Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a food delivery driver in North Austin, Texas, was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while he was making a delivery on Sunday, September 20. Garces Perez, who survived the shooting but is now partially paralyzed, says his car was rammed by a large black unmarked truck.
ICE claimed they attempted a traffic stop and that Garces Perez fled, but the DoorDash driver and his lawyers’ account contradict this report, saying after he tried to U-turn and pullover, ICE agents rammed his vehicle again, and then an agent got out and aimed his weapon through the passenger side of the car and shot Garces Perez in the back of his neck.
CBP revealed on Tuesday, September 22, that the officer that fired the shot was not wearing a body camera, despite the agency’s body-camera requirements.
“I am not doing well due to the gunshot wound and I have not received the medical attention that I require,” he said through a translator at a press conference in Austin. After receiving no pain medication at the hospital, Garces Perez said that in ICE custody, he was forced to sleep on the floor and repeatedly asked for medical care while in severe pain.
His attorney also said he developed paralysis on his left side.
Local community demands ICE out of Austin
Within hours of the shooting, protests erupted in Austin. Hundreds of residents flooded the streets demanding ICE out of their neighborhoods.
Organizers have connected the shooting to a growing number of fatal and nonfatal encounters involving immigration agents, including the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island.
“We cannot be silent as ICE is shooting and killing our neighbors!” a statement by the Austin branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation said.
Protests have continued across Austin on Monday and Tuesday. Student walkouts were also seen on Tuesday, September 22, by students across Pflugerville, Texas, north of downtown Austin, as well as Navarro Early College High School.
DHS defends the shooting and promises to investigate
After the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security quickly claimed that Garces Perez was an “illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered” the United States.
Garces Perez’s lawyers have refuted these claims, saying he entered the country through CBP One, the US border processing system. “He had a work permit. He was seeking asylum.” They said that a notice of hearing was sent to an old address, despite Garces Perez updating his address with the immigration court. “He didn’t know he had a hearing. So he didn’t go and got a deportation order in absentia, which is a very common thing.”
According to reports, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are leading an investigation into the ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez.
Austin police and the Travis County district attorney’s office have also said they intend to investigate the shooting. But their investigations come amid strong criticism of federal officials’ handling of previous ICE shootings in Texas. In Houston, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has said federal officials did not provide his office with information about the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He is taking his own investigation to a grand jury to force the release of more details.
ICE violence continues in the US
The Austin shooting follows a series of fatal encounters involving federal immigration agents this year, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine.
As federal agents continue to face scrutiny over deadly encounters in Texas and other states, Austin residents and organizers say they will continue protesting and organizing until ICE is out of their communities.
On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.
Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.
AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.
What the Dario essay asks for
Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”
The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.
The incident that supposedly proves it
The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”
The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.
Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.
Why now
The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.
Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.
Washington says no, for its own reasons
The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.
Two futures
China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”
That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.
The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.
Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.
President Xi Jinping is set to visit to the United States from September 23-25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.
In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.
In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognize that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.
That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.
But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.
The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.
The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialization, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatization of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.
The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilizing cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.
Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theater.
Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.
The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.
The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.
There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognize that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.
This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.
Confrontation offers neither country a future.
Collaboration offers the world a chance.
Vijay Prashadis an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director ofTricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor ofLeftWord Books(New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
After the US officially admitted it deployed weapons into outer space earlier this week, Russia and China expressed concerns, calling it a threat to international peace and demanding the immediate stoppage of all such activities.
During a regular press conference on Tuesday, September 15, Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that “China opposes any arms race in outer space or any attempt to weaponize it and turn it into a warzone.”
He further said that “China stands for the peaceful use of outer space and keeping it safe” and urged the US to “stop expanding military build-up in outer space, and uphold global strategic stability with concrete actions.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that the US weapons deployment is a threat to international security and puts a question mark on the stability in outer space.
“Russia has for many years been consistently drawing the attention of the global community to the grave consequences for international security that Washington’s destructive course may lead to,” Zakharova said.
She said her country seeks “urgent practical measures to prevent arms race in outer space” and reiterated Russia’s push for a “multilateral legally binding instrument banning the deployment of weapons in outer space.”
Though it has long been a subject of speculation, a couple of US military officials, earlier this week, admitted that its military is operating weapons deployed in outer space.
The admission was made by US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink on Monday during a conference. He said that the US “has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”
Meink’s statement was substantiated by US Space Force chief Douglas Schiess, who a day later, on Tuesday, said that in the coming years the US is even planning to increase the number of orbital weapons already used by the members of his military unit.
Urgent need of legal prohibitions
Underlining the threat that the deployment of weapons in outer space poses, several countries, including Russia and China, have been calling for an international treaty to prevent any arms race in outer space for decades now.
The existing instrument, the UN Outer Space Treaty (1967) makes clear that “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
It also prohibits the deployment of “nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or stationing them in outer space in any other manner,” but it says nothing about the deployment of conventional weapons, despite declaring it should be used for peaceful purposes only.
None of the US military officials spoke about the nature of weapons deployed by the US in outer space.
Though only a handful of countries have the technological capability to explore outer space in any significant way, several countries have used satellites for military and war purposes for decades now.
The US has a dedicated space force which has recently held exercises related to possible military conflicts in space.
The deployment of weapons and claims of exclusivity, apart from increasing possibilities of an arms race between the existing powers in space; the US, Russia, and China, may also make the rest of the world more insecure.
Zakharova said that Russia is planning to submit a proposal for the creation of an international instrument legally prohibiting all weapon deployment in outer space during the upcoming annual UN General Assembly session.
She asked for more countries to join the Russian initiative and co-author the treaty document.
In the year of the 250th anniversary of US independence, the bipartisan US Semiquincentennial Commission released “America’s Soundtrack: The Sound of 250 Years.” Perhaps unsurprisingly – because the initiative was planned over the course of a decade with the support of corporations like Amazon, Oracle, and Palantir – the playlist is a romantic ode to the most paternalistic and militaristic sides of the United States.
However, activists have pointed out that there are “Two Americas at 250.” In other words, there is a working-class history and culture that directly contradicts the imperialist project of the billionaire class. Therefore, we must study another soundtrack: one based on the struggles, desires, and traditions of the people. One person that represents this soundtrack is “America’s favorite blues man,” 34-year-old Buffalo Nicols.
Music characterized Carl Nichols’s upbringing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though not surrounded by musicians, he always had the sounds of jazz on the radio, his mother‘s music collection, his older brother’s hip-hop, and his older sisters, R&B, punk, and metal. This was the context in which he taught himself to play his sister’s guitar at the age of 12.
Performing with bands throughout high school, Carl found kinship among the West African community. As he played a cheap banjo along with a friend on the instrument known as the xalam, he embraced music as an opportunity to learn about other cultures. Traveling through countries like Senegal, Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine in his early 20s and learning their sonic traditions, motivated him to study Black American music with the same rigor.
Performers like Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie left a lasting mark on him, specifically relating to communal and commercial music. Similarly, the writing of Etheridge Knight, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka helped him understand the blues as “a living thing” rather than a set of important names and dates. He said, “There’s always been this connection between activism and folk music because I think trying to exist as an artist in America has been a political thing.”
His 2025 song “Belly of the Beast“ is one example of this because it asks about the responsibility which domestic victims of US imperialism have for protecting victims abroad. Written during the heightened media coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the song calls attention to the relationship between Black Americans and Palestinians. He conceptualized the song following a period of political education defined by a collection of Malcolm X speeches and Régis Debray’s 1967 “Revolution in the Revolution?”
I live in the belly of the beast
Though I only meant to look into his mouth
It was not opportunity but chains he used to capture me
And every day I’ve tried to get back out
While these lines of the chorus speak from the individual or first person perspective, Nichols uses them to describe a common experience.This is why the song ends with the collective “we live in the belly of the beast.” The song is neither nihilistic or romantic in its allusion to topics like police killings, occupation and ethnic cleansing. Rather, in verse four, the singer puts his hope for change in the hands of the people, saying “we cannot win ’till we get organized.”
