Ahead of a White House meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on July 28, multiple news outlets reported that their relationship was “warming.” In a July 27 article, the Wall Street Journal reported that “in recent weeks, the president has expressed fresh optimism about Ukraine and its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, according to people who have spoken to him.” Semafor also said relations were “warming,” and that the two leaders were meeting at the “peak of their relationship — though it may not last.”

On July 28, the meeting happened with no press, as did Trump’s other meeting of the day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Zelenskyy described it as “good” and Trump said it went “very well.” While this meeting apparently went better than last year’s televised meeting where Trump and JD Vance berated Zelenskyy as television cameras were rolling, no new policies were announced. Traveling via train, car, and plane from Kyiv to Washington for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) funeral and a meeting with Trump, Zelenskyy seems to have come back empty-handed.

In Trump’s second term, the U.S. has sharply curtailed the assistance it has provided Ukraine, even briefly cutting off intelligence support. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. reduced its overall military, humanitarian and financial support by 99 percent, with Europe largely filling the gap. As Kyiv faces stepped-up ballistic missile attacks from Russia, Zelenskyy has appealed to the U.S. and Western countries for Patriot missiles to defend against them.

Earlier this month, Trump said that he would grant Ukraine the license to produce U.S.-made Patriot missiles, but this is a process that is likely to take years, and Ukraine needs more interceptor missiles now. The U.S. Department of Defense has said that only about 600 interceptor missiles are produced a year, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies has estimated that the U.S. has used over half of its supplies in Trump’s war of choice against Iran. As part of Trump’s cutoff of Ukraine funding, the U.S. no longer donates missiles to Ukraine -- Kyiv must finance the buys itself, often via European countries. Despite Trump’s reported “optimism” for Ukraine’s war strategy, he is offering Kyiv very little.

While in office, Trump has not announced any new major spending packages for Ukraine. According to Reuters, Trump’s Pentagon has told lawmakers that it will not finish spending the $400 million Congress has authorized for aid to Ukraine until 2029, the year Trump leaves office. ($400 million sounds like a lot, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $127 billion in aid since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.) Reuters added that the funds include “$200 million for weapons, ammunition and explosives, $99.9 million for vehicles, spares and equipment and $100 ​million for services such as transportation of defense articles to Ukraine.” Democrats have accused Trump of slow-walking the military aid that his administration is legally obligated to spend, a similar charge that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. With Congress in Republican hands, impeachment is off the table.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin looms large in the Zelenskyy-Trump relationship.

Read more

Dear Reader,

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi is out. On the evening of July 21, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced his dismissal and his replacement, General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who had been publicly supportive of ousted defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Syrskyi’s dismissal is a huge concession to the protests that had rocked Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine for five straight nights. The protests initially focused on reinstating Fedorov. However, Syrskyi, who Fedorov said on July 16 that he had unsuccessfully lobbied Zelenskyy to fire, became a target of protesters’ ire. Protesters made cardboard signs playing on Syrskyi’s last name, the first part of which is similar to the Ukrainian and Russian word for cheese. Protesters made cardboard Swiss cheese signs, and one protester I saw wore a costume of a mouse.

Fedorov, 35, and Syrskyi, 60, had clashed during the defense minister’s six months in office. Fedorov lobbied for a decentralized structure to the military with drones, unmanned systems, and robotic units on the frontline to bridge Ukraine’s manpower shortage against Russia. Syrskyi, who was educated at a Soviet military academy in Moscow and speaks Russian, favored a centralized, Soviet-style command structure with more recruits risking their lives on the frontline.

Syrskyi came to symbolize the problems associated with mobilization: lacking willing recruits in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians fear that inexperienced men are being picked up off the street for dangerous missions on the frontlines. On June 23, the Ukrainian news outlet Babel.ua published a lengthy investigation into an assault regiment that had expanded under Syrskyi’s tenure, known as Skelia. The outlet reported that the unit had mobilized marginalized men, including those with addiction problems, and there had been at least 26 noncombat deaths and multiple cases of abuses and torture at the unit’s training centers. (Authorities later announced an investigation into the allegations; Syrskyi said that he supported it.)

Subscribe now

As protests grew, a video surfaced online of two soldiers in the contested town of Kostiantynivka supporting Syrskyi with Ukraine’s flag. The news outlet Ukrainska Pravda and a prominent military volunteer and Fedorov supporter, Serhii Sternenko, reported that brigades were ordered to record videos in support — Sternenko added that those who refused were punished. Later on the same day, Russia’s ministry of defense posted a video with the same men holding the Russian flag, proclaiming support for Russia’s generals. Skelia confirmed that the men were captured, but did not say what everyone was thinking: whether the first video in support of Syrskyi was connected to their capture by the Russians.

