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The Ukraine-Russia War Has Reached a New Phase

With the constant chaos generated by the Felon and the continued murder of people by ICE, it's easy to forget about the war in Ukraine and the importance of seeing a Russian defeat for not only Ukraine, but also Europe and the world as a whole.  Nothing sends a message to dictators with visions/delusions of grandeur like Putin's than to see one of their number go down to defeat. Sadly, the Felon - who seeks to emulate Putin as both a dictator and in terms of his rampant corruption - has vacillated in support for Ukraine and has likely allowed the war to drag on.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, Ukraine has proven adaptable and has created its own domestically built drones that are taking the war to the interior of Russia (see the image), but the need for ballistic missile interceptors remains high on Ukraine's needs if the war is to turn further in Ukraine's favor.  Meanwhile, the USA and Iran are back in a shooting war and America's stockpiles of Patriot and other missile systems are being  depleted.  One can only hope Ukrainian ingenuity and aid from Europe will help to further turn the tide of Putin's aggression:

Back when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was in its early stages, the cry from the West was to supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells and tanks to blunt the Russian onslaught. Now, well into the war’s fifth year, this is a far different fight, one that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says has become a decisive “battle in the sky.” It is a decisive moment, too, for the West.

The ground war is at a stalemate. Russia is still clawing away at Ukrainian territory, but at a snail’s pace and extraordinary cost. Ukraine says it inflicted almost 40,000 Russian dead and wounded in June, or about 1,300 casualties per square kilometer “seized or infiltrated,” according to the Institute for the Study of War — an attrition rate 19 times what it was a year earlier.

Russia is pummeling Ukraine with salvo after deadly salvo of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles; Ukraine is using ever more sophisticated and longer-range drones to drive Russia’s fleet away from Ukraine in the Black Sea, starve Russian-occupied Crimea and, most effectively, strike oil facilities and military installations deep inside Russia. Long lines for gas in Moscow and black smoke billowing from a refinery in distant Omsk, and images of victims being pulled out of demolished apartment blocks in Kyiv, tell the rest of the story. . . . . “And frankly, in that contest it matters far less whose territory is larger.”

What matters, he made clear, is to have the means to block the Russian fusillades, and there lies the current crunch. After America’s large-scale expenditure of crucial missiles against Iran, including the prized Patriot interceptors, precious few Patriots remain to share with Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that in the intense Russian attack on July 6, Ukraine shot down drones and cruise missiles but did not have enough interceptors to stop a single ballistic missile.

So interceptors, and specifically Patriots, have replaced artillery shells as the indispensable weapon for Ukraine in what may well be the end game of this war. That was at least part of the thinking behind Mr. Zelensky’s government reshuffle announced on Sunday; the “most important” matter for the new government to address, he said, was the procurement and production of Patriot missiles.

The money is there — NATO has pledged $80 billion in military aid for Ukraine, and individual NATO countries have allocated billions more. [The Felon] President Trump also seems to be shifting his favor back toward Ukraine after its recent military successes.

At the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey, last week, he called Ukraine’s leadership “ingenious,” and said he’d license Ukraine to produce the Patriot missiles it so urgently needs. Mr. Zelensky, reflecting the hard lessons of a rocky relationship, told The Financial Times, “President Trump wants to be where there’s success.”

[I]t would take years for Ukraine to start full production. In the meantime, Ukraine has to compete with U.S. armed forces and 16 other foreign clients waiting for Patriot deliveries, and these fancy weapons take time to put together.

Each $3.9 million missile takes about two years to make, and Lockheed currently produces only about 600 a year. In the 39 days of bombardment before the cease-fire with Iran began, the United States used up about half of its inventory of 2,330 Patriots, so just replacing them would take three and a half years, according to an estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That is not what Mr. Zelensky wants to hear. “It is simply absurd that, in the modern world, production has still not been scaled up to the level actually required to protect people from ballistic terror,” he said in one of his nightly video addresses.

