The space industry was ecstatic to get a shout-out in President Trump’s first Joint Address to Congress. It appeared to be a signal that his administration was going to prioritize space issues, as it had during Trump’s first term, when significant attention was paid to ensuring the competitiveness of the space industry.
Unfortunately, the ever-evolving tariff regime is set to have the opposite effect. It will raise the cost of making rockets and satellites in the U.S., limit industry access to core inputs and materials and encourage boycotts of American products and services abroad.
Two small knots of people—fatigue-clad soldiers and unaccompanied women—gathered in the spring sunshine on the south side of the iconic bridge. Few spots in Ukraine are better known in the West than the span that connects Kyiv with its northern suburbs, Irpin and Bucha. This is the bridge Ukraine destroyed in February 2022 to stop Russian tanks from reaching the capital, forcing tens of thousands of fleeing residents to cross the river on foot. Three years later, the bridge has been repaired, and simple as it is—an unremarkable stretch of urban roadway—there is something miraculous about it, smooth and unbroken across the flat marshland.
The Ukrainians huddled near the old crossing last week are there to celebrate the third anniversary of the liberation of Irpin—the end of the opening battle of the war. It’s a simple ceremony, the first of several marking the day. Attendees stand for a moment of silence for fallen fighters; a small band plays the national anthem. There are short prayers and speeches. Then the mayor, also in fatigues, hands out the little plastic boxes with Ukrainian flags, one for each tearful widow. “We can fix the buildings,” wounded veteran Andrii Rizhov, a compact man with a graying beard, tells me. “Most of the physical damage and destruction has been repaired. The souls are different. Nothing can repair these widows’ shattered lives.”
This is a time of swirling emotions for most Ukrainians. Three years of war—nightly bombardments, power outages, unrelenting mobilization, and mounting casualties—have left citizens exhausted and yearning for peace. Few expect much of the ceasefire being negotiated by Washington and Moscow.
Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine in favor of Russia and Vladimir Putin threatens to upend the global order. Will Europe emerge as a unified force to defend Western democracies in the absence of American leadership? Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris speaks with Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute; and Mike Lofgren, author, historian and a leading expert on military weapons systems.
IT’S “UNFORTUNATE” THAT EUROPEAN LEADERS think Vladimir Putin isn’t interested in peace, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff told CBS News last week. “I know what I heard,” Witkoff insisted, recalling his latest visit to Moscow, “the body language I witnessed.” It was a frightening echo of George W. Bush, who declared after meeting Putin in 2001 that he had “looked the man in the eye,” got “a sense of his soul,” and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy”—a hopeful take Bush later came to regret as he learned from bitter experience how duplicitous and aggressive an adversary he faced in the Kremlin.
This is a lesson Donald Trump and team have yet to learn, but it’s only the beginning of what the 47th president doesn’t understand about his Russian counterpart. Even more dangerous, Trump doesn’t grasp that his vision of peace in Ukraine—a compromise requiring concessions on both sides—is fundamentally at odds with Putin’s vision. Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine center on one goal and one goal only, and it’s not something that can be split 50–50. Putin is determined to end Ukrainian sovereignty—its very existence as a freestanding, independent nation.
This mismatch doesn’t bode well for ceasefire talks continuing this week in Saudi Arabia. As long as one man seeks a deal—even a lopsided deal—and the other wants capitulation, they will inevitably talk past each other. Worse still, only Putin sees the skew, and he wants to prolong it. It serves his interest.
The longer he can keep Washington and Kyiv tied up in talks, the more time the Kremlin has to accomplish its aims militarily—seizing more Ukrainian territory, undermining Ukrainian morale and running out the clock on European war fatigue. Meanwhile, the longer the game goes on, the more desperate Trump becomes and the more he gives away—slice after slice of American power and Western leverage over Russia.
News that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invitedThe Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Cabinet-level group chat discussion where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth uploaded plans for U.S. military strikes in Yemen ought to prompt the resignations of both officials.
It’s irrelevant that Signal, the messaging app used by the group chat, is a secure platform; the personal phones on which Trump administration officials likely ran the app most certainly are not. If a foreign intelligence service can access one of these officials’ personal phones, it can access their Signal chats. At least one member of the group, Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow at the time the discussion took place, while another, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, admitted under questioning that she was overseas as well.