Some, who mistake folk music as apolitical, took offense to this song. They attack him in social media comments, direct messages, and hate mail. In the spirit of the blues, Nichols said he laughs at their assumption that they can hurt him. The same minority of listeners attacked him for his 2025 song “Ice Age Blues.”
He wrote the song in response to the second Trump administration’s escalation of ICE terror. Specifically, on the widespread sense of surprise that law-enforcement would use deadly force against the US residents. He said that it reminded him of the same realization among new activists during the 2020 uprising for George Floyd. However, Nichols shows that he was not shocked by the contradiction – he ends the song by asking,
You think all that money is for war fought abroad?
They won’t hesitate to kill you in your own backyard.
They’d be happy to kill you in your own backyard.
Nichols said that political finger pointing will not help identify the common perpetrator of a shared oppression. Instead, he urges readers to understand the state and how it works against the people; to study the basis of its patterns and changes. By doing so, he calls listeners attention to the basis of repression rather than simply what accelerates it.
Similarly, he recommends the new generation of blues people to “return to the root.” That is, to disregard stereotypes about their Black art and study those – like Zora Neal Hurston – who preserved long-standing traditions. By reclaiming their legacy, he said that culture workers can affect consciousness on a mass level.
I know no artist really wants to be a role model or to be representing an entire people but the reality is that Black culture is such a fragile, delicate and important thing that we have to be more mindful of how we share it and how we interact with it.
Buffalo Nichols is currently touring through states like West Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota.
The Democrats could win big in the US midterm elections. This won’t matter much for constraining Trump, but it will start to establish what politics comes after him.
Our research finds three camps of Democrats, all with different diagnoses of America’s problems: the revolutionaries see the system as unjust and needing structural change; the renovators see it as corrupt and needing reform; and the revivalists blame right-wing populism for breaking a system of bipartisan cooperation.
What these camps see as broken in American domestic politics translates to how they view US foreign policy and Europe’s place in it.
No matter which camp goes on to determine the future of Democratic foreign policy, it will be a far cry from the transatlanticism of previous Democratic administrations. This year’s midterm candidates have barely mentioned Europe, Russia or Ukraine in their campaigns.
Europeans need to engage early and help shape their relationship with the party now, lest they be overlooked if and when Democrats do come to power.
What comes after Trump
This summer, the FIFA World Cup turned the world’s attention to America while America turned on much of the world. As Iran was due to play Egypt in Seattle, the US launched new strikes in its four-month war with the country. On semi-final day, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social an AI-doctored image of a map showing Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Venezuela covered with an American flag. And just days after Trump handed the World Cup trophy to the Spanish national team, his administration announced sweeping 10% baseline tariffs on 80 countries. The juxtaposition of tournament host and wartime belligerent reflects the position America now occupies in European strategic thinking: too central to ignore and too disruptive to rely on.
Europeans hoping that a midterm victory for Democrats in November will bring a reversal of this foreign policy should not hold their breath. If the party wins a majority of seats in one or both chambers of Congress—which is looking likely—they may be able to attach provisions to bills, launch investigations, issue subpoenas and lambast some of Trump’s poor foreign policy choices. But the second Trump administration has shown it will route around Congress and confront it with delays, hostility and vitriol, limiting any capacity for oversight. Having spent its first 18 months in power ignoring a friendly Republican Congress, one with a Democratic majority has even slimmer chances. In other words, little will change until the occupant of the White House does.
For now, the Democrats’ real power resides not in stopping the current administration but in shaping what comes next. Democratic candidates competing across the US—for both primaries and generals—have a wide ideological range, from “democratic socialists” to “centrists”. While they all heavily criticise Trump and his administration, they have different diagnoses for where the dysfunction began, what sustains it and what needs to be done about it. Engaged in party primaries across the country, Democratic candidates are putting forward competing answers to the two central questions Americans are asking themselves: “What went wrong?” and “How do we fix it?” Based on these answers, we have identified that Democrats tend to cluster into three camps—the “revolutionaries”, the “renovators” and the “revivalists”—each with distinct proposals for the future of America.
The revolutionaries argue that the political and economic system that drives America has always been unjust and was built to concentrate wealth at the top. Therefore, the way to fix America is to enact large, structural change. The renovators argue that the democratic system of government was largely built to benefit all Americans but has been corrupted by money and captured interests. Their proposed remedy is to root out large-scale corruption, rebalancing the economic and political systems to the benefit of middle- and working-class Americans. The revivalists argue that increased partisanship, fuelled by Trump and the MAGA-aligned right, has divided the country and undermined the collaborative bipartisanship that is necessary for the functioning of the system and its institutions. They are focused on reinvigorating those institutions, reviving the post-war international order and rebuilding political bridges, all of which they see as the path back to peace and prosperity.
The revolutionaries, renovators and revivalists are ideal types, not formal factions. They emerge from our analysis of over 50 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle. We also researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington. In doing so, we found that sorting candidates by their messages about the underlying cause of what has gone wrong in America proved to reliably predict how a candidate discusses domestic and global problems. For example, revolutionaries support Europe’s strategic autonomy but would dislike a Europe defined by militarisation and austerity; renovators see Europe as a potential partner on anti-corruption, taxation and democracy, as long as Europeans provide for their own security; and revivalists remain attached to the NATO alliance but are still unlikely to restore the old division of labour.
The ideological battles between Democrats will matter more than the arithmetic of the Senate or the House for the next two years. One of these three camps will lead the party’s ideological charge for the next presidential race, if not the next presidency. Leaders across Europe should not wait to see which will prevail. Rather, they should engage with these camps well before the presidential race gets under way. They may then be able to shape the thinking and policy proposals that Democrats put on the table between now and 2028, and beyond.
The Democratic camps
Democrats—from New York democratic socialists to staunch Iowa moderates—have more in common than not. Practically everyone in the party believes Trump is a problem and that he and the MAGA movement have fundamentally changed American democracy for the worse. Many view widespread corruption as an issue and some say corruption is encouraged by the system itself.
But while the policy views of the three Democratic camps overlap, there are a few key points of difference. To illustrate these characteristics more clearly, this paper focuses on key individuals who have gained national attention, are running in close races, or are largely representative of what other ideologically aligned candidates say. It is rare for a candidate to be a perfect “revolutionary” or “revivalist” because they must answer to constituencies with divergent interests and disparate views of American and global affairs. Some candidates will even recognise themselves across different camps. Nevertheless, these three camps represent sensitivities that are bound to clash in the primaries until one of them breaks through and is championed by the 2028 Democratic nominee for president. Understanding them helps anticipate the direction of US policy in the brouhaha of its politics.
The revolutionaries
The revolutionaries maintain that the political and economic order in the US is functioning as designed: to serve concentrated wealth rather than the American people. The enemy, in revolutionaries’ rhetoric, is not necessarily any one person or party (such as Trump or the Republicans) but the economic and political system that consistently benefits the ruling class. Only a structural transformation of the system would finally make it work for the people.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in his primary victory speech put the thesis as such: “It turns out that the reason so many of us ain’t got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. That is the thing we are taking on now”. El-Sayed, who is a former public health official in Detroit, focuses his entire campaign on big structural goals: getting corporate money out of politics, and, like Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, passing Medicare for All, a proposal for universal healthcare. Often revolutionaries’ critiques take a moral tone, such as when Senate candidate Angie Nixon of Florida talks about cruelty out of Washington, or denounces the “liars” and “cheaters” in office.
Their theory of power follows: winning office is useful, but only insofar as it can be used to structurally change power dynamics between a ruling corporate class and average working Americans. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when asked about a potential run for president in 2028, responded: “My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, house seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever.”
