all designed to send a powerful demand signal to shipyards, manufacturers, capital markets, and trade unions that shipbuilding is once again a growing business with a profitable future for both firms and skilled employees.

 

To be sure, nobody should expect large numbers of ships to flow out of the yards right away. Power is the product of intention and capability; and while intention can change quickly, capability cannot. That is especially true for shipbuilding, which requires huge capital investment, the most sophisticated technology and manufacturing processes, and thousands of skilled workers.

 

You can’t flip a switch and produce a ship, much less a shipyard. But at least the government has now decided to engage the enormous reservoirs of latent power in the American economy in behalf of rebuilding, not just the United States Navy, but the entire maritime industry.

 

A commitment like that is absolutely necessary — and long overdue. America is, has been, and always will be, a maritime nation. Our history and future are tied irrevocably to the seas; we must have access to the oceans of the world to protect our security, move our goods, and ensure the continued prosperity of our people — and we cannot sail the oceans without ocean-going vessels.

 

I’ll repeat what I wrote nine years ago: We do indeed need more ships. Now, for the first time since the Reagan administration, the government is serious about getting them.

Anti-Anti-Proliferation

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Trumpism is a politics of spite, by which I mean that its strategic impulses often seem driven by nothing more complicated than “if the traditional liberal establishment believes X, then surely Not X must be better.”

 

That’s how we ended up in our current mess in Iran. In 2018 the president exited the hated nuclear deal that Barack Obama had negotiated with the regime; the Iranians responded by resuming their enrichment of uranium, eventually amassing a stockpile of 22,000 pounds. That eventually led to last year’s joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and ultimately to this year’s stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The nominal strategic logic for leaving the nuclear deal was that putting “maximum pressure” on Iran would be more likely to get it to denuclearize than friendly diplomacy would. (Donald Trump seemed to think better of that belatedly, per last month’s now-defunct peace agreement.) But in all probability, it wasn’t strategic logic that made the president abandon the Obama nuclear deal. It was its provenance.

 

The late Lindsey Graham once shared the secret of his influence over Trump with political reporter Mark Leibovich. “If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different,” Leibovich recently recalled. That approach was reliably effective, the senator claimed, because “Obama drives him nuts.”

 

If the traditional liberal establishment typified by Obama believed that negotiating with Iran was good, then surely not negotiating with Iran—“180 degrees different,” as Graham put it—must be better.

 

That impulse animates lots of Trumpist policies. There are ideological rationales for postliberal hostility toward NATO and the Pax Americana, toward “soft power” federal agencies like USAID, toward domestic diversity initiatives and LGBTQ rights, and toward college education and women in the workplace. But postliberalism is a revolutionary project, and at base that project is driven by contrarian rejectionism toward the postwar liberal order in its entirety. As such, in literally any situation, knowing that liberalism favors X will cause postliberals to at least strongly consider Not X, if not to embrace it outright.

 

No matter how stupid or pernicious Not X might be.

 

I thought of that this morning upon discovering that the president evidently now thinks nuclear proliferation in the Middle East might be a good idea.

 

Last night the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House has signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia that “will provide the country with a civilian nuclear program and potentially open the door to uranium enrichment in the kingdom’s territory.” Joe Biden’s administration had considered a similar deal but conditioned its support on the Saudis agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. Trump’s administration is making no such demand.

 

Nor is it insisting on the sort of safeguards that the U.S. imposed on the United Arab Emirates when it struck a nuclear deal with that country in 2009. Supposedly, per the Journal, any enrichment facility that America constructs for the Saudis will be built “under a secretive ‘black box’ arrangement that would preclude the transfer of sensitive enrichment technology to Riyadh.” But, according to the New York Times:

 

To get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 40-year-old de facto leader, Mr. Trump had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.

 

And he agreed that, after a joint study with Saudi Arabia on the economics of producing nuclear fuel, the Saudis may be allowed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on their soil.

 

If the Saudis don’t intend to convert this supposed nuclear energy program into a weapons program, it’s weird that they’d drive a hard bargain about permitting homegrown enrichment and limiting inspections, no?

