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Responsible Statecraft
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.
Top photo credit: Lockheed Martin MGM-140 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System)
'Arsenal of democracy'? Arms makers the only winners in Ukraine
February 24, 2026
This article is part of a special series recognizing the four-year anniversary of the Ukraine War.
Helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion was an appropriate policy, and sending Kyiv the weapons to carry out the task itself made sense. Unlike cases like Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza or Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Yemen, it could be reasonably argued that in Ukraine at least, U.S. arms supplies were being used for defensive purposes.
But the arms lobby and the Biden and Trump administrations weren’t content to leave it at that. On May 3, 2022, less than three months after the original Russian incursion into Ukraine, President Biden visited a Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, Arkansas where Javelin missiles that were being sent to the Ukrainian armed forces were being built, and called the workers there part of the “arsenal of democracy.” The president failed to explain how other U.S. arms exports to undemocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and the Philippines fit that framing.
Not only was supplying Ukraine good branding for the U.S. weapons industry, it was good business. Transfers have totaled over $70 billion. In some cases, companies like RTX and Lockheed Martin had to wait to get paid, as initial transfers to Ukraine came from U.S. government stocks, and the companies were then paid to build new weapons to replace them.
The Ukraine war also gave fuel to longstanding industry arguments about the need to dramatically expand U.S. arms making capabilities to keep a steady flow of weapons and ammunition flowing to Kyiv while sustaining adequate stocks for a potential conflict with China. To a significant degree this was a case of comparing apples and oranges. Ukraine is a ground war supplemented by intensive use of drones. A U.S.-China conflict would rely more on naval power and long-range strikes, not artillery barrages. But the argument worked, and the Pentagon budget is now soaring past $1 trillion per year based on arguments for a bulked up weapons industrial base to address contingencies like Ukraine and China, and, to the everlasting shame of the U.S. government, Gaza.
Industry executives were not shy in talking about how supplying Ukraine would boost their bottom lines. For example, A few months into the war RTX (formerly Raytheon) CEO Greg Hayes said the following:
“Look, we don’t apologize for making these systems, making these weapons. The fact is, they are incredibly effective in deterring and dealing with the threat that the Ukrainians are seeing today. … I think again recognizing that we are there to defend democracy and the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time.”
And in May of 2022, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet received the star treatment in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’ Sunday interview show Face the Nation. Taiclet was treated with such respect — verging on adulation — by Brennan for his company’s role in arming Ukraine that media critic Dan Froomkin described the segment as the equivalent of an “infomercial” for Lockheed.
In its case, the military tech sector claimed — falsely, in some instances — that Silicon Valley products used in Ukraine were showing their value for the wars of the future. But as a Wall Street Journal investigation showed, Silicon Valley produced drones that often proved to be too brittle and too costly for the task at hand. Instead, Kyiv has turned to a massive DIY production program that uses commercial drones — often purchased from China. Since they are often used as suicide drones, the Ukrainian-assembled systems are adequate to the task, absent the costly bells and whistles incorporated into many U.S. systems.
The ultimate benefit of the Ukraine war for the weapons industry was for propaganda purposes. They have exploited the war to push longstanding policy desires like faster vetting and production of weapons destined for foreign clients, reducing human rights reviews and attempting to gut independent testing and safeguards against price gouging and shoddy work. The industry is focused on speeding weapons out the door, and when it comes to arming the kinds of regimes on the U.S. client list, speed kills.
The conflict in Ukraine needs to be resolved in a fashion acceptable to the Ukrainian people, one that stops the killing and protects their nation from future Russian aggression. But much of the new Pentagon spending justified by the arms lobby’s skewed “lessons” from the war will do nothing to defend Ukraine now or in the future, and everything to line the pockets of weapons makers, their executives, their lobbyists, and their financiers. That is a path to endless war, not peace and stability.
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Top photo credit: Gemini AI
History tells us coercion through airpower alone won’t work
February 24, 2026
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has deployed a massive U.S. naval and air armada to the vicinity of Iran, seeking to coerce the Islamic Republic into signing a deal that mostly favors the U.S. side.
