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Top image credit: Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks with President Donald Trump during an event in the State Dining Room at the White House Oct. 8, 2025. Photo by Francis Chung/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM VIA REUTERSCONNECT
Five restraint successes — and five absolute fails — in 2025
December 30, 2025
The first year of a presidency promising an "America First" realism in foreign policy has delivered not a clean break, but a deeply contradictory picture. The resulting scorecard is therefore divided against itself.
On one side are qualified advances for responsible statecraft: a new National Security Strategy repudiating primacy, renewed dialogue with Russia, and some diplomatic breakthroughs forged through pragmatic deal-making.
On the other, particularly in Latin America, lies a stubborn residue of ill-conceived interventionism, and, like in the Middle East, strategic incoherence — legacies of the very foreign policy orthodoxy the Trump administration vowed to overturn.
This is the central tension of the moment: a government caught between some restraint tendencies and actions still firmly rooted in ruinous interventionism.
Five Foreign Policy Successes for Realism/Restraint in 2025
1. A New National Security Strategy: The new National Security Strategy (NSS) represents a significant, if incomplete, shift away from the pursuit of primacy. Its formal rejection of global dominance marks a necessary break from the post-Cold War consensus that led to endless war and strategic overextension.
Framing power, balancing, and prioritization as central pillars of statecraft — while explicitly stepping back from democracy-versus-autocracy ideology, a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s strategy — creates space for a more focused and sustainable foreign policy. This is clearest in the document's approach to Ukraine, where it acknowledges the imperative of managing escalation risks with a nuclear-armed Russia.
However, while the strategy pivots away from primacy, its transition to restraint at best incomplete. The focus on the Western Hemisphere, for example, is rational, but Washington's continued reliance on coercive tools in Latin America risks undermining regional partnerships and pushing nations closer to Beijing — already a top trading partner for many.
While the strategy correctly diagnoses the multifaceted European decline, its language on Europe’s “civilizational erasure” feels over-wrought, and its overt courting of nationalist parties in Europe may backfire in the same way the administration’s rhetoric on Canada hurt the chances of a pro-Trump candidate in that nation.
The true test will be whether this nascent framework translates into an actual policy of restraint. For now, the NSS stands as an acceptable, though hesitant, first step away from primacy and toward a more realistic grand strategy.
2. Re-engagement with Russia on Ukraine: The administration’s handling of the Ukraine war is perhaps its clearest — if most contentious — expression of nascent strategic restraint.
President Donald Trump’s core objective — to shut the war down — is a necessary break from the prior policy of indefinite proxy war and severed diplomatic contact with Moscow. He deserves credit for re-establishing direct U.S.-Russia dialogue, launching a peace initiative and resisting significant pressure, including from within his own party, to take escalatory steps like supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine or imposing secondary sanctions on Russian oil.
However, this remains a highly qualified success. The initiative has been undermined by inconsistent presidential rhetoric and a flawed transactional approach. A truly successful strategy would require steadier execution and, critically, must avoid the trap of any NATO-like security guarantee to Ukraine.
For now, the shift from maximalist aims to active, if messy, diplomacy represents the best path toward ending the conflict and de-risking a direct NATO-Russia confrontation.
3. Breakthrough with Belarus: This achievement stems from a discreet, calibrated engagement with the Belarussian government, replacing the fruitless moralizing and maximalist rhetoric typified by the Biden administration and European officials. The current U.S. approach, spearheaded by Special Envoy John Coale (who deserves high praise for this achievement), directly secured the release of over 100 high-profile political prisoners in Belarus in exchange for sanctions relief on some Belarussian agricultural exports and a prospect of further normalization.
This process demonstrated to both Minsk and its close ally Moscow that Washington can be a pragmatic actor, that sanctions are not perpetual but can be lifted in exchange for concrete concessions, creating a powerful incentive for negotiation.