It is not yet clear whether Syrskyi’s firing will be enough for the protesters. The organizer of the protests, Dmytro Koziatynskyi, a veteran and former combat medic, has demanded both Syrskyi’s ouster and Fedorov’s reinstatement. Koziatynskyi paused protests until July 24 to give time to Zelenskyy to meet the demands. Zelenskyy is betting that one scalp will be enough; he has made acting Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) chief Yevhen Khmara acting defense minister, and supports him being confirmed by parliament for the full job. Fedorov, meanwhile, praised Syrskyi’s firing, but has not accepted Zelenskyy’s offer to be a special adviser for advanced military technologies. He has made clear that he will only return to his old job, because he believes that only from that post that he will have the authority to finish implementing his reforms. Zelenskyy and Fedorov remain at loggerheads.

I left Kyiv on July 20 after reporting and visiting friends, but I wanted to convey to paying readers what being on the ground for one of the largest barrages of ballistic missiles launched at Kyiv since the full-scale war began in 2022 was like, early on the morning of July 19.

Read more

Update: Late on the evening of July 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media that he had spoken with former Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, saying that decisions will be “worked out.” For the first time since Fedorov’s firing, he seemed to be looking for a way out of the crisis, amid growing protests.

“Don’t change horses in midstream” is a 19th-century idiom warning against making abrupt shifts in the middle of a difficult campaign. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ousting of popular Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov after six months in office has shown exactly what happens when you do, in fact, change horses in midstream.

Consider how chaotic the change has been to replace a defense minister for a country fighting a war for its very existence. On July 16, Fedorov automatically lost his post as parliament voted in Zelenskyy’s new cabinet which did not include him. However, while parliament confirmed other posts, Zelenskyy didn’t formally nominate a new defense minister as protests raged on July 17. While Zelenskyy had been expected to choose the current Interior Minister as the new Defense Minister, he instead backed a candidate with experience in the long-range strikes against Russia that Fedorov had championed: acting Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) chief Yevhen Khmara. However, Zelenskyy cannot legally appoint an acting defense minister, while the Cabinet of Ministers can, and it did so on July 18. Parliament, which must vote on Khamara’s appointment, is scheduled only to return in mid-August.

Rest assured, there will not be a test on these details. But they have compounded the anger that many Ukrainians and Western officials feel as they see the ouster as unnecessary, counterproductive, and even threatening to Ukraine’s progress against Russia. When I asked opposition lawmaker Inna Sovsun at the protests on July 17 what needed to happen after Fedorov’s dismissal, she corrected me: “Well, it’s easier to answer the question of what needn’t have happened.”

Behind the paywall, I will answer three questions:

1. What was Fedorov’s theory of victory?

2. How might his ouster impact joint military initiatives with the West, including air defense?

3. What has been the reaction to his ouster among military officials?

I also share photos from the protests, like this one I took of a woman who made a cardboard protest sign for her dog:

Subscribe now

Read more

I do not have a paywall today; I’m giving away this post for free because I want it to reach a wide audience. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself, which annually costs just $1.34 per week. Cheap!

Subscribe now

KYIV -- The dismissal of popular reform-minded Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has sent shockwaves through Ukrainian politics and society, leading to impromptu protests in Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine on July 16.

On the evening of July 15, Fedorov announced on Facebook that it had been a “great honor” to serve as Ukraine’s Minister of Defense. The move comes after Fedorov spent just six months in office and clashed with Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. Fedorov, 35, who had not served in the military and was previously Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, advocated for the broader adoption of drones and unmanned systems to bridge dire manpower shortages on the frontline. Syrskyi, 60, a career Soviet military veteran and four-star general, had emphasized the need to recruit more people to serve on the frontlines. At a press conference later on July 16, Fedorov revealed that he had lobbied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fire Syrskyi, viewing him as an obstacle to winning the war, and the president had refused. Zelenskyy later addressed the firing by saying that Fedorov and Syrskyi refused to meet together without him and he had to “make a choice.”

Fedorov had also been the brainchild behind Ukraine’s mid-strike campaign against Russia hitting Moscow’s supply lines, which he dubbed a “logistics lockdown.” Possessing close ties with Silicon Valley executives -- and one could easily mistake him for one with his youthful appearance and casual attire -- he worked with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to shut down Russia’s Starlink terminals. He had also angered traditional defense contractors with moves to make defense procurement more open and transparent, like allowing soldiers to buy their own weapons directly from the website Brave1, dubbed the “Amazon of Weapons.”

The dismissal was met with shock and anger across Ukraine’s civil society. A July 15 social media post by Dmytro Koziatynskyi, a veteran and former combat medic, called for protests the next morning. In Kyiv and other cities including Lviv, Dnipro, and Odessa, the protests began at 9:01 -- one minute after the daily moment of silence for Ukrainians who have lost their lives in Russia’s invasion.

After a ballistic missile strike killed two and injured six in Kyiv the night before, I made my way to the protests in front of the Ivan Franko Theater, not too far from Zelenskyy’s office. There, the crowd chanted “Shame!” “FE-DOR-OV!” and “No personal interests!” The news had only broken a little over 12 hours before, and yet there were at least 1,000 people there during the workday. There were no speeches or really much organization behind the protests and protesters carried improvised cardboard signs, but there was a lot of anger -- and fear -- over Fedorov’s dismissal.

