Confirming that he has, indeed, taken a top job at Palantir, a $72 billion high-tech weapons firm and military contractor, former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is publicly acknowledging that he is looking to trade on his government contacts to create profits in his new role overseeing Palantir’s defense business.
In other words, he didn’t just go through the revolving door. He’s proud of it.
Gallagher, who oversaw the hawkish House Select Committee on China and led the congressional push for a bill requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest or face a ban on the app in the U.S., is directly cashing in by going to a company whose CEO, Alex Karp, told The New York Times that the U.S. will “very likely” end up in a war with China, Russia and Iran and endorses “scar[ing] the crap out of your adversaries.”
Having spent much of his time in Congress doing exactly what Karp describes — Gallagher also pushed for Taiwan to be armed “to the teeth in the cyber domain” and supported massive military aid packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — Gallagher says he’s looking to enrich his new employer, Palantir, using the connections in government he formed over seven years as the representative from Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district.
In an interview published this morning by Defense One, Gallagher said::
"I've spent almost a decade now immersed in that world, from the perspective of a legislator. But a lot of my work on the [House] Armed Services Committee was focused on defense innovation, how we create an ecosystem where more companies can succeed. And so my hope is to leverage the network that I built for a decade and apply it to my work at Palantir."
Gallagher concluded the interview by emphasizing that he sees a natural progression from his work as a public servant to his new role, on the other side of the revolving door, working for a multi-billion-dollar weapons firm.
“I just look forward to working with the Defense Department to strengthen and grow the work that's already underway with Palantir,” said Gallgher. “And so it's a really exciting opportunity again, as I said at the outset, a way in my mind to continue the mission that's guided my service in the Marine Corps and in Congress.”
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft. He reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy.
Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) walks through the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, February 6, 2024. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA) via REUTERS
The Ukraine war, in addition to all the other ways in which one can describe it, has been a strangely humbling exercise for the foreign policy and military commentariat.
Pre-war projections of Russia’s rapid victory did not come to pass and, perhaps a fit of willful over-correction, were quickly replaced by fantastical tales of Russian collapse by Sunday (of March 6, 2022, not that anyone is keeping track), and a Crimea beach party slated for Summer 2023 when the Russians were to be expelled from the peninsula.
Predictions about the course of the war have become more qualified, understandably with a great deal more hedging, but old habits die hard. News of a 30-day ceasefire, agreed to by Ukraine and offered to Russia by the US, was greeted with furious posturing from all the stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic.
A great many Kremlin allies, curiously joined by some Western neoconservatives, intoned that Moscow would flatly reject the proposal. There are good reasons why such projections were always unlikely.
For one, there is a clear transatlantic fissure between the Trump Administration and official European positions on this war. The former maintains it should end as quickly as possible with a negotiated settlement, whereas most EU and European leaders continue to demand Ukrainian battlefield victory and argue that “peace in Ukraine is actually more dangerous than the war.”
Russia’s outright rejection of the ceasefire proposal risked precipitating a convergence between these two and provoking President Trump to make the fateful decision — one from which, one hastens to add, he has so far vigorously refrained — to own this conflict much the same way that President Richard Nixon took ownership of the Vietnam war.
Further still, the incentives simply don’t line up. What sense does it make for Russia to jeopardize what could be a generational opportunity to normalize relations with Washington and reintegrate back into U.S.-led institutions just to seize a few more desolate villages in the Zaporizhzhian steppes?
But, though it would have been outlandish for Moscow to come back with abject refusal, there are several reasons why it was just as nonsensical to expect its unconditional acceptance.
First, there is the reality that ceasefires are by their nature conditioned on modality and parameters concerning implementation, monitoring, enforcement, and duration. All of these operational-level details will have to be discussed, indeed, negotiated, between Russia, the U.S., and Ukraine if a resilient ceasefire is to be established.
More broadly, ceasefires tend to benefit the side that’s losing — to wit, Ukraine. Insofar as this is a bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine (though there is a palpable sense in which it’s much more than that), the Russian side is therefore in a greater position to shape the terms of the ceasefire or push for other concessions in exchange for accepting it.
There is every reason to believe, as has already been reported, that Putin will seek a freeze on U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine while a ceasefire is in effect — he is likewise reportedly interested in halting Ukraine’s mobilization efforts.
These terms are sure to leave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office unsmiling, but Zelensky is himself operating under severe constraints. President Trump has clearly demonstrated that he will not hesitate to pull the rug from under Ukraine, which is deeply reliant on the flow of U.S. weapons and intelligence sharing, if Zelensky tries to exercise a veto over the peace process.
No less importantly and perhaps somewhat less cynically, Zelensky no doubt realizes that his country and its valiant but harried populace stands to benefit tremendously — in any case, more than the Russians — from a cessation of hostilities even under unendearing terms.
Nevertheless, whether these Russian ceasefire stipulations are a red line or simply a bargaining position remains to be tested by the administration. There are any number of counter offers that can be made. For example, the White House can argue that completely severing security assistance to Kyiv compromises Ukraine’ security in a way that’s not conducive to long-term peace, but that Washington is prepared to place restrictions on certain types of security assistance and intelligence sharing as a good faith measure.