4. Restraint in Yemen: The 2025 U.S.-Houthi ceasefire stands as a clear example of America First restraint in action. By securing a halt to attacks on U.S. vessels in exchange for ending its own bombing campaign, the administration achieved a narrow, definable security interest through discrete diplomacy, facilitated by Oman.
Crucially, this success stemmed from refusing to link the deal to broader, unrealistic goals, such as demanding the Houthis cease their campaign against Israel absent a Gaza ceasefire. This disciplined focus on a direct, reciprocal arrangement avoided the trap of another endless war in the Middle East.
5. The domestic realignment: A cross-ideological movement for foreign policy restraint gained momentum in 2025. This movement found its most potent symbol in the strategic alliance between Republican Congressman Thomas Massie and Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna. Their partnership, focused on reasserting Congress’s constitutional authority over war, became a powerful vehicle for a growing left-right consensus against endless conflict.
Simultaneously, a significant ideological shift occurred on the right, particularly among younger Republicans, who are increasingly skeptical of unconditional support for Israel. Together, these developments fractured the longstanding bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, signaling a promising domestic realignment in favor of restraint.
5 Foreign Policy Failures for Realism/Restraint in 2025
1. The Iran strikes debacle: A catastrophic strategic blunder. After promising negotiations with Iran, the U.S. joined Israeli strikes on Iran, shattering diplomatic progress. The administration’s adoption of Israeli red lines (no uranium enrichment) rather than American ones (no weaponization) has led negotiations to a dead-end. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back lobbying for another war with Iran, this time over the country’s ballistic missiles (with Trump claiming that the nuclear infrastructure was destroyed during the U.S. strikes), Trump’s ability to resist the pressure will define the commitment to restraint in the Middle East. The track record is not encouraging.
2. Reckless escalation with Venezuela: The lethal interdiction of vessels without clear proof of illicit activity constitutes an illegal act of war absent congressional mandate. The administration offers shifting rationales for its aggressive posture: first, it was about fighting drug trafficking, then it shifted to allegations of Venezuela “stealing American oil.” This creates an overall impression that Trump’s real goal is a regime change in Caracas.
Given the record, regime change in Venezuela is more likely to produce a Libya in the Western Hemisphere than a prosperous, stable, US.-friendly nation. Besides, the focus on regime change exposes glaring inconsistency: while accusing the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of drug trafficking, the U.S. pardons a convicted drug-trafficking ex-president of Honduras and actively meddles to support his political party in the elections in that nation.
3. The Syria quagmire endures: The deaths of U.S. personnel in Syria are a direct consequence of the failure to decisively end the military mission after the defeat of ISIS's territorial caliphate. American troops remain in Syria without a clear strategic objective, making them perpetual targets for ISIS and other hostile forces.
There is a general acknowledgment that the Middle East should no longer dominate U.S. foreign policy. Rather than securing American interests, the indefinite deployment in Syria drags the U.S. back into regional quagmires and guarantees future casualties. The only way to prevent further loss of life is to finally execute a complete withdrawal from Syria. The U.S. presence there has long outlived whatever rational purpose it ever had and become a lethal liability.
4. Failure to apply pressure on Israel: The Trump Administration's comprehensive failure to apply meaningful pressure on Israel in 2025 represents a dual collapse of foreign policy restraint, abandoning both diplomatic leverage and the principles of international law.
While providing unconditional support for Israeli actions, the administration removed any incentive for Israel to respect a Trump-mediated ceasefire in Gaza, let alone pursue a genuine political solution with the Palestinians.
This abdication was compounded by the administration's decision to sanction International Criminal Court judges investigating the conflict. Punishing jurists for following international law to shield an ally from accountability is the antithesis of restraint and of America First policy. It is a myopic and reckless strategy that entangles America as a co-sponsor of conflict and injustice.
