Sometime in the Twenties, Józef Piłsudski quipped that the “most beloved state” of the Polish people is indecision. Almost exactly a century on, the modern nation’s founding father has never been more right, with last week’s presidential election resulting in an almost literal dead heat. Though the conservative Karol Nawrocki finally carried the day, the populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate only defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, by just 1.78% of the vote, with less than 370,000 ballots separating the two men in a country of 37 million.

Since Nawrocki’s win, commentators of all stripes have been eager to pigeonhole the election as a win for Russia, as the MAGA-fication of Poland, or as the nail in the coffin of Poland’s warm relationship with Ukraine. In truth, it’s none of those things — politics here is never so simple. The razor-thin margin of Sunday’s election, and indeed the divided, hamstrung government that has existed here for the last 18 months, is emblematic of a deeper fight about the nature of Polish identity in the 21st century. Caught between a future at the heart of the EU, and the familiar, reassuring hearth of traditional Catholic values, Poland is scrabbling for its future, even as it faces the old security challenges Piłsudski knew so well.

In the first place, Nawrocki’s win has crystallised the resurgent ascendancy of the country’s Right, this time with a new anti-establishment cadre of Gen Z acolytes at its back. It’s true, of course, that the guiding star of this quintessentially Polish brand of nationalism lies not in Europe: but in Trump’s America. Not only do its true believers take a “Poland First” approach on immigration and security, but their views on taxation, government regulation, and gun ownership are much closer to Trump’s than those of the PiS. Having posed with Nawrocki during his visit to the Oval Office in May, Trump hailed him this week as an “ally” whose victory had shocked “all in Europe”. But regardless of what Poland’s populists do next, what the country has achieved over the last three or four years cannot be undone. Behind Nawrocki’s win lies the simple fact that this country has left its mark on Europe, becoming indispensable to the very stability of the continent no matter who’s in charge.

The seeds of Poland’s modern-day dualism were sown long before Donald Tusk, the country’s embattled centrist prime minister, took power in 2023. Rather, they stretch back to the twilight days of communist rule. In 1989, after years of chaos and martial law, the country’s Soviet-backed regime agreed to sit down for discussions with Lech Wałęsa and other Solidarity leaders. The talks were ostensibly to diffuse tensions — but in practice ended up setting the stage for the collapse of communism right across Eastern Europe. Alongside Wałęsa, Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński also attended the meetings, with the twin brothers going on to form the PiS in 2001.

The PiS emerged from the ruins of Solidarity Electoral Action, a diverse coalition of parties created as the political wing of Solidarity in the mid-Nineties. Civic Platform, led by Tusk and supported by Wałęsa, was another party to emerge from the ashes of Solidarity Electoral Action. Though Tusk and the Kaczyńskis had common roots in Poland’s anti-communist centre-right, in other words, by the early 2000s their paths had diverged. Civic Platform set its sights on EU membership, while the PiS defended the Polish social conservative tradition.

Over the next two decades, both parties led governments in Poland, while drifting further and further apart. After joining the EU in 2004, Poland reaped enormous economic benefits, not only becoming the fastest growing economy in Europe, but also gaining the rare distinction of being the only country on the continent not to experience recession in 2008. But in the eyes of the PiS — and the growing number of Poles who saw traditional Catholic values as central to their identity — the boom came with trade offs. Like other conservatives in Europe, they felt that on the road to European integration, something deep within the national soul had begun to slip away. Soon enough, they began to castigate Tusk, Civic Platform, and all liberal-minded Poles, dismissing them as foreign interlopers intent on selling the country out to the old German nemesis. For their part, Poland’s liberals returned the favour. Centred in the cities and more Left-leaning areas in western Poland, they characterised the PiS as the party of backward, provincial cultists, holding the nation back from fulfilling its ambitions.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when the PiS won a majority in both houses of parliament and secured the presidency for Andrzej Duda, giving the party broad control over the country’s institutions. In the name of completing decommunisation, the PiS reordered Poland’s courts, stacking the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, all while tightening abortion laws, politicising state media, and cracking down on LGBT rights. Amid the battles with Brussels that followed, Poland’s liberals no longer saw themselves merely as pro-EU advocates fighting to pull their country out of the prejudices of the village — they were now freedom fighters trying to save Poland from a hostile internal takeover.