These assets have arrived with explicit and public warnings that comply and “say uncle” or be punished from the sky.
Meanwhile, Iranian and American diplomats have been negotiating indirectly in Oman, with another meeting planned for Thursday, to find a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. wants Iran to dismantle and give up its uranium enrichment program, while Iran continues to insist that it is exercising its rights under the Article IV of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
What is unfolding bears the hallmarks of 21st Century gunboat diplomacy, in which naval and air power are deployed not merely as deterrents, but as instruments of coercive bargaining.
As of this writing, Trump has discussed limited airstrikes to coerce Iran to sign a deal, or face larger campaigns against “regime facilities” potentially aimed at toppling the Islamic Republic. Some reports have also suggested that one of the potential scenarios against Iran is a direct strike against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his son, Mojtaba. The logic behind Trump’s thinking is quite straightforward: he believes that after the June 2025 war on Iran conducted with Israel, and the recent massive protests in the country, the Iranian leadership, which is grappling with multiple crises at the same time, would be desperate for a deal.
But Trump’s assumption rests on a familiar, but flawed, strategic premise that air campaigns are an effective instrument of coercing adversarial states into submission, or in the case of U.S. policy on Iran, bringing an end to the Islamic Republic. It echoes a long lineage of airpower doctrines dating back to Giulio Douhet’s early 20th century notion that bombing cities could shatter morale and force governments to submit to political demands.
For presidents wary of protracted ground wars, airpower can appear to provide decisive action while minimizing American casualties and long-term commitments. Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has bombed Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela, and has kidnapped a country’s leader, at almost no cost to the United States.
Time and again, however, modern warfare has demonstrated the limits of this notion.
During Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam (1965–1968), the United States launched a sustained bombing campaign intended to compel North Vietnam to negotiate on American terms. Instead, Hanoi adapted by dispersing infrastructure, hardening defenses, and mobilizing political resolve. The bombing failed to break North Vietnam’s will or force meaningful concessions.
In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, sustained aerial attacks did not by themselves compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait; it was the ground invasion that proved decisive. More recently, Russia’s air and missile campaign against Ukraine underscores the same strategic lesson: sustained strikes on infrastructure and military targets, absent decisive control on the ground, have failed to compel the political leadership in Kiev to agree to Moscow’s territorial ambitions.
University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape’s systematic study of air campaigns reinforces this pattern. Airpower tends to succeed not through punishment of civilian infrastructure, but when it is linked to a credible threat to seize or hold territory. Even NATO’s campaign in Kosovo — often cited as a triumph of airpower — became coercive only when Serbian forces on the ground were increasingly threatened and the prospect of a NATO invasion appeared plausible. The lesson is consistent: without jeopardizing territorial control, bombing alone rarely compels capitulation or surrender.
Iran is unlikely to be an exception to the rule. The United States’ unmatched air superiority is a powerful tool for destruction, but that does not necessarily translate into political submission. President Masoud Pezeshkian captured this sentiment when he announced on February 21 that “world powers are lining up to force us to bow our heads… but we will not bow our heads despite all the problems that they are creating for us.”
Indeed, Iran, because of its size and strategic depth, can absorb plenty of punishment from the air without capitulating. In fact, the last time Iran was forced to surrender to a foreign adversary was when British and Soviet forces violated its neutrality during the Second World War and occupied Iran in August 1941, after it refused to capitulate to their demands to expel German nationals from its territory.
The Islamic Republic has spent decades preparing precisely for a confrontation defined by superior U.S. firepower, and its military doctrine emphasizes asymmetric warfare, dispersal, and hardened facilities. Reports indicate that in the anticipation of U.S. air strikes, Iran has begun reinforcing its nuclear facilities to minimize the impact of U.S. attacks. Even in the event of total destruction, Iran has the technological and industrial capacity to rebuild them over time: bombs can destroy physical infrastructure, but cannot destroy knowledge and technology.
More importantly, the Islamic Republic's political system is quite resilient. It was born into a revolution, survived assassinations and a total war for eight years, and consolidated itself under decades of U.S. economic warfare without capitulating. During the Iran–Iraq War, Iran absorbed hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, yet the Islamic Republic neither collapsed nor surrendered.
