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A war between the U.S. and Iran is the last thing that Europe needed. Tehran’s throttling of the Strait of Hormuz has caused global energy prices to soar, threatening Europe’s stagnant economies with inflation and fuel rationing. The war that U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started on February 28 also distracts Washington from Europe’s primary strategic concern, Ukraine, and makes valuable Patriot missile interceptors more scarce. Trump has been badgering NATO countries to get involved to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but so far, the response has been a resounding no. As much as Europeans are loath to help Trump, they also have a strategic interest in keeping the strait open, where about 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through.

I discussed this summit with Dave Keating, who writes the Gulf Stream Blues newsletter. He is a Brussels-based journalist who focuses on European politics, and is also the author of a new book about Europe’s reliance on the U:S., The Owned Continent.

You can watch the conversation above or download it as a podcast.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it.

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On the evening of March 21, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran: he would bomb its power plants if Tehran didn’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He wrote on social media, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Tehran warned that it would respond in kind. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesman, said that if Trump followed through, Tehran would attack U.S. and Israeli energy infrastructure, as well as desalination plants operated by U.S. allies in the Gulf. Tehran also vowed to keep the strait closed until Iranian power plants were rebuilt.

So far, this threat has not had the intended effect. Iran won’t reopen the strait because that is its leverage over the United States: by shooting cheap drones at oil tankers, Tehran can cause global oil prices to spike, which puts pressure on Trump to end the war ahead of midterm elections. Iran’s retaliation would likely cause a humanitarian crisis: lacking significant rainfall and permanent rivers, desalination accounts for more than 90 percent of the drinking water in several Gulf states.

UPDATE: On March 23, Trump backed down. He posted on social media that he had told the Pentagon to delay possible energy strikes for five days, “SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS” between the U.S. and Iran, which he said have been going on for the past two days. Iran denied that the two sides had spoken.

Destroying Iran’s energy infrastructure as Trump has vowed would likely constitute a war crime. According to the Geneva Conventions, attacking civilian objects like power plants “wantonly” and “unlawfully” is prohibited. Under customary international law, launching an attack expected to cause damage to civilian objects “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.” In other words, while striking a power plant used by a weapons factory and some civilians would be permissible, Trump’s threat of “STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST” doesn’t sound lawful.

Trump’s threat also echoed Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s strategy of targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

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Well, Zelenskyy may have drawn an ace.

The war in Iran has created a diplomatic and economic opportunity for Ukraine and its president. As swarms of low-cost Iranian drones have caused havoc across the Gulf, hitting oil infrastructure and U.S. bases, Ukraine’s low-cost drone defense technology is suddenly in high demand.

Zelenskyy told the British Parliament on March 17 that 201 Ukrainian anti-drone experts are in the Middle East and another 34 “are ready to deploy.”

What can Middle Eastern countries learn from these experts? And what can Zelenskyy gain for Ukraine by helping the Middle East?

To help answer these questions, I spoke with Frida Ghitis, a global affairs analyst and opinion writer. She writes the Substack newsletter Insight. Frida is also senior columnist for World Politics Review. She is an on-air CNN contributor, who worked for the network as a producer and correspondent in more than 60 countries. During her 18 years at CNN she worked in the major events of the times, including wars, revolutions, and presidential summits, with multiple stints in Moscow, Havana, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, and dozens of places in between. Watch or listen to our conversation above.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it.

Unlike YouTube, this video doesn’t have ads, so I rely on paid subscribers to help keep it free.

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It’s hard to overstate just how much of a reversal of fortune Russia has had since U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched military strikes against Iran on February 28. I last wrote about how much Vladimir Putin has gained from this conflict on March 9, and in the past few days, he has gained even more.

Before February 28, Russia’s economy was in serious trouble due to falling oil and gas prices, rising budget deficits, and needing to keep the war machine against Ukraine funded. Economist Alexandra Prokopenko compared the situation to what mountaineers call the “death zone” -- the altitude above 8,000 meters wherein the human body consumes its own muscles for energy to survive. In other words, the war has had the effect of cannibalizing the wider economy.

In the first two months of 2026, Russia’s energy revenues fell by nearly half and overall revenues fell by 11%, leading to a projected GDP deficit of 1.6% for 2026. (While its deficit is lower than Western countries, Russia is cut off from Western capital markets by sanctions, so it cannot easily borrow.) To alleviate the fiscal crisis, Reuters reported that the Russian government is considering a 10% across-the-board spending cut to “non-sensitive” programs. However, that cut is now on hold -- depending on what happens with global oil prices.

According to an analysis published on March 12 by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Russia has made an additional 6 billion euros in the two weeks of fighting between the U.S. and Iran. Russia’s 2026 budget deficit is about 38 billion euros, so if oil prices stay high, the deficit could be wiped out. The analysis found that the additional oil revenue could also purchase 17,000 Shahed drones -- which are launched at Ukraine on a near-nightly basis -- every 24 hours at a cost of $35,000 each.

One of Putin’s long-term strategic goals in the war in Ukraine has been to weaken Western sanctions by dividing the U.S. and Europe, which have sought to maintain a united front against Moscow. Trump obliged.