Subscribe now

I caught up with Inna Sovsun, an opposition lawmaker from the party Holos, who said that while she sometimes disagreed with Fedorov’s decisions, his dismissal was “very wrong.” “At this point, there at least has to be a clear communication from the president about what the hell is happening,” she told me. She noted that it was unusual for Ukrainians to protest a minister’s dismissal -- there were no protests when Zelenskyy dismissed Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko on July 12, for example -- but in this case, “the personality and the issue” coincided.

Protesters tended to be younger Ukrainians in their 30s and 40s, and they were anxious and outraged over what the dismissal meant for the trajectory of the war, where Ukraine has been recently gaining momentum by striking Russia’s energy infrastructure. “We’re fighting a stronger country and we need to fight with new technologies,” said Andrei Rusan, 42, who works in the IT sector. “When Fedorov came, we felt hope. After yesterday, I am disappointed.” Maria Vynogradova, 40, who also works in IT, told me that she was partly there for the soldiers who couldn’t be there. “What are we doing? Why are we taking away this person?” she said. “I want to have my country; I don’t want to leave Kyiv; I don’t want to leave Ukraine.”

Among the protesters, the hope was that Zelenskyy would change course, as he did on a controversial anti-corruption law in July 2025 following mass protests in Kyiv and other cities. However, the political crisis was only deepening as the deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force, Pavlo Yelizarov, announced his resignation on July 16, citing Fedorov’s dismissal, saying that it would cause more casualties and destruction from Russian missile and drone attacks. He wrote on Facebook that Fedorov’s dismissal was a “great evil for the country’s defense capability.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Note: I have some photos and videos from this protest that I will send to paid subscribers later; the uploader is currently not working.

Subscribe now

The sports world reflects society at large, and this year’s World Cup has been no exception. As the U.S. secured its first win in a knockout since 2002, the team’s top scorer, striker Folarin Balogun, received a red card, meaning he would be ineligible for the next match. The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. President Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino and asked him to review the call. According to the Journal, Infantino was noncommittal on the first call, but the next time the two spoke, Infantino told Trump that the call had been reversed, using a seldom-used part of the rulebook. On July 5, Trump posted on social media: “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”

While it’s reasonable to disagree with the controversial call, such blatant political interference threatens the integrity of the game. The episode is another example of how international institutions are kowtowing to Trump instead of carrying out their mission, which for FIFA, is to cultivate the game of football.

It’s not only FIFA. NATO is having its annual summit in the Turkish capital of Ankara this week, and the expectations are merely to avoid angering Trump, who will be there. A year and a half since Trump took office for the second time, it’s worth taking stock of the effectiveness of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s strategy of flattering Trump to keep him inside the alliance. No, Trump has not left NATO as he has repeatedly warned. And Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland earlier this year failed after NATO allies closed ranks with Denmark, which controls the territory.

But NATO has failed to convince Trump to take meaningful steps to contain Russia, which is the raison d’être of the alliance. In August, Trump invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Anchorage, Alaska, for a summit, bringing him back from the cold of international isolation that began after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Before and since, he has talked with Putin far more than any Western leader -- most recently on July 4 -- and failed to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the Russo-Ukrainian war in “24 hours.” Putin seems emboldened by Trump’s outreach, as evidenced by statistics showing that Russia’s missile and drone attacks against Ukraine have more than doubled since Trump took office again.

Moreover, as Rutte has upped the flattery -- even referring to the U.S. president as “daddy” -- Trump has wanted more. Initially, Trump claimed that his problem was with NATO countries not spending enough on defense, but now he has demanded members’ loyalty to him. “We don’t need their money — we don’t need anything,” Trump said late last month. “I just want loyalty.”

The rest of this story is for paid subscribers only. A yearly subscription to Public Sphere is only $1.35 per week; please consider upgrading your subscription to help me continue offering analysis and reporting on global affairs.

Subscribe now

Read more

I do not have a paywall today; I’m giving away this post for free because I want it to reach a wide audience. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself, which annually costs just $1.34 per week. Cheap!

Subscribe now

After Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea in March 2014, Russia experienced a wave of national pride. Supporters of the annexation cried “Krymnash!“ which translates to “Crimea is ours!” However, the Russian internet had other ideas. On social media platforms like Twitter, Krymnash became an ironic meme. Internet users used Krymnash to call attention to the fact that the annexation was a patriotic sugarhigh that papered over a poor standard of living for ordinary Russians: for example, a Twitter user might call attention to the fact that the bathrooms didn’t work in a provincial school, but add the hashtag #krymnash -- Crimea is ours!