 

For 80 years, the traditional liberal establishment believed that the risks of international nuclear proliferation waaaaaaaay outweighed the deterrent benefits. It appears that postliberalism has arrived at the Not X stage with respect to that too.

 

Tit for tat.

 

As always with Trump, it’s possible that helping the Saudis build a nuclear program had nothing to do with strategic logic.

 

Maybe it’s a thank-you to the Saudi royals for being such generous benefactors of Trump family businesses. If so, it’s not the only story on the wires today in which a Middle Eastern government that rained cash on Trump Inc. has received a benefit that threatens long-term U.S. national security. How any of that squares with the idea of “America First” is hard to say, although I suppose that’s why the president has reserved the right to define that term however he likes.

 

Maybe it’s a simpler matter of Trump taking his usual “friends/enemies” approach to politics. The Saudis are trusted cronies and so they’re naturally exempt from the usual arm’s-length strategic considerations that might normally guide decisions like “Should we make this sharia desert backwater a nuclear power?” Rules, laws, and norms like anti-proliferation apply only to enemies, never to friends. That’s Postliberalism 101.

 

It could also be that the Saudis appealed to Trump’s insatiable thirst for oil, which drove his coup in Venezuela and is clearly on his mind in Iran. Per the Journal, Riyadh has argued for years that a nuclear program will help it meet its domestic energy needs, which “would free up more of its oil production for export and boost revenues.” No matter that most of the planet is headed toward electric vehicles and green energy, particularly in China. To the president, a creature of the 1970s and 1980s, cheaper gas in the distant future continues to hold talismanic appeal.

 

Or perhaps green-lighting a nuclear program is Trump’s way of trying to make it up to the Saudis for having sabotaged their oil industry by starting a foolish war in Iran. Our Gulf allies learned a painful lesson this year about the limits of America’s ability to protect them from the local Shiite menace. The president might be trying to atone for that by boosting their native ability to defend themselves. With, er, a nuclear deterrent.

 

Wherever you land in all of this, it goes without saying that a U.S. government led by Trump can’t be counted on to stop the Saudis from converting their nuclear energy program into a nuclear weapons program, no matter what sort of formal “black box” guarantees might be built into the relationship. Relying on postliberal America for oversight of Riyadh is like relying on one mafia family to police another with which it’s in business.

 

I do think there could be some bona fide strategic logic to Trump’s Saudi nuclear gambit, though. Pure and simple: Tit for tat.

 

He was once asked during his first presidential campaign what his favorite Bible verse was and, instead of replying disingenuously with some crowd-pleaser from the Gospels like “love thy neighbor,” he responded candidly with “an eye for an eye.” Tit for tat: If someone wounds you, you wound them. And when you do, you make it painful enough that they’ll never think of wounding you again.

 

“Tit for tat” is about as sophisticated as his strategic acumen gets, I’m afraid. Certainly, it captures his thinking on how to free the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian control. Tit for tat: They shoot at a passing tanker, we bomb a few targets along the coast, and then the cycle repeats—never mind that U.S. intelligence has warned the White House that tit for tat won’t work here, which means we’re burning through dwindling weapons stockpiles to no obvious effect.

 

This morning Trump went as far as to make the strategy official military policy. “From this point forward,” he announced, “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” They hit a ship, we hit a bridge. They block the strait, we block the strait. Tit for tat.

 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but if tit for tat is all you know, you’re destined to keep doing it even after it fails. So is it any surprise that the president might have reasoned that the proper countermeasure to a nuclear threat by Shiite fanatics … is to create a nuclear threat by Sunni fanatics?

 

Let’s see if we can identify any strategic problems with the idea of a Saudi nuclear program that might override the otherwise compelling logic of “If the Iranians get the power to blow up the world, it’s only fair that the Saudis should have it too.”

 

A strategic disaster.

 

In the first place, although it’s hard to remember now, the initial case for war with Iran rested on the belief that a regime as radical as the Islamic Republic had to be deterred from developing nuclear weapons by any means necessary.

 

If that’s so, why the hell would we want to further incentivize them to build nukes by agreeing to help their bitter sectarian rivals in Riyadh create a nuclear program of their own?