That does not mean Ukraine is doomed. Far from it. The Ukrainians have displayed remarkable ingenuity in adapting to new forms of warfare, most notably in the development of sophisticated, inexpensive and lethal drones. Following the old precept of “shoot the archer, not the arrow,” Ukraine has been increasingly targeting military-industrial facilities deep in Russia with considerable effect, as evidenced by Russia’s recent ban on the export of diesel fuel. Ukraine’s relentless drone attacks on Crimea and Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov have also been highly effective.

Authorities in Crimea have declared a state of emergency because of acute fuel shortages and power outages. In addition to drones, whole battalions of tracked and wheeled robots fight on the ground, conducting thousands of missions every month to haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and hold land.

It is what David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called “adaptation warfare,” and for now, Ukraine is doing it better. As Mr. Zelensky put it, “Today, I believe victory in this war belongs to whoever is smarter.”

Overall, it is difficult to fathom how Russians have put up for so long with Vladimir Putin’s maniacal mission to destroy Ukraine, given the growing pain of Ukrainian strikes, a battlefield death toll of about 450,000, deteriorating living standards and the revival of a Soviet-style police state.

Yet Mr. Putin continues to believe that he can bring Kyiv to its knees with regular barrages. That makes it imperative for Ukraine, at this critical juncture of the war, to find ways of surviving the dearth of Patriot missiles while it hammers away at Russia.

In the meantime, it is imperative for the United States and Europe to do what they can to help Ukraine protect itself. In his last undertaking before his death, Senator Lindsey Graham had traveled to Ukraine. From there, he said he had reached agreement with the White House on a bipartisan bill to sanction buyers of Russian oil. That bill should be quickly advanced. Mr. Trump also should urgently act on his pledge to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriots, and also to accelerate production at home and in Europe. Europeans, too, should share as many air-defense missiles as they can and redouble their efforts to help Ukraine develop new systems. That may not block Russian missiles right away, but it would be a powerful message to Mr. Putin that his time is fast running out.

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Thanks to the Felon, the World Is Cutting Ties With America

As the war in Ukraine continues to grind on with Ukraine increasingly taking the war to the Russian home front, in one area Vladimir Putin continues to have great success: the weakening of America through the actions of the Felon and his band of sycophants.  Long time allies of America have been threatened, insulted and delivered a resounding message that America is not a trustworthy ally and that  the safest course of action is to reduce dependence on America. One immediate outcome has been America's isolation in its failing war with Iran which is continuing to deplete America's munitions supplies and again cause oil prices to rise. But the damage extends far beyond the Iranian front as nation's rethink who they purchase armaments from to who they sign trade deals with, including Canada, our former strong ally to the north. It's hard to see any goal of the Felon's actions - when not focused on shocking self-enrichment - other than degrading American power around the globe.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, some of this damage may never be fully undone even after the Felon has left office and/or this world (another Times column also looks at this ongoing damage to America's best interests):

In March 2023, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, laid out a strategy for managing the coercive policies of China. Europe, she argued, should “de-risk” from its dependence on the economic juggernaut by joining forces and building homegrown alternatives.

Three years later, de-risking from predatory superpowers remains the fundamental challenge facing European leaders, but China is no longer the main country of concern: The United States is. As they publicly seek to mollify a vindictive American president, policymakers across Europe are quietly working to reduce their decades-long dependence on the United States by increasing their own defense, energy and technology industries and diversifying their relationships with other nations. That dynamic was on display last week at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where President Trump renewed his threats against the U.S. allies Denmark and Spain.

It’s not just Europe backing away from the United States. Leaders of America’s partners in Asia and the Middle East are quietly doing the same. The second Trump administration’s ostentatious corruption, trade conflicts, military adventurism and mercurial artificial intelligence regulation have produced a new moment in international affairs: a nearly global grand strategy of countries distancing themselves from the world’s most powerful nation. . . . For the United States, which has called itself the “indispensable nation” for decades, this represents a sea change.

Now, amid intense competition from China, the erosion of key partnerships is undermining our military edge and world-leading technologies and limiting our ability to respond to China’s industrial advantages.

The Trump administration tends to view weaker foreign ties as positive, on the logic that countries’ doing more for themselves frees America to focus more on its interests. But . . . . .the global de-risking is already hurting Americans at home.