Into this tumult stepped Russia. In 2021, when with Russian backing Belarusian dictator Lukashenko began luring migrants to the border of the EU, before forcing them to cross into countries like Poland, the PiS was catapulted into the European spotlight. The party was now not only defending Poland’s national character from the scourge of liberalism, but Europe itself from Putin’s hybrid warfare. The fact he chose migrants as his weapon of choice made things even more convenient — its fight against European multiculturalism had become intertwined with Poland’s ancient struggle with the Kremlin.

The start of the war in Ukraine further enhanced the PiS’s role on the European stage, taking Poland as a whole along with it. The party’s leaders became the face of Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, and the facilitators of Ukraine’s defense, as Warsaw got its first real taste of international prestige. But the moment also gave Poland something else — an opportunity to merge its EU aspirations with its traditional anti-Russian animus. Now, rather than challenging the European order, Polish nationalism was something the EU and Nato not only commended but actually demanded. In other words, then, the PiS had got the best of both worlds, and for a brief moment had bridged the divide that had been growing in Poland since Tusk and the Kaczyński brothers went their separate ways.

Yet before long, things fell apart once again, this time with help from a new brand of populist Rightists — for whom the PiS was an inadequate guardian of Polishness. Fuelled by farmers’ protests over Ukrainian grain imports, anger over perceived preferential treatment of Ukrainians refugees, and a good dose of historical grievance over the unresolved massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, the Polish far-Right, led by the Confederation Party, pushed the PiS to adopt an ever-harsher line on Ukraine. Not that Ukraine is the only issue these new nationalists care about. Worries about immigrants from non-European countries do too, even as Confederation also calls for economic libertarianism and continues the familiar refrain that Poland’s business interests and political future are being outsourced to Brussels insiders.

Even so, Ukraine has risen to become the essential issue of Polish politics. To be sure, rearming at home and backing Nato abroad are still causes that unify almost everyone from Warsaw to Wrocław. But for Confederation, and increasingly for the PiS too, they are no longer the Europeanist projects they once were — even as they have increasingly begun to see Ukrainians in Poland as an impediment to Polish sovereignty rather than a boon.

The pivotal moment in the PiS’s shift took place late last month, after the first round of voting, when Confederation’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen came third behind Nawrocki. That led Mentzen to invite his PiS rival to appear on his YouTube channel and make his case to Confederation’s voters ahead of the runoff. Without hesitation and on camera, Nawrocki signed a document in support of Confederation’s agenda, notably pledging to oppose Ukraine’s Nato membership. The PiS’s fellowship with Confederation was sealed, and the tactic largely worked: over 88% of Mentzen supporters in the first round voted for Nawrocki in the second. Whatever happens over the weeks ahead, it seems clear that Poland is headed for a PiS-Confederation coalition in 2027, with Tusk’s fragile coalition probably splintering.

For now, though, Poland will remain in stasis, with political gridlock set to continue. It’s ironic, then, that the very voters who ended up delivering Nawrocki his victory were those who’d once yearned for a more dynamic political landscape — and for more options outside the PiS-Civic Platform duopoly. Driven by frustration with the establishment, Mentzen’s effective and direct social media presence, and a desire to return to traditional Polish roots, a slim majority of young people voted for Right-wing populist parties in the first round of the election, subsequently supporting Nawrocki in the runoff. By embracing their desire for more radical ideas and aligning itself with Confederation in the long-term, the PiS may well reinvent itself too, ensuring the tug-of-war with Poland’s liberals remains as energetic as ever.

For its part, Civic Coalition has had to adapt too. Despite his reputation as an urban progressive, Trzaskowki ran a more conservative campaign than expected, even going so far as criticising some social programs for Ukrainians in Poland. Though it clearly didn’t help him, he won’t be the last liberal to appeal to the increasingly conservative masses before the decade is out. Having already moved Rightward on migration, Tusk is also flexing his conservative muscles on the European stage, for instance rallying against the Green Deal earlier this year by framing it as a threat to European competitiveness. In a testament to how much Poland has moved the needle on the continent, meanwhile, many other countries are now following Tusk’s lead.