On foreign policy, the revolutionaries argue that the current political system led America on an inevitable path of hyper-militarisation, threat inflation, an over-extension of its financial and human resources in military adventurism, and the reproduction of domestic systemic racism into foreign policy. They view the American relationship with Israel as the seminal example of everything wrong with this approach; Palestine being “one the great moral questions of our time” as New York congressional candidate Claire Valdez puts it.
Their diagnosis abroad is largely parallel to the one at home, viewing the pitfalls of US foreign policy as a metastasis caused by the American corporate class. As Valdez asserts:
“For decades, we have been sold a lie: that the US empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights…In reality, the bipartisan war machine has delivered immense suffering around the world while doing little to improve the lives of working people here or abroad. The military-industrial complex doesn’t just enrich arms manufacturers—it has become our de facto industrial policy, sustaining enough jobs and political constituencies to make endless war challenging to stop.”
Their fixes to US foreign policy largely follow their domestic proposals: if you fix the system and its incentives for prioritising the financial gains of the wealthiest class, all else will follow.[1] This is rooted in banning corporate political action committee spending on campaigns which they believe will ultimately diminish the influence of defence contractors and foreign interest groups—namely the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)—over candidates’ races, and therefore, diminish their influence on policy. In the short term, the revolutionaries aim to cut defence spending, bolster humanitarian aid and preference diplomacy in the American foreign policy toolkit. They also believe that the Biden administration’s foreign policy officials must be held accountable for continuing to supply Israel as its war on Gaza intensified.
In these midterms, some of the revolutionary firebrands include Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, Florida senate candidate Angie Nixon, Representative Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, House candidates Melat Kiros in Colorado, and New York congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Disgraced Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner also used that same rhetoric.
The renovators
The renovators believe the system is imperfect, but largely worth keeping. In their view it has been co-opted and corrupted by money and corporate greed and upheld by a leadership class that is either corrupt themselves or out of answers. As James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, explains: “I think we’re living in an era of corruption, and I don’t just mean illegal activity… I’m talking about corruption in the deeper sense, the rotting of our systems from the inside out…” In his telling, strengthened by his moral standing as a middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, the issue with the American political system is not the institutions themselves, but the way in which they are weaponised and perverted.
While the revolutionaries name the ruling class as the enemy, the renovators see the villain as a narrower collection of groups who have captured institutions that were otherwise built to work for the American people. This distinction yields a different theory of power: with the right rules in place, the existing machinery can be trusted to function again. Therefore, instead of demolition, this group aims to renovate.
Senator Jon Ossoff spoke to this message at a campaign rally in June when he mused about what the founding fathers of America would see if they came to the US today:
“They’d see a pluralist democracy, people of all colours descended from every point on earth, stitched together from out of many nations into one. But they’d also see a nation, that at its height of wealth and power, fell into the very traps they most feared. Devouring itself in bitter conflict between warring factions, captured by special interests. And they’d see a faithless president exploiting this rot to pursue the absolute power they overthrew.”
House candidate Daniel Biss has voiced a similar critique, stating that: “While our families struggle to get ahead, politicians in Washington line their own pockets and special interests and wealthy donors flood our political system with money to protect their own power and access.”
Because renovators share the same anger towards an entrenched leadership class, the remedy they prescribe overlaps somewhat with that of the revolutionaries, including stock trading bans for Congress, term limits and campaign finance reform. However, the renovators are more likely to clean out and reform an agency—namely the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that the revolutionaries would call to abolish. The renovators also view the Democratic party as a vehicle worth trying to steer rather than run against.
On foreign policy, the renovators argue that the same corruption that is eroding domestic institutions has been exported, and that this is primarily corroding America’s credibility. Ossoff made this connection explicit when he criticised the financial gains Jared Kushner has made while carrying out US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Senator Chris Murphy, a leader in this camp, has also described Trump’s acceptance of gifts and business arrangements from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as corruption with “no precedent in American history”. Thus, the fix renovators recommend is twofold: root out the graft of those currently running foreign policy so American leadership abroad can function as intended, and then fix the political system such that future administrations cannot replicate the corrupt schemes of the current one.
Renovators are spread across the country, from candidates in conservative states and districts such as Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas, Senator Jon Ossoff from Georgia, House candidates Sam Forstag of Montana, Manny Rutinel of Colorado, and Eric Jones of California. There is also a cluster of midwestern candidates including House candidate Daniel Biss from Illinois, Senate candidate Peggy Flannagan of Minnesota, and former Senator and current candidate Sherrod Brown from Ohio.
The revivalists
The revivalists are firm believers in American exceptionalism and credit American liberalism for the peace and prosperity of the past 80 years. They see Trump and the MAGA-aligned right as the primary threat to that inheritance and to American democracy and values more broadly.
Their diagnosis is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement behind him have steeped the country in hyper-partisan vitriol and driven it into a spiral of polarisation. Revivalists argue that these divides drive dysfunction in Washington and make it impossible to worth within the political system. They often celebrate a prior era of bipartisanship and showcase their own capacity to work across the aisle.
Their theory of power follows from that diagnosis. Democrats must defeat Trump, the movement behind him and the polarisation that produced both. Then competent, experienced hands will make the system function as intended again. They believe collaborating with reasonable, non-MAGA Republicans to build bridges and pass longer-lasting legislation will show Americans how a working government can operate. In turn, they think a government that delivers will earn back trust on its own merits. Revivalist candidates centre their electoral pitches around defeating Trump, restoring institutional norms and bipartisan collaboration. Senator Chris Coons, who is running for re-election in Delaware, made an appeal to voters saying as much:
“At some point [Trump’s] chaos, corruption, and cruelty will come to an end. And a lot of work will be needed to pick up the pieces, to clean up the mess he’s made, to fix a system that’s still broken and not delivering results for the folks I serve in Delaware. I’m running for reelection because the job’s not done.”
Coons emphasises the damage that Trump has caused and his desire to restore normality to the halls of Congress. Additionally, many revivalists stand closest to the Democratic party leadership and often treat experience as a credential rather than a liability. In her unsuccessful race for Michigan’s Senate seat, Congresswoman Haley Stevens emphasised her time in the Obama administration, for example, and Roy Cooper spotlights his accomplishments as evidence of his policy chops from his time as North Carolina’s governor.
On foreign policy, the revivalists argue that American military alliances, trade relationships and institutions are integral pieces of the liberal world order. In their view, the post-war structures are worth defending, US leadership is needed and Trump’s destruction of these institutions is actively harming American global power. They mostly believe that the backlash against these institutions, whether it be NATO or the WTO, is a failure of messaging. Americans were never told what the post-war order gave them, so they have had no reason to defend it.[2]
Where revivalists identify a problem abroad, they frame it as they frame problems at home: the result of a specific bad actor’s conduct or of partisan divisions. For example, they blame Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for their countries’ strained relationships with the US. Change the leadership and you can restore the relationship, which is an argument for patience both at home and abroad. They argue too that foreign adversaries purposely widen American divisions, and that Americans should fight back by recognising those efforts and working across the aisle, a case New York representative Tom Suozzi made recently during a hearing on foreign influence:
“The biggest factor causing division in our country is our foreign adversaries…They are feeding division in our country. They cannot defeat us economically. They cannot defeat us militarily. So they want to take what they see as being our biggest weakness which is our diversity. And they fuel dissent in our country…”
Revivalists comprise the largest cross-section of the party and are represented from coast-to-coast, including Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, Senator Chuck Schumer from New York, Senator John Hickenlooper from Colorado, Representative Tom Suozzi from New York, Representative Maggie Goodlander from New Hampshire, Senate candidate Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Senate candidate Roy Cooper from North Carolina, House candidate Rebecca Cooke from Wisconsin, former Senate candidates Janet Mills from Maine and Angie Craig from Minnesota.
The five foreign policy issues
Primaries have at times led to tense disputes among Democrats. When it comes to foreign policy, our analysis shows where the camps divide on five key issues that will matter to Europeans: affordability and trade; the use of military force; China and great power competition; Israel; and Europe and European security.