One doesn’t have to look far to see the costs. The lost war against Iran, the first in which we didn’t have diplomatic or military alignment with our closest allies in Europe and Asia, caused a spike in gas and fertilizer prices that contributed to a $132 billion hit to American consumers, according to Moody’s. Even as Europe increased its military spending by 14 percent, to $864 billion, in 2025, its military purchases from American companies actually fell by almost half.

[The Felon's] Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are also driving countries away. Four million fewer visitors came to the United States in 2025 than in 2024, at an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. America is hemorrhaging future skilled labor as enrollment by international university students dropped 17 percent last fall from the prior year, already costing universities at least an estimated $1 billion, and potentially costing the country hundreds of billions in future revenue.

The chilling effect is spreading. As [the Felon's] Mr. Trump muses about making Canada a 51st state, it has embarked on a “new strategic partnership” with China, opened its market for the first time to 50,000 Chinese electric vehicles and joined a more than $150 billion European defense fund aimed at breaking the dependency on the American defense industry.

In East Asia, where Mr. Trump has paused the sale of arms to Taiwan in deference to President Xi Jinping of China, Taipei and allied capitals are recalibrating their relationships. Japan is overhauling its concept of national defense to develop greater offensive strike capabilities. South Korean contractors are displacing American arms sellers around the world.

India is deepening commercial ties with Europe, the Middle East and even, grudgingly, China. India is one of a growing number of countries sufficiently worried about reliable access to American frontier A.I. models that it is reconsidering Chinese or domestic alternatives.

But nowhere is the push to de-risk from the United States more costly to both sides — and disadvantageously timed — than on the continent that coined the phrase. Once-unthinkable conversations are underway in European capitals. European officials tell me they are quietly developing plans for responding in the event of a full-blown trade war with America that would include choking off our technology companies’ access to the continent’s vast market or limiting key inputs like semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

[S]ome de-risking can have some benefits for the United States. Expanded European defense capacity could eventually free up American resources. . . . But the divisions Mr. Trump is causing are different. . . . Some costs of the world’s de-risking from America are already hitting home. Others won’t be evident overnight. Allies were right not to join Mr. Trump’s unnecessary Iran fiasco, but our ability to deter future conflicts is weakened by our greater isolation.

As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds [the Felon] Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.

Then there is this from the second column:

It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services. . . . . An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself?

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MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

Despite what they may say, one of the underlying motivation for the MAGA base - and the Felon and his minions - is racism.   When the Felon came down the escalator in 2015 and attacked Hispanics and depicted them as murderers and rapists, that set the blueprint for attacking and maligning non-whites and appealing to aggrieved whites who believe the advancement and achievement of others can only come through taking from these whites who are unable to see the common humanity in others who may look different from them or hold different beliefs.  This dovetails with the "Christian" nationalists who believe only white Christians should govern the nation.  Hence the strident attacks on immigrants who in their sick and small minds are all racial minorities who come to America to steal it from "real Americans." Hence the obsession with ending birthright citizenship even though most of these folks somewhere in their own ancestry likely gained citizenship through birthright citizenship.  Currently, the State Department's shift of interviewers of prospective immigrants from numerous nations in order to solely focus on white South Africans reveals the racism at the core of much of the MAGA movement and the Felon's contempt for non-whites.  It's only black, brown and other non-white immigrants who are not welcomed.  (My own father is the beneficiary of birthright citizenship following his Austrian parents arrival in America around 1913 while much of my mother's English and French ancestry traces back to Massachusetts in the 1600's, and the early days of New Orleans and Charleston.)  A column in the New York Times looks at this MAGA obsession:

On July 4, the world’s richest man made an ominous declaration. To follow Elon Musk’s X feed is to peer into a dystopian reality where immigrants are murderous brutes, Black-on-white crime is endemic and the “makers” in America are under siege from the “takers,” the people who live merely as parasites off the productivity of others.

But on the 250th birthday of his adopted country, he did something that might seem surprising but is entirely consistent with his hateful, paranoid trajectory: He turned on the American founding. A science fiction author and X personality named Devon Eriksen wrote, “Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism. If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker, and they will convert more and more makers into takers, forever.” “Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering,” he concluded.