Twelve years later, Crimea is still controlled by Russia, but severe variants of the kinds of infrastructure problems that bloggers were drawing attention to in mainland Russia have come to the peninsula because of long-range aerial strikes by Ukraine. On June 26, Crimea’s governor declared a state of emergency in the peninsula. Fuel is no longer for sale. Public transit has partially stopped. Blackouts last days. Once a popular summer destination for Russians, yielding at least $60 million in annual tourism revenue, many beaches are empty. Social media users posted pictures of long traffic jams fleeing Crimea for mainland Russia on the Kerch Bridge -- the long-awaited infrastructure project that was completed in 2018.

Crimea is the crown jewel of Putin’s war against Ukraine: a Russian-speaking province that Russian forces took over without a shot and imposed a police state. In 2014, Ukraine’s army was too weak to respond to the Crimean takeover, and instead concentrated its forces in the East, where Putin launched an offensive to retake the Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia used Crimea as a staging ground to quickly take territory in parts of Southern and Eastern Ukraine, establishing a land bridge with its occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk. Since 2022, the Russian military has repurposed civilian hospitals for troops and used the peninsula as a logistics hub to store weapons.

Once a military advantage, Ukraine has turned Crimea into a military liability. Now, Moscow has to deploy scarce resources to try to protect the peninsula. Ukraine’s June 18 large-scale attack on Moscow showed how Kyiv has improved its mid-range drone technology and Russia is running out of air defense systems. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Putin has moved air defenses to protect his residences as well as the Kerch Bridge, which Ukrainian forces have attacked and temporarily disabled before, but have not been able to permanently destroy. Ukraine has been able to thwart Russia’s air defenses to successfully attack power stations, fuel supplies, bridges, and weapons convoys in Crimea.

Russia’s weaknesses extend beyond Crimea. Ukraine is targeting Russian oil refineries hundreds of miles from the front line, leading to fuel restrictions in at least 56 of Russia’s 89 regions. Russia, an oil exporter, has been forced to import gasoline for the first time in years, according to Reuters.

Putin has limited options to respond to the Crimea campaign. He has rejected the idea that he should negotiate with Zelenskyy because of the Crimea strikes, calling them a distraction from Kyiv’s “catastrophic” shortage of troops in the East. There is some truth to this. The Kyiv Independent recently reported from the outskirts of the frontline town of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s “fortress belt” in the Donbas, where Kyiv faces a manpower shortage and Russians are successfully infiltrating the depopulated town. Of course, Russian troops have their own problems on the battlefield -- Russian military bloggers have said that Russians have an average life expectancy of 20 to 35 minutes when they arrive at the front -- but Putin is dug in.

Subscribe now

So far, Ukraine’s recent advances in Crimea and the fuel shortages there do not threaten Putin’s control over Russia. Putin has severely restricted his travel, the number of people who see him is small, and he has a cadre of up to 400,000 soldiers who are personally loyal to him. A Russian veteran, Alexander Lunin, who recently made international headlines for his public campaign for a meeting with Putin about the situation at the front, has been arrested.

Still, Ukraine’s campaign for Crimea and strikes on Russian oil refineries are a new development in the war, and there is no telling where they might lead. Alexander Etkind, a historian of Russia, offered a prediction on Facebook: “The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 triggered the global crisis of trust and security, [which] led to Trump’s presidency in 2016, Brexit in 2020, new invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gaza war in 2023, and Iran war in 2026. The retreat from Crimea will start the unwinding of the crisis.”

If you found this post useful, you can use the buttons below to share it!

Share

Share Public Sphere

But this fight was really more than over a photo. The two leaders tangled over U.S. bases in Italy, which have been controversial since the Iran war. Trump accused her of causing “a great logistical inconvenience” by barring the U.S. from using Italian air facilities for American military operations in Iran. But Meloni said the use of Italian bases “is governed by agreements that we have always respected, and that cannot be violated as long as I am prime minister.” More broadly, this fight shows how Trump’s popularity has tanked in Europe since the war, and even Meloni, who is ideologically close to him in the global far-right movement, has distanced herself.

I discussed the feud with Brussels-based journalist Dave Keating, who writes the Gulf Stream Blues newsletter. He wrote about the feud on his Substack. Watch the video above or listen to it as a podcast.

Unlike YouTube, this video doesn’t have ads, so I rely on paid subscribers to help keep it free. An annual paid subscription to Public Sphere is about $1.34 per week, and it really helps me keep going. If you can swing it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Luke Johnson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

A June 22 X post featuring a claim that Iranian officials later denied.

Since Donald Trump became U.S. president for a second time in 2025, two regimes have been immune from his threats: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. Now, you can add a third: the theocracy in Iran. Earlier this year, the regime in Tehran -- weakened by airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel last June -- withstood a 37-day bombing campaign and closed the Strait of Hormuz, a global oil choke point. Last week, Trump signed a lopsided peace agreement extending an April cease-fire, reopening the strait, giving Iran significant sanctions relief, and acknowledging Tehran’s colonial influence over Lebanon, while making Iran’s nuclear program the subject of future negotiations.

