Every country, from Canada to Vietnam, is facing the same high-stakes conundrum: Is it wiser to try to placate Donald Trump or to push back against his bullying and outlandish demands?

Arguably, no nation is in a more difficult position than Poland. Historically one of America’s closest European allies, it’s also the country with the most to lose if a revanchist Russia, emboldened by a skewed peace in Ukraine, sets its sights on regaining its traditional sphere of influence not just within the former Soviet Union but also beyond it.

Imagine a spectrum with China on one end and Italy on the other. Beijing has defied Trump’s tariffs and hit back hard with retaliatory levies. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, the only European leader to attend Trump’s second inauguration, never misses a chance to flatter the 47^th president and is angling for a trade deal.

In between, Japan and South Korea say little in public while pursuing bilateral agreements with Washington. Britain and France make nice in the Oval Office but still strive, with charm and diplomacy, to persuade Trump to block Vladimir Putin’s bid to dominate Ukraine. Incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has taken a tougher stance, vowing European “independence from the USA.” So has Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney, fresh off a stunning electoral triumph for his once-seemingly-doomed Liberal Party, has accused the American president of “trying to break us so he can own us.”

Both leaders of Poland’s two-headed “cohabitation” government—national conservative President Andrzej Duda and centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk—were once touted as “Trump whisperers” who could wrangle the U.S. president on behalf of Europe. Neither has managed to capture that mantle—if indeed there is such a thing. Several Polish officials, all of whom I spoke to this month, were wary of the term and requested anonymity as their nation heads into a presidential election.

Read more in Washington Monthly. 

When Andrius Kubilius considers Europe today, he thinks about the U.S. in the late 1930s. The former Lithuanian prime minister, now European commissioner for defense and space, sees many parallels. Americans lacked a sense of urgency about Nazi aggression. The U.S. had few reserves of manpower or weaponry. Its arms industry had been weakened by years of underinvestment. Manufacturers, uncertain about future orders, hesitated to ramp up production capacity, and money was in short supply.

In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt defied this apathy and inaction with the historic defense buildup known as the “Victory Program.” Eighty years later, Kubilius says, Western democracies face a different form of totalitarian aggression. But if America could do it then, Europe can and must do it now. “We have the same responsibility,” the commissioner wrote recently in a personal post, “to define and to implement our ‘Victory Plan.’ This is our moral task. For our grandkids to live also in peace.”

Kubilius is one of the architects of the European Union’s ambitious new rearmament strategy, ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030, approved in principle last month by 26 of the continent’s 27 heads of state. Unlike in the U.S. where it now seems unclear to many whether Russia is a friend or foe, few Europeans are confused about the need for the initiative. Kubilius sums it up with one fact: as things stand today, Russia can produce more weapons in three months than all the NATO member states, including the U.S., can produce in a year.

Read more in Forbes.

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.

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.

Read more in The Bulwark.

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.

So what is the best approach to ending the war?

Read more in The Editors. 

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.

Read more in Forbes.

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.

Read more in The Washington Monthly.