Instead, the war was framed as a sacred defense of the nation, and the language of sacrifice and martyrdom became embedded in state ideology and political mobilization. This historical experience matters. The regime is structurally insulated from popular pressure in ways that limit the coercive leverage airpower seeks to generate, and it possesses institutional mechanisms to ensure leadership continuity even in the event of decapitation strikes.
At the same time, Iranian decision-makers understand the asymmetry in casualty sensitivity. American political culture, shaped by democratic accountability and media scrutiny, tends to react sharply to sustained losses. By contrast, Iranian culture has historically demonstrated a far higher tolerance for prolonged hardship and sacrifice in the face of external attack. Under such conditions, aerial punishment is more likely to consolidate regime cohesion and nationalist resolve than to compel capitulation.
Airpower is an imperfect instrument of political coercion. It can destroy facilities. It cannot occupy territory, replace regimes, or compel durable political surrender absent credible ground threats. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s central warning was that war has its own dynamics once begun. Political leaders may choose when to start it, but they do not control its trajectory in a linear way. Once force is unleashed, escalation, retaliation and unintended consequences often follow paths that no planner fully anticipates.
If Washington proceeds under the illusion that bombs alone can coerce Tehran, it may discover what history has repeatedly shown: punishment from the sky often hardens resolve rather than breaks it — and wars begun as instruments of pressure can evolve into conflicts far larger than those who initiated them intended.
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Top photo credit: Jose HERNANDEZ Camera 51/Shutterstock
Ukraine's Dilemma
February 24, 2026
This article is part of a special series recognizing the four-year anniversary of the Ukraine War.
As the full-scale war enters its fifth year, Ukraine finds itself in an impossible position: keep fighting or accept defeat.
For a year, they have managed to hold their own in peace talks in which Kyiv is being asked to cede valuable defensive positions and territory in the Donbas in return for questionable security assurances from Moscow. (Russia has made it clear that it will never allow Western troops to enter Ukraine to monitor a future peace deal.) They will, as President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, fight on if necessary. But how long can Ukraine keep it up?
The balance of forces
The basic arithmetic behind the conflict is straightforward. The Russian population is four times larger than that of Ukraine. The Russian economy is 10 times larger, and the Russians were preparing for war for years. So in the long term, the odds are stacked in Russia’s favor.
However, the economy of the European Union is 10 times that of Russia, and that of the U.S. is 15 times larger. So as long as Ukraine’s Western partners keep it supplied with money and weapons, Ukraine has a fighting chance of staving off the Russian assault. But despite an 80% increase in defense spending in Europe since 2021, Russia is still producing four times as much ammunition as NATO and the U.S. has curtailed much of its aid beyond what was pledged during the last administration.
Russia has over 5,000 nuclear weapons, and has repeatedly threatened to use them if it decides there is an "existential" threat to its security. That means the Western powers have been unwilling to commit their own troops to the conflict. Russia meanwhile, has brought in 14,000 soldiers from North Korea and also recruited mercenaries from Nepal to South Africa, with more than 1,000 coming from Kenya.
Staying in the game
Ukraine can take heart from the fact that it defied the odds and has survived four years of war against a much larger, better armed and more ruthless adversary. It prevented the Russians from taking Odesa and occupying the north coast of the Black Sea. It sank one third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, including its flagship, the cruiser Moskva. In fall 2022 Ukraine recaptured half the territory taken by the Russians in the initial assault.
In August 2024 Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Russian Federation, seizing territory in Kursk province for several months (before being expelled). It has repeatedly struck air bases, arms factories, and oil refineries deep inside Russian territory.
Technology has been a factor in leveling the playing field, to a degree. Ukraine’s deployment of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles helped to blunt the initial Russian assault, and their early and effective use of drones for surveillance and strikes was key to their pushback of Russian forces in fall 2022. After a slow start Russia has also developed effective drone forces, and always had strong electronic warfare capacity.
