The End of the Neocons
The Victory of Russia and the Twilight of American Unipolarity
When President Trump picked up the telephone, called Vladimir Putin, and talked to the Russian president for ninety minutes on Wednesday, February 12, communicating that he wanted to reach a peace deal in the now three-year-old Russian-Ukraine war, a bomb went off among established American and European elites. Trump had done the unthinkable and what the legacy media had for so long ‘warned’ us about: Trump was a Putin stooge who wanted to cuddle up to the Russian dictator, ready to betray the heroic and freedom-fighting Zelensky into the hands of a merciless aggressor.
Of course, what Trump had done was take the first step in ending the unnecessary and brutal war between Russia and Ukraine. The America First president was resuming talks with a great power and America’s geopolitical rival. Even during the height of the Cold War, America was talking to the USSR. Conversely, it was the Biden Administration’s cold shoulder and refusal to talk to Russia that was the historical anomaly and an unforced policy blunder. That Trump is resuming diplomatic relations with another superpower is not only the norm, but it is sensible and responsible. Only neoconservative warmongers and their media allies who have dominated the airwaves and talking points for the last few decades have convinced us that American leaders cannot talk to Vladimir Putin, reach a peace settlement with him, or normalize economic relations. To grasp the remarkable transition underway in American foreign policy under Trump, we must understand America’s role in the Russian-Ukraine war, the pivot away from Europe, and the emergence of a multipolar world once again.
The Pivot: Vance and Hegseth in Europe
At the recent Munich Security Conference (February 14-16) Vice President J. D. Vance gave a brief talk to a packed room of European leaders where he stunned them with some harsh words. Accusing them of becoming like the oppressive communist regime under the Soviets, Vance declared that the main threat to Europe’s security came not from without—not from Russia or China—but from within, from the censorious regimes in the U.K. and Germany that were suppressing free speech and overturning democratic elections in Romania deemed unfavorable by the ruling elites. Vance made it clear that America would no longer financially, militarily, or culturally support European nations that ignored and suppressed their own people. Only when America and Europe hold the same ‘shared values’ is cooperation possible, and Vance clearly communicated that the Trump administration no longer holds to the fraudulent and globalist values of the Obama-Biden era.
Two days prior, on February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels, set off a bomb in his remarks to those present when he announced that America was committed to bringing the Russian-Ukraine war to an end, that Europe must take the lead in European security, and that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO and there would be no return to the pre-2014 borders. In a subsequent briefing, Hegseth made it clear that the US was not leaving NATO but was committed to a “stronger, more lethal NATO.” He called upon NATO members to continue to step up their support and contribution to the military alliance (up to 5% of GDP), and that Europe must now play the lead role in European military security.
Vance and Hegseth’s speeches represent a foreign policy earthquake of 9.0 magnitude. Trump’s America First movement signals that American global dominance and hegemony are coming to an end. Russia and China are peer competitors, and the world is now multipolar, with regional powers dominating their hemispheres. America can no longer be everywhere at once, spending profligately overseas while America taxpayers die from opioid and fentanyl overdoses at home. Accordingly, American foreign policy must pivot to Asia, where China poses a more significant threat than Russia—and in a resource scarce, multipolar world, a pivot to means a pivot from: from Europe and to Asia. To do this, however, America must extract herself from the foolishness of the Russian-Ukrainian war and seek a peaceful end to that conflict as quickly as possible.
Peace in Ukraine?
Trump’s call with Putin and the subsequent peace negotiations between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Saudi Arabia were harshly condemned by the ‘experts’ from America’s foreign policy ‘blob.’ If Trump had committed the unforgiveable sin in talking to The Dictator, then Defense Secretary Hegseth supposedly made the biggest blunder in the history of peace negotiations by stating beforehand that neither Ukrainian NATO membership nor Ukraine territorial recovery were possible. Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012-2014 and who strongly supports Ukraine, summarized the negotiations by calling Hegseth’s remarks “concessions” to Putin.
Online chatter about Trump preemptively ‘conceding’ to Russia and thus violating the first principle of all international diplomacy (never concede anything to your opponent) missed the obvious point that you can only concede that which you could have gained. Yet both Trump and Hegseth (and many other clear-minded realists) understand that there is no world in which Ukraine joins NATO and regains its territory and a successful peace deal is reached between Russia and Ukraine. Russia has made it clear that Ukrainian NATO membership is, under all circumstances, off the table; and there is no chance Russia is going to simply hand back the three oblasts and Crimea which it has captured in three years of bloody fighting because European and Ukrainian leaders prattle on about the morality of sovereign borders and territorial integrity. Acknowledging these realities publicly was probably a necessary first step Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio had to take to even get Russia to the negotiating table in the first place.