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After U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began military operations against Iran on February 28, officials and journalists predicted that Russia would suffer as a result. In a March 4 interview with Newsmax, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said, “Now that Iran is facing this full onslaught of Israel and the U.S., [that] will also degrade their capacity to export their chaos even to Russia and, therefore, to Ukraine.” On March 6, the New York Times published an article arguing that while Russian leader Vladimir Putin would reap a windfall from a rise in global oil prices, “Putin is also grappling with the arrival of a new world of unbridled American power under President Trump, which is checking Russia’s global influence and ripping up Moscow’s playbook for partnerships abroad,” including Iran.

However, Russia isn’t very reliant on Iran for drone production, as it can produce Iran’s Shahed drone domestically, which it calls the Geran. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that Russia can produce 500 Geran drones per day. While it’s true that Iran -- like Venezuela -- is a partner of Russia, Russia doesn’t have alliances in the sense that the U.S. has built (and now are on the brink) with European and Asian countries. Moscow has long viewed Middle Eastern and Latin American partners as fair-weather friends, and that existed before Trump. For example, while Russia could whisk Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to Moscow for a comfy exile during Joe Biden’s presidency in December 2024, it didn’t spend any military or political capital to save his regime from falling to Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.

Here are three reasons why the war is good for Russia:

The Iran War Creates Leverage Against the U.S. The revelation, first reported by the Washington Post, that Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces in the Middle East, has created a new pressure point that Putin can use against the U.S. Trump has refused to condemn Russia for providing Iran this intelligence.

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Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker covering wars, revolutions, and democracy. He is the author of a new book, Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution. Based on seven years of research and over 2,000 interviews, the book follows six Syrians and their experiences in the city of Manbij during the Syrian revolution. Gopal also wrote a book about the Taliban in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living, and has reported throughout the Middle East and conflict zones for publications including The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. Gopal and I spoke last week. Our conversation follows, condensed and slightly edited for clarity.

Luke Johnson: Can you talk about the city of Manbij and how you came across it?

Anand Gopal: I had been reporting on various conflicts including Iraq and Afghanistan for several years, and in 2011, I was covering the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. I was interviewing people who had suffered from airstrikes committed by the Syrian regime, kidnappings, and the proliferation of militias -- stories of destruction and devastation. In the midst of this, I heard about a city named Manbij, which is in northern Syria and has a population of about 200,000 people. They had managed to overthrow the dictatorship in their city and tried to build a democracy from scratch. I was very intrigued to see how that would look, especially in the context of one of the world’s deadliest civil wars.

LJ: Before the Assad regime fell in 2024, journalists were routinely taken hostage and killed in Syria. Can you explain how you have been able to travel to the country and do your reporting?

AG: The first time I went, I snuck into the country under a fence between Turkey and Syria in the middle of the night, as that was the only way to get in. At that point, the Assad regime was controlling most of the country, and there were just a few hamlets that were controlled by protesters. We met some protesters at the border, and they smuggled us in. Eventually, the protesters were continually shot at by the regime, and they militarized. Armed factions began to appear, and these factions seized a few border crossings between Turkey and Syria. Then, one was able to go through these border crossings. Over time, it became more and more difficult to get into the country, in part because the Assad regime reclaimed large parts of territory. In reporting on this book, I had to go through Iraq, and then make a 15-hour drive across the Iraqi border, through Syria, to get to Manbij.

LJ: So when you got to Manbij, what did you find?

AG: I first arrived in 2016 after the democratic experiment had finished, but I tried to track down people who had been involved in it. A team of researchers and I did over 2,000 interviews with people from the city in the 18-month period beginning in July 2012 when they tried to build a democracy.

LJ: How did this window emerge for a democracy?

AG: During the Arab Spring between 2011-2012, there were protests around the country, and the Assad regime was trying to suppress them everywhere. The government forces were shooting at protesters. Manbij was one of the cities that had a protest movement, and the protesters were shot at, but the regime was simply unable to suppress all of these uprisings simultaneously. Assad’s forces were forced to withdraw from the city. Almost overnight, there was no government: the mayor’s office was empty and Assad’s forces had taken the money from the bank. The protesters formed what they called a Revolutionary Council to take power in the city and to begin to think about how to run the city.

LJ: Myself and I think most of the people reading this interview have never been to Syria, yet they’re concerned about the state of democracy in Europe and the United States. Are there any lessons we can learn from this democratic experiment?

AG: Absolutely. The reason I was drawn to this story is because in a way, it tells us less about Syria, and more about democracy and authoritarianism. In the 18 months that the city was run by this Revolutionary Council, there were two ideas of freedom. There were believers in freedom, which for them, meant freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and also freedom of markets. However, there began to be an affordability crisis. The cost of food started to rise. Rents were rising because the population was increasing from displaced people from outside the city. There began to be clamoring from working-class people demanding price controls, rent control, and more progressive taxation.

There began to be a divide in the city between these two different conceptions of freedom: the freedom to be left alone, which was being put forward by the leadership, and another kind of freedom, which was the freedom to be given the things you need to live your best kind of life.