We shouldn’t exaggerate here. Though his own days as prime minister are numbered, Polish liberals are unlikely to wholly cave to the rising Right anytime soon. The record turnout of Sunday’s vote proved that despite the country’s polarisation, and despite the obstacles in their way, pro-EU Poles will continue to be a force to be reckoned with so long as there remains space for Poland at Europe’s top table.

Cliché though it may be, Poles are capable of overcoming their differences and banding together in the face of adversity. Back in the interwar years, Piłsudski shaped the country’s trajectory as he saw fit, but the Poles themselves were never able to get over their indecisiveness until the Nazis and Soviets came knocking in 1939. In today’s Poland, though, waiting that long may not be an option — a synthesis in national identity will necessarily have to emerge, not only for Poland’s own national security, but if Europe wants to defend itself against whatever Russia has in store for Nato’s east.

Poland’s longtime political divisions haven’t hampered its rise so far, but as it enters a new arena of geopolitical competition, the rules of the game have changed. If it hopes to expand its influence in Europe, solidify its brand — and resist Russian imperialism all at the same time — it will have to break through the glass ceiling currently limiting its rise. Once it does so, a vision that unites forward-looking Europeanism with a positivistic nationalism will be Poland’s only ticket in town. Even in the interwar years, Piłsudski understood this well. “Poland will be great,” the marshal once said, “or it won’t be at all.”

Michal Kranz is a freelance journalist reporting on politics, society and defence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He runs The Eastern Flank, a Substack newsletter focused on Eastern European geopolitics.

Michal_Kran

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has been stolen.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

Let’s face it, no one expected Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” to be perfect. But for Elon Musk to adopt the intransigent position that the work of government should stop in its tracks in pursuit of perfection is a manifest nonsense. Especially when considering OMB chief Russ Vought’s explanation of how the bill helps reduce the deficit.

Musk has a habit of failing to see the wood for the trees. He’s been a long-standing backer of China, which my website has reported on for years. He supported DeSantis, not Trump, in the primary. He recently tried to depose Brexit leader Nigel Farage (it went badly for Musk), and just a few weeks ago lashed out at the architect of the tariffs – Dr. Peter Navarro.

Now, he’s set his sights on the President, tweeting this afternoon about how Trump is in the Epstein Files, as if this were new information. It’s not.

Such petulance, however, was visible to some of us for a very long time. A while ago, I told the New York Times: “Musk is an atheistic, amoral, CCP-aligned, unaccountable foreigner that’s going to be the head of the MAGA movement at some point.” I may have been wrong about that last bit.

Now, Elon has very publicly severed his links with the MAGA movement, going so far as to retweet Malaysian influencer Ian Miles Cheong (who, to my shame, once worked for me), saying Trump should be impeached and replaced with J.D. Vance.

Let’s be honest: this is no great loss. Trump should immediately cancel all SpaceX, Tesla and X contracts with the US government.

After all, Elon once claimed he would save US taxpayers $2 trillion. That figure was then revised down to $1 trillion and then to $150 billion. At last check, just 27 percent of these recommendations can be verified. That is worse than failure.

And he’s not just hurting himself with his very public meltdown. He’s harming the MAGA movement. He’s harming the President of the United States. He’s harming his shareholders and investors. And he’s harming the fight against the far left. For what? His amour propre? 

It’s a pretty predictable and sad ending for Musk’s short foray with the MAGA right. Good riddance, as far as I am concerned. 

Raheem Kassam, The Spectator

The goodwill Elon Musk established with House Republicans is plummeting about as fast his relationship with President Donald Trump, and the GOP doesn’t appear to be concerned the tech tycoon who donated millions to back the party in 2024 could work against them in the 2026 midterms.

Musk has been a fervent opponent of the reconciliation budget bill that narrowly passed the House last week and is being considered by the Senate because it adds too much to the federal deficit and doesn’t cut enough spending. He also reportedly is angry that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act phases out by 2026 the tax credit of up to $7,500 given to buyers of electric vehicles, which could be crucial to the success of Musk’s Tesla.