1. Affordability and trade
Since Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory in November 2025, affordability has defined this election cycle’s messaging. Candidates across the board focus on policies that would help the affordability crisis and frame other issues as perpetuating it.[3] The focus is so singular that the headline messages are often interchangeable across the party: Abdul El-Sayed is running for “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all” while Roy Cooper’s prevailing message is “Make stuff cost less.”
In terms of foreign policy, trade is affordability gone global. And as all Democratic candidates see it, Trump’s tariffs raise the price for Americans while enriching himself and his allies. But this consensus is an objection to these specific tariffs, not to all tariffs.
Revolutionaries remain sceptical of the old free-trade order itself: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference called for “a recognition of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] as a failed policy for many rural and working class communities,” and Abdul El-Sayed called NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership a disaster for the American worker. Moreover, this camp sees small, strategic tariffs as legitimate tools of job protection.
Renovators, on the other hand, believe current trade agreements can be improved. Senator Jon Ossoff, for example, sent a letter to the Trump administration urging them to use the US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) review to police Mexican labour and environmental practices to ensure American growers have a chance to compete fairly on the global market.
Revivalists remain closely aligned to the old free-trade consensus. In April of this year, for example, senators in this camp asked the US trade representative to “strengthen and renew” the USMCA. They believe that trade tools like tariffs or export controls should only be used for national security issues, akin to the “small-yard, high-fence” policies of the Biden administration. Amid the Trump administration’s trade wars, they suggest focusing on a narrow trade agenda that directly serves the interests of both sides, such as deals on critical minerals, new technologies or other pieces of critical supply chains.
2. The use of military force
America’s two latest military operations—Trump’s war in Iran and the operation to remove Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—have sparked debate among Democrats over what role the US military should play in foreign policy. Nearly every Democrat criticised the Iran war and many voiced reservations about Venezuela, but the extent to which Democrats are comfortable using the military as a foreign policy tool differs.
Revolutionaries read Trump’s use of force in Iran and Venezuela as a natural continuation of an overly militarised foreign policy and advocate for that to change. El-Sayed called the Iran war “dumb and illegal”, but argued that the real issue was the cost of a war America did not need to fight. Colorado’s Melat Kiros makes this structural claim directly, “It’s time to reimagine our global role: not as a militarised empire, but as a champion of diplomacy, human rights, and peacebuilding. We need to end the blank checks for endless war and reallocate that funding towards diplomacy abroad and housing, education, and healthcare here at home.” New York candidate for congress Darializa Avila Chevalier puts it similarly.
The revolutionaries, if in office, would work to cut the military budget broadly in the name of keeping the money at home. For them, the deeper fix to a foreign policy driven mainly by military action is upstream: end the corporate and defence contractor lobbies that supports these wars in the first place.
The renovators view the most recent use of force as domestic corruption running through foreign policy. They are not necessarily opposed to using military force, but uncomfortable with the corrupt forces that push the military to be a tool of first resort. Chris Murphy’s office headlined his remarks on the money: “This president’s foreign policy, the invasion of Venezuela, the ouster of Maduro, is about making his crowd filthy rich. It has nothing to do with American national security.”
James Talarico likewise described the transaction as follows: “Trump promised the biggest oil executives in this country a ‘great deal’ if they gave him a billion dollars for his re-election campaign, and then he turned around and gave them a gift. He gave them the nation of Venezuela, home to the largest oil reserves in the world. Billionaires don’t just run our economy. They don’t just run our government. Now they run our foreign policy.” Corruption, in this telling, drives how Trump uses force. As with domestic concerns, the way to “fix” the incentives to use military force is largely the same as the revolutionaries: reign in defence contractor graft, lobbying and campaign spending.
Revivalists press hardest on legality and cost, but the argument underneath is about what these operations do to America’s standing in the world. Chris Coons admonished the administration’s decision to launch strikes on Iran in February for their method and legality: “President Trump’s military campaign against Iran and call for regime change are the beginning of a reckless new war of choice with no clear strategy and no clear endpoint. This is not how a democracy goes to war.”
Revivalists levelled similar critiques at the military operation in Venezuela. Representative Maggie Goodlander responded to the capture of Maduro by asking: “What is the legal justification for such an action? The US Constitution entrusts the US Congress with war powers for very good reasons. The Trump Administration must immediately and truthfully answer questions about the motivation and legality of this unilateral military action, the potential for any further escalation, and the plan for peace.”
For this camp, how a country goes to war is a sign of its strength. Authorisation, a stated objective, and allies consulted in advance are what gives a war public support and partners willing to help in the effort. According to revivalists, a democracy that goes to war via unilateral decision is weaker afterward, because that decision erodes the constitutional system of checks and balances. So, Trump’s lack of consultation widens a divide between Republicans and Democrats, between the branches of government and diminishes the public image of the US military.
3. China and great power competition
China is generally understood by all on the left as a strategic challenge. Yet Democrats disagree on just how big the threat is, whether to commit troops to the defence of Taiwan, and just how much the US should orient its economic and security policy around the strategic competition with China.
Revolutionaries fear a full-throated strategic competition with China would subvert domestic priorities. When Ocasio-Cortez was asked at the Munich Security Conference if she would commit to sending US troops to defend Taiwan, she said: “We want to make sure we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.”
This camp’s scepticism of the use of force and relentless focus on domestic framing is clearly seen when hot-button issues in the strategic competition discussion arise. For example, this camp would rather support limits on AI development to protect jobs, workers and the environment, than to push forward on AI research in order to compete with China. Likewise, they are more likely to focus the conversation of US-China strategic competition on manufacturing gaps, lags in research and education and trade deficits, thus bringing the focus back to the working class and economic issues.
Renovators sit in the middle. Hawkish enough to want to compete but unwilling to let strategic competition swallow the agenda. They are focused on economic fairness with China and competing beyond military means alone, but also willing to place domestic guardrails on AI and the tech race. They believe competition is important, but that it should not overtake all domestic needs. For example, they would advocate for the need for data centres to be energy and water self-sufficient, or even call for moratoriums on data centres, even if that threatens frontier model development.
4. Israel
Israel is where the three camps separate most cleanly along a single question: what, if anything, should America sell or give to Israel?
This is a central issue for the revolutionaries, who maintain that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. This camp has concluded that conditioning aid to Israel, the previous progressive position, is no longer a viable measure to ensure any meaningful end to the conflict or long-term peace. Their preferred policy is a full arms embargo on Israel, including defensive systems.
This distinction has already defined a few primary elections. New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the congressional primary against Representative Adriano Espaillat, ran on “babies not bombs”, promising to vote to halt arms sales to Israel. Melat Kiros, who unseated nearly-30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado, called for a full arms embargo to Israel and closed her victory speech leading a “Free Palestine” chant. El-Sayed takes this same position: “I support an immediate arms embargo on Israel and reject the false differentiation between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons.”
The renovators often make that distinction and are primarily focused on the need for change in the US-Israel relationship. Their belief that the system must be reformed is clearly reflected in their positions towards Israel. James Talarico, for example, has said he would work to ban the sale of offensive military weapons to Israel while still supporting Israel’s defensive systems. Talarico has declined to call it a genocide but has called the destruction in Gaza a “moral disaster”. Senator Jon Ossoff similarly told constituents that he voted against sending rifles to Israel because of the “extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza”, and defended his vote for air-to-ground missiles because of Israel’s need to be able “to strike those who would launch missiles and rockets at Israeli civilians.” Senator Murphy, likewise, voted with Bernie Sanders’s resolution disapproving of the sale of offensive weapons in 2024, but has since moved even further, calling for a halt of US military aid altogether. But most in this camp have stopped short of demanding a total embargo. Instead, they try to thread the needle between respecting America’s long-standing special relationship with Israel and combatting the structure that has allowed Israel’s abuse of military force.
