According to the state department on Wednesday, Washington is slapping new sanctions on Iran’s petroleum and petrochemical producers, along with Hong Kong and Emirati companies accused of selling the oil on East Asia markets in violation of existing embargoes.
In a tweet, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “absent a commitment from Iran to return to the JCPOA, an outcome we continue to pursue, we will keep using our authorities to target Iran's exports of energy products.” But is this really the best way to get back into a deal that Washington was the first to leave, and for which talks have been on thin ice and time is ticking away? Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi, author of “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy,” weighs in.
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Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
When it comes to the Ukraine war, there have long been two realities. One is propagated by former Biden administration officials in speeches and media interviews, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion had nothing to do with NATO’s U.S.-led expansion into the now shattered country, there was nothing that could have been done to prevent what was an inevitable imperialist land-grab, and that negotiations once the war started to try to end the killing were not only impossible, but morally wrong.
Then there is the other, polar opposite reality that occasionally slips through when officials think few people are listening, and which was recently summed up by former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council Amanda Sloat, in an interview with Russian pranksters whom she believed were aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’ — which at that point it may well have done,” Sloat told the pranksters. “There is certainly a question, three years on now, you know, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and loss of life.”
When asked moments later if Ukraine and its Western partners could have avoided the whole war and if they had “made a mistake somewhere,” Sloat again suggested, unprompted, that addressing Russian concerns around NATO’s expansion into Ukraine may have been the way to prevent the war.
“If you wanna do an alternative version of history, you know, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January 2022, ‘Fine, we won’t go into NATO, we’ll stay neutral,’” Sloat said. “Ukraine could’ve made a deal in March, April 2022 around the Istanbul talks.”
It’s worth breaking down these few sentences to understand their full significance. Sloat, a high-ranking former Biden official closely involved in Ukraine policy, is saying that:
1. Ukraine explicitly affirming its neutrality would have likely stopped the invasion from happening.
2. This would have prevented the enormous death and destruction experienced by Ukraine at Russia’s hands the last three years.
3. Ukraine could have made this deal at least as late as the Istanbul talks shortly after Russia’s invasion.
4. The Biden administration explored doing this to prevent the war, but ultimately rejected the idea.
But why did the Biden team reject it, if it would have meant preventing a war that by any estimation has been enormously bloody and costly for millions of Ukrainians?
“I was uncomfortable with the idea of the U.S. pushing Ukraine not to do that, and sort of implicitly giving Russia some sort of sphere of influence or veto power over that,” Sloat said about her own position. When asked about Biden’s thinking, she offered: “I don’t think Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then. To tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO.”
Sloat, in other words, quietly admitted that she at least preferred letting the war happen if the alternative was giving Russia a de facto veto over NATO membership. Her claim, however, that she and Biden were squeamish about pressuring Ukraine is harder to take seriously.
U.S. policy toward Ukraine has often involved pressuring both its officials and its population to reluctantly accept measures they were against, particularly when it came to NATO. George W. Bush pushed Ukraine’s entry into NATO despite overwhelming, vehement public opposition among Ukrainians in the early 2000s, and leaked diplomatic cables I reported on two years ago show U.S. officials at the time discussing with their Ukrainian counterparts how to make the Ukrainian public “more favorable” to the idea. In fact, this was often Biden’s personal role during the Obama years, pressing Ukrainian officials to pass unpopular domestic reforms imposed by the IMF.
Sloat also makes another potential admission, when mentioning that Ukraine could have made a deal over its NATO status in the Istanbul talks in early 2022. “I know then there were differing views between our countries’ militaries around the counter-offensive,” she said. “I think during the Biden administration that had been the big hope of Ukraine getting back territory and being able to negotiate a better deal. That didn’t go as anybody wanted it to.”
This hews awfully close to what has long been both alleged by a variety of officials and other sources about the talks: that, as Ukraine’s Pravda newspaper first reported, Zelensky had been pressured to reject a deal to instead seek victory on the battlefield, with the governments of the U.K., U.S. and a variety of Eastern European NATO states reportedly being especially favorable to this ultimately disastrous idea.
Sloat is not the first to have made this admission. As I documented two years ago, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and former Biden Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both likewise explicitly said that NATO’s potential expansion into Ukraine was the core grievance that motivated Putin’s decision to invade, and that, at least according to Stoltenberg, NATO rejected compromising on it. Zelensky has now publicly agreed to this concession to advance peace talks — only three years later, with Ukraine now in physical ruins, its economy destroyed, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and survivors traumatized and disabled on a mass scale.