Now, those negotiations have commenced and Iran has proceeded to humiliate the U.S. by denying the claims made by Trump and Vice President JD Vance on what has been agreed to.

Trump claimed in a June 23 Truth Social post that Iran had “fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!)” After talking with Iranian officials on June 22 in Switzerland, Vance claimed that inspections would begin as soon as that very day.

Share

However, Iranian officials denied this and said there were no plans to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back into the three most crucial sites of Iran’s nuclear program that the U.S. and Israel bombed last year. Allowing inspections isn’t a concession: it is required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Tehran signed in 1970. (Update: IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said on June 24 that inspections are “going to happen” under the interim deal; however, he declined to provide a timeline.) Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has already granted Iran sanctions relief to sell its oil in U.S. dollars for the first time in decades, providing Tehran’s flailing economy with a vital injection of hard currency.

The rest of this story is for paid subscribers only. Unlike global oil prices, my subscription rates have not gone up AT ALL. A yearly subscription to Public Sphere is only $1.35 per week; please consider upgrading your subscription to help me continue offering analysis and reporting on global affairs.

Subscribe now

Read more

Frida Ghitis, the author of the Substack newsletter Insight and an on-air CNN contributor, sees a parallel to the 2020 election: Trump will try to claim victory where he has plainly lost. Watch our conversation above, which touches on the details of the agreement, the role of Israel and Lebanon, and how it might affect the November midterms. We also discussed Ukraine’s drone barrage against Moscow earlier this week, which was the largest attack by Kyiv in the full-scale war as it seeks to deprive Russia of oil revenue and bring the war to Russia’s doorstep.

Unlike YouTube, this video doesn’t have ads, so I rely on paid subscribers to help keep it free. An annual paid subscription to Public Sphere is about $1.34 per week, and it really helps me keep going. If you can swing it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Read more

On March 6, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Some 15 weeks later, the United States and Iran are nearing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to extend the April 7 ceasefire that falls well short of this goal, and would leave Tehran’s regime in a stronger position than when the U.S. and Israel began joint military operations on February 28.

To borrow Trump’s oft-used diplomatic phrase, Iran has the cards in this negotiation. After Israeli airstrikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, the remaining Iranian leadership withstood a 37-day bombing campaign, and thus is in no mood to compromise. Meanwhile, Trump has no viable military options left that don’t involve putting U.S. troops on the ground, which he does not want to do.

The details of the peace agreement remain murky. However, according to Iranian and U.S. officials, the MOU includes a 60-day ceasefire including Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and lifting of U.S. and Iranian blockades, and a pledge to continue negotiating Iran’s nuclear program. Iran also says that the U.S. will agree to waive oil sanctions during the negotiation period, and that some $25 billion in frozen assets will be released. Trump denies the latter; however, it’s hard to see Tehran agreeing to a deal without their release. The emerging agreement also contains none of the initial U.S. and Israeli goals of containing Iran’s ballistic missile program and reducing Iranian support for its regional proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

The MOU would allow Trump to claim that the war is over, but not much else. Looking at each of the points of the emerging MOU and the status quo before the war, Iran comes out ahead.

Beyond the paywall, I will address three questions:

1. Will Iran be economically stronger even if it does not charge tolls or service fees for the Strait of Hormuz?

2. Will the U.S. have less leverage against Iran’s nuclear program than under the 2015 Obama nuclear deal?

3. Could Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scuttle an agreement between the U.S. and Iran?

   Subscribe now

Read more

In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that the United States was the “indispensable nation.” Not only could the U.S. defend itself with its formidable military power, Albright said, but with a web of alliances and a capable diplomatic corps, the U.S. could maintain global peace and security. Diplomacy, military power, and alliances were all more powerful in concert, Albright believed: in other words, the threat of military force was stronger because of alliances, and diplomacy was more stronger because it carried the threat of military force.

In his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump has sidelined the diplomatic corps and torn up alliances, while its military power has failed to dislodge a weakened regime in Tehran. Diplomats with lifelong language and regional expertise have been replaced by Trump’s envoys, former real estate developer and Trump golf partner Steve WItkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who maintains a web of private business interests. The U.S. still has the world’s largest military, but as the Iran war has shown, the Trump Administration has confused means with ends: showing technological prowess in the Iran war has not made up for the lack of strategic goals in starting the conflict. Trump has berated traditional U.S. allies in Europe for not helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while also maintaining that he doesn’t need their help. European and Asian allies are now de-risking from the U.S. by pursuing strategic autonomy and greater cooperation among themselves.