5. Congressional dereliction of duty on War Powers. In December 2025, Congress failed in its most basic constitutional duty when the House of Representatives defeated, by a razor-thin 211-213 vote, a resolution to prohibit unauthorized military action against Venezuela. This was not a simple policy disagreement but a dereliction of the legislative branch’s power to declare war. The vote came as President Trump had already imposed a blockade on Venezuela — an act of war under international law — and amassed a formidable naval armada in the Caribbean, creating a clear path toward open conflict.
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Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as U.S. Vice President JD Vance reacts at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 28, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
10 moments we won’t soon forget in 2025 Ukraine war politics
December 30, 2025
It has been a rollercoaster, but President Donald Trump vowed to end the war in Ukraine and spent 2025 putting his stamp on the process and shaking things up far beyond his predecessor Joe Biden. Here’s the Top 10.
Tears in Munich
We didn’t have to wait long after President Trump assumed office for one of the more bizarre moments of 2025. In closing the Munich Security Conference on February 16, outgoing Chairman, Christoph Heusgen burst into tears. Taking issue with Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech two days before, he lamented: “we have to fear that our common value base, is not that common any more.”
Vance hadn’t even mentioned Ukraine, had heaped praise on the city of Munich, and offered heartfelt prayers following the February 13 terrorist attack. His crime? Advancing the cause of democracy and free speech in Europe, which he argued was under attack, a theme explored in the new U.S. National Security Strategy. In my view, this little vignette characterizes Europe’s fragility more than its leaders’ efforts to maintain the war in Ukraine.
Dressed-down in the Oval Office
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had not previously taken criticism for his signature dress-down wartime style until asked by a reporter why he wasn’t wearing a suit in the Oval Office on February 28. The conversation sped down-hill from there with the now infamous dressing down by President Trump.
That was a pivotal moment in how this year has played out. Zelensky had previously been untouchable, calling the policy shots in D.C. and across Europe for ever increasing military and financial support for his beleaguered country. To quote from Vice President Vance’s Munich speech, it was the moment when President Trump made it clear that there was a “new sheriff in town.”
Starmer launches the coalition of the (not very) willing
Days later in London, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted Zelensky and other European leaders to unveil the “coalition of the willing.” Starmer was trying to achieve the impossible: reposition himself as an interface between the U.S. and Europe after a history of his political party criticizing President Trump, and to maintain an unchanged European stance on the Ukraine War. He has failed. Starmer’s willingness to back a peace deal with British “boots on the ground and planes in the air” fell apart within weeks, when it became clear that Europe would struggle to muster 25,000 troops. The Europeans have continued to block any U.S.-led peace initiative to the point where they have increasingly been left out of the talks.
Meet me in Turkey, if you dare!
With President Trump piling on the pressure for peace talks, President Zelensky challenged President Vladimir Putin to meet him in Istanbul on 15 May for peace talks. This was pure performance, of the type we have become accustomed with Zelensky. Putin was never going to turn up for a summit with no prior talks having taken place.
True to form, he sent a negotiating team who waited around with no sign of the Ukrainians. President Erdogan pressured Zelensky to send a delegation for negotiations which finally took place on May 16. Little progress was made towards peace, beyond helpful steps for both sides to exchange dead bodies and prisoners. Further pressure would be needed from the U.S. administration to edge talks forward.
Zelensky starts to lose his luster
For the first time since the war started, July witnessed widespread protests to Zelensky’s rule after he made a failed bid to shackle independent anti-corruption bodies as they closed in on investigations of members of his inner circle. Zelensky backed down under pressure from the West, but his image has not recovered, and even the western mainstream media seems to have slowly cooled on him.
More shocking revelations of his administration's complicity in corruption would later be revealed by the New York Times. In parallel, growing concerns about manpower shortages in the Ukrainian military and the increasing use of forced conscription of young men into the army has built a sense that Zelensky is increasingly the problem, not the solution.
Who's the daddy?
Undaunted by President Trump’s increasing persistence to pursue a peace deal in Ukraine, European leaders pivoted to a new strategy: flattery. This reached peak weird on June 25 at the Hague NATO Summit, when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to the U.S. President as “daddy.”
