issue: Foreign Policy & Defense

Hegseth Must Go

Posted on by Max Sherrill

If recent news reports are accurate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likely issued an illegal order to give no quarter in the first of what are now many likely illegal strikes against alleged narcotics trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. Already manifestly unfit and unqualified for the job, focused primarily on fighting culture wars and politicizing, and having previously endangered American military personnel by discussing sensitive operational details over an off-the-books group chat, Hegseth may now be guilty of war crimes if not outright murder. 

Congress must now embark on a thorough investigation of these strikes and Hegseth’s potentially criminal role in ordering them. Ultimate responsibility for these immoral and likely illegal military actions rests with President Donald Trump, but Hegseth bears significant responsibility of his own for following and executing Trump’s directives. As secretary of defense, however, Hegseth has the right and duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders from the president — but he has chosen to follow them instead.

Indeed, Trump likely nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense in part because, like Trump, he possesses few if any qualms about ordering the American military to act in direct contravention of the laws of war. As a Fox News television personality during the first Trump term, for instance, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes by his fellow SEALs, and defended others charged with or alleged to have ordered similar crimes. His partisan polemics, moreover, seep with barely-concealed contempt for the laws and rules of war. In Hegseth’s telling, America fails to win wars because the U.S. military cannot act like its enemies and commit obvious war crimes with abandon — a morally reprehensible stance that drags America down and damages our standing in the world.

Hegseth also summoned the military’s highest-ranking officers back to the United States in September for a lecture that included, among other things, a promise that the military would no longer have to follow “stupid rules of engagement.” He also reportedly forced Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, to resign less than a year into his three-year appointment after Holsey expressed doubts about the legality of the Trump administration’s boat strikes — doubts buttressed by the command’s senior military lawyer, whose view that such strikes were illegal was overruled by the Trump administration’s lawyers. 

In a blatant attempt to intimidate critics, moreover, Hegseth has absurdly threatened Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — a retired Navy pilot and astronaut who flew 39 combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War and piloted four space shuttle missions from 2001 to 2011 — with a court-martial for recording a video with other Congressional Democrats that reminded American servicemembers of their right to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth has acted beneath the dignity of his office in other ways, such as active trolling on social media and provoking a Canadian children’s book publisher to condemn him for using one of their characters in a juvenile AI-generated meme.

Hegseth has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no business holding his present office. In a normal political universe, he would never have been nominated as secretary of defense in the first place. But we live in abnormal times, and President Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense because of their shared disdain for the laws of war and the notion of basic human dignity during armed conflict. Given its general subservience to Trump, this Congress will almost certainly not impeach and remove Hegseth — no matter how much he deserves to be dismissed from office. 

Assuming he remains Secretary of Defense and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term election, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office should be one of a new Democratic majority’s first orders of business. If successful, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office will be only the start of accountability for the Trump administration’s lawless and immoral war in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific — but a start must be made.

Jacoby in Joan Esposito Live Local & Progressive: An Update on Ukraine

Posted on by Alex Terr

 

Tamar Jacoby, contributor to Washington Monthly (https://washingtonmonthly.com/author/…)  and the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project (https://www.progressivepolicy.org/pro…)  and the author of “Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience.” Her latest article for Washington Monthly is “ Three Lessons From Trump’s Latest Plan for Ukraine (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/11…) .”

Jacoby on Background Briefing with Ian Masters: What Impact Will the Resignation of Ukraine’s Negotiator Yermak Have on Peace Talks?

Posted on by Alex Terr

We assess the multiple and confusing Trump teams of negotiators trying to make a deal Putin clearly has no interest in peace with Ukraine unless he gets all of his maximalist demands. We also examine the impact of Zelensky’s right hand man Yermak’s resignation under a cloud of corruption accusations. Joining us for Kyiv is Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Now a regular contributor to Forbes.com, she is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and has an article at The Washington Monthly, “Three Lessons From Trump’s Latest Plan for Ukraine: Whatever emerges from U.S.-Ukrainian talks in Geneva, nothing good is likely to come from this recipe for appeasing Moscow.”