Alternatively, the administration can say that the ceasefire should not come with any strings attached, but that it is prepared to reduce the effective period to, say, 15 days as a way of mitigating the Kremlin’s stated concern that ceasefires may be used to buy time for Ukraine to rearm in anticipation for another round of fighting. In any case, U.S. officials should make clear to their Russian counterparts that a ceasefire, far from a goal in of itself, is merely the first step on the path to a durable settlement, and that they stand ready to work toward a roadmap to a peace deal both before and during a ceasefire.
Indeed, one of the most important steps that the US can take is to signal both publicly and behind closed doors to all three of the stakeholders — Europe, Ukraine, and Russia — that it is in it for the long haul when it comes to securing lasting peace not just for Ukraine but for all of Europe. For the former two, this serves as a crucial exercise in reassurance that will make unpleasant but necessary compromises in future negotiations easier to stomach.
It also sends Moscow the message that working with Trump is wiser than trying to outwait him, and that Washington is prepared for serious long-term engagement on the larger and even more difficult questions of the Russia-NATO relationship and Moscow’s place in the architecture of European security.
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Refugees from Sudan wait to be transported to the transit camp in the town of Renk near the border after crossing the border into South Sudan, April 4, 2024 via Reuters
The Associated Press is reporting this morning that American and Israeli officials want to send Palestinians to Sudan and Somalia, two of the most poverty-stricken and violent places in Africa, if not the world.
There are no named sources in the article but the AP says both U.S. and Israeli officials are seeking places to carry out Trump's plan to evacuate some 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza strip while it is transformed into "beautiful" beachfront real estate to which the Palestinians can or cannot come back, depending on his changing positions on the subject.
Forcibly removing the Palestinians from the Gaza strip would be considered a war crime under international law. Members of Benjamin Netanyahu's government are reportedly readying to empty the Gaza strip, though officials insist it would be "voluntary."
According to the AP, Sudan officials say they have rejected the offer. Officials from Somalia, and next door Somaliland, which is also named in the article, said they were not aware of any contacts.
Perhaps the height of absurdity here is that Sudan is currently in the throes of a brutal civil war and famine in which over 150,000 of people have been killed and 11 million displaced over the last two years. It is one of the few places on earth that may be worse than Gaza in the scope of the violence and human suffering. Somalia, thanks in part to its fraught history with the U.S., is currently suffering from a food crisis and an ongoing violent insurgency (al-Shabaab). The Trump administration has already picked up the pace of of U.S. airstrikes there since the president's inauguration on Jan. 20, as the U.S. military has been actively engaged in Somalia for the better part of two decades.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that he would support the U.S.-negotiated ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine under certain conditions.
Putin said that the Russians certainly support "the idea of a ceasefire," but "there are issues that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to talk about it with our American colleagues and partners and, perhaps, have a call with President Trump and discuss it with him.”
He added that the Russians “proceed from the assumption that the ceasefire should lead to lasting peace and remove the root causes of the crisis.”
The key conditions Putin outlined in a news conference late Thursday included a demand that foreign weapons assistance would not continue to flow to Ukraine during any 30 day ceasefire, that Russia would not let remaining Ukrainian soldiers to peacefully withdraw from Kursk but force them to surrender, and that Moscow must know who would be monitoring the ceasefire.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky retorted by saying, "Putin, of course, is afraid to tell President Trump directly that he wants to continue this war, wants to kill Ukrainians,” adding that Putin had set so many preconditions “that nothing will work out at all, or that it will not work out for as long as possible.”
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, was expected to conduct talks with Russian leadership later on Thursday. In a statement, President Trump was cautiously optimistic, saying that there were “good signals” coming out of Moscow. Later at a Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, he said there were "very serious discussions going on" and “we’d like to see a cease-fire from Russia.” He also said the U.S. had been discussing territorial issues with Ukraine.
“We’ve been discussing with Ukraine land and pieces of land that would be kept and lost, and all of the other elements of a final agreement,” he said, adding: “A lot of the details of a final agreement have actually been discussed.”
Putin’s statements come after Ukrainian leadership endorsed the Trump administration’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. This support, as well as the resumption of military assistance and intelligence sharing to Kyiv, were secured during meetings between the American and Ukrainian leaders in Saudi Arabia earlier in the week.
The recent breakthrough comes after a public spat between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Trump and Vice President Vance at the White House last month. Following that breakdown in negotiations, President Trump paused military aid from the United States to Ukraine. That pause has since been lifted.
Ukrainian leadership previously said that a ceasefire would only be agreed upon if security guarantees were attached, but none were mentioned in a joint statement. Indeed, Zelenskyy said in a late-night address that guarantees would be agreed to at a later time.
Russia still holds roughly 20% of Ukraine and insists that it maintain control of a significant portion following a ceasefire. Additionally, Ukraine has lost much of its leverage via its partial occupation of Kursk, which began in August of 2024.
Reutersreports that Ukraine launched its most significant drone attack on Moscow yet. The attack on Tuesday killed at least three civilians and wounded 17 others. Due to the attack, Moscow had to shut down all four of its airports.
A poll released by The Economist this week indicates that the Ukrainian public still trusts Zelenskyy and rejects most of Russia’s demands despite Mr. Zelenskyy’s recent spat with American leaders at the White House.
According to the poll, 72% of Ukrainians strongly support or somewhat approve of President Zelenskyy’s performance. The poll also indicated that the president would likely win a hypothetical election. Additionally, 74% of respondents agree that “Ukraine should continue fighting even if the United States withdraws all support.”
There were no State Department briefings this week
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