Revivalists support the US-Israel relationship but blame the two leaders, Trump and Netanyahu, for souring the once-mutually beneficial of defence relationship. In their view, Netanyahu and Trump’s actions have exacerbated US public opinion of the relationship, rather than the structure of the relationship itself. Chris Coons has reiterated that his “commitment to Israel remains ironclad” while directly placing the blame on Netanyahu for the declining American sentiment towards the country. Similarly, Representative Chris Pappas, running for Senate in New Hampshire, articulates support for Israel and criticism of Netanyahu’s government. Roy Cooper, meanwhile, has flatly rejected efforts to block aid to Israel.
The revivalists’ view on America’s relationship with Israel is perhaps best expressed in Chuck Schumer’s March 2024 Senate floor speech, where he called Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” who has “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” In other words, just as Trump and the rise of the MAGA right have degraded the American political system, Netanyahu and the far-right in Israel have degraded the US-Israel relationship. The solution, then, is to try to change the behaviour of Netanyahu since they cannot change that he and Trump are in power. Therefore, this camp tends to treat US-Israel arms sales on a case-by-case basis, usually agreeing to send weapons, but reserving the right to condition those arm sales based on how Israel uses them. As Governor Janet Mills, who failed to win the Democratic primary for Maine’s Senate, said while criticising Netanyahu’s conduct she would evaluate any bill to halt arms shipments “on the specifics.”
5. Europe and European security
Nearly all Democrats see the value of the transatlantic relationship beyond the Trump administration’s idea of a “shared cultural heritage”. For the president, this is often a thinly veiled way to value the continent for its whiteness and colonial past and lambast it when he sees this as changing. Democrats, on the other hand, value the relationship for its shared rules and norms—whether these are liberal internationalism or workers’ rights.
A Democratic congressional majority will certainly not have the same disdain for Europe as many in the Trump administration do, but the Democratic party is certain to present its challenges. Some in the Democratic coalition would like to see a renewed American role in NATO, for example, while others want a European partner that can stand on its own. One challenge is for certain: the US-European relationship will be on the back burner. In the midterm campaigns you would be hard pressed to find a single Democratic candidate talking about the transatlantic relationship with voters.
Ukraine
On the war in Ukraine, all camps are firmly behind Kyiv but divide over the specifics of what America should do in support. Revolutionaries are wary of a militarised US foreign policy and an economic statecraft whose costs fall to the American taxpayers. Leaders in this camp voted against seizing Russian oligarch’s assets in 2022, and signed, then retracted, a 2022 letter urging Biden to use negotiation and diplomacy. Much of the motivation to write that letter four years ago still exists within this camp today.[4]
The revolutionaries are most eager to push for peace and they remain somewhat doubtful that additional weapons for Ukraine benefit Americans, viewing an open-ended war as another entry in the long book of American over-extension. However, they are not outright against supporting Ukraine. Even Abdul El-Sayed, who was extremely vocal against sending weapons to Israel, said: “When it comes to Ukraine, I think we are involved in a righteous struggle from being invaded by their neighbour.”
Those in the renovator and revivalist camps both support Ukraine’s independence and the use of American military aid to secure it with varying intensity. Their divergence is on the use of sanctions on Russia. Renovators Chris Murphy and Jon Ossoff expressed some scepticism of the efficacy and knock-on effects of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which would authorise an increase of tariffs up to 100% for the top-five foreign purchasers of Russian energy supplies. Murphy ultimately voted for the bill, and Ossoff against. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, both revivalists, on the other hand, vocally supported the bill from the beginning. These are arguments about how much to spend and how hard to squeeze, not about whether Ukraine should survive. The sharper disparities appear when the question turns from the war to the US-European relationship itself.
US-European relationship
Revolutionaries are interested in a transatlantic relationship that is not centred around NATO or any military alliance. As revolutionaries believe in creating an American foreign policy that is not solely centred on military force, they also see that as a goal in the European context. Hence, they accept European strategic autonomy and might even welcome it. They are the camp most open to structural boldness and the least likely to campaign for returning any troops Trump withdraws from the continent. This camp has shown a proclivity for supporting a move towards burden-shifting, but are sceptical of a European relationship achieved only through rearmament.[5] Rather, they will seek an affirmative agenda as sketched by Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Jason Crow at the 2026 Munich Security Conference: a new transatlantic relationship re-centred on combatting authoritarianism on both continents and advancing labour standards, rather than one singularly obsessed with NATO and continued US security commitments.
Renovators would likely treat Europeans first and foremost as partners on the agenda they care about—corruption, taxation and democratic resilience.[6] They would also push for Europe to continue to take an increased responsibility for its own security. Murphy explained as much during a Senate foreign relations subcommittee hearing in September 2025: “I believe in that NATO treaty, I believe in Article 5, but I also think it is absolutely time for the members of NATO on the other side of the Atlantic to take more responsibility for their collective defence.” The renovators are therefore keen on the idea of increased burden-sharing within NATO since they often view foreign policy issues through the lens of “where is the money going?” Correspondingly they view European governments as natural allies in the pursuit of tax enforcements, financial transparency, AI and digital platform regulation.
Revivalists remain the most attached to the alliance and the most likely to defend NATO. Coons released a joint statement with Senator Mitch McConnell in April of 2026 reaffirming their support for the alliance: “Americans are safer when NATO is strong and united. It is in our interest for all allies to tend this unity with care…The Senate will continue to support the alliance for the peace and protection it provides America, Europe, and the world.” The revivalists also credit European allies with responding to American pressure by committing 5% of GDP to military spending, and with this they treat burden sharing as a question already answered.
Any structural change, in their eyes, is unnecessary and potentially counterproductive to continued US leadership. Rather, they see European rearmament as vindication of the alliance and reason for the US to stay committed. Even if the old division of labour and spending is not coming back, they would restore the old processes within the alliance: consultation before decisions, allies told in advance and an obligation to commitments.[7]
The uncertain road ahead
It is too early to know which of the three camps will be the most successful with voters. Democratic primaries in the spring and summer 2026 have offered mixed lessons. Quite a few revolutionary firebrands, such as Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon, have won their primaries in widely covered upset victories. Meanwhile, some renovators like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico are running particularly strong campaigns while revivalists continue to fare strongly across the board. In other words, Europeans could be facing any of the foreign policy positions described above, and should engage with all three camps long before the American public decides which should come out in front.
Recommendations for Europe
Trump’s frenzy of disruptions too often clouds European judgement on long-term evolutions. If Democrats return to power, they will not revert to “back to normal”. Instead, Europeans need to engage with them on a new agenda; whether they be a far cry from the previous Democratic administration, like the revolutionaries, or a fair bit closer, like the revivalists. To anticipate what they may be dealing with in less than three years, Europeans should engage with all Democrats—from the familiar to the uncomfortable—even when disagreements abound, and start thinking of a common agenda to help shape Democratic policy while it is still being formed.
Expect the unexpected
European governments took a long time to accept that MAGA is durable and not a deviation from the norm. To be better prepared this time around, the debates on the American left deserve early attention, especially as they too could cause surprises. The populist energy emanating from the revolutionaries may prove to be a winning electoral strategy for Democrats in the midterms, and could well be mobilised by the next presidential candidate.
One thing is for certain: the Democratic party has entered a post-Obama, post-Biden era where questions over leadership mark more than a change of personnel. They signal the passing of the generation shaped by the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the rise of ISIS and the return of great-power rivalry with Russia and China. Strategic competition with China is no longer the modus operandi as it was under Biden. International trade is no longer taken as an unqualified good. The American left is not returning to the internationalism of the 2010s. A new cohort of Democratic leaders is emerging with different political instincts and foreign-policy priorities.
Many Democrats no longer see the transatlantic relationship as an inheritance that they have a duty to preserve. If and when they return to power, their expectations of burden-sharing will have hardened, historical attachment to the Atlantic alliance will have faded and Europe will no longer occupy the central place it once did in Democratic foreign policy debates. Younger Democrats in particular approach alliances through the lens of effectiveness and narrow shared interests and values, rather than a long-standing historical solidarity. Europeans need to pay attention to the debates taking place inside the Democratic party in order to engage the party of tomorrow.