 

Background Briefing with Ian Masters · What Impact Will the Resignation of Ukraine’s Negotiator Yermak Have on Peace Talks?

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Three Lessons From Trump’s Latest Plan for Ukraine

Posted on by Alex Terr

The world appears to have dodged a bullet. Donald Trump and team are walking back from their latest and most outlandish proposal for peace in Ukraine. American and Ukrainian negotiators meeting in Geneva are working to revise the plan, and U.S. and European officials have agreed to meet separately to discuss its implications for NATO and the European Union. The outcome of these talks is unknown, and it’s hard to imagine a deal that will satisfy all parties—the Russian, Ukrainian, and European positions remain starkly at odds. But whatever the result, some things are already clear—including three lessons for the U.S. and Europe.

Kyiv and its European allies have long feared that Trump would betray Ukraine by using U.S. leverage to impose an unfair, unrealistic peace settlement modeled on a real estate deal—splitting the difference between two sides, in this case, a rapacious aggressor and its much smaller neighbor struggling to defend itself. In fact, the 28-point peace plan leaked last week was far worse than that. It didn’t even pretend to split the difference. With a few minor exceptions, Moscow got everything it wanted, and Ukraine got nothing. The deal rewarded the aggressor and pummeled the victim, strengthening a voracious Russia while enriching the U.S.

But Washington wasn’t just betraying Ukraine—the proposed deal would also be disastrous for Europe. With Ukraine sidelined—its large, experienced army and cutting-edge weapons neutered—nothing would stand between Europe and Russia, now armed to the teeth, invigorated by four years of war, and openly hungry to reclaim more of what it considers its historic sphere of influence.

Read more in Washington Monthly. 

Ainsley in the IPS Journal: ‘The working class hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s just transformed’

Posted on by Alex Terr

When Labour won in July 2024, there was a fair amount of goodwill toward the new government. However, there was also scepticism about what the government could deliver. People were worried about the state the Conservatives had left the country in. There were also questions about what Labour really meant by ‘change’, its campaign slogan.

After a fairly sure-footed start, especially on foreign policy, the government made several missteps that cost it dearly. The most significant was the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance, not just for wealthier pensioners, which would have been justifiable, but for middle-income pensioners as well. Labour did this to reassure the markets ahead of its first major budget, to show it could be trusted with public finances. But the move unsettled people and raised doubts about what Labour actually stood for.

At the same time, Labour kept blaming the Conservatives without giving a clear destination of what they were going to do. Confidence fell among businesses and voters alike. When the budget eventually came, it included a substantial increase to employers’ National Insurance contributions. Businesses felt this cut against everything Labour had promised about growth and wealth creation.

Since then, we’ve seen a disappointing economic performance. On top of that, you had the ‘freebies’ scandal: It’s quite normal for MPs to be given tickets to events or dinners or things like that, but they’re required to declare it. When this all came out, the public was quite taken aback. Labour failed to get a grip on that quickly. In opposition, they had successfully repositioned the party as fighting for ordinary working people. In government, their decisions and handling of these issues made it feel like they’d lost sight of that.

Read more in the LPS Journal. 

Lewis for The Diplomatic Courier: Is the International Treaty System Fit for Purpose?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

In an era of global crises, multilateralism remains the cornerstone of international cooperation. Treaties are often seen as its highest expression—from public health to narcotics to climate change—designed to harmonize policy, set minimum standards, and catalyze collective action.

Yet today’s multipolar world has exposed the treaty system’s fragility. It’s not only the geopolitical shocks—Trump’s foreign policy reset, Russia’s aggression, or a weakened United Nations—but also deep structural flaws that have long been ignored: a lack of transparency, rigid frameworks resistant to innovation, weak enforcement, and growing hostility toward the private sector.