Putin understands what soft and pusillanimous Western leaders have forgotten: behind all claims of rights or justice, especially at the international level, there must be a willingness to expend blood and wield steel to make good on those claims. If American and European authorities insist that any future peace deal between Ukraine and Russia include Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the return of its eastern oblasts, Russia will merely continue the war. Since neither Europe nor America are going to commit troops, and since American money and weapons have not been sufficient for a Ukrainian victory, a continuation of the war ensures that Russia will gain more territory and thousands of more Ukrainians will die. Trump and his administration understand this full well, which is why they are seeking to end the conflict as soon as possible. Any other outcome will only be even more disastrous for Ukraine. On the flip side, European heads of state and American neocons decrying Trump’s peace initiatives are only trying to save their own reputations and defense contracts and so prove they care little about Ukraine and its people (this has, in fact, always been the case).
Trump was none too kind to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, sending out an excoriating post on his Truth Social account that called Zelensky a dictator and accused him of bilking the U.S. of billions of dollars. While the respectable classes gasped, rank and file Americans remember what many others have forgotten: Zelensky was a crude comedian who only gained political power by play-acting the role of a president in the Ukrainian television series “Servant of the People” (2015-2019), he was long financed by the dirty money of Ukrainian billionaire and oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, he actively campaigned for Democratic politicians in Pennsylvania during the 2024 elections, and, since the beginning of the war, he has ruled Ukraine with an iron fist. Zelensky is hardly a hero and anything but authentic. He is the face of a charlatan, a saber-rattling propagandist, and a beneficiary of American money laundering and largesse. He has fleeced the American people, and the American First voter knows this. He has been rude and demanding toward the Trump administration, and Trump’s response was an appropriate rebuke. Americans who voted for Trump voted for the end of the fawning and coddling of Zelensky by spineless and milquetoast Western leaders and the beginning of hard-nosed international bargaining that puts Americans first.
The Origins of the Ukraine War
In a recent interview with FoxNews Sunday, Pete Hegseth refused to be baited into claiming that Russia invaded Ukraine “unprovoked.” Instead, when asked about it, he responded that “fair to say, it’s a very complicated situation.” Hegseth’s refusal to play along with the absolutist neocon post-war/Cold War framework of good guy/bad guy sent commentators into a tizzy. American war hawks, like Senator Lindsey Graham or Bill Kristol, could only sputter in amazement that Hegseth does not toe the line about ‘Put the Dictator Waging an Unprovoked and War of Aggression Upon Democratic Ukraine.’
The truth is that the West, through American hegemony and NATO activity, has long been provoking a great-powers conflict with Russia. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989/1990, America emerged victorious as the single world superpower. This was the first ‘unipolar’ moment in modern history, and triumphalist American elites viewed Russia as a weak, fragmented backwater and ex-superpower ripe for the plundering. The history of America/European-Russian relations has been written about extensively, but the best analyses come from foreign policy realists like John Mearsheimer, geopolitical development economists like Jeffrey Sachs, and experts like Joshua Shifrinson writing on NATO expansion.
While the history is too complicated to recount in depth here, there are two developments everyone needs to understand in order to see why Russia was provoked. First is the expansion of NATO eastward toward Russia against the promises made by the Americans and Europeans; second, the active role that the U.S. and CIA played in ousting the Russian-leaning and democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maiden Revolution (euphemistically called the “Revolution of Dignity”).
The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1989 immediately sparked a host of questions: would Germany reunite, and if so, would she be a neutral power or join NATO and the West? If the latter, the Warsaw Pact (which included East Germany) would collapse. How would Russia respond, and what would happen to the former Soviet satellite states? In early 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III promised Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward.” The America-back NATO coalition was making a pitch to allow a reunified Germany to be a NATO member, but to reassure Russia that this was not an act of military aggression—especially as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were being disbanded—Americans promised not to expand NATO any further eastward. While revisionist historians have tried to recast this promise as not expanding any farther into East Germany, the context of the discussions at this time makes it clear that all of Eastern Europe was in view.
In August of 1991, Ukraine declared political independence from the Soviet Union. Under the Declaration of State Sovereignty adopted by the Ukrainian parliament, the nation made its pledge to the world: Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.” Thus, from Russia’s perspective, a balance in Europe had been reached: Germany was reunited and brought into NATO, Ukraine was a permanently neutral buffer state, and the West had promised not to expand NATO eastward into the previous satellite states of the USSR.