Engage with every Democrat
As Europeans navigate the new American left, the biggest hurdle they will face is that they are increasingly viewed as at best as irrelevant and at worst as complicit. Europeans are not the focus of any of the three camps’ foreign policies. In fact, throughout our analysis, Europe was hardly mentioned in any television interviews, stump speeches or posts on X. Even the war in Ukraine and Russia’s hybrid challenges have lost prevalence in foreign policy debates consumed with China, Iran, Israel and Venezuela, to name a few.
When they do pay attention to Europe, Democrats across the board are beginning to regard European leaders who have spent nearly two years currying Trump’s favour as part of the problem—whether that is because Democrats view them through the lens of upholding an oligarchy, enabling gross corruption or being pathetic in the face of a global bully. Even if European leaders are pragmatically flattering the president with paternal references or golf rounds, they should remember that there are still a lot of democrats (not the party, the philosophy) on the other side of the Atlantic who would like to see in Europeans a standard-bearer and not an enabler.
Likewise, behind closed doors European leaders espouse a disappointment in Democratic politicians for losing to Trump twice and failing to put up decent opposition so far.[8] Democrats, too, are acting pragmatically. The options they currently have to mount a significant opposition are few and ineffective.
Which is all to say, engagement and re-building bridges across the left now will be essential for building a transatlantic relationship fit for the post-Trump world. European leaders and all three camps want America to play a constructive, trusted and peaceful role in the world—they just differ on what exactly that looks like.
In particular, Europeans have to start meeting and engaging with revolutionaries, even if their positions appear furthest outside the norm. This camp, for its provocations and innovation, is feeding most of the political conversation and fires up the base. Engagement would make Europe’s concerns and assets more prevalent to their thinking, while ignoring them only guarantees tension if they come to power.
Shape the next transatlantic agenda
As Democrats are not paying any attention to Europe, the burden of revitalising the transatlantic relationship lies with Europeans. There are significant areas—like tech regulation, corruption reform, taxation, trade and security—where European leaders will find partners in the American left if they so choose. They should not be surprised, however, if they must make the first move. Indeed, if Democrats win the midterms, the next two years will see Trump weak and the Democrats not yet strong. In that time, no policy idea will come from Washington that imagines the future of collaborations with Europe. It is up to Europeans to propose them.
Europeans’ experience of the Biden administration illustrates why relying on American leadership is insufficient. Although Biden championed alliances rhetorically, several defining decisions were taken with limited European consultation. The Inflation Reduction Act prioritised domestic reindustrialisation through measures many Europeans regarded as discriminatory. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was poorly coordinated with allies. The AUKUS agreement advanced Indo-Pacific strategy but came at the expense of French interests. These episodes reflected a broader shift towards a US that increasingly pursues its strategic objectives unilaterally, even under an avowedly pro-NATO administration. Europeans’ continued acquiescence towards the Trump administration has only made unilateral foreign policy more appealing.
To avoid facing a Democratic majority which operates alone, Europeans must think through what they would like to propose to Democrats. That agenda should be capable of appealing across the Democratic coalition, from revolutionaries to renovators to revivalists.
In setting an agenda, Europeans should connect with Democrats from all three camps, but there are specific opportunities to build stronger coalitions with the camps that are naturally aligned with European interests. For example, on Israel policy and a new US role in the Middle East, the revolutionaries and the renovators could find alignment with many European governments. On a framework for competing with China and derisking, Europeans should collaborate with renovators and revivalists. All three camps will be in favour of a rebalanced NATO, but should Europeans seek more structural changes, they would find allies in the renovator and revolutionary camps. On all issues, Europeans should make the case that they can be a practical partner in solving some of the international problems around which the next Democratic coalition will organise itself. In so doing, Europeans and the US Democrats can build a new, more balanced and stable alliance.
A renewed transatlantic programme should therefore include:
A “fair trade” agenda that combines openness with stronger labour protections, coordinates responses to Chinese industrial overcapacity, establishes minimum wage requirements and climate standards. All three camps could be interested in such an agenda: revivalists for competitiveness, renovators for reestablishing ethical rules and revolutionaries for climate and labour rights progress. For Europeans, it is important to move away from the logic of indiscriminate tariffs and negotiated exemptions. Instead they should put forward a logic of fair competition and sustainable industrial development on both sides. The European Commission should start by identifying partners with whom to discuss these goals.
A joint framework for AI that strengthens consumer protections, ensures fair taxation of digital platforms, promotes open access to AI for public goods such as healthcare and education, and aligns technological innovation with climate objectives. The renovators would be most in favour of such a proposal, and elements of the revolutionaries and revivalists would be a natural coalition. France, which promotes international cooperation for responsible AI governance, as well as Britain, which will host the G7 in 2028, should reach out to Democrats interested in tackling the issue and working on a regulatory framework for AI and other technologies.
A rebalanced NATO in which European allies assume greater responsibility for force generation, command structures and regional deterrence, allowing the US to reduce its military footprint without weakening collective defence. All three camps would find favour in stronger European allies, although revivalists are probably more comfortable in the conversation. Nevertheless, Europeans should also spend time engaging with revolutionaries and renovators, who do not see the same value in alliances, and show that collective defence can be cost-effective and a guarantee of long-term security. Transatlanticist networks in staunch US allies such as Germany, the Netherlands or Poland should start suggesting concrete transformations of the alliance to be discussed with Democrats.
A substantial expansion of transatlantic educational, research and cultural exchanges, including easier access to European universities for American students, expanded researcher mobility and new funding for joint academic networks. Revivalists would applaud a greater cultural exchange and such a vision for renewed American leadership. Revolutionaries and renovators would also welcome the opportunity to centre education, research and culture in the transatlantic relationship, rather than military. The EU could help promote such a “Community of friendship for Europeans and Americans”, which a lot of Europeans may embrace, that de-emphasises trade and defence as the only pillars of the transatlantic relationship, and put democracy, innovation and human rights at the centre. Such an initiative would, above all, help cushion Europe’s fall towards irrelevance on the American left.
These proposals would resonate differently across the Democratic coalition. Revivalists would view them as a means of modernising American leadership rather than abandoning it. Renovators could see them as evidence that Europe is assuming greater responsibility for its own security while contributing to domestic American priorities on labour, industrial policy and technological governance. Revolutionaries may find opportunities to advance an ambitious climate and social agenda beyond their shores. In all cases, the objective should be the same: demonstrate that Europe can be an asset rather than a burden for the next generation of Democratic policymakers.
Methodology
The revolutionaries, renovators, and revivalists are ideal types that emerged from our analysis of 42 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle and of 63 individual Democratic candidates. We exhaustively researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington DC from April to August 2026.
The Democratic primary races and candidates studied include: Senate races in Alaksa, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; Governor races in Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin; and Congressional races in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
About the authors
Célia Belinis a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office. Her research focuses on transatlantic relations.
Chris Herrmannis the US programme coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Washington, DC. His research focuses on US domestic and foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship.
Nevada Joan Leeis a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in the Washington office. Her research focuses on European security and defence, US foreign policy, the transatlantic relationship and NATO.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the many people who helped with this paper. First and foremost, thank you to all the Democratic politicians, staffers, pollsters and pundits who met with us for our research. A big thanks to Portia Kentish, whose thoughtful and thorough editing greatly sharpened the piece. Jeremy Shapiro and Jim O’Brien provided sage wisdom and multiple rounds of considered feedback. Majda Ruge offered generous comments and advice on earlier drafts. Chris Eichberger gave this piece its visual life through his extraordinary visuals. Martin Tenev worked tirelessly to bring the paper to its final form—life on the web.