These challenges call for reflection. Without a more agile, inclusive framework grounded in pragmatism, collaboration, and shared responsibility, the international treaty system risks slipping into irrelevance.

Keep reading in The Diplomatic Courier.

Jacoby on Background Briefing with Ian Masters: A Report From Kyiv on Whether Europe’s Tough Talk on Russia Will Translate Into Action

Posted on by Alex Terr

Background Briefing with Ian Masters · A Report From Kyiv on Whether Europe’s Tough Talk on Russia Will Translate Into Action

Finally, we speak with Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Now a regular contributor to Forbes, she is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and we discuss her article at The Washington Monthly, “Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?”

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?

Posted on by Alex Terr

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

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

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

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

Read more in Washington Monthly.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Estonia in the Crosshairs

Posted on by Max Sherrill

It was the kind of display only NATO can mount. Several hundred Italian troops from the alliance’s Baltic air policing mission stood in formation at Estonia’s Ämari Air Base, more than 1,500 miles from home. Some of the world’s most powerful weaponry loomed behind them on the windswept tarmac: an F-35 fighter jet, a SAMP/T air defense missile launcher, a Typhoon Eurofighter, and a CAEW radar surveillance plane.

Just days after three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated Estonian airspace, loitering for 12 minutes before being escorted out by NATO aircraft, Italian defense minister Guido Crosetto had flown in to thank the Italian pilots who intercepted the planes. A big bear of a man with a shaved head, he and Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur stood together on the runway to announce that Italy would extend its rotational presence in Estonia, leaving its jets and air defense system at Ämari through spring 2026.

“If [the Russians] are looking for a response,” Crosetto declared, “this is it—our strengthened presence here.”

Keep reading in Washington Monthly.

Ainsley for The Spectator: Labour’s deputy divisions: insider vs outsider?

Posted on by Alex Terr

Tim Shipman and Claire Ainsley from the Progressive Policy Institute join Patrick Gibbons to reflect on Labour’s party conference as it draws to a close in Liverpool. This conference has been received positively for Labour but, on the final day, a hustings for the deputy leadership demonstrated that divides remain under the surface. Is Lucy Powell versus Bridget Phillipson a case of left versus right in the party, or is it more about the outsider versus the insider? And, as a leading political commentator declares Labour to now be the ‘party of the professional middle class’, what does the contest tell us about who Labour needs to appeal to?

Listen to the podcast on the Spectator.

Jacoby for Forbes: Kyiv’s E-Points Drone Marketplace—An Amazon For Frontline Units

Posted on by Alex Terr

The tall, bearded officer, code-named Prickly—like all Ukrainian fighters, he uses a call sign to protect his identity—is proud as a peacock of what he has done in six months at the helm of his frontline drone unit, and he gives some of the credit to Kyiv’s new “e-point” system, Army of Drones Bonus.

He and several of his men explain how the system works in an interview near a former farmhouse in eastern Ukraine. The yard is littered with military equipment and junk, including the farmer’s much-worn living-room furniture, now arranged around a makeshift fire pit. Several stray cats and a mangy dog come and go as we talk. “We’ve improved our performance by a factor of 10,” the commander boasts. “We know that thanks to the drone points system, which measures how many men we kill and how much equipment we destroy.”

After more than three and a half years of fighting, drones have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine. Every operation depends on uncrewed platforms, either to carry out the mission or protect soldiers. Units work with an increasingly varied drone arsenal—large and small devices, powered by rotors and fixed wings, guided by radio waves and fiber optic cable. Kyiv and Moscow are locked in a deadly technology race, constantly competing to counter the other side’s latest developments, and things change so fast that an wounded fighter returning to the front after just a few months away can no longer recognize his unit’s tactics. Estimates suggest that unmanned aerial vehicles are responsible for up to 80% of battlefield casualties.

Read more in Forbes. 

