Nearly 60 percent of Americans would support the United States engaging in diplomatic efforts "as soon as possible" to end the war in Ukraine, even if that means Ukraine having to make concessions to Russia, according to a new poll.
The survey, conducted by Data for Progress on behalf of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, also found that a plurality (49 percent) said the Biden administration and Congress have not done enough diplomatically to help end the war (37 percent said they had).
The poll’s release comes after Vladimir Putin doubled down on Russia’s war in Ukraine by mobilizing reserves and issuing threats to use nuclear weapons after recent gains by the Ukrainian military near the country’s eastern border with Russia.
Moscow has also recently orchestrated referendums in some Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine on whether citizens there want to secede and become part of the Russian Federation, leading experts to believe that regardless of the outcome, Putin plans to illegally annex parts of Ukraine.
The survey also found that 47 percent said they support the continuation of U.S. military aid to Ukraine only if Washington is involved in ongoing diplomacy to end the war, while 41 percent said they would support aid regardless of whether the United States is engaged in negotiations.
Just six percent said Russia’s war in Ukraine is among the top three most important issues facing the United States today, with the top three being inflation (46 percent), jobs and the economy (31 percent), and gun violence (26 percent).
Ben Armbruster is the Managing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of politics, foreign policy, and media. Ben previously held senior editorial and management positions at Media Matters, ThinkProgress, ReThink Media, and Win Without War.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in Reykjavik, Iceland, on May 19, 2021. [State Department photo by Ron Przysucha]
In a new Al Jazeera docuseries called the Business of War, the Atlantic Council’s Mark Massa was left speechless in response to a question from journalist Hind Hassan about the think tank’s funding from weapons manufacturers. Massa, whose think tank accepted at least $10 million from Pentagon contractors in the past five years, paused for a revealing ten full seconds before stumbling through a non-answer.
“There have been some other think tanks and other organizations that have done an analysis of the recommendations that have been given by the Atlantic Council, and they found that it tends to benefit those same weapons companies that are also providing a lot of money towards the Atlantic Council,” Hassan said, adding, “How do you respond to that?”
“Well, all I’ll say is that the Atlantic Council has a very strong intellectual independence policy for our researchers and the work that we, that we produce,” said Massa, who is a deputy director in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
Hassan pressed the question.
“How can you unravel from the interests of weapons companies when there’s money coming in from them? I’m just trying to understand what the reasoning is behind that.”
Then, the 10-second-long pause — one second for every million dollars that the Atlantic Council accepted from weapons companies over the past five years.
“I think you’re right that it's something that a lot of people have commented on, the relationship…the relationship between, you know, the interests, we see this, we see this, you know, we see this often,” Massa said, seeming to stammer. “But I would say that, you know, if you’re interested in learning more about the Atlantic Council’s intellectual independence policy, I can connect you with people at my company who can talk to you about that.”
Massa struggled to respond because it is a plainly obvious appearance of a conflict of interest. The top 50 foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. accepted at least $35 million from top Pentagon contractors in the past five years. The Atlantic Council took over $1.2 million from SAAB, $850,000 from General Atomics, and $750,000 from RTX (formerly known as Raytheon). The real figures are likely far higher, because there is no legal requirement for think tanks to disclose their funding sources.
No matter how good a think tank’s intellectual independence policy is, think tank experts are aware of who their donors are. Sure enough, oftentimes those donors include friendly household names such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, companies that are less interested in pure academic research than they are in price-gouging the Pentagon and, for example, selling bombs being dropped in Gaza. As the executive director of a prominent DC think tank recently told me, “every donor has intent.”
Maybe what’s most revealing about the interview is that Massa mistakenly refers to the Atlantic Council as a “company” even though it is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Companies are beholden to shareholders, and those shareholders are looking for a return on investment. Think tanks have investors, too, but the return on investment that weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are looking for is not monetary, at least not immediately. Instead they are hoping for the think tank to produce reports sympathetic to their bottom line, which are in turn cited by inquiring lawmakers and Pentagon officials to justify procuring more F-16s and ICBMs. That is their return on investment.
You don’t have to look that far for evidence of that. Earlier in the same interview, Massa defended the U.S.’s right to use nuclear weapons to respond to cyberattacks, chemical weapons, and bioweapons:
“At the end of the day, if an adversary is inflicting strategic damage on the United States, it might not matter if that’s through large-scale use of nuclear weapons or through other high-consequences strategic attacks. There’s nothing magical about nuclear weapons,” he said.
Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on the Sentinel ICBM program, has given at least $350,000 to the Atlantic Council since 2019.
Massa, like other fellows at the Atlantic Council, has advocated for more investment in nuclear weapons such as the Sentinel program. He co-published a piece at the Atlantic Council titled, “Don’t cut corners on US nuclear deterrence,” which argued that there is “simply no room to cut the number of ICBMs at this moment” and that investment in the Sentinel program “is necessary but not sufficient to maintain strategic deterrence.” The Sentinel program has sparked controversy due to the program’s soaring cost — recent estimates indicate it could cost up to $160 billion, more than double its initial $77 billion price tag — which goes unmentioned in Massa’s piece.