These trends have led the U.S. to become, well, dispensable. This dispensability is evident in the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, where U.S. allies have ignored Trump’s demands. Over the weekend, Iran launched missiles at Israel for the first time in two months, threatening the cease-fire that Trump announced in April. Iran said it was retaliating against Israeli attacks against the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which has rejected the cease-fire; Israel has said its war in Lebanon is not part of the cease-fire. According to Axios, Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate against Iran; Trump told the Financial Times, “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He (Netanyahu) doesn’t call the shots.” However, the possibility of Iran having a deterrent against Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon was intolerable, so Netanyahu promptly retaliated with airstrikes. On June 8, Trump called on both sides to cut it out: “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting,’” he posted on Truth Social. Both sides seemed to be moving towards de-escalation on June 8, but only after Netanyahu rejected Trump’s first entreaty, and the structural problem remains: if Israel attacks Hezbollah in Lebanon again, then Iran will retaliate against Israel.

The U.S. has also become mostly dispensable in Ukraine, where Trump promised during his campaign to end Russia’s war in “24 hours.”

The rest of this story is for paid subscribers only. Unlike global oil prices, my subscription rates have not gone up AT ALL. A yearly subscription to Public Sphere is only $1.35 per week; please consider upgrading your subscription to help me continue offering analysis and reporting on global affairs.

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering the intersection of politics and entertainment. She is the author of a new book: Screen People, How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency. Screens, Garber, writes, have made turned many Americans into passive consumers of politics, while functioning democracies require active participation. While there was some optimism in the early 2010s about how technology could be harnessed for political change, this enthusiasm has given way to cynicism with the rise of doomscrolling. This pessimism accelerated with the political rise of Donald Trump, who first became known to many Americans as the star of the NBC reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” and has only gotten more acute as more and more parts of modern life have become mediated by screens. However, Garber thinks that screens are here to stay, and that they can bring about political engagement.

Garber and I spoke earlier this week. (The irony that our conversation was done through screens is not lost on me :) ) You can watch the video above or download it as a podcast.

Leave a comment

Share

Share Public Sphere

On May 23, U.S. President Donald Trump posted on social media that a peace deal with Iran was “largely negotiated” and that a memorandum of understanding would be announced “shortly.” Five days later, no agreement has been announced and the U.S. and Iran have traded tit-for-tat strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating that Tehran can still threaten the vital waterway, where about 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies once flowed through. After Republican senators pushed back on a deal that might leave Iran in control of the strait, Trump backpedaled and said, “if I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” referring to the 2015 agreement made by his predecessor, which he withdrew from in 2018.

Trump keeps favorably comparing the Iran war to the Vietnam War, saying that the former is short by comparison. (However, Trump initially said that the Iran war would last between four to six weeks, and it has lasted longer than two months.) The comparison is apt -- but not in a way that is favorable to Trump. The U.S. eventually stopped fighting in Vietnam because it had no strategy for winning and even with a superior military, it couldn’t stay indefinitely; all the communist North Vietnamese regime had to do to win was not to lose. Similarly, even the mighty U.S. has limited military resources; all Tehran has to do is not lose.

Trump’s Saturday declaration that an agreement was “largely negotiated” seemed to echo National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s infamous comment a week before the November 1972 presidential election that peace in Vietnam was “at hand.” U.S. President Richard Nixon then won in a landslide, but it took another three months -- and brutal bombings that changed nothing on the ground -- before the administration hammered out a deal where the U.S. withdrew its forces, leaving the allied South Vietnamese government defenseless to resist an invasion by the North, which happened some two years later, handing the U.S. a defeat.

Subscribe now

Trump’s zigzagging over ending Operation Epic Fury which he started on February 28 with Israel illustrates an unavoidable problem that also echoes Vietnam: Trump can’t exit the war in a better place than he started it.

Read more

It has become conventional wisdom that Americans voters do not care about the self-dealing that U.S. President Donald Trump has undertaken in his second term. Cryptocurrency dealings, stock trades in companies influenced by his policies, and the emergence of a pay-to-play pardon system have failed to gain significant public attention. Since as Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg put it, “every day is a Watergate,” many of these scandals are treated as if they are old news. Moreover, these dealings are done largely openly and Trump thinks there is nothing wrong with them. Since at least the uncovering of the Watergate conspiracy by the Washington Post, American journalism has tended to value secret information, so self-dealing done without concealment tends to get less notice.

However, the Trump Administration’s May 18 announcement of a $1.8 billion (or $1.776 billion, to use the administration’s symbolic value) fund of taxpayer money to compensate people who claim they were wronged by the Biden Administration and Democrats, coupled with a provision “forever” banning audits of Trump and his family, is in a different league than past scandals. The Trump Administration is now proposing to take taxpayer money and give it to its allies. Behind the paywall, I will outline three reasons why I think that this instance of self-dealing may be unlike past ones:

1. It is simple

2. Material conditions are worsening

3. Trump has expressed indifference to worsening material conditions

   Subscribe now

Read more

During the scaled-back Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, Russian leader Vladimir Putin suggested that the war in Ukraine may be “coming to an end.” The remark indicated to some Western commentators that Putin might be looking for a way out. Simon Saradzhyan, who leads the Russia Matters project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said on X it was the “strongest signal he has sent so far that he wants to end the war soon.” Other reporters and analysts on X indicated that they thought it was a sign that Putin wanted to end the conflict, maybe even with a cease-fire beyond the three-day one that he had asked Trump for to protect the parade, which had no military hardware for the first time in 20 years.