As a breach of security, the Signal group chat is unprecedented in its negligence. What’s more, the group chat also likely violates a number of laws relating to the disclosure of sensitive national defense information and federal records retention — Waltz had apparently set the group’s messages to disappear after one to four weeks.
This incident only reinforces the impression that President Trump has assembled a squad of inept amateurs for his national security team. Though Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DNI Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were all included in the chat, for instance, none thought to even ask why they were discussing the details of an upcoming military operation in an app on their unsecured personal phones. That suggests that such informal deliberations are a standard operating procedure for Trump’s national security team. Indeed, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested as much in a recent hearing.
Congress should mount a serious and thorough investigation into the Trump administration’s wider use of personal phones and messaging apps, encrypted or otherwise, to plan military operations and discuss sensitive national security matters. At minimum, however, National Security Adviser Waltz and Secretary Hegseth should immediately resign for their roles in this debacle.
For his part, Waltz carelessly added a journalist to a group chat that he organized via Signal, a secure app installed on insecure personal phones. Whatever the reasoning behind this move, it likely contravenes the spirit and letter of laws meant to safeguard sensitive national defense information and preserve communications involving senior federal officials. Waltz cannot remain as national security adviser, given his apparent disregard for laws and rules regarding sensitive information and records retention.
Hegseth, already unqualified and unfit for his position as secretary of defense, should resign for his cavalier disclosure of plans for impending military operations in the group chat, presumably via an insecure personal phone. According to Goldberg, Hegseth revealed details including “the specific time of a future attack, specific targets, including human targets, meant to be killed in that attack, weapons systems, even weather reports… It was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.” The fact that the Pentagon itself had warned against using Signal in a building-wide email just after the group chat took place puts Hegseth’s eagerness to share these details in an even less favorable light.
Neither Waltz’s nor Hegseth’s resignations will repair the damage done by their careless and reckless handling of sensitive national security information. Nor will it address the Trump administration’s wider use of messaging apps to discuss defense and foreign policy issues. But they are an important first step toward accountability.
Donald Trump has one thing right about the war in Ukraine: the sooner the killing stops, the better. Done right — a fair and lasting peace — this would be good for Ukraine, the U.S., our allies in Europe and ordinary Russians, if not Vladimir Putin and his murderous circle. But that doesn’t mean we should seek peace at any price.
What Trump doesn’t seem to understand: just how cunning and aggressive an adversary he’s facing. In fact, it’s not clear he understands Putin is an adversary, intent on exalting and expanding Russia at the expense of the West, which he views as an implacable enemy, to be vanquished by any means necessary, including not only brutal conquest but treachery, deceit and all the other underhanded tactics he perfected as a career KGB agent. It’s also apparently lost on Trump that Putin is playing him for a fool, flattering, manipulating and pretending he wants to be America’s friend.
Vasyl Talaylo, 35, can still remember the heady day last August when his unit was among the first Ukrainian troops to cross the Russian border into the Kursk region, spearheading a daring gamble to divert the enemy from the all-but stalemated fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front. An elite company, mostly engineers tasked with electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing Russia’s radio signals to confuse its drones and artillery operators—Talaylo’s unit is often among the first to enter contested territory and the last to leave, an essential shield for the rest of the army.
Seven months later, the excitement of the Kursk incursion has evaporated. The last Ukrainian troops are retreating from the region as I interview Talaylo in a hospital in Kyiv. “Yes,” the wounded fighter recalls, his face twisted with emotion, “it seemed promising then. But we left a lot of young lives on that narrow strip of land. We didn’t achieve much, and we paid a heavy price.”
Talaylo’s wife holds his hand—the arm that isn’t in a sling—as we talk in a nurses’ staging area outside his dingy hospital room. A crude gauze patch covers his left eye; under the sling, a tangle of metal rods holds what’s left of his left hand together. It’s not clear if he will recover use of either hand or eye. A soft-spoken, gentle man in mismatched black sweats, he’s not complaining, just eager to see the kids—a daughter, 10, and a son, 6—he left at home in a village in western Ukraine, where he worked as a driver before enlisting a year ago. But his weeks in the hospital have given him time to reflect on the war and the U.S.-brokered ceasefire taking shape as he lies in bed, and like several soldiers I’ve spoken to in recent weeks, he’s not optimistic.