“I’ve had a lot of love and respect for you for what you’ve done for this country over the last several months, but you’ve lost your damn mind,” Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, told reporters of Musk, The Hill reported Thursday. “You’ve lost your mind. Enough is enough. Stop this. I don’t think it’s healthy.”

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., said Musk’s standing with Republicans has diminished.

“He’s extremely bright, my God. I mean — SpaceX, Tesla, all that stuff,” Van Drew said, according to The Hill. “However, I never saw that he had his finger on the pulse of America and what the American man and woman is thinking. I quite frankly, don’t think he does.”

Musk compounded his criticisms by urging his followers on X in a Wednesday post: “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.” The post had more than 329,000 likes and 46.5 million impressions as of 7:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday.

But out of nearly a dozen Republican Capitol Hill offices that spoke with The Hill, ranging from rank-and-file members to leadership, almost none said they received calls from GOP-supporting constituents opposing the bill by the afternoon after Musk’s tweet, or callers making references to Musk. One office reported a caller who said, “kill the bill.”

As party leaders push to get the legislation to Trump’s desk by July 4, lawmakers said there is no time to go back to the drawing board.

“It would be problematic starting at ground zero since it’s taken us about three months to get what we’ve done,” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said Wednesday, according to The Hill. “I don’t know if Elon understands the whole process, but I think that the Senate will make it more conservative.”

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., former chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, noted how Musk stood back while members of the group went to war against GOP leaders and demanded more deficit reductions in the bill ahead of the vote.

When there was blistering fire heaped upon them, he didn’t really have much to say,” Biggs said Wednesday, The Hill reported. “He’s waiting till now to make the assessments? It’s kind of odd.”

House Republicans, including some who benefited from Musk’s donations in 2024, said they are not concerned about losing out on his cash in the midterms, The Hill reported. They aren’t convinced he will follow through with spending plans a year from now, and if he does, it will be effective. Musk and his groups spent more than $20 million to support the losing candidate in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year.

As long as a candidate has Trump’s endorsement, one GOP member told The Hill, “You don’t [have] to worry if Elon spends $5 million.” And in a swing district, “Elon being against you if you are a Republican probably isn’t so bad either.”

Michael Katz ✉

Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.

June 6 marks the eighty-first anniversary of D-Day, when Allied troops crossed the English Channel, landed under heavy fire on the beaches of Normandy, and launched the successful campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi control.  It was one of the riskiest amphibious assaults in military history — not only because of the size of the operation, but also because everyone on the continent knew that it was coming.  

The German High Command anticipated the timing and location of the Allies’ arrival; but for robust counterintelligence measures, brilliant logistical planning, and good fortune, June 6 could easily have become a day synonymous with demoralizing defeat rather than one remembered for heroic sacrifice and bravery.  On the other hand, had the D-Day landings failed, a German-controlled Europe might today be celebrating the Nazis’ successful efforts to repel the American, British, and Canadian invaders.  

There are moments in history when all the chips are pushed to the center of the table for one consequential hand, and the future is decided accordingly.  D-Day was such a gamble, and those who participated ensured Allied victory.

Part of what captures my heart near D-Day’s anniversary is the thought of its terrifying uncertainty.  War-planners spent years preparing for the Battle of Normandy, but much was out of their hands.  Smart, capable generals appreciated the tremendous risks involved with moving the bulk of their fighting forces in one fell swoop.  The troops understood that they might never return home.  Boys who had seen little of the world beyond their farms, towns, or boroughs parachuted out of aircraft and jumped out of landing craft to fight and die on foreign soil.  

It simply takes the breath away to consider how so many found the courage to meet danger head-on, knowing that they would likely never see their families again.  What an awful yet awe-inspiring thing it is for a man to sacrifice himself, so that others might continue living.

And though the historic significance of D-Day is unique, every soldier, sailor, and marine who struggled through the carnage of WWII endured its perils.  The average high school student alive today might have seen enough of Saving Private Ryan to understand why we take time to remember those lost on June 6, 1944, but most have only a vague awareness of the even larger amphibious landing during the Battle of Okinawa that began nearly a year later on April 1, 1945.  