Into that divide, a far-right group, ISIS (the Islamic State), inserted itself and began to wage what was essentially a populist campaign, saying that the leadership of the revolution were out-of-touch elites that didn’t care about the needs of ordinary people. They began to promise to working-class people that they can deliver them from their anxieties, and they connected their vision to an extreme version of Islam. They used a lot of distortion; they lied; they were duplicitous. But in everything they did, there was a kernel of truth in their messaging, which was that ordinary people were suffering from unbridled free-market policies. The elites in the city refused to take this seriously until it was too late.

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LJ: And how was ISIS ousted?

AG: In 2016, the U.S. supported a group of Kurdish-majority fighters called the Syrian Democratic Forces, who invaded the city, destroyed half of the city, killed lots of people, and ultimately ousted ISIS.

LJ: You interviewed a lot of people. Can you talk about somebody who you got to know very well, Abel Os?

AG: Abel Os was a shopkeeper who was also very adept at Karate--that was his sport. Growing up from a very poor family in Manbij, he had grown up with the promise that many Syrians grew up with, which is that if you work hard and play by the rules, that your children will have a better life than you have. For a couple of generations in Syria, that was actually true, even under the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad. The promise of Syria -- and across the entire Middle East -- was that the regime will give you basic economic security. In exchange for that, you have to surrender all political rights.

For Abel Os’ father, that meant moving from very poor to being lower-middle class. However, by the time Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, the state-supported economic policy was scrapped for a free-market approach. As a result, the cost-of-living started to rise, and Syrians’ ability to imagine a better life for their children compared to themselves vanished.

Abel Os is an example of this. He became a roadside vendor and then opened up a little shop in the city, and he was trying to make ends meet. He ended up having to take out lots of loans. He got himself in debt with loan sharks, and ultimately, he found himself bereft of the shop and he was forced to work as a migrant worker in Lebanon. When the Arab Spring started in 2011, he was at the front lines of the protests, because he didn’t see a future for his or his children’s life under Assad. He then became a leading revolutionary figure in the city during the 18 months.

LJ: How did you get to know him?

AG: I first met him when I started researching the book in 2016, and I got to know him very well over the next several years. We would meet about every two months, and he told me his life story. After becoming the leader in the democratic period, ISIS took over the city, and he was imprisoned by ISIS and suffered greatly in prison. I met him shortly after he was released from prison and ISIS had collapsed, and so he still had those memories fresh with him.

LJ: You didn’t get to meet everyone. There’s a character in your book, Oday, who goes missing, but you were able to talk to his family members and friends. Can you tell the story of what happened?

AG: Oday threw himself into the protests and became one of the leaders of the protest movement. He was arrested by the Syrian regime and brutally tortured through the course of the 18-month democratic experiment, and he was one of the activists who tried to hold the Revolutionary Council to the promises that they had set forth about freedom and democracy. When ISIS took over the city in 2014, the democratic experiment was dead. But there were some revolutionaries who still wanted to keep fighting, and Oday is the leader of that group. He led a resistance against ISIS. He organized a general strike, I believe, the only example of mass civil disobedience against ISIS anywhere, and it was successful in that the strike shut down the city. But Oday was arrested after the strike, and imprisoned in 2014. By the time I arrived in 2016 after ISIS had fallen, I talked to Oday’s parents, and he was missing. His parents believed that he was being kept somewhere in the desert.

In looking for him, I realized that there’s a much broader story. In the Syrian War, 600,000 people were killed, and around 100,000 people went missing. Their families are still waiting to hear from them. They still believe their loved ones are out there. And in searching for him, I found that there’s many other people in the same circumstance.

LJ: Can you talk about the role of women in this revolutionary government?

AG: Manbij is a fairly conservative, even tribal city. In the book, I profiled a woman, Mina, who was a housewife, and never thought much about politics--she was vaguely supportive of the Assad regime. But her brother got involved in the protests, and he was arrested and tortured. This switched something in her, and she wanted to take a stand. She led a group of women to start protesting against the regime. Once the regime was overthrown in the city and the democratic period began, she realized that her struggle was on two fronts. On the one hand, it’s against the Assad regime and its remnants, but on the other hand, it’s also against prevailing patriarchal attitudes. She created a group called the Women for Freedom, which is fighting to combat sexism in the city, as well as to further the goals of the revolution and democracy. This is just one example of several women’s groups that appear in the revolution, and all of them are fighting this two front battle, sometimes against their own husbands, brothers, and fathers as well as the regime.

LJ: You write:

International law does not consider the slaughter of Syria a genocide, because people were primarily targeted for their political activity--something we normally understand as a free choice…but putting it this way seems to miss something important about the human condition.

What does it miss?

AG: We tend to think of genocide as the worst possible crime because it targets people based on their ethnicity or religion, which people don’t choose. But there are many other instances in history where people have been slaughtered en masse, for example, the killing of leftists in Indonesia. In international law, that’s usually not considered a genocide. It’s not the crime of all crimes.