The news from the U.S.-Ukraine talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday brought relief across Ukraine last night. The outcome could have been much worse—in keeping with the brutal negotiating style Washington has favored in recent weeks. The agreement stipulates a 30-day ceasefire in exchange for a resumed flow of the U.S. weapons and intelligence essential for Kyiv’s defense. Now the ball is in Russia’s court. Will Vladimir Putin observe the truce? Is he serious about wanting peace?
Even if he is—a big if—neither Ukraine nor the rest of Europe are likely to forget the way Washington bullied and abused them in recent weeks.
On March 4, just days after Donald Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Washington cut off the supply of U.S. arms and ammunition, threatening to incapacitate some 40 percent of the equipment Kyiv counts on to defend itself. A day later, the U.S. restricted vital targeting and intelligence data, endangering the lives of soldiers and civilians by sharply limiting Ukrainian knowledge of Russian troop movements and missile launches. The immediate result was one of the fiercest Russian air attacks in recent months: 67 missiles and 194 attack drones launched overnight on March 6, killing at least 20 people in the front-line city of Dobropillia.
For the first time since the early months of the war, I saw fear in the eyes of my Ukrainian friends. Sources said soldiers’ morale was teetering between despair and defiance. And many still fear there is worse to come: a U.S. push to compel Kyiv to surrender to Moscow’s steepest demands—for demilitarization and a change of government.
It reminded me of a certain kind of unpleasant talk show. The guest shows up, a little nervous but earnest, looking forward to a serious discussion of the issues. But the host lies in wait, spoiling for a fight and ready with ammunition—in this case, complaints about the guest’s supposed lack of gratitude and a poorly planned visit last fall to an arms plant in Pennsylvania, a state thought at the time to be leaning Democratic.
So began last week’s meeting in the Oval Office, Volodymyr Zelensky vs. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. “Much was learned,” Trump posted on Truth Social shortly after the fracas, “that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure. It’s amazing what comes out through emotion.” Sadly, he’s right, but the truth revealed wasn’t about Zelensky. It was about Trump and his unprincipled approach to American foreign policy.
It was 10 excruciating minutes of classic Trump: bullying, lies, and utter indifference to American values.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former executive director of policy who now works at the US-based Progressive Policy Institute think tank, told CNN. “(The visit) is a big test for the relationships between Europe and the United States, and Europe and the United Kingdom.”
There were few, if any, people in the room who weren’t aware of the meeting under way that afternoon in Saudi Arabia—Russian and American diplomats talking about the future of Ukraine with no Ukrainian input. But none of the 3,000 attendees at the defense forum in Kyiv—a combination conference and expo designed to bring startups, investors, soldiers, and government officials together to discuss Ukraine’s burgeoning defense industry—mentioned the proceedings in Riyadh.
Even if a peace deal is signed in coming months, the world-class weapons industry that has emerged in Ukraine since Moscow’s invasion in 2022 is likely to play a pivotal role in the country’s future—both as a deterrent against future Russian aggression and an export-driven pillar of the Ukrainian economy.
The sprawling expo showcased just how much the fighting in Ukraine has transformed war as we know it. The four or five dozen companies present ranged from fledgling startups to established manufacturers producing at scale for the Ukrainian armed forces. Exhibition booths featured every conceivable type of drone, large and small, for use in the air, at sea, and on the ground. Also on display was a range of electronic-warfare jamming and spoofing devices.
WASHINGTON — President Trump has fundamentally altered America’s global stance after just one month — alienating key allies, dismantling vital treaties, and embracing America’s adversaries. As the damage unfolds, Democrats must prepare now for the consequences of four years of weakened U.S. leadership.
In response, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released “Five Pillars of Freedom: First Steps Toward a New Democratic Foreign Policy,” a report by Peter Juul, PPI’s Director of National Security Policy. The report outlines a principled, proactive, and pragmatic Democratic foreign policy that prioritizes defending freedom, strengthening alliances, and advancing strategic economic engagement in a world reshaped by a second Trump presidency.
“Any Democrat who succeeds Donald Trump in 2029 will inherit a world that is more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more hostile to American interests than at any time in recent history,” said Juul. “This roadmap provides a path for Democrats to rebuild America’s standing, defend democracy, and protect our national security in an increasingly unstable world.”
Juul argues that Democrats must abandon outdated approaches and embrace a bold, forward-looking strategy rooted in five key pillars:
Defending Freedom: America must lead the global fight against authoritarianism and stand with democracies under threat.
Investing in a Strong National Defense: Democrats must overcome outdated skepticism about defense spending and ensure America’s military is prepared for 21st-century threats.
