The fate of the conflict, part 2: Trump, China, and the end of the united Western front against Russia

2025 can be seen as the year in which the united anti-Russian coalition fell apart. In essence, there are now three distinct players acting against Russia (Ukraine, Europe, the US), and each has its own interests. Analyst Sergey Poletaev has prepared a series of articles in which he analyses the position of each player, their goals and interests in the conflict, and suggests how Russia might respond.

Today we focus on the United States.

Resignation from the role of leader

Since the Trump team's rise to power, US politics has undergone a profound, one is even tempted to say historic, shift: The US is moving away from its role as the 'leader of the free world' and seeking to focus on its own interests.

While in the first half of 2025, it seemed that this was merely a whim of Trump's, and that the US could not be diverted from its course of maintaining its hegemony, by the end of the year, it had become clear that the Trump administration was seeking to reset relations with all global players. We will not be discussing today the extent to which Trump has been successful; what matters to us is his motivation.

Prominent neoconservatives are criticizing Trump's war on Iran, but do these critiques amount to a foreign policy shift?

In a recent Atlantic article, Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan declares that the United States has already lost its war against Iran. He writes:

"It's hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.

"Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored," he continued. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done."

Kagan began his career as a foreign policy advisor for Jack Kemp, then spent the 90s pushing for multiple U.S. wars in the Middle East, consistently claiming that Iraq posed a military threat to the United States.

Karaganov advocates preemptive Russian nuclear strikes against a Europe he deems bellicose, banking on American passivity. Scott Ritter believes conventional missiles, not nukes, are the only credible path.
Editor's Note : After publishing our article "Is 1914 repeating itself? Will war between Europe and Russia finally break out openly?" where we discussed - among others - the nuclear doctrine of the Russian Federeation and also the Karaganov doctrin, Dmitry Orlov published the article «How to survive a Russian tactical nuclear strike». In today's article Scott Ritter analyses the Karaganov doctrine and argues that nuclear weapons are not the right tools for Russia.

Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, the Wallstreet brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton, came up with one of the most iconic television ad campaigns in history, built around the catch phrase "When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen."

Sergei Karaganov is the Russian analog to E.F. Hutton — when Karaganov speaks, people listen. The 73-year old political scientist, who currently heads the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy and serves as the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, has advised both post-Soviet era Russian Presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and his opinion continues to carry weight among the senior-most decision making circles of the Russian government.

Karaganov has, for the past several years, been warning about the growing threat to Russia from NATO, and in particular the European nations of NATO who have constructed a world view which postulates Russia as an existential threat which must be decisively confronted and defeated.

In this Karaganov is not wrong.

The language of the Europeans is self-indicting.

According to a newly published German military strategy, Russia represents "the greatest and most immediate threat for the foreseeable future" to Germany and transatlantic security. The classified strategy concludes by declaring "Russia is laying the groundwork for a military attack on NATO member states."

Germany's chief of defense, General Carsten Breuer furthered this argument in a 2025 statement to the media where he noted that "There's an intent and there's a buildup of the stocks" by Russia for a possible future attack on Nato's Baltic state members.

Brueuer and Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorious, are using the threat from Russia as an excuse for the rearmament of Germany, with the goal of making the German army the most powerful in Europe by 2029.

Why that date?

According to General Breuer, this is when Russia will attack Europe. "This is what the analysts are assessing," Breuer said, "in 2029. So we have to be ready by 2029."

The German analysis is nearly identical to that of their British allies. Former Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, who retired in the summer of 2025, has warned that a war with Putin was a "realistic possibility" by 2030. "If Russia stops fighting in Ukraine," Sanders told the British media, "you get to a position where within a matter of months they will have the capability to conduct a limited attack on a NATO member that we will be responsible for supporting, and that happens by 2030."

The aspirational totalitarians over at Big Tech have seen fit to retrofit 32 million mosquitoes with a bacterial infection, using AI, and then dump them onto California and Florida.

The federal government, beholden as ever to the private interests that run it, is poised to give its blessing.

Via California Post:

"California could soon become a testing ground for one of Google's most ambitious public health projects yet.

The tech giant is seeking federal approval to release up to 32 million specially treated mosquitoes in California and Florida over the next two years as part of an effort to reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, including West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis, dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever...

The project is part of Google's little-known Debug initiative, launched more than a decade ago to develop new technologies aimed at reducing populations of disease-carrying mosquitoes...

Rather than releasing biting insects, the company plans to release male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacteria. When the infected males mate with wild female mosquitoes, the offspring do not survive, helping suppress mosquito populations over time.

Because only female mosquitoes bite humans, experts say the releases would not increase the number of biting mosquitoes....

Google says artificial intelligence and robotic systems would be used to breed, sort and release the mosquitoes at a scale large enough to make the strategy effective."

Anti-ICE demonstrations outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, an ICE immigration detention facility, escalated in the overnight hours as the far-left and well-funded maximum pressure campaign entered its ninth day on Saturday. The continued mobilization only suggests a coordinated pressure operation, with dark-money-funded NGOs appearing to provide organizational and financial support.

