With Ukraine-Russia tensions reaching a boiling point, the Senate is poised to vote this afternoon on a bill championed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to sanction Russian businesses associated with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. If completed the pipeline would allow Russia to circumvent Ukraine and export natural gas directly to Germany, a move Ukrainian interests fiercely oppose as, amongst other issues, it will cost the country hundreds-of-millions in energy transit fees it receives every year under the current pipeline system.
While the vote and seemingly all things Ukraine-Russia have garnered front-page headlines, behind the scenes, Ukraine has launched a multi-million dollar lobbying push to steer U.S. foreign policy on this, and other issues, in its direction.
In just the past year, the Ukrainian government and other interests in Ukraine have hired nine firms that registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Most prominently, Yorktown Solutions, has reportedreceiving more than $1 million from Ukraine clients in 2021 and contacted congressional offices hundreds of times on behalf of the Ukraine Federation of the Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI), including at least one meeting between these lobbyists and Senator Cruz himself. Yesterday, the firm sent a “Nord Stream 2 pipeline - Facts on the Ground” brief in support of Cruz’s bill to hundreds of congressional offices.
Additionally, UFEOGI inked deals with Karv Communications and Arent Fox in the summer of 2021, which, respectively received nearly $120,000 and more than $300,000 from UFEOGI to advocate against Nord Stream 2. Karv has focused heavily on media outreach related to the pipeline, and reported meeting with journalists at the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and others on UFEOGI’s behalf. Arent Fox has played more of an inside game for UFEOGI, focusing its efforts on influence at the State Department.
These and many more details about the Ukraine lobby in the United States will be chronicled in a forthcoming Quincy Institute report on the topic. And, as for the vote today, even if Cruz’s bill isn’t passed as is expected, it’s well worth noting that Ukraine’s lobbyists and public relations professionals were a vital reason the bill even made it this far.
Ben Freeman is Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. He investigates money in politics, defense spending, and foreign influence in America. He is the author of The Foreign Policy Auction, which was the first book to systematically analyze the foreign influence industry in the United States.
Top image credit: U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and U.S. special envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack speaks after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
A tale of two envoys recently unfolded in Beirut, encapsulating the crossroads at which Lebanon now stands. Tanned and sporting a pink tie, the U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack arrived with Deputy Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus in mid-August. Their meetings with top Lebanese officials underscored Washington’s insistence that lasting stability in Lebanon depends on consolidating state authority, and disarming Hezbollah.
Days earlier, Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, had departed, leaving a message equally blunt but diametrically opposed: Hezbollah’s arms are a red line and are necessary tools for its “resistance” to Israel. These visits represent the opposing magnetic poles pulling at the country.
Lebanon is reeling from a confluence of catastrophes. A devastating scuffle with Israel last year decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership and ravaged its strongholds. Compounding this military blow was a strategic amputation: the swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, which severed the critical land bridge that for decades funneled Iranian arms and support to Iran’s most prized regional proxy. Into this vortex has stepped Barrack, a 40-year friend of Donald Trump and a businessman by trade, embodying a U.S. strategy that is quintessentially Trumpian in its DNA.
The American proposal, relentlessly pushed by Barrack in marathon meetings from Jerusalem to Beirut, eschews ideology for incentives. It is a carefully sequenced, "step-by-step" plan designed to untie the Gordian knot of southern Lebanon.The Lebanese government, led by former army chief President Joseph Aoun, must take concrete actions to implement its own historic cabinet decision to disarm Hezbollah. As Beirut makes progress, Israel is expected to reciprocate, beginning with a phased withdrawal from the five military outposts it still occupies inside Lebanon and a reduction in its routine airstrikes within Lebanese territory, actions that have continued despite a November 2024 ceasefire.
Yet, true to the spirit of a purported dealmaker president, the core of the strategy is a buyout of Hezbollah’s economy of resistance, replacing it with an economy of reconstruction. The plan's centerpiece is the proposed "economic zone" in southern Lebanon.
Recognizing that Hezbollah’s power is rooted as much in patronage as in piety, the plan aims to substitute Iranian funding and Hezbollah’s shadow economy with a surge of Saudi and Qatari investment, specifically designed to offer new livelihoods to tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters. Barrack articulated this vision bluntly. "What are you going to do with them?" he asked. "Take their weapon and say ‘by the way, good luck planting olive trees’? It can’t happen. We have to help them."