[1] ECFR conversations with current and former progressive congressional staffers, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[2] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[3] ECFR conversation with Democratic pollsters, Online, May 2026
[4] Conversations with progressive and moderate Democratic congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[5] ECFR Conversation with former and current progressive congressional staff, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[6] Authors’ conversations with politicians, March 2026, Washington DC and conversation with Tim Walz, ECFR annual council meeting, Vienna, June 2026
[7] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[8] ECFR private workshop with European officials, Berlin, February 2026
The facility, known as Hyperion, is being built to train and operate the artificial intelligence systems behind Meta’s products. What began as a $10 billion proposal has since ballooned into a more than $50 billion development spanning nearly 10 million square feet and roughly 3,650 acres. At full scale, Hyperion is expected to require 5 gigawatts of computing capacity, making it the largest data center in Meta’s global fleet and one of the largest ever built. According to Meta, the project is expected to employ around 7,500 workers during peak construction and support 1,000 permanent jobs once operational.
For residents of Richland Parish, the arrival of Meta has brought both desperately needed jobs and profound uncertainty about what the project will mean for the community. The enormous facility is being constructed on former farmland and will require an equally immense network of infrastructure to support it. In nearby Rayville, many residents view Meta as an economic lifeline after decades of limited employment opportunities, with local families securing jobs that pay far more than the parish’s median income. But the influx of highly paid, out-of-town workers has also driven up rent and the cost of living as landlords and businesses increasingly orient themselves toward Meta employees. Landlords routinely raise the rent of low-income housing in order to price out local tenants in favor of contractors, forcing residents to move out of the area to afford housing.
Bringing Meta to Richland Parish
Richland Parish is a rural stretch of northeast Louisiana dominated by flat, fertile land rich with cotton, soybeans, corn, and rice. The parish’s economy has historically revolved around large-scale, row-crop farming, but declining farm incomes and population loss has strained the region in recent generations. Richland’s employment rate sits at 49.9%, 9.4% below the already dismal state average, with a median income of $53,544. A total of 36% of the 20,000 person population is Black. Rayville, the parish seat, is 80% Black. For decades, Richland has been far removed from the state’s economic centers of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, receiving little of the investment that has flowed into Louisiana’s larger cities.
That changed in January 2024, when Entergy Louisiana, the state’s monopoly power company, began a year-long courting ritual to bring Meta’s largest data center to the impoverished parish. Following months of backdoor deals and nondisclosure agreements, Meta announced plans to build a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot data center on a 2,250-acre flood plain. In July 2026, Meta expanded the project, committing more than $50 billion and nearly 10 million square feet to what may become the largest data center in the company’s fleet and home to its massive Hyperion AI training cluster.
Both Meta and Entergy have been quick to dismiss community concerns, with state officials claiming that “whatever comes out of it will be better than the mostly fallow farmland that was there.” Meta likewise touts a laundry list of benefits it promises to bring to the area, most notably permanent jobs and increased tax revenue. The company now claims that the expanded Hyperion AI center will create more than 1,000 permanent jobs, alongside thousands of temporary construction jobs.
But Meta has refused to provide the evidence behind those projections. On August 12, the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 3–1 to overturn the recommendation of an administrative law judge that Meta turn over information substantiating its projected job creation, economic impact, and electricity demand, effectively shielding the company’s claims from public scrutiny.
Meta’s empty promises of economic growth
The public’s skepticism is warranted. Data centers routinely generate thousands of temporary construction jobs while creating only a fraction as many permanent positions once construction ends. Meta’s projects in Texas and Oklahoma, for example, are expected to leave only around 100 operational jobs each after thousands of construction workers leave. QTS similarly estimates that a data center campus in York County, North Carolina will produce roughly 1,000 construction jobs but only about 100 permanent onsite positions. Even Hyperion’s original proposal called for roughly 5,000 construction workers but only 500 permanent operational employees. None of these figures guarantee that the permanent positions will go to Richland Parish residents. Meta has offered assurances about local hiring, but there is no binding commitment requiring the company to employ local workers.
Meta also claims the data center will bring tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue to Richland Parish, an argument it bolsters by pointing to the 2,000% increase in sales-tax totals since construction began – $50,000 of which has funded bonuses for some local schoolteachers. But that windfall is largely a product of the construction boom itself, not a sustainable source of revenue generated by the completed data center. The teacher bonuses are distributed through Richland Parish’s longstanding one-cent sales-tax program, which provides annual “13th checks” to eligible school employees. As those construction workers spend money in the parish, that pool has temporarily grown; once construction ends, so will much of the revenue feeding it. The result is a temporary infusion of money that can obscure the longer-term fiscal consequences of the project. When the construction boom ends, Richland Parish will be left with the costs of a massive industrial project, and fewer public resources to pay for them.
Cementing Louisiana’s dependence on fossil fuels amid environmental devastation
The environmental impact of the Meta data center could also be deadly for residents of Richland Parish and Louisiana as a whole. The Hyperion AI data center is expected to consume roughly half of the state’s electrical capacity – approximately seven times the energy consumed by the entire city of New Orleans – placing enormous new demands on Entergy’s already overburdened power grid. Louisiana residents know what a fragile electrical system can mean in a disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, Entergy’s restoration efforts took 42 days to complete across its service territory. In 2021, Hurricane Ida left nearly 950,000 customers without power after an Entergy tower fell into the Mississippi River, a disaster that required 15 days of restoration work just to bring more than 90% of affected customers back online.
Rather than address these vulnerabilities, Entergy’s proposed solution to Hyperion’s unprecedented energy demands is to build an entirely new fossil-fuel energy infrastructure around the data center. The company plans to construct ten natural-gas power plants, including seven new facilities capable of generating roughly 5.2 gigawatts of electricity, alongside new transmission lines and a massive 500-kilovolt substation. Meta, Entergy, and the Louisiana state government are working to present these projects as investments that will strengthen Louisiana’s electrical grid and improve reliability for ordinary customers.
Louisiana is being asked to construct an enormous new fossil-fuel-based energy system so that a single private corporation can consume an unprecedented share of its electricity. More generation may increase capacity, but it does not eliminate the physical vulnerabilities that have repeatedly left Louisiana residents without power after hurricanes. Instead, the state is doubling down on a centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent grid whose infrastructure will remain vulnerable to the same storms that have already decimated Louisiana’s communities.
Entergy’s catastrophic deal with Meta has arrived as Louisiana is already on the front lines of an environmental crisis. The state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land since 1932 and continues to lose more than 16 square miles each year. The state has experienced 31 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters since 2018, leaving communities to repeatedly rebuild from hurricanes, flooding, and extreme weather. Meanwhile, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the area known as “Cancer Alley” contains a dense concentration of petrochemical and chemical facilities, exposing surrounding communities to significant air pollution and toxic emissions which have resulted in a cancer rate fifty times higher than the national average.
People of Louisiana reject corporate profiteering
These environmental pressures are only compounded by an affordability crisis. In 2024, 49% of Louisiana households – nearly 900,000 – were either living in poverty or earning too little to afford basic necessities. A basic survival budget costs an estimated $30,708 a year for a single adult and $81,912 for a family of four, before accounting for savings or emergencies such as climate disaster. All the while, the state is being asked to absorb another enormous industrial project while nearly half of its households are already struggling financially and its communities confront environmental catastrophe.
Community opposition to the Hyperion project reflects a growing recognition that the promised benefits of corporate development cannot be separated from the costs that residents will be asked to bear. The fight is not simply over one data center, but over who gets to determine what Louisiana’s resources are used for and whose interests development is meant to serve. For generations, Louisiana communities have been told that jobs and investment require accepting pollution, environmental destruction, and the transformation of local resources into private profit.
Hyperion offers another version of the same bargain: enormous amounts of Louisiana’s land, electricity, water, and public infrastructure would be redirected toward the interests of one of the world’s largest technology companies. And the resistance to that bargain extends far beyond Richland Parish. Hundreds of Louisianans have mobilized around Public Service Commission meetings, traveling to the capital to demand that regulators prioritize the people who will bear the costs of Meta and Entergy’s expansion. Their concerns have repeatedly been dismissed or overridden by a majority of commissioners, even as the commission has approved billions of dollars in new generation and transmission infrastructure for the project. A 2024 investigation by the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight found that nearly 43% of campaign contributions to Louisiana utility commissioners over the previous decade came from utilities, energy-related businesses, and their attorneys and lobbyists, with Entergy Louisiana and its executives and family members contributing roughly $350,000.