While holding the line that Ukraine should receive unlimited financial assistance until Russia is defeated, the Europeans had hoped that by saying nice things to President Trump he might not notice that they were blocking his efforts. This then led to the moment in August in which European leaders and Zelensky, now in a sports jacket, presented themselves in the Oval Office before daddy, sour-faced and looking like "unruly schoolchildren.”
Trump brings President Putin in from the cold
The schoolchildren moment happened hot on the heels of President Trump bringing President Putin in from the cold, at the Alaska Summit for Peace on August 16. That event was pivotal in breaking the diplomatic isolation that the U.S. and European nations had imposed on Putin since the start of the war (and which, arguably, has been building since 2014).
However, it was also key in outlining the contours of the peace plan that we appear to be slowly edging towards. One in which NATO membership is finally taken off the table in return for security guarantees, where some concessions are made on territory in Ukraine.
Yermak is sacked and says he'll go to the front line (but doesn't)
The former Head of Zelensky’s Administration, Andriy Yermak, was called the second most powerful man in Ukraine. But he increasingly came to be seen as at the heart of a growing authoritarianism in Ukraine. Having resisted pressure to sack him after the July corruption protests, Zelensky was left with no choice when the corruption investigation reached Yermak’s door in November.
Having started life as a film producer, Yermak theatrically announced his plan to join the army and go to the frontline. He does not appear to have done so, but rather still holds 10 advisory and consultative positions linked to the Ukrainian leadership. His official position as Head of the Presidential Administration has yet to be filled, adding to a sense of Zelensky’s increasing domestic isolation.
Shootout in Brussels
It has been clear for some considerable time that Ukraine was bankrupt and would eventually run out of money to continue the war. Europe’s response, expropriate sovereign Russian assets and find a legally defensible way to give them to Ukraine. However, an immovable obstacle stood in the way of the European Commission’s cunning plan: Belgium. The lowlands country, led by Bart de Wever, was never going to agree to this, given the huge financial and legal risks involved. At a chaotic European Council meeting in Brussels on December 18, he stood firm under considerable pressure, forcing Europe to borrow Euro 90 billion to keep Ukraine’s finances afloat.
This now leaves European taxpayers on the hook to keep the war going (as I predicted).
Pokrovsk is slowly dying and Ukraine continues to lose territory
The Ukrainian army has fought valiantly for eighteen months to hold the heavily fortified military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. The city now appears to be fully encircled, although fighting continues in the slow death of a city that Russia has prioritized capturing. The military strategic value of Pokrovsk is questioned, but its complete loss to Russia would be another political blow to the Zelensky regime that is finding it increasingly hard to shore up western support.
In any case, Ukraine continues to lose land at “one of the fastest rates since the war began.” The Russian Ambassador to London, Andrei Keilin, told me last week that Russia intends to take the whole of Donetsk by military means if Zelensky does not commit to a US-brokered peace plan. I have seen nothing to make me doubt that.
The passing of time will only make any deal that Ukraine strikes more unpalatable. As we roll into 2026, some of President Trump’s remarks to President Zelensky in the Oval office from February will jangle ever louder: “you’re not winning this.”
Others will increasingly become less likely: “you have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.”
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Top photo credit: Frank Schoonover illustration of Blackbeard the pirate (public domain)
Aargh! Letters of marque would unleash Blackbeard on the cartels
December 29, 2025
Just saying the words, “Letters of Marque” is to conjure the myth and romance of the pirate: Namely, that species of corsair also known as Blackbeard or Long John Silver, stalking the fabled Spanish Main, memorialized in glorious Technicolor by Robert Newton, hallooing the unwary with “Aye, me hearties!”
Perhaps it is no surprise that the legendary patois has been resurrected today in Congress. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act on the Senate floor, thundering that it “will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.” If enacted into law, Congress, in accordance with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, would license private American citizens “to employ all reasonably necessary means to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any cartel or conspirator of a cartel or cartel-linked organization."