The plan is designed to achieve two goals at once: to dismantle the group's arsenal in the near-term, and to re-engineer the conditions of state neglect and economic grievance that allowed Hezbollah to flourish in the first place.
This political-commercial nexus is especially evident in the second, quieter dimension of Barrack’s mission: the business of borders and energy. The demarcation of Lebanon’s maritime boundaries, first with Israel and now with Syria, is the essential legal groundwork required to de-risk the Eastern Mediterranean for major American and European energy corporations.
As energy experts have noted, Big Oil firms like Chevron and ExxonMobil will not invest in exploration and extraction in blocks adjacent to a war zone. The American “green light” for investment is conditional on a stable, predictable security environment — one in which a non-state actor like Hezbollah cannot trigger a regional conflagration.
Thus, border demarcation, disarmament, and investment (on land and sea) form an unbreakable chain. A stable border with Syria is necessary for Damascus to begin its own offshore licensing rounds. A stable border with Israel is necessary for Lebanon to attract the capital it desperately needs. And for both to be stable, Hezbollah’s autonomous military capability must be neutralized. Barrack’s plan is a comprehensive effort to establish the political and security prerequisites for a new energy-driven economy in the region, with Lebanon and a post-Assad Syria as junior partners.
The Lebanese cabinet’s approval in early August of a Lebanese army-led disarmament plan was an unprecedented defiance of the state-within-a-state that Hezbollah has operated for decades. However, to expect a simple capitulation is to fundamentally misunderstand the organization.
For generations, Hezbollah has been more than a fighting force, it has been a provider of social services for Lebanon's Shiites and the purveyor of a potent narrative of dignity and resistance against Israeli aggression. The new American-led proposal offers jobs and investment, but it demands the surrender of the very weapons that many in the community believe guarantee their security and political relevance.
This re-engineering extends beyond economics to the entire security architecture of Lebanon’s south. The long-standing U.N. peacekeeping force, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is recast through Barrack’s unforgiving business lens as a failed investment — a billion-dollar-a-year venture that has left Lebanon, in his words, "in a swamp." The true answer, he insists, is the Lebanese Armed Forces. Washington’s backing for a final one-year extension of UNIFIL’s mandate is therefore a deadline to operationalize Hezbollah’s disarmament.
This existential fear animates the defiant rhetoric of Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem. His threats — "whoever wants to take this weapon means they want to take our soul from us…then the world will see our might" — and his framing of disarmament as a humiliating submission to "U.S.-Israeli dictates" are aimed directly at this constituency.
But money talks. The sales pitch at the core of the American-led strategy is to make an offer that Hezbollah's constituents, crippled by Lebanon's economic collapse, cannot refuse. The goal is a hostile takeover of sorts: a buyout of Hezbollah's entire political economy of resistance and its substitution with a new marketplace of reconstruction. The re-engagement of Gulf powers is what puts the capital on the table for this deal, with Saudi Arabia leading the diplomatic charge. After years of frustrated withdrawal, Riyadh has returned with a new policy of "engaged conditionality" — offering the financial support crucial for Lebanon's survival, but strictly conditioned on following Washington’s lead to end Hezbollah’s paramilitary existence.
Where, then, is this heading? The convergence of pressures — military, political, regional, and now economic — on Hezbollah is unprecedented. The path of least resistance, and perhaps the only one that ensures its long-term survival, is for the group to consolidate its immense political gains by sacrificing the military wing that made them possible. This path would compel Hezbollah to finally choose between its two identities: relinquishing its role as a revolutionary vanguard to fully embrace its reality as a powerful, but conventional, parliamentary bloc operating within the confines of the state.