Syria is a similar case where up to 600,000 people were killed. But it’s not considered a genocide, because the people who were killed were targeted because for their opposition to the regime. Manbij shows that, one day the government collapses, and the next day, people come out and create all these assemblies, newspapers, and councils. They didn’t do it because they were political theorists, but because people have to cooperate to secure the essentials, like bread, electricity, and water.

In the book, I draw on Aristotle for a definition of what politics is. Politics is the art of collectively making alliances to pursue the goods that are needed for life. In that definition, civil society, unions, media, are needed and humans have no choice but to form them when given the chance, and when these things don’t exist, it’s as if some essential part of our own human nature has been stifled.

LJ: What is life like for the people whom you profiled now?

AG: Abel Os unfortunately passed away before the Assad regime fell. Mina is in exile in Turkey. She has not come back to Syria yet, even though she’s thrilled that Assad is gone, but she lived through the overthrow of the dictator in her own city for a year and a half, and saw all of these grand promises that ultimately didn’t come to fruition. She is waiting and wants to know: what will the economic policy be? Will there be jobs for her kids? However, I also profiled someone named Ibrahim, who was a son of a farmer and then became a rebel fighter. He lives in Manbij, and he has a lot of optimism. He feels like now, for the first time, there’s a future for him and for his family. Regardless, the overthrow of the dictator was a great victory for all of them.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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In announcing military operations against Iran on February 28, U.S. President Donald Trump outlined an explicit goal: regime change. In the eight-minute video posted to social media, Trump urged Iran’s people to “take over your government” after the bombing ended. He went on: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

Since then, he has been far less clear. In telephone interviews with The Atlantic and the New York Times and in a press conference on March 2, Trump did not unequivocally endorse regime change. He declined to tell the Atlantic whether he would continue bombing if a popular uprising began, and told the Times that the operation in Venezuela was a “perfect scenario” for Iran, while later contradicting himself that the people would “have an opportunity” to rise up. What happened in Venezuela was not regime change: while dictator Nicholas Maduro was abducted by U.S. forces to stand trial in New York, the autocratic regime stayed in place and the country’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, took power.

Administration officials have further backed off regime change as being a goal of the operation. U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on March 2 that regime change was “incidental” to the president’s goal of making it clear that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. However, this rationale strains credulity because Trump declared last June after the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Trump’s claims of Iran posing an “imminent threat” to the U.S. also don’t hold water as U.S. intelligence estimated that Iran wouldn’t possess a missile that could reach the U.S. until 2035. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth further muddied the waters by saying in a March 2 press conference: “This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change.”

Try as they might to backpedal, once regime change is called for, it is like the proverbial bell that cannot be unrung.

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On February 28, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a joint military attack with Israel against Iran with the goal of devastating its military, eliminating its nuclear program and overthrowing the regime in Tehran. In an eight-minute video, Trump urged Iran’s people to “take over your government” after the strikes end. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it,” Trump said. “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

Trump’s goal seems to be to use U.S. and Israeli airpower alone -- there was no mention of U.S. ground troops -- to trigger a popular uprising to bring down a regime that has been in power for nearly 50 years and rules over some 92 million people. This seems like a fanciful and dangerous plan that is likeliest to result in a hardline military government.

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There’s no question that Iran’s government has been significantly weakened in recent months by U.S. and Israeli strikes on its nuclear program, economic collapse, and popular unrest opposing the theocratic, brutal, and misogynist regime. Earlier this year, Iran’s people protested en masse against the regime, only to be met by the government killing an estimated tens of thousands of people. Yet, the largest armed force in the country is the regime’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), possessing some 200,000 members and a vast, sophisticated arsenal of weapons.

Trump’s bombing is aimed at degrading their capabilities, yet airpower alone has limits. Trump promised the IRGC “total immunity” if it lays down its weapons. However, since there are no ground troops, there is nobody for them to surrender to, take them as prisoners, and implement the promised immunity. While it’s possible that this is just an attempt to sow confusion among the corps, it looks more like an empty promise, similar to Trump saying last month to Iran’s protesters that “help is on the way” for only thousands of them to be subsequently killed by the regime.

Meanwhile, the political opposition to the regime is fragmented and operates mostly outside of the country. It’s not clear who Washington would back in place of Iran’s theocrats. Trump has declined to meet with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, who has been touting himself as a possible successor.

Thus, the likeliest scenario seems to be some sort of military government led by remaining IRGC forces, who will be prepared to use unlimited force and brutality to stay in power. It’s unclear how Trump would respond to this, but the likeliest outcome would seem to be more escalation, which will further endanger the region: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates -- which have U.S. military bases -- have already faced retaliatory strikes from Iran in the hours following the attack. Israel has also faced counterattacks. (Earlier this month, I spoke with Middle East journalist Jo-Ann Mort about the consequences for Israeli civilians of an attack on Iran.)

U.S. Vice President JD Vance, speaking on February 26 to the Washington Post aboard Air Force Two, promised that the U.S. would not be drawn into a wider war: “the idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen.” Yet, Trump’s military intervention against Iran -- launched with virtually no public discussion or congressional approval and false justifications of Tehran allegedly posing “imminent threats” to the American people -- seems like it could trigger the kind of long Middle Eastern war that he campaigned against.