All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history. Critics of the war and NATO policy have long said the war and its devastating impact could have been avoided by explicitly ruling out Ukrainian entry into NATO, only to be told they were spreading Kremlin propaganda. It turns out they were simply spreading Biden officials' own private thoughts.
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Top photo credit: Senior military leaders look on as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) speaks at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Quantico, Virginia September 30, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Pool via REUTERS
The White House published its 2025 National Security Strategy on December 4. Today there are reports that the Pentagon is determined to develop new combatant commands to replace the bloated unified command plan outlined in current law.
The plan hasn't been made public yet, but according to the Washington Post:
If adopted, the plan would usher in some of the most significant changes at the military’s highest ranks in decades, in part following through on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s promise to break the status quo and slash the number of four-star generals in the military. It would reduce in prominence the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command by placing them under the control of a new organization known as U.S. International Command, according to five people familiar with the matter.
In addition, the plan reportedly calls for realigning U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Northern Command under a new headquarters to be known as U.S. Americas Command. As a result of these moves, the number of combatant commands would be reduced from 11 to 8 and would shrink the number of four-stars who report to Hegseth.
Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine is supposed to roll this out in detail to the secretary this week. “Those familiar with the plan said it aligns with the Trump administration’s national security strategy, released this month, which declares that the ‘days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,’” the Post reported.
The text of the NSS is short and frank. It renounces the pursuit of global domination, downgrades the Middle East to a peripheral concern, and announces that American military power will concentrate on the Western hemisphere unless the homeland comes under direct attack. On paper this looks like a sensible retreat from overstretch. In practice, it is a vague plan for a halfway house. Halfway houses seldom survive because they try to keep one foot in the past while pretending to step into the future.
Concrete measures are absent from the so-called strategy and the command structures to support it.
The following points must be addressed if anything is to change:
First, defend America first. Keep ground and air forces at home or close to it except when the United States or its treaty partners in this hemisphere face direct attack. In the 80 years since WW II, National Strategy relied on forward deployed armed force, a dangerous practice in a world where precision strike and surveillance are ubiquitous. At this point in the history of the United States, America’s global warfare state is both a strategic liability and a financial crash waiting to happen.
Second, secure the global commons without subsidizing everyone else on the planet. America must retain enough naval and space power to keep sea lanes, air routes, and orbits open. This commitment benefits everyone. Everyone can contribute. Start charging or at least stop calling the current arrangement charity.
Third, it is a good idea if the Pentagon streamlines command structures as mentioned in the above Washington Post report. New commands should be theater command structures designed for defense, not offensive warfare. They should be associated with directions—North, South, East and West. Functional command structures should be consolidated into fewer, more agile headquarters.
Fourth, freeze all promotions to three- and four-star rank until a proper review is complete. The military currently boasts more admirals than ships and more generals than maneuver brigades. The goal should be to cut overhead by at least 30 percent and restore clear civilian control. Keep in mind that true lethality begins with the creation of new fighting formations consisting of Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines with new equipment who’ve lived and trained together for long periods under competent leadership.
Fifth, cultivate partnerships with major states that share an interest in access to the global commons and the suppression of criminality. For instance, the Indian Navy already patrols vast areas of the Indian Ocean from the Strait of Malacca to the Red Sea. American Naval Power does not need to always be present in the region to perform this task.
Sixth, rebuild the national industrial base. Identify the shipyards, factories, and supply chains needed for great-power competition and protect them. Closing many of the overseas bases that no longer serve a strategic purpose would free roughly 10 billion dollars a year according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. Spend the money on steel mills and semiconductor fabs instead of glossy programs that promise miracles and deliver slide decks.
Seventh, Operation Southern Spear illustrates the danger of old habits colliding with new rhetoric. Attacking Venezuela because Washington has the capability to do so is reminiscent of the decision to intervene in Vietnam. American military and economic hegemony are prohibitively expensive because Washington persists in confusing foreign intervention with national defense. Unless there is an identified, attainable political-military objective for American Military Power, Washington should avoid its use.
The new national security strategy and the interest in reducing the numbers of unified commands admits in principle that America’s current military posture is unsustainable, but more than the admission is needed. Washington has spent over half its tax dollars on military operations since World War II, and by 2022, its military budget alone exceeded that of the next ten countries combined. This massive military spending diverts resources from domestic infrastructure, education, and social programs.
Apart from nuclear arsenals, no foreign adversary poses an existential threat to the American homeland. Terrorism and transnational criminality persist, but both are matters for border security and police work. In most cases, they do not entail carrier strike groups or the commitment of World War II-style Army Divisions.