Rebuilding and Strengthening Alliances: From NATO to the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. must repair and reinforce strategic partnerships.
Leading on Economic Statecraft: Free and fair trade agreements with allies must replace Trump’s chaotic, self-defeating trade wars.
Projecting Strength and Resolve: A new Democratic foreign policy must reject excessive caution and be willing to take risks in defense of American values.
Juul warns that a second Trump presidency is already dismantling U.S. alliances, emboldening autocratic regimes, and undermining international institutions that have safeguarded global stability for decades. In his first weeks back in office, Trump has already bullied NATO allies, cozied up to Vladimir Putin, and proposed dangerous policies that weaken America’s strategic position.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on X.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
Come January 20, 2029, any Democrat who succeeds Donald Trump as president must be prepared to confront the very different and much more dangerous world Trump will almost certainly create. The Democratic Party must begin thinking seriously about a new foreign policy approach now — one based on the party’s best internationalist traditions and the defense of freedom worldwide, not fantasies of “restraint” conjured up by progressive isolationists or the timid, managerial approaches of the Obama and Biden years.
Democratic foreign policy would have required a serious refresh even had Kamala Harris prevailed in November 2024. But Trump’s return to the presidency makes matters even more urgent: Unconstrained by more experienced and sober national security voices that understand the value of America’s alliances, Trump appears ready and willing to let his deepest and most destructive foreign policy impulses run wild — as became clear during his first weeks back in office. Long-standing American allies and friends have already found themselves treated as enemies, threatened with and subjected to economic and military pressure, while adversaries and autocrats find themselves welcomed as comrades and given leave to act as they please.
Like prudent military strategists who plan for every possible contingency, Democrats need to prepare for world more hostile to American interests and liberal values than at any point in living memory — and an America much weaker and far less able to defend them. Dictators in Moscow and Beijing will see their power and influence grow, possibly with Ukraine as a de facto Russian vassal state and Taiwan under China’s thumb. Other democracies could well follow America’s example and elect illiberal, far-right governments of their own, a task made all the easier by Trump’s gutting of USAID and the vital support it provides to those fighting for freedom and democracy abroad. NATO and other American alliances may either cease to exist altogether or stumble ahead shadows of their former selves, effectively unable to deter conflicts or defend their members. Future American promises and commitments will lack credibility, particularly when it comes to issues of trade and security.
Indeed, in his first month in office alone, Trump bullied two NATO allies — Canada and Denmark— with threats of tariffs and territorial annexation while sitting down one-on-one with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to discuss the fate of Ukraine. He similarly promised to levy tariffs on Mexico, another neighbor and trading partner, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio falsely claimed Trump’s threats wrested concessions from the Panamanian government over access to the Panama Canal. Trump also publicly backed crimes against humanity when he floated a preposterous scheme to depopulate the Gaza Strip, seize the Palestinian territory for the United States, and transform it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”5 The loud and repeated endorsement of gangster-style extortion, territorial conquest, and rank imperialism by the president of the United States will have lasting and calamitous global consequences.
It will, therefore, not be possible for a future Democratic president to proclaim, as President Joe Biden did, that “America is back” and restore the world as it was before. Institutions and relationships demolished, degraded, and debased by a second Trump presidency, both at home and abroad, cannot simply be resurrected as if nothing had happened over the previous four years. Reconstruction and rebuilding, not restoration and refurbishment, will be the order of the day for any future Democratic foreign policy worthy of the name — and it will need to be done at a moment when America finds itself in its most precarious strategic position since before the Second World War.
So what should a future Democratic foreign policy look like?
First, it’s important to note that it’s hard to predict just how much damage Trump will do to America’s national security and foreign relations over the next four years — making specific policy proposals and positions less relevant than a broader intellectual and moral framework for thinking about foreign policy. Indeed, less than two weeks into his second term in office, Trump and his minions have already attempted to liquidate the U.S. Agency for International Development, purge the CIA and FBI of professional intelligence and law enforcement officers, and gut public scientific research institutions like the National Science Foundation, NASA, and NOAA.
What Democrats need is not a suite of detailed policy blueprints on this or that specific issue, but a general orientation and set of attitudes toward foreign policy — an animating spirit to guide them as they navigate the world moving forward.
That starts with a clear understanding of enduring global strategic realities and abiding American national interests — realities and interests that won’t change no matter who happens to occupy the Oval Office.