However, a closer reading of the transcript shows that this was not a peace signal, and Putin’s demands for a victory remain unchanged. Elsewhere in the exchanges with Kremlin-friendly journalists, he said that the reason the parade was scaled back was to focus on the “decisive defeat of the enemy in the context of the Special Military Operation.” His comment about the war in Ukraine possibly “coming to an end” was in a long tract about how, in his view, “globalist elites” had broken promises not to expand NATO into former Eastern bloc states after the Soviet Union collapsed. This was another formulation of Putin’s desire that the war end only with a settlement of its “root causes:” the byzantine list of demands that would reverse the Soviet Union’s loss of its empire in Eastern Europe after the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991.

Subscribe now

On May 9, Putin also suggested that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could serve as a European representative to end the war and renegotiate the continent’s security architecture. This idea is ludicrous: Schroeder is a pariah for his pro-Russian sympathies. After being defeated in 2005, Schroeder was paid nearly $1 million a year by Russian energy companies and has never fully condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (He stepped down from his advisory role a few months after the full-scale invasion.) Unsurprisingly, the EU quickly rejected this idea.

In any event, after the three-day U.S.-brokered cease-fire ended, Russia launched its largest drone and missile barrage ever at Ukraine lasting two days, killing at least 27 people. That alone should cause doubt to anyone that Putin wants the war to end. But the interpretations point to a broader pitfall that many Western commentators face when trying to analyze Putin: they think that he is getting the same information as they are. He is not.

For example, Russia wants full control of the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv has its strongest defensive fortifications. According to a recent article in the New York Times, this conquest would take Russia over 30 years at its current rate of advance. However, according to the Financial Times, Russian military leaders promised Putin that they could take Donbas by this fall. Of course, the latter timeline is absurd, but it is what Putin is being told, and it’s highly doubtful that anyone brought the Times article to his desk.

Read more

It’s official: Ukraine will not attack Red Square on May 9, as Russia celebrates the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. On May 8, Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelenskyy issued a decree “allowing” a parade to take place, and publishing the coordinates in central Moscow that won’t be targeted.

The cease-fire, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump, lasts until May 11. It came after Russian leader Vladimir Putin called Trump on April 29, who asked for a cessation of hostilities for the holiday, which has become the cornerstone of Russia’s state religion valorizing World War II. Trump then had to bring Zelenskyy on board, who acceded, getting a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange. (Ukraine refused to rule out attacking other targets, but said it would observe the cease-fire on a reciprocal basis, only responding in kind to Russian attacks.)

It’s worth stepping back to note how much of a humiliation this is for Putin. The Russian leader had to ask Trump, leader of what the Soviets called the Glavnii vrag, a.k.a. the “main enemy” of the U.S., to protect the parade that legitimizes his autocratic regime.

Subscribe now

Read more

I do not have a paywall today; I’m giving away this post for free because I want it to reach the maximum number of people! You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself, which annually costs just $1.34 per week. Cheap!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If you found this post useful, you can use the buttons below to share it!!

Share

Share Public Sphere

On April 29, Russian leader Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump with an ask: he wanted the U.S. president to broker a cease-fire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for May 8-9, when Russia would celebrate the anniversary of the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II. The annual commemoration known as Victory Day has grown in importance under Putin’s quarter-century of rule, legitimizing an autocratic regime that promises a return to a glorious past, but offers no future. In the Kremlin, fears have grown that Kyiv could disrupt the May 9 parade with a drone attack.

Citing “Ukrainian terrorist activity” and “the current operational situation,” for the first time in two decades, there will be no military hardware rolling across Red Square to cheering crowds. Cadets from military institutions will also not take part in the parade. While the government has already cut off mobile access to Western apps like WhatsApp and Google Maps, on May 5, authorities entirely shut off mobile internet in Moscow and St. Petersburg. On May 4, CNN reported that a European intelligence dossier states that Putin fears assassination attempts by members of the Russian elite, and thus has sharply restricted his movements and those for staff who work closely with him, like bodyguards and cooks.

Without a doubt, Putin is paranoid. But, as Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. He has reason to fear. His approval ratings have dropped to 71 percent, the lowest since he began the full-scale invasion in 2022. As the war in Ukraine drags on with Russia having no strategy for victory, Putin is facing criticism both from those who want him to escalate in Ukraine and Russians who want him to stop. Pro-war commentators are increasingly vocal about Putin’s failures on the battlefield and the unexpectedly viral Instagram criticism by beauty influencer Victoria Bonya of wartime economic problems and internet restrictions illustrates that many Russians want the conflict to end. Putin has chosen neither to escalate or conciliate, instead muddling through.

