Amid the tide of bilge—lies, personal smears, conspiracy theories, and other drivel—offered by the Trump administration in the last two weeks as an alleged rationale for shutting down USAID and ending America’s decades-long tradition of foreign aid, one legitimate question stands out: How exactly is foreign aid in America’s interest? Or, to put it another way: How and to what extent do we benefit from spending money to improve conditions and better lives in other countries?

Consider USAID’s portfolio in Ukraine, which expanded sharply after Russia’s invasion in 2022—from $200 million in 2021 to $16 billion in 2023, adding up to some $35 billion in the past three years. USAID has served as the primary funnel for America’s nonlethal support for Ukraine, now the agency’s largest recipient worldwide.

The expansion of assistance to Ukraine originally enjoyed strong bipartisan support. According to a public “exit memo” by Biden administration USAID Administrator Samantha Power, the agency leveraged a three-to-one match by other donors, including the private sector and allied countries. Funding was spread across an array of projects, from humanitarian aid for elderly residents holding out in the rubble of ruined frontline cities to digital innovation designed to reduce corruption and keep government services running.

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In mid-2024, as the war in Ukraine ground into a third year and Western military aid showed ominous signs of flagging, Kyiv and its friends in Europe began moving toward a different approach: producing weapons closer to the fighting, on Ukrainian soil. This would require help from Europe and the U.S.—significant funding and oversight. But it promised in the long haul to reduce Ukrainian dependence on the West and, after the war, to provide a powerful new arsenal for Europe.

Denmark was the first country to participate, followed by other northern European nations, and early efforts were promising. Altogether in 2024, what became known as the “Danish model” provided more than a half billion dollars for Ukrainian weapons production, and the approach was warmly welcomed in Kyiv, with President Volodymyr Zelensky and others calling for its expansion in 2025.

Then, astonishingly, in late January, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov suspended the well-regarded director of the agency that had made the new approach possible by bringing transparency and accountability to the agency that purchases weapons and ammunition for the Ukrainian army.

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Denys Rizhov, 21, stumbled on the Third Assault Brigade’s drone school, Kill House, by accident—a random link to a YouTube video. A soft-spoken, reserved young man with a ponytail, bored by college, working odd jobs and uncertain what his future would bring, Rizhov was intrigued enough to follow up on the web. The more he learned, the more he liked, and he decided to start saving the $190 it would cost for a week of classes in the technology and tactical use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

He scrimped and saved for months, and when he finally took the course, he couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Now he’s planning to go back for further training—a second week of drone school and then the Third Assault Brigade’s intensive seven-day course that tests volunteers interested in joining the unit.

At a time when the lion’s share of Ukrainians is frightened of joining the armed forces or actively resisting it—hiding from recruiters and scheming to flee the country illegally—Rizhov is increasingly drawn to enlisting in an elite combat unit, attracted by evolving drone technology and what he’s seen of the Third Brigade’s bracing ethos.

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Looking back, Estonian officials are confident that they handled the May 2024 buoy incident about as well as it could be handled. Estonian border guards caught the Russian theft on video: a handful of uniformed men in patrol boats moving slowly up the river between the two countries, systematically removing 25 of the 50 buoys laid down by Estonia to mark the frontier. “Moscow is testing our reaction,” director general of the Estonian police and border guard Egert Belitšev tells me as we watch the tape. “When we don’t react, they go further.”

A tiny country of 1.4 million, formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, Estonia has long seen itself as the front line between Russia and the West, and Estonians are used to the so-called “hybrid” aggression that has been escalating elsewhere in Europe in recent months. The day after the buoy incident, the foreign minister summoned Moscow’s top diplomat in Tallinn and told him in no uncertain terms that the theft was unacceptable. Will that be enough to deter similar sabotage this year? Belitšev shrugs off the question. “We couldn’t follow the provocation,” he explains. “We do not enter Russian territory. Our job is to keep Estonians safe, not provoke World War III.”

It has taken the rest of Europe several years to recognize the growing challenge posed by Moscow’s shadow warfare. But with the provocations increasingly frequent and increasingly menacing—not just cyberattacks and disinformation but bomb threats, arson, and a foiled assassination attempt last year—officials across the continent are wrestling with how to react.

Western countries’ commitment to the rule of law generally prohibits responding in kind—what separates us from the Russians, after all, if not our commitment to a rules-based international order? But it’s not clear that the tools we have at hand are enough to deter Moscow from further aggression. In Western Europe, as in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes might makes right, and the civilized world has been largely unable to come up with a counterargument.

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Andrius Kubilius drew back the curtain about an hour into his November 6 confirmation hearing as the European Union’s first-ever commissioner for defense and space. A former prime minister of Lithuania and long-time member of the European Parliament, Kubilius told a story about a recent war game simulating a Russian attack on his home country.

The alarming finding of the exercise: Lithuania would be overrun—defeated by the Russians and occupied—well before NATO forces arrived, probably about 10 days later. Lithuania estimates that preparing for such an assault would require it to double its defense spending from nearly 3% of GDP, already higher than all but four European countries, to 6%. (The U.S. spends 3.4%, according to NATO.) “How shall we do it?” a somber Kubilius asked his fellow parliamentarians. “How much the European Union can help us? That is the question to which we need to find an answer together.”

Some 1,000 days after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, with President-elect Donald Trump threatening to end the fighting on terms that many believe will be favorable to Moscow, Europeans are increasingly worried that war is coming to their doorstep. The past year has seen a sharp escalation of sabotage that European intelligence services attribute to Moscow: arson attacks on a Warsaw shopping mall, a German weapons factory and a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London, plus a foiled plot to sabotage a military installation in Germany and a conspiracy to assassinate the CEO of a German arms manufacturer, among other illegal acts. And German intelligence has predicted that Russia could be ready for an armed attack on NATO by the end of the decade.

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