This did not last long, however. By the next year (1992), the Bush administration had already internally concluded that America would seek to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. This resulted in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic being invited to begin membership talks at the NATO Summit in Madrid in July 1997. These three countries were admitted to the military alliance in 1999. Late in 1997, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a timeline for further NATO expansion, proposing that negotiations over Ukraine’s membership take place between 2005-2010. In 2004, seven more Eastern European states were added to NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. In 2009, Croatia and Albania were added. The year before, in 2008, American and European leaders began talking about adding Georgia and Ukraine to NATO. This was seen as quite risky, and so at the April Bucharest Summit, it was only promised that these two nations would one day be NATO members, but without any details of when or how that would happen
These NATO expansions and future proposals happened over the loud protestations of Russia, first under the leadership of President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and then Putin in the early 2000s. In a famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, President Putin strongly condemned NATO enlargement and declared that Russia would not become an American client state; even so, he was open to a new partnership that was based upon fair dealings. America, the EU, and NATO ignored Putin. Almost surely in response to discussions of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO in 2008, Putin invaded Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the Black Sea in the first two weeks of August, indicating to Western leaders that unwanted NATO encroachment would be met with military action.
The second issue is the American-led CIA coup of Yanukovych in 2014. The “revolution” began in November 2013 when Yanukovych rejected an economic deal between Ukraine and the EU, and instead accepted the Russian $15 billion counteroffer. Antigovernment protests resulted in Western authorities (e.g., Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain) massaging the revolution and reaching a deal that left Yanukovych in power until new elections could be held. Predictably, this deal immediately fell apart, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and a new pro-Western president (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) came to power.
Unsurprisingly, it was at this point that the Russian-Ukrainian war began. In response to the Western-led revolution that ousted Russia’s ally in Kiev, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in February and March 2014; in April, pro-Russian protestors and armed separatists in the Donbas region, backed by Russian intelligence, seized the city of Sloviansk and declared both the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts independent republics. The Ukrainians responded with a military operation, and fighting continued in this area until Russia launched its massive invasion in February 2022.
This inflection point, as with the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, should have made it clear to Western authorities that Russia was not simply going to stand down and stand by while NATO continued to gobble up huge chunks of the European continent. Part of the reason for Russia’s military aggression was that it became clear that verbal warnings and negotiations with the Americans would not work. The American unipolar moment had arrived, the global war on terror was at its zenith, the American military was flexing its muscles around the world, and the neoconservatives were dominant in the White House and the halls of the Pentagon. Both American arrogance and imperial incompetence contributed to unnecessarily provoking Russia into preemptive military operations to secure her southern and western flank and to prevent Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO.
No one is claiming that Putin did not invade Ukraine in early 2022, or that the Russian President bears no responsibility for the death and destruction since then. But the idea that the world can be divided into democracies and autocracies, into democrats and dictators, with America, Europe, and Ukraine as peaceful, democratic, sovereign states while Putin is a dictatorial thug and Russia is a power-hungry oligarchy seeking to recapture Soviet territory and resume the Cold War—such is the kind of fantastical propaganda that only the State Department, CIA, and a Democrat-sponsored media complex could conjure and sell to the American public. Every rational state actor, America included, would do exactly as Putin has done. Putin understands all too well that Ukrainian membership in NATO would mean that any armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine would trigger an Article Five escalation and, thus, the possibility of another world war. Accordingly, Russia took preemptive action in response to NATO aggression to maintain Ukrainian neutrality and keep them out of the Western military alliance.
The End of American Unipolarity and the Coming New World Order
Russia has won the Russian-Ukrainian war. The American Global Empire and NATO have lost their gambit to incorporate all of Eastern Europe into NATO and under the American security blanket. The last thirty years of American unipolarity and global hegemony have witnessed the incompetence and arrogance of American neoconservative leadership and the overextension of America’s empire and resources. While neocons like Bush, McCain, Nuland, Kristol, and a host of others have been defeated at the grassroots level and at the highest echelons of American leadership, a great many mid-level neocon careerists remain in the U.S. government. They must be driven out and their ideology utterly repudiated.
America is done with forever wars overseas, with nation-building and air-dropped ‘democracy,’ with botched military withdrawals and CIA decapitations of foreign heads of state. The American Century has been an embarrassment for America, much the same way that Athenian imperial overextension and a foolish campaign in Sicily (415-413 BC) led to her final defeat by land-locked and backward Sparta in the fifth-century Peloponnesian War. America may yet avoid such a fate, but it requires immediately rethinking foreign policy and global strategy. To withdraw from the world requires regional dominance—a return to the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary—something that Trump understands as he seeks to acquire Greenland, wrest the Panama Canal away from Chinese influence, and reestablish trade parity with Canada. Only once America has regained her strength in the Western Hemisphere can she hope to properly meet the threat from China. But this requires extracting herself from the tentacles of Europe, facilitating peace between Russia and Ukraine, and ending America’s corrupt relationship with Ukraine.
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