 

“Saudi enrichment would put immense pressure on Iran to get the bomb,” Middle East expert Rosemary Kelanic observed. “Is Trump TRYING to provoke Iran into weaponizing?” Remember that, during last month’s brief rapprochement, the president actually defended Iran’s need for ballistic missiles by reasoning that its enemy Saudi Arabia has missiles too. If he grasps how conventional deterrence works, why doesn’t he grasp that nuclear deterrence will work the same way?

 

It’s particularly stupid given that the silver lining in the dark cloud hanging over Hormuz is that the Iranians have discovered they don’t need a bomb to work their will on the region and the West. Maybe, in a post-war world, they would have pivoted away from nuclear terrorism and toward commercial terrorism—but not if, thanks to Trump, the Saudis now stand a chance of outgunning them. And they do: Mohammed bin Salman promised years ago to build nuclear weapons if Iran does, giving Tehran that much more reason not to fall behind.

 

Another problem: This is an awfully weird decision for “the most pro-Israel president in history” to make, no?

 

Israeli leaders are understandably mortified by news of a Saudi nuclear program. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called it “a grave strategic failure that endangers our security. Allowing uranium enrichment on Saudi soil could trigger a regional nuclear arms race and lead to a highly dangerous loss of control.” Former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party, echoed the point in urging Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to oppose the program “with all our might,” predicting that “Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program will end in nuclear weapons and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”

 

No one doubts it, do they? “Whither goes Saudi Arabia, so goes the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt,” one nonproliferation expert warned the Journal. (America might have some oversight over Saudi Arabia’s program, but what about when Turkey and Egypt go nuclear?) The Biden administration’s imperfect solution to Israel’s anxiety was to demand that the Saudis at least sign a peace deal with Jerusalem before receiving nuclear help. Trump, by comparison, is giving the Israelis nothing.

 

Which means we’re all teed up for war in the distant, or possibly not-so-distant, future. Maybe Israel will feel obliged to reprise its raid on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor by targeting the new Saudi nuclear program, destroying any chance of peace with Riyadh. Or maybe Iran will touch off a regional war by attacking the Saudi facilities itself, as Lieberman fears.

 

Or maybe some future American administration will do it.

 

That’s another scenario that the president evidently hasn’t considered—that the chumminess between the United States and Saudi Arabia won’t last forever. A country that famously produced 15 of the 9/11 hijackers and whose government has been suspected for ages of funding jihadists abroad to keep them away from the kingdom is a bad long-term bet to remain stable and pro-Western. Today’s Mohammed bin Salman nuclear energy program is tomorrow’s Salafist nuclear weapons program.

 

And once it is, the United States will be in precisely the same place with respect to Saudi Arabia that it is right now with respect to Iran. Only this time, we’ll have built their nuclear infrastructure ourselves.

 

The Saudi royal family will doubtless use that scenario to extort future presidents for continued U.S. support in whatever nutty authoritarian things it wants to do. Once the regime’s survival becomes necessary to prevent nuclear know-how from falling into terrorists’ hands, the world will have no choice but to prop it up. If the day comes when the Saudis need American military help to defeat some homegrown ISIS-style outfit, how could we possibly refuse?

 

Even if the royals maintain their grip on the country, the risk of an atomic disaster will rise meaningfully once Saudi Arabia gains nuclear capabilities. Many officials in the kingdom’s bureaucracy sympathize with jihadist outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda, I’m sure; if any one of them is willing and able to chisel a radioactive material from the national supply, they could potentially arm those groups with so-called dirty bombs.

 

Cleanup.

 

The long and short of it is that the president and his team are poised to re-create the very elements of Iran’s nuclear program that make it so dangerous—domestic uranium enrichment without international inspections under the control of an austere Islamist regime. In theory, this nuclear version of tit for tat will force the Saudis and Iranians to resolve their differences rationally and diplomatically, the way the U.S. and Soviet Union had to, to avoid annihilation.

 

But in practice, with messianic sectarian fundamentalists on both sides this time, who knows?

 

The easiest prediction in the world is that some hapless successor to Trump will be forced to clean up this foreseeable mess and will lack good options. Perhaps President J.D. Vance will choose to stop supervising the Saudi program altogether, washing his hands of all foreign business on “America First” grounds and leaving the Middle East to solve its own problems—however hairy that might get.