Citizen journalist Nick Sortor went undercover at the anti-ICE encampment outside Delaney Hall in Newark on Saturday night, documenting what he described as far-left revolutionaries training their so-called 'woke warriors' to combat ICE agents.

The US government continues dragging out terms of settlement with Iran, Israel continues invading, occupying and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon and Gaza, and the Trump White House continues playing 'MAGA Greatest Hits' to its base. Their detachment from reality is becoming more palpable - and unsustainable, surely? - by the day...


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Abu Dhabi presents itself as neutral, but it's taking step after step towards becoming a party in the conflict.

After February 28, 2026, relations between the United Arab Emirates and Iran entered a new phase of escalation, one in which the old formula of cautious pragmatism effectively stopped working.

Formally, Abu Dhabi declared its neutrality in the war which the US and Israel launched against Iran, and emphasized that it was not providing its territory, airspace, or its waters for strikes against Iran. However, the course of the war quickly showed that Tehran no longer believed such statements. The UAE remains a key US partner in the Persian Gulf, a participant in the Abraham Accords with Israel, and an important financial and logistical hub within the Western infrastructure in the region. For that reason, in Iran's perception, the Emirates increasingly look like a participant in an anti-Iranian coalition.

The fate of the conflict, part 1: The state that forgot how to live without war.

2025 can be seen as the year in which the united anti-Russian coalition fell apart. In essence, there are now three distinct players acting against Russia (Ukraine, Europe, the US), and each has its own interests. Analyst Sergey Poletaev has prepared a series of articles in which he analyses the position of each player, their goals and interests in the conflict, and suggests how Russia might respond.

The first one concerns Ukraine.

The untamed lands

One of the scenarios long under consideration is the gradual disintegration of the Ukrainian state, turning it into a sort of Gaza on the Dnieper. As time goes on, the likelihood of this scenario is growing, so let's examine exactly what it entails.

A fully-fledged state possesses an instinct for self-preservation. Apart from heart-warming victories over enemies, a state always has a host of concerns: the economy, demographics, infrastructure, the social sphere, and so on. By definition, a state is a superstructure built upon society, and, one way or another, it wages wars for the sake of the common good. Yet while at war, a state is always thinking about how it will survive afterwards and indeed, it's forced to think of things like this.

Kiev's latest acts of official fascism worship are not a bug but a feature.
As in Mel Brooks dark satire of Western Nazi fetishism, it's hard to believe one's eyes while witnessing the latest performance put on by the comedian tyrant of Ukraine. Within the span of a week or so, the regime of president-in-eternity-no-elections-needed Vladimir Zelensky has repatriated and reburied with pomp and circumstance the remains of Andriy Melnyk, a twentieth-century Ukrainian fascist leader as well as Nazi collaborator, and named a contemporary military elite unit "Heroes of the UPA" (that is, of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of World War Two).

The UPA was, in effect, the military arm of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had two political wings that mattered, one under Andriy Melnyk, the other under Stepan Bandera. They were rivals, but both were fascists.

During the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both OUN wings tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis, in their arrogance, did not always let them, but the whole OUN was very eager to please. The OUN and the UPA also participated in murderous German violence against Jews, serving as pro-active mass murder auxiliaries. In addition, they conducted a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of their own against Poles.

Predictably, the in-your-face obscenity of Kiev's latest fascism worship moves has provoked Israel as well as Poland. Polish president Nawrocki would like to deprive Zelensky of the high state honors that Warsaw has foolishly bestowed on him and has threatened to curtail Poland's support for Kiev's EU ambitions. In Israel, both its official Holocaust remembrance and exploitation agency Yad Vashem and the foreign ministry have taken exception. That is, of course, ironic, since Israel itself engages obsessively in genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as in, literally, every war crime there is. Maybe, in this case, it takes a genocidal fascist to know one.

Official Kiev is in the middle of devastating corruption scandals - but to be fair, when is it not? - and shaken by mortifying revelations about Zelensky personally (surprise, surprise: a raging narcissist on coke and not a democrat but a kleptocrat) from a well-informed insider speaking to one of America's most influential media outlets. Yet its ruling clique finds time to really rub it in, again, just how much it cannot stop hugging Nazis, dead and alive. Costs in foreign-policy terms? Apparently, no big deal: When the Nazi-loving urge itches really bad, to hell with caution and - very unusually for Kiev - even dissembling.

A Ukrainian drone raid last week devastated a college dormitory in Starobelsk, in Russia's Lugansk People's Republic, killing 21 students - most of them young women - and injuring dozens others.

The attack was a deliberate "double-tap" that included two more waves of drones targeting civilians and first responders who raced to the scene, according to Russian officials. Russia branded the raid a "terrorist attack" and a blatant war crime. Horrific footage from the scene backed up the accusations.

However, speaking at an emergency UN Security Council session, Ukrainian envoy to the UN Andrey Melnik dismissed Moscow's account, denigrating a "so-called incident" in Starobelsk as "a fake story" and accusing Russia of spreading "yet another propaganda narrative."