“Classical liberalism,” for those not up on political terms of art, refers to the philosophy of the American founding, the creation of a rights-based republic of democratic rule restrained by constitutionally protected liberties. And what was Musk’s response to this direct assault on democracy and American liberty? “I have wised up,” he said.

I thought almost immediately of Peter Thiel, another wealthy right-wing mogul. . . . . all the way back in 2009, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

That’s why the founders created a government of limited powers restrained by, among other things, the Bill of Rights. But they also believed in the social contract theory of government, in the idea that governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

Freedom and democracy aren’t incompatible; they’re inseparable.

Musk’s and Thiel’s views would be notable enough, especially given their extraordinary political influence on the right, but their views aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re rooted in a profound sense of pessimism and despair that is spreading throughout the right.

From the inception of the MAGA movement, it has attracted a cohort of explicitly postliberal academics and intellectuals. These are often people who believe that liberalism itself — the belief in a rights-based approach to democracy — is deeply and profoundly flawed.

America, they believe, is dying — if it’s not dead already — and they hate the nation it’s becoming. How many times, for example, have we heard President Trump say that “you won’t have a country anymore” if he loses or if his plans are thwarted? In his mind (and in the minds of millions of his supporters), the fate of the country always hangs in the balance.

When the Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship decision last week, Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most powerful adviser, said that the court read the Constitution to require “national self-obliteration” and added for good measure that the ruling was a “deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”

Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing web magazine, responded to the ruling by suggesting a series of possible measures, including, incredibly enough, the “dissolution of the union” and the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

And, of course, no summary of the right-wing reaction to the ruling would be complete without overt racism. A MAGA X user writing as I Am Leah wrote that “18 years from now, my kid’s votes will be canceled out by a third-world cockroach whose cockroach mom arrived here three minutes ago.”

Don’t think for a moment that the birthright citizenship ruling was any kind of tipping point. In fact, it was more or less business as usual. Darkness covers the right. On June 28 a podcaster and columnist for The Blaze, another right-wing outlet, wrote that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “should have started a literal civil war between red and blue America.”

Kirk’s assassination was an evil act, but the idea that it should have triggered civil war in this country is deranged.

The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.

Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”

But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.

The conservatism of my youth positioned itself in direct opposition to Communism in both its Soviet and its Chinese forms. Fascism (and everything like it) was dead, and no one wanted to revive it.

How wrong I was. Parts of the right still posture as patriots, but they have imagined a different kind of patriotism, one that loves the country but scorns its creed. They — like Musk on July 4 — reject the classical liberal founding or at least de-emphasize its importance compared with the ancestral lineage of its citizens.

Vance is making a version of the argument that a certain subset of Americans — sometimes called heritage Americans — enjoys a superior claim to American citizenship. At its most extreme ends, proponents of the idea have even assigned letter grades to your citizenship based on the length of your American family roots.

As my friend and former Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote, this is a form of identity politics: “It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex or height.”

And if America isn’t rooted in its creed — and if certain classes of citizens have a superior claim to their American identity than other citizens — then it is a short trip to believing that the American government exists to serve only the favored class, the “real Americans” who make up, say, the MAGA base.

In this formulation, true patriotism isn’t the preservation of the creed; it’s the preservation of the people. And once you see this distinction, MAGA’s entire governing philosophy makes infinitely more sense.

Why crack down so aggressively on immigration? Immigrants — especially those from the global south — are not and can never be part of the people. They’re the “invaders” whom progressives want to use to replace the “real” American electorate.

[B]irthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.

Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. You can see it in the constant anger against immigrants. You can see it in the racism of constantly highlighting crimes committed by Black and brown people, citizens and immigrants alike.

I don’t want to denigrate the idea of respecting one’s ancestors. . . . . . I can be proud of where I came from without believing there’s anything magic about my blood. While I want to live up to the best parts of my ancestors’ example, they don’t make me any better as an American than my friend Leo, a Mexican immigrant, who served side by side with me in Iraq. The worth of my citizenship is judged by the value of my choices, not by the identity of my parents, much less that of my great-grandparents.

America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.