Along with the bloody fighting of the Guadalcanal Campaign, the Battle of Saipan, and the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese resistance around Okinawa included some of the most ferocious hand-to-hand combat of the entire war.  In fact, the barbarity in the Pacific War and the realization that an invasion of mainland Japan would come with heavy casualties were major factors in President Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs.  Imagine how hellish war is to conclude that the use of nuclear weapons is preferable to fighting soldiers and civilians across the Japanese archipelago.

To me, D-Day is a chance to think about not only those we lost during the Battle of Normandy but also those we lost during the entirety of the Second World War.  Over 400,000 Americans died in the conflict.  Another 700,000 were wounded.  As terrible as those numbers are, the global numbers are even more shocking.  Some eighty-five million died during WWII.  More than fifty million civilians died from military actions, disease, starvation, and crimes against humanity.  The absolute depravity required to achieve such numbers is horrifying.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the survivors looked around at the utter ruin that dotted the map from Europe to the Pacific and concluded that such mass death and suffering could never be permitted again.  They witnessed the instantaneous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluded that there must never be a third world war because it would surely be our last.  Then, just to make certain that the next war would definitely be our last, the United States and the Soviet Union spent the next fifty years building nuclear arsenals capable of killing everyone on Earth.

Yet here we are eighty years after WWII, and we’re galloping down that black road toward oblivion faster than ever.  Apparently too much of the world has been enjoying the comforts of peace for too long to worry about what comes when peace ends.  This is difficult to believe.  After all, much of the planet has been in a state of war rather recently.  

It’s hard to find ground in Africa or the Middle East where the blood of one tribe or another has had a chance to dry.  Myanmar’s civil war has been raging in fits and starts since the country first gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1948.  After millions of deaths, the Korean conflict has persisted for seven decades.  The Yugoslav Wars brought a decade of bloodshed to Europe in the ‘90s.  Since the last Great War, Americans have fought in Central and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.  Independence movements, terrorist cells, communist revolutions, ethnic genocides, religious conflicts, covert proxy wars, and so-called “cold” wars have added to humanity’s butcher’s bill every single year.  We humans just can’t stop killing each other, even though we all know where this ends.

Right now much of the West seems desperate to transform the Russia-Ukraine War into a much larger conflagration.  This march toward mass death has been at least ten years in the making.  European globalists blamed Brexit on “Russian bots.”  After President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, Democrat operatives, the corporate news media, and Barack Obama’s espionage chiefs similarly blamed “Russian bots.”  While working to elect Joe Biden, fifty-one American Intelligence “experts” lied to the American people by claiming that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”  The European Union is quick to blame popular support for conservative political parties on “Russian disinformation.”  Ignoring the unifying spirit of athletic competitions, the International Olympic Committee has continued to ban Russian athletes unless they first repudiate the actions of their own government.  Romania annulled last December’s presidential election by blaming “suspected Russian interference.”  Whenever citizens in the West push back against illegal immigration, rising crime, censorship, or bureaucratic overreach, the leftist-globalists who control the Western news media and Western capitals all blame Russian “Internet trolls.”

At the same time, U.S.-NATO and the European Union have moved closer to Russia’s borders for the last thirty years.  As the West blames Russia for interfering in foreign elections, Western NGOs and espionage agencies have repeatedly done the same thing.  In 2014, U.S. and European political leaders explicitly endorsed the removal of the legitimately elected Ukrainian president.  Today’s war in Ukraine centers around regions that have repeatedly voted to become a part of Russia and whose people have engaged in fierce fighting against the Ukrainian military.  The Ukrainian government could only control these regions in the future by imposing strict and brutal martial law.  Still, Western politicians pretend that this regional civil war is about protecting “democracy” and “self-determination.”  

I find these arguments unconvincing.  When Ukraine targets Russia’s long-range nuclear-capable bombers, I find the West’s partnership with Ukraine imminently dangerous.  Although Russian news media have so far placed the blame entirely upon Ukraine’s government, there is plenty of online chatter that Western Intelligence services might have assisted in the operation.  If that doesn’t fill you with enormous dread, it should.

With D-Day here to remind us about the extraordinary cost of war, please take a moment to pray for peace.  Thoughtful people will disagree.  But we should all wish to avoid the Armageddon of WWIII.