At the very least, the Atlantic Council is commendably transparent about its funding sources. Over a third of the major foreign policy think tanks do not reveal anything at all about their donors, and some think tanks are trending in the wrong direction. The Center for American Progress, for example, quietly took down its donor list earlier this month, citing concerns about the Trump administration’s “targeting leaders and institutions that have challenged the president’s actions.”
Kudos to Hassan for asking a question that most in Washington are afraid to. Until journalists and policymakers call this what it is — a conflict of interest — weapons contractors will keep getting the best return on investment in town.
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump meets with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte after his call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Monday, August 18, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
The failure of this week’s meeting in Washington to move the needle forward toward peace hinges, in my opinion, on the failure of the participants to properly understand the security dilemma they are facing.
Rather than seeking security for all, Europe is still seeking partial security, only for Ukraine. This short-sightedness stems from the desire to punish Russia, which argues that it is only defending its national interests.
It is telling that, toward the end of their joint press conference, Putin said he agreed with Trump’s claim that this war could have been prevented if Trump had been president. Many saw this as a throw-away line designed to ingratiate himself to Trump, but I believe that Putin was remarking on how different Trump’s approach to the conflict is from that of his predecessor. While Biden saw NATO as an unvarnished force for good; Trump appears to appreciate that it can also be seen as a threat, especially by those who have been excluded from it.
The arguments in favor of NATO expansion are all about the way the world “ought” to be. To understand why NATO can be seen as a threat, however, we must distinguish between what “ought” to be, and what “is.”
In the idealistic world of “how things ought to be,” NATO expansion is always benign because its members are democracies. Objecting to NATO expansion is therefore synonymous with objecting to the expansion of democracy. NATO thus becomes the Instrument of Democracy, seen as the summum bonum.
That is why NATO’s relentless expansion has always been a core security issue for Russia. Whatever else it may be, NATO remains, first and foremost, a military alliance, one that should now be preparing itself, according to the head of NATO's Military Committee for a “wartime scenario.”
NATO’s military function, accompanied by the longstanding exclusion of Russia from possible membership, even though it asked to be considered at least four times, makes its expansion a threat. And the same would hold true for any country whose security environment is so drastically altered.
Thus, when Putin says that a true peace settlement must address “the root causes” of the conflict, he is not just talking about specific grievances. He is also referring to the West’s deep-seated sense of moral supremacy that underlies them.
Understanding this is vital, because it means that there can be no true and lasting peace in Europe until multiple moralities learn to coexist. An important step in this direction would be having both Russia and Ukraine become part of a larger, pan-European security framework.
For Russia, this means that the West would have to give up the notion that security can be achieved by building up defenses against all its putative enemies, and instead embrace the idea that peace can only be achieved in partnership with its putative enemies, through dialogue. At times, the West has seemed to agree with this principle (in both the Istanbul Summit of 1999 and Astana Summit of 2010), but in practice it often reverts to coercion and brute force to achieve results that better suit its interests.
Such a dialogue was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ambition, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decision, made by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, to expand NATO while simultaneously excluding Russia from it, is the main reason the Cold War never truly ended, and has now erupted into war. At the time, Boris Yeltsin told Clinton that NATO expansion was not a problem, but “Russia has to be the first country to join NATO.”
The solution to this security dilemma is as obvious today as it was then — a pan-European security framework that embraces Russia and its neighbors, rather than excludes some of them. The reluctance of European leaders to discuss this openly suggests that they are still thinking of containing Russia, along the lines that John Foster Dulles envisioned in the 1950s.
They have forgotten that it was not rollback and liberation that led to the end of communism, but détente, rapprochement, and the Helsinki Process of the 1970s. Western leaders, however, only came to realize the need for coexistence after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do we really need another such crisis today to remind us?
It may seem naïve to think about a European security framework that includes both Russia and Ukraine today. But if one wants to both end the war and secure a lasting peace for Europe, it is the only realistic option.
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Top photo credit: South Korean President Lee Jae Myung (You Tube) and President Donald Trump (Shutterstock/Wirestock Creators)
On August 25, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung will be visiting the White House for his long-anticipated first summit with President Donald Trump.
Having launched his presidency only in June, Lee hopes to use the summit as an opportunity to build a positive, cooperative relationship with Trump — a crucial diplomatic counterpart with whom he must learn to work to advance the U.S.-ROK alliance and achieve shared goals in the years to come.
The new trade deal that Seoul and Washington reached late last month will likely take center stage. The deal involves lowering U.S. tariffs on South Korean goods from 25% to 15% in exchange for South Korean investments in key American sectors, most notably shipbuilding, as well as purchases of U.S. energy products and ensuring greater access to the South Korean market for American cars and agricultural products.