The new national security strategy and the concept of fewer unified commands is a step in the right direction, but it remains a halfway house that won’t crush the swollen headquarters or the single service parochialism that stifles innovation. Halfway houses fail because they compromise with conservative habits of mind that are tied to the status quo.
The above-mentioned points can advance the goals outlined in the new National Security Strategy, but without them, the problems afflicting American military performance since 1965 will not be solved.
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Top image credit: U.S. Soldiers assigned to Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard and Alpha Company, 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, conduct a civil engagement within the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility Oct. 12, 2025 (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Zachary Ta)
Two U.S. National Guard soldiers died in an ambush in Syria this past weekend.
Combined with overuse of our military for non-essential missions, ones unnecessary to our core interests, the overreliance of part-time servicemembers continues to have disastrous effects. President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and Congress have an opportunity to put a stop to the preventable deaths of our citizen soldiers.
In 2004, in Iraq, in a matter of weeks, I lost three close comrades I served with back in the New York National Guard. In the following months more New York soldiers, men I served with, would die.
In 2024, three U.S. Army reservists were killed at Tower 22 in Jordan supporting a mission whose purpose remains a mystery; and now two more soldiers were shot to death in Syria after being pulled from their civilian lives to serve in the Middle East.
None of these soldiers will ever return to the families and the lives they were called away from. We need to think about how we got here and why they were sacrificed.
The National Guard grew out of the U.S. tradition of states’ militias, and like the various branches’ reserves, historically served as a strategic military backup, for use during emergencies requiring large and rapid mobilizations of national military power.
This began to change in 1973 when the Department of Defense adopted the “Total Force Policy.” This post-Vietnam shift had several rationales and effects. With the end of conscription, the U.S. military needed a larger, more easily mobilized, and more integrated reserve. Additionally, many policymakers believed, in the wake of major conflicts in Korea and especially in Vietnam which relied nearly entirely on a draftee active-duty force, that greater reliance on part time citizen soldiers would lead to better decisions on when the U.S. would conduct large-scale, long-term military operations.
This resulted in an evolution from the traditional role of strategic reserves to a more integrated operational reserve force. By the 1990s, reserve and National Guard units were participating in the Gulf War and supplanting active duty forces on routine peacekeeping missions in the Sinai and in the Balkans. The evolution understandably changed immediately after September 11, 2001, when Air National Guard units scrambled to provide immediate patrols of skies. Shortly thereafter, then-Secretary Rumsfeld began large-scale mobilizations. They never stopped.
Since 2001, more than 900 U.S. reserve component service members have died in conflicts. A handful of these were among those called to action in Afghanistan after 9/11. The vast majority occurred during our prolonged nation-building efforts there and Iraq.
The military’s reserves now make up nearly 40% of the force, and our generals have grown too dependent on them. Active duty forces are stretched thin, and adding requirements for ground forces in peacekeeping, stability and support, and train and advise missions would stretch them even thinner.
So, we must ask “why are they there?” Are our operations in Iraq, Syria, or Jordan achieving truly “vital” national security objectives? Are they worth keeping our young men and women in remote locations far from home, away from civilian lives while facing constant attacks? Why do we remain committed to leaving 2,000 troops in Iraq alone?
The two soldiers killed in Syria over the weekend have been identified as Sgts. Edgar Brian Torres Tovar, 25, and William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of the Iowa National Guard. The Army reservists killed at Tower 22 in Jordan in 2024 were Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, all from Georgia. These names are added to the more than 8,000 service members who also died in the post September 11 conflicts.
President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have chosen to revert the Department of Defense into the Department of War. They have emphasized the proper role of the military as securing U.S. interests by use of force only when necessary. Secretary Hegseth has particularly called for a return to a military identity as a lethal fighting force.
Under the Total Force Policy, this includes the entire reserve component. This strategy implies that our reserve supply of citizen soldiers, sailors etc., should only be called to active duty when American interests are worth fighting for. It highlights the fact that our current “boots on the ground” missions in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East are not essential to the current administration’s definition of U.S. interests, especially as clarified under the new National Security Strategy.
The “Total Force Policy,” in its 21st century interpretation, is probably here to stay. We can’t return to a military that relies almost solely on our active-duty force. We can, however, ensure that when we do call up our part-time military members, it is only for true national interests.
Our current interests in the Middle East are not worth the lives of “boots on the ground,” from any service component, citizen soldiers least of all. The White House and Congress should cooperate to ensure we are wisely deploying our young service members into danger only when necessary.
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