In 2003, the Bush Administration overthrew Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied troops, resulting in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, only for a pro-Iranian government to take over. Iran is also not Venezuela, where U.S. forces last month were able to quickly capture Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro and a more pliant leader, Delcy Rodriguez, took power. Trump’s military intervention in Iran seems likely to lead to something protracted, deadly, and unpredictable -- and we are only in the opening hours of it.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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I spoke about Ukraine’s drone war with Olena Kryzhanivska, who writes the newsletter Ukraine’s Arms Monitor. She is a Ukrainian defense analyst currently based in Canada. She began chronicling Ukraine’s arms developments in January 2024, and moved to Substack in 2025. Currently, she is a Senior Editor at the NATO Association of Canada. Listen to the conversation above!

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to end the Russo-Ukrainian War in “24 hours.” Over a year into his presidency -- and as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches on February 24 -- the war is still going on with no end in sight. One major reason is that the U.S. has halted funding Ukraine’s weapons buys, depriving Kyiv of sophisticated weaponry and giving Washington less leverage over how the war ends.

Beginning in 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden delivered military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine -- albeit too haltingly -- and rushed more out as he was preparing to leave office. But according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, U.S. support for Ukraine stopped in the second quarter of 2025 -- the first quarter that Trump was president for the entire period. European countries have filled the financial gap left by Washington and still buy U.S. weapons and send them to Ukraine. The message coming from Washington is clear: the Trump Administration is okay with U.S. weapons manufacturers making money off of the war, but it doesn’t want to contribute to the pot itself.

With Trump in office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attempts to secure more advanced American weapons have been fruitless. In October, he traveled to the White House to try to get long-range Tomahawk missiles. However, according to the Financial Times, this private meeting didn’t go well: Trump said that Putin would “destroy” Zelenskyy if he didn’t agree to a deal and tossed aside maps of the frontline in eastern Ukraine, reportedly saying, “This red line, I don’t even know where this is. I’ve never been there.” Zelenskyy traveled back to Kyiv empty-handed.

The October meeting was reminiscent of the February Oval Office upbraiding of Zelenskyy by Trump and Vice President JD Vance before television cameras. I was in Kyiv when that happened, and it struck me how irrelevant the U.S. had made itself by cutting off funding. The next day, a colleague told me about a protest outside the U.S. Embassy against Trump, but when I arrived, there were more journalists than the half-dozen protesters there, and most of the picketers were American. Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence as an independent state, and they still are going to fight regardless of what Trump says or does. On a trip the following September to Ukraine, I interviewed the Ukrainian writer Arterm Chapeye for the New Republic. He told me: “We do need support, but nobody’s playing the cards given by America, adding “Nobody gives a flying fuck about JD Vance’s opinion.”

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Ukraine is doing the best it can without U.S. support; Washington does still provide intelligence support to Ukraine, but the Trump Administration briefly cut it off after the Oval Office meeting. It is surviving with European financial support (in doubt now because of Hungary’s block on a crucial €90 billion loan) and its homemade weapons industry.

Trump has shown no inclination to use the leverage he could gain to get Putin to end the war. If Trump were to send Tomahawks to Ukraine or slap tariffs on China for its purchases of Russian oil if Moscow didn’t agree to a ceasefire, then it might get Putin’s attention. But Trump backed down on sending Tomahawks after speaking with Putin. The Trump Administration punished India for its purchases of Russian oil, but the oil just flowed to China instead.

U.S.-made air-defense systems such as the Patriot are vital for protecting critical infrastructure, which has been hammered by Russian attacks during the coldest winter in years, leaving millions of Ukrainians without power, heat, and water for hours and days at a time. Ukraine is running low on supplies: Kyiv’s air force spokesman recently said that one joint U.S.-Norwegian air defense system was operating with two interceptor missiles instead of the usual six. Under U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Washington has never chaired the meeting that the Biden Administration created to coordinate Western arms deliveries to Ukraine. Prior to this year’s Munich Security Conference, this group agreed to send $38 billion in arms to Ukraine, including air defense and a few increasingly scarce Patriot interceptors; no U.S. deliveries were announced. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped a meeting in Munich with European allies on Ukraine, instead meeting bilaterally with Zelenskyy.

According to the U.N., Ukrainian civilian casualties increased by about 31 percent in 2025, the deadliest year since 2022, the year the full-scale invasion began. Ukrainian Nobel Prize Winner Oleksandra Matviichuk asked why this was the case in a Facebook post that has since gone viral: “Why did Putin not allow himself such brutal strikes on civilian infrastructure under Biden, whom Trump calls ‘weak,’ but totally destroys peaceful cities and disregards the ‘strong Trump’?”