But the underpinnings of this deal are fragile. If the promised economic relief fails to materialize, or if Israel’s reciprocal steps go unfulfilled, the entire enterprise could be exposed as the "U.S.-Israeli dictate" Qassem claims it to be. In that scenario, the Shiite community's fear of being politically neutered will become validated, and Qassem’s threat to “fight” disarmament could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed, the deal being brokered by Tom Barrack offers a potential pathway out of decades of conflict, but the approach is seen by some, not as good-faith problem-solving, but as an imposition based on a premature sense of victory. For example, Kim Ghattas, a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics and an FT contributing editor, argues that the belief Hezbollah would simply capitulate is "sorely deluded.” Hezbollah's identity, Ghattas argues, is transnational, its ultimate loyalty lies not with the Lebanese state but with Iran's Supreme Leader, making a purely national settlement a far more complex proposition.
The sense of an external, top-down imposition was personified by the Barrack himself. His controversial warning to Lebanese journalists to ‘act civilized” and not be “animalistic” was seen by many as deeply offensive. This attitude aligns with the critique from Lebanese academic Hussam Matar, who frames the plan as an attempt at "complete subjugation" rather than a respect for Lebanese sovereignty.
At its heart, the U.S.-led plan to defang Hezbollah demands that a once disenfranchised, now powerful community trade its arms — the very symbol of its identity and security — for a promise. Whether that promise is perceived as an opportunity or a trap will be the deciding factor between a nascent peace and a new civil war..
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Lloyd Austin, Kenneth McKenzie, and Mark Milley in 2021. (MSNBC screengrab)
It will be four years since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, ending a nearly 20-year occupation that could serve as a poster child for mission creep.
What began in October 2001 as a narrow intervention to destroy al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and topple the Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, morphed into an open-ended nation-building operation that killed 2,334 U.S. military personnel and wounded over 20,000 more.
But the failure of the war to deliver on its maximalist platitudes of bringing peace, democracy, and women’s rights to a nation that rejected them has obscured two of the most important lessons from the conflict and its end: first, the U.S. need not occupy a country indefinitely to prevent terrorism against the U.S. homeland. Second, the United States will severely punish any government that allows terrorist groups to attack U.S. targets from its territory, and the threat of U.S. punishment is a highly credible deterrent against state-sponsored terrorism.
Those two facts should be shouted from the rooftops of the nation’s capital any time members of the foreign policy establishment claim that the U.S. must deploy troops to far-off locales to prevent terrorist “safe havens” from emerging.
In fact, there have been zero terrorist attacks directly linked to Afghanistan against U.S. targets at home or abroad in the four years since the U.S. departed. Zero. The 2025 Bourbon Street attack, which killed 14 people, was perpetrated by a lone-wolf U.S. citizen who was “inspired” by ISIS ideology but acted alone, with no known contacts to the original ISIS or its Afghan affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K).
That’s despite fevered warnings of worst-case scenarios that would supposedly result if the U.S.-backed Afghan government crumbled in the wake of our military withdrawal. That government did fall, rapidly, and the Taliban regained control as feared. Yet we have not seen a resurgence of jihadist terrorism targeting the United States.
There are two big reasons why. First, effective counterterrorism does not require boots on the ground, so leaving Afghanistan has not hampered U.S. efforts in that security space. The United States is extraordinarily capable of detecting and disrupting international terrorist threats with over-the-horizon intelligence and targeting capabilities.
In the nearly 25 years since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism capabilities have grown so sophisticated that there are no “safe havens” from U.S. reach, even in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. The U.S. didn’t need troops on the ground to locate and kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul with a drone strike on his safe house in July 2022, for example.
Nor has a presence been necessary for authorities to foil the handful of plots tenuously linked to ISIS or ISIS-K against the U.S. in the past few years, including the 2024 Election Day plot in Oklahoma and a potential assault on a U.S. Army base in Michigan in 2025. Neither plot was well-advanced, and while the suspects believed they were conspiring with foreign terrorists, it’s not even clear those contacts were real. The would-be assailant in Michigan, a teenager, was actually communicating with undercover F.B.I. agents posing as ISIS members all along.
U.S. and allied intelligence services have also foiledmultipleplots in Europe linked to international terrorist groups since the U.S. left Afghanistan and were able to alertIran and Russia of the looming ISIS-K attacks on those countries in 2024 – warnings that were tragically disregarded by local authorities, resulting in the loss of nearly 250 lives.
Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan has actually made the U.S. less vulnerable to terrorism by depriving local groups of U.S. targets to attack. The last – and only – mass casualty attack ISIS-K perpetrated against the U.S. occurred during the chaotic withdrawal itself, when 13 U.S. troops providing crowd control at the Kabul airport were killed alongside 170 Afghan civilians by a lone suicide bomber.