Putin has conflated the full-scale invasion with World War II, depicting it as a fight to “denazify” Ukraine, despite the fact that Zelenskyy is Jewish. While this propaganda might have convinced some young men to enlist in a great patriotic struggle like their grandparents did, the comparison is just awkward now. The full-scale invasion has lasted over 1,500 days, longer than the Soviet Union’s 1,418 day war with Nazi Germany. While the Red Army reached Berlin in May 1945, according to the Institute for the Study of War, in 2026, Moscow’s advances slowed to an average of just 2.9 square kilometers per day. (The think-tank added that part of the decline could be due to changing Russian tactics.) In April, Russia suffered a net loss of territory for the first time since August 2024, when Ukraine invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast. Ukraine has launched an increasingly daring series of long-range drone attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure; while these attacks have failed to significantly dent oil revenues, the plumes of black smoke from billowing from burning refineries have brought the war home -- or at least to social media feeds -- for many Russians.

Share

The Victory Day celebration for 2025 was the first one to face restrictions due to fears of a Ukrainian attack. Putin announced a cease-fire, although none was reached. Disruptions to mobile internet were reported. However, it passed with no major incidents, and a number of foreign leaders attended, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

It is quite possible that this year’s parade will also pass with no major incidents. However, Putin’s call for a cease-fire for his parade is even more cynical this time around, as on the night of May 5, Russia launched a mass attack on Ukrainian civilians, killing at least 27. Zelenskyy had responded to Putin’s call -- which he said was never officially conveyed -- by proposing a cease-fire beginning at midnight on May 6; the Russian attack was hours before Kyiv’s proposed truce. According to The Insider, just four foreign leaders have confirmed to attend the parade, down from over 20 last year. Putin has turned Victory Day into the centerpiece of a state religion that uses World War II to justify present-day aggressive wars; however, as Putin muddles through in Ukraine, he has much to fear.

Leave a comment

Nobody should want the Strait of Hormuz to stay closed. The blockades by Iran and the U.S. of the vital waterway have caused global oil prices to rise to their highest levels since just after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and significant amounts of liquified natural gas and fertilizer flowed through the strait before the U.S. and Israel began the war on February 28; now, traffic is down to a trickle. The U.N. estimates that an additional 32.5 million people could be plunged into poverty as a result of energy and food price shocks; according to one of the biggest fertilizer producers, shortages could result in up to 10 billion fewer meals produced per week; and average U.S. gas prices have risen 44% since the war to $4.30/gallon, according to AAA. The International Monetary Fund has warned of a global recession if energy price shocks are not contained by the middle of the year.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem requires no negotiations and no deal: both sides could just drop their blockades. How this would happen seems clear: nine days after the April 8 cease-fire, Iran unilaterally announced that the strait was open. Oil futures dropped from triple digits to around $90/barrel. However, U.S. President Donald Trump said that Washington’s blockade would “remain in full force” until the two sides reached a peace deal. Tehran then reimposed its blockade. This would be a strategic defeat for Trump, as Iran will have proved that it can control the strait: however, the U.S. doesn’t have viable military options to reopen it, and to use Trump’s phrase, has no “cards.”

On May 1, Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal to discuss conditions for opening the Strait of Hormuz at the same time as the U.S. would guarantee to unwind its blockade of Iranian ports. The plan then called for discussing Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief -- the same formula that produced the nuclear deal under President Barack Obama. While it’s reasonable to be skeptical of Iran’s cunning negotiation tactics, it seems sensible to discuss the strait first and the nuclear issue second.

Trump’s refusal is grounded in the belief that Tehran will unconditionally surrender -- which he demanded in a March 6 all-caps social media post -- after the U.S. blockade inflicts enough pain on Iran. On April 29, Trump said the war would end after his “genius” blockade inflicted enough economic pain on Iran that it would “cry uncle.” Three days before, he told Fox News that Iran’s oil wells would “explode” in “three days” because Iran couldn’t export its oil. April 29 came and went and there were no reports of explosions.

Subscribe now

Read more

“I would have won Vietnam very quickly if I were president,” said U.S. President Donald Trump, calling into CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on April 22. The boast -- made by a man who dodged the draft for the conflict which killed some 58,000 Americans -- was revealing, in that it displayed Trump’s bottomless faith in his own talent and was a (likely unintentional) unintentional comparison to the joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran. However, as Operation Epic Fury passes the two-month mark, Trump has lost the Iran war strategically and militarily, and can only end the conflict by swallowing a dose of humility -- not a character trait he is known for.

Subscribe now

The war began on February 28 with vague strategic goals; none of them have been accomplished. There has been no resolution on Iran’s nuclear program. At the outset, Trump called on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government after the bombing campaign stopped. However, after the April 8 cease-fire, the theocratic regime in Tehran has remained firmly in charge after its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the war. Trump has claimed that Iran’s new leadership is “much more reasonable.” However, according to reporting from the New York Times, hard-line generals from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have taken charge of decision-making, as Khamenei’s successor, his son, Mojtaba, is in hiding, fearing being killed by the U.S. or Israel. In short, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Share

Read more