J.B. Shurk, American Thinker

Key Points – The war in Ukraine is effectively over, with Russia on a clear path to achieving its objectives through a grinding war of attrition that has exhausted Ukraine and outlasted Western and NATO resolve.

-Russia’s military has adapted, its economy has been reoriented away from the West despite sanctions, and its political regime under Putin remains stable. In contrast, Ukraine faces a critical and irreversible manpower crisis that no amount of Western hardware can solve.

-The idea that Russia might still lose is a comforting but dangerous illusion; Russia is methodically consolidating control over its limited territorial aims.

The idea that Russia might still lose the war in Ukraine has become a kind of security blanket for Western elites – a comforting illusion clutched in think tanks, editorial pages, and official briefings long after the battlefield realities have changed. We are now well past the phase where optimism could be excused as ignorance. The facts are in. Ukraine is exhausted. The West is demoralized. And Russia, despite its many internal challenges, is grinding toward its war aims with brutal consistency.

Let’s be clear: if by “lose” we mean military defeat on the battlefield, collapse of the Russian economy, or regime implosion in Moscow, then no – Russia is not going to lose. Not this year, and not under the current trajectory. All the major structural forces – military, economic, political—are now moving in Russia’s favor. The war is not over, but the outcome is no longer up for grabs.

Start with the military situation, because that’s the foundation of everything else. On the ground, Ukraine’s strategic position is deteriorating by the month. Mobilization efforts have stalled. Recruitment has collapsed. The average age of a frontline soldier is now nearing 45. Desertion and draft-dodging are spreading, and Western aid – though still flowing – is increasingly mismatched to Ukraine’s real needs. You can send as many artillery shells and drone kits as you like, but you cannot manufacture trained infantry out of nothing. And that’s what Ukraine is short of: not resolve, not hardware, but men.

Meanwhile, Russia’s army has evolved. It’s no longer the chaotic, overstretched force that stumbled out into Ukraine in February 2022. It has absorbed its losses, adapted to the terrain, and reverted to what it does best: attritional warfare, backed by overwhelming firepower and deep reserves of manpower. Russia doesn’t need to stage flashy counter-offensives or overrun all of Ukraine. It only needs to advance slowly, dig in, and bleed Ukraine white – while maintaining pressure long enough to outlast Western political will. And that’s exactly what it’s doing.

The idea that Russia might still lose the war in Ukraine has become a kind of security blanket for Western elites – a comforting illusion clutched in think tanks, editorial pages, and official briefings long after the battlefield realities have changed. We are now well past the phase where optimism could be excused as ignorance. The facts are in. Ukraine is exhausted. The West is demoralized. And Russia, despite its many internal challenges, is grinding toward its war aims with brutal consistency.

Let’s be clear: if by “lose” we mean military defeat on the battlefield, collapse of the Russian economy, or regime implosion in Moscow, then no – Russia is not going to lose. Not this year, and not under the current trajectory. All the major structural forces – military, economic, political—are now moving in Russia’s favor. The war is not over, but the outcome is no longer up for grabs.

Start with the military situation, because that’s the foundation of everything else. On the ground, Ukraine’s strategic position is deteriorating by the month. Mobilization efforts have stalled. Recruitment has collapsed. The average age of a frontline soldier is now nearing 45. Desertion and draft-dodging are spreading, and Western aid – though still flowing – is increasingly mismatched to Ukraine’s real needs. You can send as many artillery shells and drone kits as you like, but you cannot manufacture trained infantry out of nothing. And that’s what Ukraine is short of: not resolve, not hardware, but men.

Meanwhile, Russia’s army has evolved. It’s no longer the chaotic, overstretched force that stumbled out into Ukraine in February 2022. It has absorbed its losses, adapted to the terrain, and reverted to what it does best: attritional warfare, backed by overwhelming firepower and deep reserves of manpower. Russia doesn’t need to stage flashy counter-offensives or overrun all of Ukraine. It only needs to advance slowly, dig in, and bleed Ukraine white – while maintaining pressure long enough to outlast Western political will. And that’s exactly what it’s doing.