With U.S. troops gone, hurting the U.S. is much more difficult. In fact, ISIS-K has never managed to strike U.S. targets outside of Afghanistan.
The second reason Afghanistan hasn’t devolved into a launching pad for anti-U.S. terrorism is that the Taliban government knows that the United States will not tolerate it — from Afghanistan or anywhere else. If the 20-year Afghanistan War proved anything, it’s that the threat of massive U.S. retaliation for state-sponsored terrorism is both deadly serious and a powerful deterrent against allowing terrorists to operate freely.
It's ironic that U.S. policymakers worry so much about establishing credibility in marginal situations but can’t recognize overwhelming U.S. credibility where it does exist.
It should be unsurprising, then, that the Taliban have largely upheld their pledge from the 2020 Doha peace deal to never again allow armed groups to menace the U.S. homeland from Afghan territory. That assurance was credible, not because of any trustworthiness or altruism on the Taliban’s part, but because it served the regime’s own interest in political survival. Permitting a repeat of 9/11 would be regime suicide, and since returning to power, the Taliban have fought a protracted campaign to weaken ISIS-K.
Moreover the Taliban has not allowed al-Qaeda to revive itself, despite friendly ties to the group. Al-Qaeda “is all but destroyed” in Afghanistan, according to Bruce Riedel, a former U.S. counterterrorism official, and U.S. intelligence believes the group is unlikely to reconstitute.
Realizing that boots on the ground are unnecessary to disrupt foreign plots and deter state-sponsored terrorism should be enormously consequential for security efforts going forward. It means the U.S. can safely end its anti-ISIS mission in Iraq next month, as planned, and withdraw all 2,500 U.S. troops from the country by the end of 2026.
It also reinforces the wisdom of the ongoing U.S. drawdown from Syria and suggests the U.S. footprint there should be completely removed. And it undercuts any rationale for deploying U.S. forces across more than 10 countries in Africa — or anywhere else — that purported “sanctuaries” could arise.
The U.S. must implement the lessons learned from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Those lessons came at a steep price. Let’s do what we can to not pay it ever again.
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Top image credit: France's Prime Minister Francois Bayrou arrives to hear France's President Emmanuel Macron deliver a speech to army leaders at l'Hotel de Brienne in Paris on July 13, 2025, on the eve of the annual Bastille Day Parade in the French capital. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS
If you wanted to create a classic recipe for political crisis, you could well choose a mixture of a stagnant economy, a huge and growing public debt, a perceived need radically to increase military spending, an immigration crisis, a deeply unpopular president, a government without a majority in parliament, and growing radical parties on the right and left.
In other words, France today. And France’s crisis is only one part of the growing crisis of Western Europe as a whole, with serious implications for the future of transatlantic relations.
The latest shock in France has come with the announcement by Prime Minister Francois Bayrou that he will call a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 over his plan for €43.8 billion ($51.1 billion) in budget cuts to address France’s budget deficit 5.8 percent of GDP — almost double the three percent that is supposed to be the limit for members of the Eurozone, and the highest in Europe after Greece and Italy, leading to a debt to GDP ratio of 113 percent. French GDP growth last year was only 1.2 percent and the economy is projected to grow by a mere 0.6 percent this year.
Bayrou’s plan includes the freezing of welfare payments, reductions in pensioners’ benefits, the abolition of two national holidays, deep cuts to state jobs, and unspecified tax increases for the wealthy. The only area of state spending that will increase is the military — and it is President Macron’s pledge (in line with the promise of Europe’s NATO members to President Trump) radically to increase military spending that has brought France’s fiscal crisis to a head.
This would involve the French military budget rising from around two percent now to 3.5 percent (plus another 1.5 percent in “defense-related” infrastructure spending). In July, Macron promised that the French military budget would reach €64 billion in 2027, three years earlier than previously planned and twice the figure in 2017. He also promised that this would not involve any increase in debt. Bayrou’s thankless task is to try to reconcile these two promises.