 

Or perhaps some future Democratic president will consider intervening to block the Saudis’ path to a bomb, only to back off when he’s extorted by the royals in the manner I described before and attacked by Republicans for supposedly siding with Iran in the region’s nascent nuclear conflict. If and when a rough equilibrium in atomic deterrence is achieved, how could any administration dare risk disturbing it in the name of nonproliferation?

 

These are the dilemmas you force upon yourself when you choose someone to command the military whose grasp of strategy runs not much deeper than tit for tat, gassy rhetoric about “strength,” and casualty comparisons as a yardstick for whether a military operation was successful. For all its failures, the traditional liberal establishment did a solid job of keeping the nuclear genie in its bottle. But here too, it appears, Not X will win again.

The Logical Effect of Undermining Our Allies’ Trust

By Mike Nelson

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Before entering office and in the year and a half since, officials comprising the second Trump administration’s defense and foreign policy establishment have been sending a clear message to our NATO allies in Europe: The United States is no longer putting as much of an emphasis on the alliance nor on the defense of the European continent. This message has been sent directly and indirectly.

 

Individuals appointed to key Pentagon positions have for years advocated for a diminished American presence in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance—both in statements intended for public consumption and those revealed to the public through the administration’s incompetence—has characterized Europeans as freeloaders whose security is no longer a primary American interest. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a reduction in Army forces present in Germany and Poland and—on the anniversary of D-Day, of all times—chose to demean, berate, and scold our European partners about their domestic politics. And Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has intervened to halt approved aid to Ukraine, denied support for Ukrainian deep strikes using U.S.-supplied munitions, and recently championed “NATO 3.0,” wherein reduced U.S. support for the alliance would be explicit.

 

Perhaps most concerning to the allies, however, are the messages from the man leading the administration. President Trump, who has for years harangued our European partners for not providing enough for the common defense—about which he was correct—seemed to believe these countries were in arrears in membership dues that the United States was covering and, therefore, that the United States deserved repayment—about which he is incorrect. The historical under-contribution by European allies was rather a failure to meet promised spending goals on their own militaries as a percentage of GDP.

 

This historical deficit is being, or in most cases already has been, corrected. The historical goal of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense, codified in 2014 at the NATO Wales summit, has since been reached by all member states. The allies have further expanded this goal to 5 percent of GDP, to be reached by 2035, with Poland currently leading the way with 4.48 percent of its GDP spent on defense in 2025. (The U.S., meanwhile, is actually spending a lower percentage of its GDP on defense now than it did in 2014.)

 

The president deserves a large share of the credit for this shift. The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared.

 

Ironically, the president must share some of the credit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—a man for whom the prospect of diminishing NATO is a primary motivation. Europe's rearmament has come about largely in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, as did the expansion of the alliance to include two previously nonaligned powers: Finland and Sweden.

 

But President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked. Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.

 

The message is clear, through both the Trump administration’s words and actions: Europe should not count on the United States. The nation that had once been the stalwart ally might, in the near future, be a neutral observer at best or an adversary at worst. Even if the Trump administration does not progress further down this path, the idea that America may be fickle about commitments in which we had previously been resolute is not a concern that can be ignored. Europe now has to consider the possibility that the indispensable nation may choose to be dispensable in the future of European security.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that defense officials in capitals throughout Europe may start planning and implementing the steps necessary for a post-American Europe; not as a preference, but as a matter of necessity.

 

Europe is expanding its defense industrial base, and NATO countries are weighing a shift away from traditional arrangements of purchasing American-made or designed equipment. Canada, after witnessing America shutting off certain targeting capabilities in the GMLRS missile guidance systems provided to Ukraine, is considering building its future air force footprint around the Gripen fighter instead of the F-35, not because the Gripen is superior, but because it is not reliant on the continued approval of a mercurial American government to perform after purchase. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall and Sweden’s Saab, maker of the Gripen, are expanding in preparation to fill European demand created by a reduction in orders for American weapons and, ironically, by the increased spending the president demanded.