As Democratic Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized, the dramatic scientific, technological, and industrial breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century transformed the world in fundamental and irreversible ways.10 From steamships, the telegraph, and internal combustion engines to aviation, the radio, and rocketry, these advances made it impossible for geography to insulate the United States from threats across the Atlantic and Pacific. The political, economic, and diplomatic fate of this vast geographic expanse would now determine and define the sort of world in which America and other nations would live.
These profound changes required Americans to think about their national security in global terms, not just continental or hemispheric ones. As Roosevelt reminded his fellow citizens in his December 1940 fireside chat, “The width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.” Rapid technological progress since the Second World War — jet airliners, nuclear weapons, satellite telecommunications, and the internet, among other innovations — have only made Roosevelt’s central argument more compelling. Today, America’s own safety, prosperity, and freedom remains, as it has for more than a century, intimately and inextricably bound up with that of Europe and East Asia.
This essential national interest in the stability, security, and freedom of Europe and East Asia remains constant and objective; it can be denied and downplayed by isolationists on both left and right, but it cannot be altered, eliminated, or wished away. Now and for the foreseeable future, this interest is threatened by a pair of global gangster powers — Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China — that aim to dominate these two vital regions and dictate their own terms to the rest of the world. In this endeavor, moreover, Moscow and Beijing receive both material and moral support from lesser gangster states like Iran and North Korea. The frontiers of America’s own national security, in other words, now stand at Ukraine’s Dnipro River and in the Taiwan Strait.
For a future Democratic foreign policy to fully succeed, however, the pursuit of America’s national interest must proceed hand in hand with the pursuit of higher ideals and moral values that represent America at its best — namely, a stalwart defense of freedom and democratic self-government against the depredations of despots, dictators, and international gangsters.
A strong and forthright defense of freedom at home and abroad ought to sit at the heart of a future Democratic foreign policy, serving as its crucial central pillar and main organizing principle. As America learned during the first half of the twentieth century, a world dominated by unfree powers is one that’s manifestly unsafe for the United States. It ultimately remains up to America to defend freedom around the world — there is no other nation or group of nations that can assume the same mantle of moral leadership as the United States or possesses the necessary geopolitical heft. Without a power as strong and influential as America to stand for them, freedom and liberal values will find themselves with no real or effective champion on the global stage. In short, the fate of freedom around the world depends in no small part on America’s own active involvement in the world.
Democrats should also make clear that they want the United States to defend freedom where it already prevails — however incomplete and fragile it may well be in certain places — against bullying, intimidation, and outright invasion by gangster powers like Russia and China. America remains the only nation with the capacity and ability to organize an effective, durable defense of democratic self-government where it now exists against such powers. It’s not some abstract rules-based international order that Democrats want America to defend, then, but actual living-and-breathing societies like Ukraine and Taiwan who wish to live free from the very real threat of military bullying and political domination by their more powerful and predatory neighbors.
Four additional pillars support and flesh out in more practical terms this main animating principle of a future Democratic foreign policy:
Provide for a strong defense capable of meeting present and future challenges.
Alliances amplify American power and help secure American interests.
Free and open trade with friends and allies around the world.
A willingness to take risks and use American power to defend freedom overseas.
The United States strove for more than 100 years—since we entered World War I in April 1917—to hold its own as leader of the free world. It took Donald Trump precisely one month to abdicate that leadership, destroying everything his predecessors—from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—had built through two global conflicts, the Cold War and the creation of the post-World War II Western alliance. Trump thinks he is strong and making America stronger. But his bullying of Ukraine and capitulation to Vladimir Putin make us immeasurably weaker—a loss of reputation and power never likely to be regained.
Americans sympathetic to Ukraine have long worried that Trump would turn against the country on the receiving end of Russia’s brutal aggression. But the president’s behavior in the last week stunned even the Trump worriers. His ingratiating overture to the Kremlin, his preemptive giveaways—suggesting Ukraine should cede one-fifth of its territory and renounce joining NATO before Moscow even asked for those concessions—and his administration’s rush to meet a Russian delegation without Ukraine or our European allies, all of that was stunning enough.
But now the American president has sunk to baseless insults, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “modestly successful comedian,” a “dictator,” and a thief. Zelensky’s measured response, telling Ukrainians that he was counting on their unity and courage and “the pragmatism of America,” showed up the president’s barbs for the schoolyard taunts they were.