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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I spoke to Jo-Ann Mort, who is the author of the newsletter, A Precise Chaos. She is a journalist with deep experience in Israel, Palestine and the Middle East who often writes for The New Republic, Prospect Magazine, and The Guardian. She is also the author of a book of poetry, also called “A Precise Chaos.” We talked about Trump’s threats to Iran, the possible Israeli role in an attack, as well as her recent reporting trip in Israel and the West Bank.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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Dear subscribers,

I’m starting a feature where I share what’s left on the cutting room floor from my reporting. Reporting is kind of like an iceberg: what you read is undergirded by a lot of observations that don’t make it into print. This feature will be for paid subscribers only. The first one will be about discussions about the United States and Ukraine at this year’s Munich Security Conference.

As an American, I fielded a lot of questions about how Americans look at Europe. To me, the dynamics have seemed like an unequal, and now possibly abusive, marriage, where, after 80 years, the more powerful partner is taking advantage of the weaker one.

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MUNICH--A hot topic at this year’s Munich Security Conference is the question of “Can Europe defend itself without the U.S.?” However, this question is being framed by U.S. President Donald Trump and European leaders as a resource problem, and that is problematic: Europe, on its own, is wealthy enough to defend itself against Russia, which has a sputtering economy a fraction of the EU’s size. It isn’t a question of the U.S. needing to bear the economic burden of defending Europe: European countries account for almost two-thirds of the defense spending in the North Atlantic theater, while the U.S. accounts for the other third.

Rather, Europe cannot defend itself without the U.S. now because of how the money is being spent. Trump and German Chancellor Friederich Merz have both been emphasizing that NATO countries in July agreed to spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense (a number which includes related spending on securing infrastructure), but they haven’t talked much publicly about where the money is going.

On the sidelines of the MSC (and in a decidedly less fancy room of the ornate Bayerischer Hof), I attended a briefing by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy on a new report detailing how European countries can get the best “bang for the buck” on defense. According to Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick, the president of the institute, this isn’t happening now: European legacy defense manufacturers are still focused on “artisanal production of single, expensive pieces of military equipment” and not the kinds of mass production that Russia and Ukraine have moved to as the war has increasingly been defined by the use of drones and other unmanned systems.

Since Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine nearly four years ago, European production of artillery and air defense has been remarkably sluggish. According to Estonian intelligence, Russia now produces 7 million rounds of artillery annually -- a factor increase of 17 from 2021. European countries produce around 2 million rounds annually. Production of Germany’s IRIS-T air defense system -- crucial for protecting Ukrainian civilians from drone and missile attacks -- has only increased from about three per month to six.

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Rodrigo Carill, an economist at the University of Barcelona and the author of the Kiel Institute’s new report, estimates that European countries will spend around a whopping €830 billion annually on defense. However, European defense manufacturers only have the incentive to deliver orders with existing factories -- and not to build the capacity to build more. Consider a hypothetical order for 200 tanks. A defense manufacturer might be able to fill that order in two years, but it has no incentive to build the capacity to make 200 tanks in one year, which would also deter Russia from attacking. As Schularick put it, “Maybe we have filled our shelves again, but then what happens when these shelves empty again?” (This is a problem that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is trying to solve with his ‘Arsenal of Freedom’ defense procurement strategy, even if it raises transparency questions about private companies currying favor with Trump.)

Overwhelmingly, European countries buy weapons individually; however, if they were to join forces, this would mean economies of scale, greater interoperability, and increased competition. To use an everyday analogy, the 27 EU countries are like 27 shoppers individually buying groceries at 7-Eleven -- which can charge inflated prices for small quantities -- when EU members could join and create their own Costco for defense.

Doing so would not be easy, as European countries are distrustful of each other after being at war for hundreds of years, and European legacy producers are closely linked with their national governments. However, Schularick argued that there could at least be a start for joint production with the kinds of unmanned, autonomous systems that will define the future of war, especially for a continent with an aging population and a younger generation that is skeptical of fighting for their country. “At least, let’s start with the next-generation technologies. Otherwise we will just replicate these interoperability issues that we have,” he said.

I asked Schularick what political body this new procurement would happen under; he said that there could be a European Defense Union with the 27 EU countries plus the U.K. and Norway. This body could pool financial resources from member states, issue joint debt, and buy military assets that are owned jointly. “That could be the game-changer,” he said.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte recently excoriated Europeans by saying they should “keep on dreaming” to think that they can defend themselves without the U.S. However, it is possible. Things like joint procurement and improving command-and-control so Germans and Brits can talk to each other without American equipment are meant to be an insurance policy in the event that President Trump decides to walk away and not defend Europe amid a Russian attack. “In a nutshell, the current German plan is to spend 500 billion until the end of the decade, and in the end, be as dependent on the Americans as we are now,” said Schularick. “Doesn’t sound like a great plan to me.”

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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Like Potter, I found myself with mentions in the Epstein files.

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“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.” --Don Graham, whose family owned the Washington Post for 80 years, after he learned the paper’s sports section was being eliminated by Jeff Bezos.

I, too, used to read the paper like Graham. As a kid, I would check the Boston Globe for the Red Sox scores, and then I would try to read the other sections. I often couldn’t understand the particulars of the Middle East peace process or the Kosovo war. Nevertheless, the sports section was a gateway to reading about the outside world.