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Downing Russian Drones: “The U.S. and Europe Should Learn From Us”

Posted on by Alex Terr

Looking back, it was a prescient warning. Just the day before the Kremlin sent 19 unmanned aerial vehicles deep into Polish territory, prompting NATO to scramble its most advanced fighter jets and anti-missile air defenses, I met with the commander of a Ukrainian air defense unit protecting the city of Sloviansk from Russian drones. We sat outdoors in a quiet courtyard near the city center, just 15 miles from the front line. The officer, who goes by the name Fin—he worked in the financial sector, running a grain export company, before volunteering for combat duty in 2022—explained how his team of advanced IT technicians and other specialists uses signals intelligence (SIGINT) to intercept incoming Russian drones.

A tall, well-built man with a graying beard, Fin took out his phone to show me a video of a typical intercept. The unit had hacked into the frequencies the targeted Russian drone was using to send video images back to its pilot behind the front line, letting us see the battlefield through enemy eyes. Ukrainian forests and fields floated by, bracketed by the drone’s spinning rotors on the edges of the frame. Then it all went gray. The SIGINT unit, code-named Specter, had used the device’s own navigational signals to bring it down, crashing to earth far short of its target.

“We do this for a fraction of what it would cost Europe and the U.S.,” Fin explained. “No jets, no million-dollar weaponry. And we intercept a large number of drones.” Just the night before, he told me, a routine evening in Sloviansk, the unit brought down 198 enemy UAVs. “Europe and the U.S. should start learning from us before it’s too late,” he warned. “They’ll either learn from our experience, or they’ll learn on their own—the hard way.”

Read more in Washington Monthly.

Jacoby for Forbes: Ukrainian Veterans Prepare For Postwar Leadership

Posted on by Alex Terr

Nothing about the dozen men and women gathered on a summer Saturday in the nondescript classroom in downtown Kyiv signaled who they were. Pale, skinny women in punkish black mingled comfortably with beefy men in rugged work clothes. Ages ranged from early 20s to late middle age. They greeted each other warmly and shared a few jokes as they squeezed into plastic chair desks and waited for their instructor.

What they had in common: all were Ukrainian veterans chosen to participate in a program they hope will prepare them for future leadership, whether in government, nonprofit organizations, or community settings—any initiative, as the program’s cofounders put it in an interview, to “rebuild and strengthen Ukraine.”

Virtually no one in Ukraine expects peace anytime soon—they don’t believe Vladimir Putin will make peace until he has achieved his goal of subjugating his southern neighbor. But in a nation fighting to break free of Russian influence, refashioning itself as a European democracy, the future of the country is on everyone’s mind—that’s what they’re fighting and dying for—and it’s never too soon to think about rebuilding.

Read more in Forbes.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: A Deadly Night in Kyiv Makes a Mockery of the Peace Process

Posted on by Alex Terr

It was already clear at 10:00 p.m. that it would be a tough night in Kyiv. The air alert sounded at 9:24 p.m., blaring outside and shrieking out of the state-supported app on my phone. Like many in Ukraine, I checked a couple of privately run Telegram chats to see what was incoming—the chats use open-source intelligence to give real-time updates, sometimes with a text every few seconds, showing exactly what is in the air and where, pinpointed to the neighborhood. The picture didn’t look good: already two dozen little drone icons on my go-to channel’s schematic map. But none were yet in Kyiv, so I breathed easy for now and went back to my otherwise quiet Wednesday night.

That day, the news in the Western media was still all about Donald Trump’s efforts to broker a ceasefire a week earlier. Several media outlets were still analyzing what exactly had happened when seven European leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, traveled to the White House on August 18 to try to undo the damage Trump caused at his chummy meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska the week before. Another story revealed European leaders were working to develop security guarantees—perhaps European soldiers at Ukrainian airports and train stations—to be implemented once a peace agreement is signed. Another shocking report detailed ExxonMobil’s secret talks with a state-run Russian energy giant about resuming business as usual when the ink on a deal is dry.

Read more in Washington Monthly.