Access to U.S. satellite surveillance and communication systems such as Starlink has been a decisive advantage for the Ukrainians. These new technologies have shifted the advantage back towards the defending forces, which means that Russia is now having to pay dearly for its incremental territorial gains in Donbas. Russia has captured less than 1.5% of Ukrainian territory since 2024, at a steep cost. As Michael Kofman likes to put it, Putin’s political goals have consistently exceeded Russia’s military capabilities.
A war of attrition
Apart from the dead and injured soldiers and the shattered economy, Russia’s relentless assault on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine has inflicted prolonged pain and suffering on the civilian population of Ukraine. This campaign has reached a crescendo over the first two months of 2026, leaving millions of Ukrainians without power and heat as temperatures fell below freezing. One is reminded of the saying of Tsar Nicholas I, that his two best generals were General January and General February.
The mood, by all accounts, is grim. Veteran CNN reporter Clarissa Ward talks about Ukrainian society as “broken,” “at breaking point,” and “desperate for an end.” On the other hand, Ukrainians don't want to believe all the sacrifices of the past four years were in vain. Ukrainian novelist Andrei Kurkov agrees that the mood is bleak, but notes that the Ukrainian people have shown incredible resilience. Ukrainian democracy is under severe strain having endured under martial law since the onset of the war. The country has seen a series of corruption scandals which led to resignations of some of the top officials in Zelensky’s administration.
A July 2025 Gallup poll found 69% of Ukrainians favored “a negotiated end” whereas 24% wanted to “fight until victory.” Those numbers have changed since 2022, when the figures were 22% and 73% respectively. Nevertheless, a December 2025 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology reported 75% oppose ceding the remainder of Donbas as part of a peace deal.
The end game
Over the past year, since Trump’s return to the White House, attention has focused on Trump’s efforts to end the war, which many suggest would force Zelensky to accept a land-for-peace deal. Trump said on January 14, “I think he (Putin) is ready to make a deal. I think Ukraine is less ready to make a deal."
Zelensky, with the support of the Europeans, has maintained he is willing to negotiate in good faith, while insisting that he is unwilling to give up more territory, and wants security guarantees in place as part of any peace. Polling indicates that the Ukrainian public supports these positions. In recent weeks attention has shifted towards demands that Ukraine hold elections, ostensibly for democracy, but with the real goal of removing Zelensky from power. In January 2026 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “proposals for a settlement aiming to keep the Nazi regime in [what remains of] Ukraine are absolutely unacceptable."
This is consistent with Russia’s long-term approach to managing Ukraine: looking for compliant pro-Russian leaders such as Viktor Yanukovych, president from 2010-2014. The problem is that the devastating impact of the war has eradicated the middle ground in Ukrainian politics. It is hard to imagine any future Ukrainian president being willing to seek some modus vivendi with Moscow and the restoration of cultural and economic ties. Too much blood has been spilled.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff’s peace plan reportedly included a clause giving Ukraine 100 days to hold elections. Zelensky was reportedly planning spring elections and a referendum on a peace plan under pressure by the Trump administration. Those reports were roundly dismissed by Zelensky, however, who said there will only be elections when a ceasefire and security guarantees are in place. Experts say it would be impossible to hold elections while the country is still under martial law.
In the meantime, the Ukrainian government needs a total of €137 billion for this year and the next to keep the war effort going and its government operating. In December, the European Council agreed to lend €90 billion to Ukraine over the next two years, but the decision so far has been blocked by Hungary because Ukraine had failed to repair the damaged Druzhba pipeline bringing oil from Russia.
But the main constraint on Ukraine’s war effort is shortage of manpower. Its prewar population of 36 million has shrunk to 32 million due to emigration. There are no official casualty numbers but outside estimates have pegged the wounded at upwards of 600,0000 and killed at upwards of 140,000. Meanwhile an estimated two million Ukrainians have avoided military service, 200,000 soldiers were absent without official leave, and enforcement of the conscription regime has grown increasingly brutal. Ukraine may well run out of fighters before Russia does.
Ukrainians are losing so much — a true, fair negotiated peace will ensure they don't lose more. Four years into the war neither side has won, and both have all the incentive right now to stick with negotiations to end it.
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