I suspect that many people read newspapers like this. They start with a lighter section like the sports or the advice column and then move onto something heavier. The New York Times has successfully invested in its cooking section and Wordle. Lighter fare has subsidized more expensive and difficult stories.

This past week, a third of the Post’s staff was let go, including its sports and books section and much of its international coverage. Even if the paper executes its stated strategy of doubling down on politics and national security coverage, a lot fewer people will be reading it because it will offer less. The paper still does excellent accountability coverage of the Trump Administration -- but it will get fewer eyeballs.

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You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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In a January 14 interview with Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election [in November].” His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later tried to clarify that he was “simply joking” and that he meant that his administration was doing such a good job that it should keep “rolling.” However, the comment was one of a series of musings about cancelling future elections.

Trump has neither the legal authority nor practical ability to cancel elections. But he is doing everything in his power to undermine future ones. Exactly two weeks after the Reuters interview, FBI agents descended on the Fulton County, Georgia elections office, executing a criminal warrant in connection with Trump’s Justice Department’s efforts to find fraud in the 2020 election. They removed hundreds of boxes of ballots and voter information.

The reliably Democratic county containing most of Atlanta is ground zero for Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him: Georgia swung Democratic in 2020 for the first time since 1992, and on January 2, 2021, Trump called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking that he “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state.

Adding to the abnormality of a raid conducted over five years after the alleged wrongdoing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the elections office when the search was conducted. The presence of the coordinator of intelligence between 18 of the U.S. government’s spy agencies has no precedent or explanation. She has no jurisdiction over domestic law enforcement. However, her presence may have something to do with sowing wild conspiracy theories of foreign interference in U.S. elections: after news broke of the raid, Trump posted on Truth Social a series of discredited -- and bizarre -- claims about the 2020 election involving China, the CIA, FBI, and Italian satellites.

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The raid isn’t just about putting the full weight of the U.S. government behind Trump’s grievances about the 2020 election -- it’s about the conduct of a free and fair election in 2026. Fulton County is a heavily Black, Democratic county in a swing state; in 2020, Trump pushed to invalidate votes in heavily Black cities like Milwaukee and Detroit, which are also in swing states. In 2026, Fulton County officials fear that the raid is part of an effort to wrest control of the county’s elections into the hands of the pro-Trump state elections board. Rob Pitts, Chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told NPR: “There has to be something much bigger than just an FBI raid coming to Fulton County...I think this is about an effort to take over our state elections.”

Should Democrats win back control of Congress in 2026, Trump will likely claim that the result was bogus, and lean on local Republican officials to try to invalidate ballots on account of imagined fraud. In 2020, Republican officials like Secretary of State Raffensperger resisted this pressure; the 2026 election will likewise rest on the integrity of local officials -- but, this time, they will face the threat of politicized law enforcement from the federal government.

Trump has long spread conspiracy theories about millions of noncitizens voting and tainting election results. Hence, Democratic secretaries of state -- the state officials charged with organizing elections -- are worried that Trump will deploy federal immigration agents near polling places, especially in the aftermath of Trump’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis, which has left two U.S. citizens dead. Deploying ICE would undoubtedly frighten U.S. citizens -- especially people of color and U.S. citizens with a migration background -- from voting.

Trump’s administration seems to be laying the groundwork for a new big lie about Republicans winning the 2026 elections if they do, in fact, lose them. However, elections are easier to manipulate if they are close. If Trump’s party loses by a lot, this effort will be seen as a brutal expression of power at odds with reality, and most Americans won’t like it, just as the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE agents has triggered a larger backlash.

If Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress, it would be a substantive check on Trump’s power, as he controls the executive branch. In addition, the Supreme Court has almost always sided with him and Congress is controlled by Republicans, who have shrugged as their power has been usurped by his administration. It makes sense, then, that he is doing everything to forestall this very real possibility by turning federal law enforcement into a personal tool of revenge, and in turn, eroding democracy.

I will be doing a live video on Monday, February 2 at 6pm CEST/12pm EST with international affairs journalist Mark Leon Goldberg, who writes the Global Dispatches Substack and hosts the Global Dispatches podcast. We will be discussing Trump’s efforts to create a Board of Peace and how it may be actually sparking new support for the United Nations. You can join the conversation on the Substack app for iOS/Android, and there will be a video afterwards.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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A few weeks ago, I was talking with another journalist about how reporting in Russia has become practically impossible. I haven’t felt safe going there since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and wartime censorship makes it difficult — and dangerous — to gauge what people think and feel.

The documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, provides a window into Russia’s descent into fascism that no journalist could have ever obtained. The film, directed by Copenhagen-based American documentary filmmaker David Borenstein, follows Pavel Talankin (pictured below), the events coordinator and videographer for a school in the town of Karabash, a poor mining town in the Ural Mountains. Talankin is able to freely document the government-mandated patriotic events of the school because the state requires the school to upload footage of these displays to an online database to prove compliance. Talankin, who is opposed to the war, initially quits his job because he doesn’t want to be an accomplice for the state’s propaganda machine; however, he gets in touch with Borenstein, decides to save the footage for an undercover-style documentary, and rescinds his resignation. His camera captures children forced to march in formation, veterans from the brutal paramilitary organization Wagner speaking to young kids, and pupils taught how life in Europe has become terrible because of Western sanctions and why Russia was right to annex Crimea.