Lee and Trump are expected to review the various aspects of their deal and formally announce it to the public.
While the trade deal will contribute to creating a positive atmosphere, several pending complex alliance issues could raise tensions, particularly regarding how the financial and military burdens of sustaining the alliance will be shared into the future.
Trump has long suggested that America’s allies have been free-riding on Washington’s extended deterrence and has called on U.S. allies to dramatically increase their defense spending and overall financial contributions. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them,” Trump has warned in the past. South Korea has been no exception.
During his first term, in an apparent bid to press Seoul into paying significantly more for the stationing of U.S. Forces Korea, Trump ordered the Pentagon to consider withdrawing them. Trump raised the issue again during last year’s presidential campaign, suggesting that South Korea should pay up to ten times what it is paying now.
If Trump brings it up again, Lee will likely agree on the need to enhance South Korea’s financial responsibility for the alliance. Anticipating that likelihood, in advance of the summit, Seoul has been reportedly preparing a concrete plan to accommodate Trump’s demands, including a multi-year commitment to increasing South Korea’s defense spending.
Whether that proves sufficient to satisfy the U.S. president remains to be seen, although both sides should be prepared to compromise.
When it comes to burden-sharing, the more contentious issue could be whether there is agreement on the strategic priorities for U.S. forces based in South Korea. Trump’s Pentagon has stressed its intention to “prioritize” deterrence and warfighting against China and concentrate its forces on that goal. A number of the administration’s defense officials and military strategists have publicly urged shifting the operational focus of U.S. Forces Korea from North Korea to China — including responding to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan — and placing South Korean forces predominantly in charge of deterring North Korea.
This idea of expanding the so-called “strategic flexibility” of U.S. Forces Korea is likely to draw resistance from Lee if Trump raises the issue. The concept is unpopular in South Korea for quite obvious reasons; it heightens the danger of the country being pulled into an unwanted war with China while degrading military readiness against North Korea.
A recent survey found that South Koreans would overall strongly oppose the deployment of U.S. Forces Korea for regional conflicts with China that do not directly involve South Korea. Only 6% of South Koreans supported allowing U.S. Forces Korea to be deployed for combat operations in the event of a conflict over Taiwan, and only 14% approved of U.S. Forces Korea carrying out military operations in response to China’s use of force outside Korea more broadly.
Lee himself shares this reservation. As a presidential candidate, Lee said that South Korea should not be involved in any conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
To be sure, the issue of strategic flexibility may not be entirely non-negotiable for Seoul. In the survey, 42% of South Koreans approved of U.S. Forces Korea playing a limited, non-combat support role in a Taiwan conflict, hinting at some room for compromise. However, with South Koreans first and foremost concerned about the threats posed by North Korea’s nuclear advances, conversations regarding strategic flexibility will inevitably feature disagreements.
In any case, if Trump's defense planners press the Lee administration on the issue too hard or too impatiently, they are likely to encounter serious resistance.
Instead of spending too much energy trying to get South Korea to pay an exorbitant cost for stationing U.S. troops or to subordinate its core security interests to support U.S. war-planning against China over Taiwan, the Trump administration would be wise to prioritize issues where mutual interests and strategic convergence are relatively clear. One such issue is pursuing diplomacy with North Korea.
Both Trump and Lee share a strong interest in engaging North Korea. Since entering office, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to resume nuclear talks with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Likewise, Lee, convinced that “peace is better than war, no matter how expensive,” is keen to pursue dialogue with Pyongyang and improve inter-Korean relations that have been severely strained in recent years, with the goal of eventually moving the regime toward nuclear disarmament.
According to a report published earlier this week, Washington and Seoul have been coordinating to demonstrate bilateral support for dialogue with North Korea in the joint statement, possibly including an endorsement of the 2018 Trump-Kim Singapore Declaration. This would be a positive first step.
That said, both Trump and Lee also face a common challenge: how to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. Pyongyang has consistently rebuffed diplomatic overtures from Washington and Seoul, reiterating that it will “never” give up nuclear weapons. And time seems to be on Pyongyang’s side. Having developed an unprecedentedly tight alliance with Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pyongyang does not appear particularly eager to engage in diplomacy with either the United States or South Korea.
Despite the overall pessimistic outlook, however, a path to diplomacy with North Korea may still exist. Pyongyang has signaled that it may be open to talks not conditioned on denuclearization. Indeed, moving away from the goal of denuclearizing North Korea will be hard for both Seoul and Washington. But it is a possibility that the Trump and Lee administrations should face and explore together, given the harsh reality that decades of efforts to denuclearize North Korea have all but failed.
While accepting that North Korea will get to keep nuclear weapons is disturbing, the alliance in fact has already been living with an increasingly nuclear-capable North Korea. Diplomacy with Pyongyang for more modest goals — aimed at preventing further nuclear buildup and promoting arms control — may be the only viable way forward, and the Trump and Lee administrations might have a lot less to lose from pursuing this path than they imagine and fear.
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