Bayrou is prime minister today because his predecessor, Michel Barnier, was ousted nine months ago in a vote of no confidence after he passed the 2025 budget by emergency decree having failed to gain a parliamentary majority for budget cuts. This was the first time a government had been ousted by a no confidence vote since 1962.
Bayrou stands a very good chance of being the second premier in a year to fall this way. On the face of it, his challenge looks insuperable. The loose coalition of centrist parties that supports the government was beaten in the snap elections called by Macron in the summer of 2024, and despite an election deal with the left in the second round to keep National Rally (which won a plurality of votes) down to third place in the number of seats, have only 210 seats in the National Assembly, compared to 142 for the radical rightists National Rally and its allies, and 180 for the left-wing New Popular Front.
Both of these groupings have declared that they will vote to oust the government if it persists with its budget plan. The socialists are strongly opposed to austerity measures, and are allied with trades unions that have announced a nationwide strike on September 10 to block the budget.
As for Marine le Pen, leader of the National Rally, her friendliness towards the government is hardly likely to have been increased by what many see as a politically-motivated legal case launched against her by the government, which (unless overturned on appeal) will lead to her being banned from standing in the next presidential elections.
If Bayrou’s government falls, there are likely to be fresh parliamentary elections; and the premier’s best chance may be that neither of the opposition blocs are afraid that the French public would blame them for a new political crisis, and that if the government is prepared to abandon some of its budget cuts (or covertly abandon the case against Le Pen), one or other could abstain in the no-confidence vote, leading to a government victory.
This is far from certain however. Radical socialist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has already said that Macron himself should resign if the government loses new elections.
The implications of this crisis extend far beyond the borders of France. Bayrou has warned that if it does not reduce its debt, France will risk the fate of Greece after the 2008 financial crisis, when it suffered years of recession and very harsh and bitterly unpopular austerity measures imposed by the European Union (at the instigation of Germany) as a condition of its bailouts.
It seems inconceivable however that Brussels would be able to impose such austerity measures on France, the second largest economy in the EU. Presiding over deepening economic decline would be the politically easier choice. Moreover Germany, the largest economy, is facing severe budgetary problems of its own. Disputes over the budget brought down the last German coalition government.
The present coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have agreed (despite deep unhappiness among fiscal conservatives in the CDU) to increase borrowing from €33 billion in 2024 to €81 billion this year and €126 billion in 2029 in order to pay for a doubling of Germany’s military spending and huge (and badly needed) investment in infrastructure. Economists are warning however that this will not be sustainable without cuts in social welfare. As elsewhere in Europe, Germany’s problems in this regard are being worsened by its aging population, which both reduces the tax base and creates a huge lobby against cuts to pensions and healthcare.
The German elections in February saw a surge in support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which opinion polls now show as close to overtaking the Christian Democrats as the most popular party. If this rise is sustained up to the next German national elections due in 2029, then one of two things will happen: either the other parties will maintain their “firewall” against allowing AfD into government, which will require a permanent, unstable and deeply divided coalition of perhaps all the other parties against them, or the firewall will collapse, leading to a German government far to the right of anything seen since 1945.
In Britain too, the Labour government of Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular. It has suffered two humiliating revolts by its own MPs against its attempts to cut social welfare so as to increase military spending and is facing the defection of many of its voters to a new left-wing party. Debt to GDP stands at 103 percent and rising.
As in France and Germany, the right-wing populist Reform Party of Nigel Farage is surging in the polls, and has a real chance of forming the next British government.
Some of these radical parties of the right and left (like AfD and the socialists in France) are openly opposed to European military support for Ukraine and increases in military spending. Others fell in line behind NATO under the shock of the Russian invasion, but are strongly opposed to a European reassurance force for Ukraine. All believe (though with very different emphases) that their countries’ problems are overwhelmingly internal ones, that will not be solved by higher military spending.
The lessons for the Trump administration are the following: first, be very skeptical of European promises to significantly increase military spending. Even if present governments are sincere, it may well be simply beyond their power.Second, however, be careful of pushing them too hard. The political and economic stability of Europe is an old and vital US interest — far more vital than the exact borders of Ukraine.
Finally, be even more careful about encouraging and guaranteeing a European “reassurance force” for Ukraine. Lacking both adequate resources and adequate political support, the European planners of this force are in no position to guarantee it themselves.
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