The grim truth is that Russia is winning the war – methodically, incrementally, and without apology. It is winning not by blitzkrieg, but by attrition. It is not trying to take all of Ukraine, only the parts it considers vital: the four annexed oblasts, the land bridge to Crimea, and a neutralized rump to the west. And it is succeeding – not because it has outmaneuvered NATO, but because it has outlasted the illusion that victory was ever going to look like the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders.

So is there any way Russia could still lose? Only at the level of fantasy. Only in the realm of narratives unmoored from facts – as with the delusional fantasies regarding Operation Spiderweb. The battlefield favors Moscow. The economic sanctions have failed to break its will. The regime has stabilized. And the West has no plan – none – for reversing any of this.

Which means it’s time to start thinking like realists. The question is no longer how to defeat Russia, but how to limit the damage of a war we have already lost in everything but name. That’s not a message anyone in Washington, Brussels, or Kyiv wants to hear. But it’s the only honest one left.

The tragedy of Ukraine is not that it fought. It’s that it was led to believe victory was possible – when all along, the most it could hope for was survival. And even that now hangs by a thread.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

June 5, 2025

I have a lot of Democratic friends who are extremely disappointed with their party leaders. They tell me that the Democratic Party is currently rudderless, weak, passive, lacking a compelling message. I try to be polite, but I want to tell them: “The problem is not the party leaders. The problem is you. You don’t understand how big a shift we’re in the middle of. You think the Democrats can solve their problems with a new message and a new leader. But the Democrats’ challenge is that they have to adapt to a new historical era. That’s not something done by working politicians who are focused on fund-raising and the next election. That’s only accomplished by visionaries and people willing to shift their entire worldview. That’s up to you, my friends, not Chuck Schumer.”

There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the L.G.B.T.Q. movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.

In 2024, I wrote about an Ipsos poll that summarized the populist zeitgeist. Roughly 59 percent of Americans said the country was in decline. Sixty percent agreed “the system is broken.” Sixty-nine percent agreed the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.” Sixty-three percent said “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me.” The American results were essentially in line with the results from the 27 other countries around the world that were polled.

The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party. Recently, George F. Will compiled a list of all the ways Trump is departing from conservative orthodoxy and behaving and thinking in ways contrary to the ways Republicans behaved in the age of conservative market liberalism. Will’s list of Trump pivots is worth quoting in full:

“1. Combating the citizenry’s false consciousness by permeating society, including cultural institutions, with government, which is politics. 2. Confidence in government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities. 3. Using industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers because the future is transparent, so government can know which enterprises should prosper. 4. Central planning of the evolution of the nation’s regions and the economy’s sectors, especially manufacturing. 5. Melding governing and party-building by constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act). 6. Rejecting conservative growth-oriented tax simplification — lowering rates by eliminating preferences — to use taxes (including tariffs) as tools of social engineering. Bypassing the appropriations process, the tax code can transfer wealth to favored constituencies. 7. Limitless borrowing from future Americans to fund today’s Americans’ consumption of government goods and services. 8. Presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress. 9. Unfettered majoritarianism, hence opposition to the Senate filibuster.”

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Trump has taken the atmosphere of alienation, magnified it with his own apocalypticism, and, assaulting institutions across society, has created a revolutionary government. More this term than last, he is shifting the conditions in which we live.

Many of my Democratic friends have not fully internalized the magnitude of this historical shift. They are still thinking within the confines of the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview. But I have a feeling that over the next few years, the tumult of events will push Democrats onto some new trajectory.

The crucial point was made by the Bulgarian-born political scientist Ivan Krastev on the “Good Fight” podcast with Yascha Mounk. He said, “In every revolution, there is always more than one revolution.”

He went on to explain: “If this is a revolution, revolution changes the identity of all players. No political party or actor is going to get out of the revolution the way they started it. You can have Lenin after Kerensky; you cannot have Kerensky after Lenin. It is a totally different story. The Democratic Party is going to be as dramatically transformed by the Trumpian revolution — for good or for bad — as the Republican Party is.”

If you’re thinking the Democrats’ job now is to come up with some new policies that appeal to the working class, you are thinking too small. This is not about policies. Democrats have to do what Trump did: create a new party identity, come up with a clear answer to the question: What is the central problem of our time? Come up with a new grand narrative.