 

It is realistic and rhetorically clear that if the United States keeps banging on the table demanding that Europe become less dependent on us, the result would be for it to become more independent from us. The result of the Trump administration pushing Europe to the side is Europeans adapting to that reality. Yet Colby seemed perturbed at the effect for which his policy was the cause when he posted a condemnation of Europe’s plans on X last week, saying that a “‘middle powers’ strategy”—the idea that second-tier powers would align independently and in prevention of aggression by the great powers—is not “a serious possibility.” In a demonstration of the underlying problem, Colby condemns Europeans who consider procuring weapons elsewhere, but then reminds them that “access to the American DIB (defense industrial base) is a privilege, not a right.” How dare you consider looking elsewhere for weapons, but also remember we might cut off your access to them, fail to fulfill already paid-for orders, deny software integration that makes the weapons usable, or deny you access to repair parts. Gee, who would want to build a hedge against that unreliable supply chain?

 

Colby seems to want inelastic European demand for a product for which we are specifically threatening to cut off supply. It’s an extension of the larger issues at play between the administration and NATO allies over Iran. The administration doesn’t feel the need to share its plans with or get input from European allies, but begins clutching its pearls when those allies don’t jump to join our rudderless conflict.

 

In other words, the administration seems to want Europe to provide more for their interests, but as we determine their interests to be. It’s an overcorrection. Rather than building on the legitimate win of reviving NATO defense spending and capabilities, this rhetoric is creating cracks that can spread into full fractures in the alliance. Colby is correct that developing a middle powers strategy is not the best option for Europe; but neither is America receding from its role as the leader of the free world. And the administration doesn’t seem to grasp that the former flows from the latter.

 

Without a strengthened transatlantic alliance, the world will become less advantageous for liberal democracies and more favorable for those rising powers looking to fill the empty space created by the gaps in the alliance. There are some who convince themselves America has no business maintaining interest in, or benefiting from the liberal world order and instead recommend a withdrawal to behind the walls of an American-dominated fortress of the Western Hemisphere. But history demonstrates that the storms that gather around the world eventually spread to those who seek refuge in isolationism.

The Robots Die So We Don’t

By Luther Ray Abel

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Anduril Industries, arguably the Apple of this new generation of venture-capital-funded defense tech firms, just released its latest weapon system: Thunder. An autonomous attack rotorcraft — think an unmanned Falcon from Halo or the chick of a V-22 Osprey — Anduril’s Thunder is being sold as the multi-tool wingman for Apache attack helos and the forthcoming Cheyenne II from Bell (co-creator of the V-22). The added payload, load-out, and protective envelope that such slavecraft (in the engineering sense) could offer is enticing.

 

 

The concept of concentric defense is nothing new. Troy, Constantinople, even the humble hill fort, are all static examples. Layers of protection provide the soft innards multiple opportunities to retard an aggressor’s advance. The U.S. Navy puts this strategy to sea, with carrier strike groups composed of picket vessels — destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and subs — and aircraft providing a third dimension of surveillance and interdiction to ensure the continued operation of the carrier, the heart of the strike group. Should all weapons fail, we were informed that our ship, the USS Rodney M. Davis, would sail between the incoming threat (be it missiles, drones, or small-boat explosives) and sacrifice itself (ourselves) so that the carrier would survive. The same is expected of any vessel that orbits the floating nuclear airfield.

 

What Anduril aims to do is swap out the 200 souls aboard a frigate and replace them with swarms of sacrificial drones/chaff/missiles launched from autonomous motherships similar to the Thunder rotorcraft. Doing some napkin math, each sailor’s family would be due a minimum of $100,000 in the event of the ship’s loss. So $20 million and the public’s outrage at the very least but, more likely, something north of $250 million after all survivor benefits are factored. And that’s just for the loss of our most basic ship class with the smallest crew.

 

Whether Thunder will be successful, I can’t say. Anduril is a young, hungry company making products no government has commissioned. Yes, that’s right, they use VC funds to make products they think the military needs and only then sell them, which is an inversion of the procurement status quo since the 1990s. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Having developed this system with Archer Aviation for commercial or defense applications, Anduril may ultimately sell more for domestic rather than military use. I’d be interested to see what such a system could do for firefighting in California, for example.

 

I’ll be writing at length about Anduril and its peers in an upcoming magazine piece, but I’m not spoiling anything by admitting that their marketing chops are something else: