In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Keep reading

The following is reporting from Western and pro-Ukraine sources, and should be viewed with caution. Russian forces continue to take territory in Donbass. Constantinovka is in Russian hands and Slavyansk is in their crosshairs. The deep strikes on Russia are causing pain but yet to stop Russia’s advance on the ground.

Ukraine’s drone war pivoted sharply to the sea this week. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, announced Wednesday morning that Ukrainian drones had struck 13 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov within the past 48 hours — the most concentrated maritime strike operation of the conflict to date, per The Independent’s live war coverage.

The campaign is targeting Russian-flagged vessels operating between the Russian mainland and occupied Crimea — the lifeline that sustains Moscow’s grip on the peninsula. The Kyiv Post reported this week that the operation has now expanded beyond its original focus area to include Russia’s Krasnodar shoreline, marking the first time Ukrainian drone strikes have targeted that stretch of coast. In an earlier phase of the campaign, Ukraine’s drone forces commander told outlets that 183 vessels had been struck in July alone — a figure the BBC said it had seen evidence to support, though it could not independently verify the full tally.

Simultaneously, Ukraine hit Crimea’s power grid. Drones struck electric substations in Masandra and Yalta, according to Telegram monitoring channel Supernova Plus, triggering widespread blackouts across occupied Alushta and surrounding areas, per the Kyiv Independent. The blackouts add to weeks of infrastructure attrition: much of the peninsula is now reported to have limited access to food, running water, and electricity — a grinding siege by drone rather than by armor.

On land, Ukraine renewed strikes deep behind Russian lines Wednesday. The head of Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries — Tatyana Kim — confirmed on Wednesday that warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk had been hit. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev said 10 people were wounded in the Krasnodar storage complex attack, and social media footage showed a thick column of smoke rising over the city. Drone debris also damaged two residential high-rises in Krasnodar, with no reported casualties from that secondary strike.

The maritime escalation comes as Ukrainian military and political leadership is navigating a command transition. Zelensky overnight confirmed General Mykhailo Drapatyi as the new commander-in-chief, and it will fall to him to either sustain or redirect this naval offensive. Russian milbloggers, meanwhile, have been pushing back on official Kremlin claims that Russian forces have secured the M-14 Rostov-Crimea highway — the primary land route linking mainland Russia to occupied Crimea — against Ukrainian mid-range drone strikes, per the Institute for the Study of War’s July 20 assessment.

Keep reading