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Ji.hlava IDFF on Instagram: "◢◢◢ Užší nominace na Oscara mají l…

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has made teachers central to the war effort; in 2023, he approvingly cited a purported Bismarck quote that “wars are won not by generals but by teachers and priests.” The most interesting focus of Talankin’s camera is on his fellow educators: Talankin’s foil is the school’s jingoistic history teacher, Pavel Abdulmanov. In one chilling scene, Talankin asks Abdulmanov which figures from history he would have liked to have met, and he rattles off a list of Soviet sadists including Lavrentiy Beria, who served as head of the secret police under Stalin, oversaw the deportation and killing of millions in the Gulag system, and raped dozens of women in his spare time. It hardly comes as a surprise when Abdulmanov wins a luxury apartment (by European standards, a middle-class apartment) in the center of town for being the “teacher of the year.”

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Yet, teaching is one of the few stable jobs in this poor town and a lot of his other colleagues treat the mandated indoctrination like checking a box. For example, while reading a script for one of the Kremlin’s patriotic lessons about the war in Ukraine, a teacher repeatedly struggles to say the word “demilitarization.”

Earlier this month, British intelligence estimated that Russia has suffered about 1.2 million casualties (wounded and dead) in the war; Talankin provides a rare glimpse into their grieving family members. In his narration, Talankin notes how he has barely seen any men wounded from the war; it seems like Russian authorities haven’t allowed them to return home. Many Karabash residents lose brothers and sons. Talankin’s student, Masha, ultimately loses her brother, and while she holds it together for the camera, there is a wall of unspoken grief on her face. Talankin also goes to the funeral of a dead soldier from the town, Artem. It’s too dangerous to film there, but in a particularly devastating scene, he plays the audio of the service as Artem’s mother wails in grief.

Talankin doesn’t hide his antiwar views, and things start getting dangerous for him. After a faculty meeting where the teachers are chewed out for the high rates of failing students, he tells colleagues: “the reason they are failing is all the bullshit…’Go, Russia! Hooray for nuclear weapons!’ is all we have here now.” Eventually, he spots a police car outside the window of his apartment. With the help of the filmmakers, in 2024, he fled Russia with his footage.

In “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” most Russians go along with Putin’s war without really thinking much about it, but also without much enthusiasm. Sure, there are figures like the history teacher Abdulmanov who are true believers. But a lot of guys in Karabash go to war because the money’s good, their jobs are boring, and ultimately, it’s the path of least resistance. At goodbye parties, their friends say they will come home in a year, but they come home in body bags. Figures like Talankin who actually think for themselves and take action against the war are rare, but they inevitably have to flee, leaving behind a dwindling group of people who have acquiesced to fascism to eke out an ordinary life.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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I discussed this summit with , who writes the Gulf Stream Blues newsletter. We talked about how the 27 members of the EU are divided over whether to genuflect to Trump or show firmness towards his bullying. He also said that the summit, which lost its raison d’être after Trump suddenly withdrew the threats, might have done more harm than good.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. 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.

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Reading List:

Gulf Stream Blues

Meloni was wrong, Macron was right

EU prime ministers and presidents are descending on Brussels as we speak for an emergency European Council summit that has now been pre-empted by President Trump’s sudden bizarre retraction of his Greenland military and tariff threats last night in Davos. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is arriving claiming victory, crediting her daddy diplomacy f…

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2 months ago · 68 likes · Dave Keating

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Hours after giving a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he repeated his desire to annex Greenland from Denmark, U.S. President Donald Trump backed down. He said on social media that the threat of tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries who opposed his bid for U.S. control of Greenland was off, and announced the “framework” of a deal over Greenland, the details of which remain unclear. Earlier in his January 21 speech, he said that he wouldn’t use force to take the island. The head-spinning reversals appeared to be a case of TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

However, these turnabouts should be of little solace to Europeans for two reasons. First, the threat of force was never on the table because the U.S. doesn’t need it: under a 1951 treaty, the U.S. already has the ability to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” military bases on the island. Moreover, elsewhere in his speech, he threatened Denmark like a mafia don: “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.” With European countries unable to defend themselves without the U.S. military and its nuclear umbrella, this is a real threat. Second, Trump is so mercurial that he could reinstate the tariff threat tomorrow; for European businesses, having the most important trading relationship dictated by social media posts is unsustainable.

Even though the tariff threat is off the table for now, European leaders are still holding an emergency summit tonight in Brussels. Tomorrow at 11 am CEST/5 am ET, I will be discussing the summit on Substack Live with Dave Keating who writes the Gulf Stream Blues Substack; he will be covering the summit. (You can find the livestream on the Substack app for iOS/Android, or follow with a link here.)

Trump’s rambling Davos speech was a familiar list of grievances, but the cri de cœur for middle powers from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will be one for the history books.

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