Although still enshrined in Constitutional canon, the fact that American citizens can be empowered to make war in a wholly private capacity skirts centuries-long understanding over “the laws of war.” At best, a letter of marque is to be issued only in the circumstance of a legally issued state declaration of war. Hence, a licensed corsair or privateer is akin to a sheriff’s deputy, who even as a private armed person is sworn to abide by the order and laws of the state.
History, however, does not support this best case. The plain truth — again, over centuries — tells the story of private naval enterprise practically unfettered. These are no Old West deputies under direct command of a U.S. Marshal. These are licensed raiders, serving autonomously, as flag-waving freebooters.
A letter of marque, the King’s signature notwithstanding, is simply licensed predation at sea — and this is under the most favorable aegis, when said letter is actually granted to a private person when the nation is at war. Yet most often, for the last 700 years, a letter of marque is really no more or less legal piracy.
But why would states want to create such a legal justification for attacking rivals and competitors, pesky inconvenient minor states, or in this case, drug traffickers?
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn), who introduced his own bill in February, proudly confesses to the Washington Post that letters of marque would give “the president some constitutional power to go after the Bad Guys and not wait on Congress to give their permission.”
Here we come to our world reality — the exact same reality that has held for seven centuries — and that is this: States want to degrade their rivals, competitors, and their pesky minors without having to go to actual war. This is an ironclad rule of “international relations” that is also (forever cynically) unspoken. War continues as it has always, outside of any laws.
“Private” legions have often made private war, often at the behest of state authority, down the centuries. Think: William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibuster, the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal, the Freikorps rampaging in the Baltics, the Czech Legion’s battle across Siberia, Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, Mike Hoare’s Congo Commandos. When they do state bidding, we call such fighting bands “proxies” — whether or not they operate with an official letter. The United States has been an eager — if not a standout — puppetmaster of privateers.
Like all privateers, however, the very autonomy of these armed groups leads them into gray areas outside of state sanction, into freebooting piracy. When they leave, or are let go by their state employers, they can easily go over to the dark side. Such was the fate of many most fabled pirate captains.
Yet many others, from Elizabethan Sea Dogs to Ottoman corsairs to Dutch vrijbuiter, worked their way back into the good graces of royal court — and the law — to great honor and even greater riches.
The dirty jobs that need doing
Two takeaways for today: First, the so-called laws of war are infinitely fungible, according to the desires of the state. Second, privateers — and pirates — are only meeting the compulsive need of legal authority to find someone who will go over to the dark side of the law for its own purposes.
After the grueling Napoleonic Wars, European powers tried to more decorously regulate the laws of war. In 1856, the Declaration of Paris, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, outlawed privateering altogether. The U.S., however, refused to sign. The U.S. Navy did, however, abolish prize money for naval crews in 1899, ostensibly to discourage piratical excesses at sea.
Yet, when there are dirty jobs that need doing, and the state seeks to avoid embarrassment through plausible deniability, it will always, unfailingly, turn to a willing proxy. Although the letter of marque, resurrected, lies at present merely in the realm of “sometimes a great notion,” the assets of both Washington Imperial and Crown covert agencies are even now attacking international shipping in the Black Sea, working from the media cover that these are Ukrainian strikes.
So why go to the trouble of reviving a troublesome and long-buried marque of state piracy from bygone days? Perhaps administration boosters want to widen the scope and means of U.S. seapower in decline. Perhaps they want to “spread the wealth” when it comes to making war, so that it is not so pointedly a government-only enterprise. Maybe some believe they can clothe a dirty war in flamboyant raiment, by invoking the romance of another age.
Judging from social and old-style media alike, there are legions of vocal patriots champing and clamoring to prime the frizzen and grab a cutlass. “Unleash the Privateers!” cries one highly respected military analyst. Robert Newton fans are almost ecstatically onboard.
Perhaps this rogue gang in Congress is truly channeling the Trumpian battlecry: Make War Aargh! Again
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