For nearly a century, the Democrats have ridden on the grand narratives of previous eras. First, the welfare state narrative: America is too unequal; we can use big government to give people economic security. Second, the liberation narrative: History moves forward as progressive movements fight the oppression of marginalized groups: Black people, women, Palestinians, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Those are noble narratives. They are not sufficient in the age of global populism.

The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions — the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated.

Democrats recently had an argument about whether they should use the word “oligarchy” to attack Republicans. They are so locked in their old narratives that they are apparently unaware that to many, they are the oligarchy.

If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.

Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for doling out attention and respect. When millions of people feel that they and their values are invisible to that order, they rightly feel furious and alienated. Of course they’ll go with the guy — Trump — who says: I see you. I respect you. If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.

My second notion is this: Pay attention to Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a Republican president in the middle of the welfare state era. He basically said: I’m going to endorse the basic shape of the New Deal, but I’m going to achieve those ends more sensibly. You can trust me.

For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.

To show that, you have to be willing to take on your activist groups: We’re going to reform schools in ways the unions don’t like. We’re going to reform zoning in a way the NIMBY brigades don’t like. We’re going to reform Congress in ways the incumbents don’t like. We’re going to talk about patriotism and immigration in ways the groups don’t like. We’re going to fix how blue cities are governed in a way the groups don’t like.

Do you really think professional politicians are going to lead the tectonic shifts that are required? That takes intellectuals, organizers, a new generation, all of us. It’s the work of decades, not election cycles. Clear your mind. Think anew.

David Brooks

In politics, they say you want your people all peeing out of the tent rather than into it.

In this context, there is a case to be made for assigning Elon Musk a new task to keep his mind off the budget and keep him focused and on point.

Here is the assignment. Give him a contract to develop the desalination technology that will increase the habitable size of the USA by one-third and double the habitable size of the Earth. This can be achieved by collapsing the cost of desalinating seawater to roughly $ 200 per acre-foot. (That would make it economic to farm any desert on earth and place data and server farms– as well as mango and avocado orchards–in the US deserts.) And if Musk wants to, he can make the technology dual-use. That is, the technology will work on both Earth and Mars.

Do you think this project would achieve the political ends mentioned above while advancing Trump’s policy aims?

Anonymous

Radio host Charlamagne Tha God on Thursday criticized black Democratic voters for what he called blind loyalty to the party.

Charlamagne’s comments on “The Breakfast Club” followed former White House press secretary Latrine Jean-Pierre announcing on Wednesday that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent and publishing a book. The radio host praised her departure from the Democratic Party, arguing that black Americans should not be tied to either major political party.

“I respect her being independent because I feel like if you black in this country, you shouldn’t be loyal to any party. You should only be voting your interests,” Charlamagne said. “You should only be voting for politicians who are implementing legislation and policies for your communities and your people. And if you ask me, none of these parties have done enough for us to be screaming we Republican or Democrat. So independent is the way to go.”

Jean-Pierre’s book is titled “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” and is slated for publication in October.

Charlamagne read a quote from a press release for the book, which he called “very interesting.”

“We need to be willing to exercise the ability to think creatively and plan strategically,” Jean-Pierre’s press release stated. “We need to be clear-eyed and questioning rather than blindly loyal and obedient as we may have been in the past.”

“And that right there is the problem with Democrat supporters, especially black ones — just blindly loyal and obedient for no damn reason,” Charlamagne said after reading the quote.

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said on “CUOMO” in May that he was pleased with President Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory because he believed the Democratic Party has long manipulated black voters, including through “guilt” and scare tactics — rather than policy.

“I think, for the longest time, black Americans have played the role of suckers to the Democratic Party,” Smith said. “They’ve guilted us into voting for them, making us feel as if we’re going to be ostracized, creating division within our own communities or what have you to get our vote, instead of saying to us, ‘Hey, this is what we will do for you. And it will work better than what they’re offering.’”

Trump made gains with black voters in November, garnering 13% of their votes, including 21% of men, according to a CNN exit poll.

Staff, Daily Caller