The resistance emerging across Louisiana is more than a battle over a single data center. It is a decisive stand for the right of Louisianians to determine their own future, rather than surrender it to corporate interests. This is a battle for the future of working people everywhere, and the people have vowed to keep fighting.
Kieran Spencer is a New Orleans-based historian and organizer.
In the United States, the phrase Indian Wars conjures a specific set of images: the Battle of Little Bighorn, the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the forced marches of the Trail of Tears, the decades-long manhunt for Geronimo. All of it is generally remembered as a 19th-century story, closed out by the early […]
It is clear that ethnic differences, like religious ones, have been the origin of countless conflicts throughout the world from Antiquity to the present day. It is not surprising, then, that this also occurred when the Old and New Worlds established definitive contact after Columbus’s arrival in 1492. These differences manifested in Spanish America through […]
Oil prices rose more than 2% Monday after the United States attacked an Iranian island in the Strait of Hormuz and drew retaliation from Tehran, as the six-month-old conflict between the two countries showed no signs of easing. Brent crude futures climbed $2.21, or 2.51%, to $90.31 a barrel as of 0436 GMT. U.S. West ... Read more
Many—perhaps most—Trump administration foreign policy initiatives find ways to make money for people selected by Trump officials. These deals unjustly enrich a chosen few.
They can also create facts on the ground that could bequeath problems to the next US administration. For example, grants of property rights to friends and family by the Trump-controlled Board of Peace could decide who has land and money in Gaza. This would limit the discretion of any approach that aims to increase Palestinians’ role in the place they live in. Other peace deals contain similar long tails.
To address this threat to peace around the world, the next US administration should introduce anti-corruption sanctions from its first day in office. The new administration could bar non-US persons or institutions involved in such transactions from the US itself and from the American financial system. To do this, the administration would use the Global Magnitsky Act and related executive orders, including the Trump-issued executive order 13818.
Europeans can help this along even now. They can begin to declare their expectations that a new US administration will break from the practice of enriching chosen insiders. Such statements will influence preparations for the new administration. Over the next two years, Europeans can also preserve information about US insider dealing while publicly refusing to support or finance such deals where European interests are involved, including in the south Caucasus, Western Balkans, Gaza, Russia and Ukraine. And they can shore up their own sanctions and anti-corruption regimes.
Starting discussions about sanctions now will also send a message about the importance of professional, thorough investigations by journalists, civil society, and especially by congressional committees if Democrats take control of the House or Senate. This information can inform decisions about sanctions. Clear signalling from American and European political leaders now may deter potential foreign partners of the current administration from entering into corrupt deals over the remaining two years of the administration.
What sanctions can and cannot do
Sanctions will not provide complete answers in any situation, and they may not be appropriate in some instances. An understanding of how they work will clarify their importance and some of their limitations.
Executive order 13818 authorises sanctions against any “foreign person” (that is, not a US citizen or person) who participated in:
corruption, including the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources, or bribery
The commercial aspects of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy appear to fall squarely into this framework. Even if not every instance is found to involve corruption, a close look is warranted. For example, Kazakh authorities were reportedly pressed to award a valuable mineral concession to a specific American company (associated with US political insiders, including the president’s family) while the administration considered financing for the development and export of the minerals. This was not an effort to promote a fair process in which American companies could compete—a staple of US government advocacy in any administration—but an attempt to short-circuit the normal process. It appears to involve the essence of the behaviour targeted by the Magnitsky act and executive order.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a specific American company was newly created by two US citizens with no relevant experience but with a track record of supporting the president (and one of whom is the brother of a senior official in the first Trump administration). The US lobbied for this company to receive a lucrative concession for a natural gas pipeline, and the US demanded the resignation of a reluctant international official.
American sanctions apply only to non-American citizens. It may seem unfair to leave US beneficiaries of a scheme out of a US response. But the administration’s power to require foreign persons or institutions to provide all relevant information about suspect transactions could impede the activities that unjustly enrich American insiders.
Further, by the end of the Trump administration, many insiders (and possibly some foreign persons) are likely to be covered by presidential pardons. This could make it difficult, if not impossible, to proceed with US criminal investigations, at least not without extensive litigation while the US justice system recovers from Trump’s attacks on its capacity. This could make a new administration look feckless, and foreign partners may expect that Trumpian practices will return in future administrations. Crucially, sanctions are not subject to the pardon power, and their emphasis on non-US persons and institutions will provide some protection against charges that they are part of a partisan agenda.
Another concern may be that sanctions have generally been adopted after careful review by relevant US agencies, including the Justice Department. Given the amount of information available, a reasonable basis for a decision on sanctions can be prepared for day one of a new administration. This decision can be accompanied by a provision that reviews will follow as new information becomes available and US government agencies rebuild enough capacity to conduct them.
The investigative resources of European governments, the US Congress (or parts controlled by Democrats after the 2026 midterms), civil society and independent journalism will provide an ample, well-documented basis for sanctions in many instances. By inviting those who might be subject to sanctions to provide information, the effort will gather more information, more quickly, aiding in decisions about priorities for further sanctions or investigations by congressional or law enforcement authorities.
Significantly, early sanctions may be necessary for a new administration to deliver on promises it makes on issues of foreign and domestic policy. For example, the Trump administration is seeking to have rights to minerals critical to US industrialisation granted to its preferred partners, including in Central Asia, Ukraine and eastern Congo. Individuals holding these rights would be important stakeholders in any policy shifts, even though they may have obtained the rights through insider dealing and could be opposed to the direction a new administration would like to take on policy.
The leverage provided by a policy of using sanctions may be a key instrument of foreign policy
The same situation could occur in other locations. In addition to the examples of Gaza and the Western Balkans noted above, in Venezuela, if a democratic government emerges, it may face challenges from Trump-affiliated companies accustomed to working with Maduro-regime holdovers kept in place by Trump and Marco Rubio. Control of a key trade route from Central Asia to global markets, along with a US-taxpayer funded investment vehicle, is said to be in the process of being placed under the control of a Trump-associated individual. In each instance, more knowledge about what deals are in place and how they came to be will improve both policy and decisions on sanctions. The leverage provided by a policy of using sanctions may be a key instrument of foreign policy.
The list goes on. Even before his second inauguration, a Trump-owned business accepted a $500m investment from a fund controlled by a member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family; within weeks the UAE received an exemption to purchase high-end computer chips. A Chinese businessman purchased $50m in a Trump-owned crypto business (part of the president’s $1.2bn windfall from crypto in 2025); weeks later his US criminal problems were resolved by the president.
If other jurisdictions like the EU and Britain join new American sanctions efforts, the costs to the non-US individuals and institutions affected will be real. To do this, the EU might consider how its rule of law initiatives, including its investigative bodies such as OLAF or the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, could prepare to work alongside US sanctions authorities. It could propose that the EU and the US return to coordinating assistance programmes to reinforce public procurement reforms. Various European states have national anti-corruption sanctions programmes; more should consider adopting them.
Some will worry that rapid deployment of sanctions may distract from a new administration’s positive agenda. This will depend on the strength of that agenda. Europeans can help make clear that they regard this as a false choice: a break from the insider dealing of the Trump administration should be part of a new, positive plan for government. This will make it easier for a new administration to adopt sanctions policy as part of leaving Trump practices firmly in the past.
There will, of course, be difficult decisions around the application of sanctions. Not every example of insider dealing will be proven to be corrupt. Some potential targets of sanctions may be important to other US administration initiatives, and if the new administration defers sanctions it may be subject to accusations of hypocrisy. Other countries may object strongly to seeing their institutions or citizens named in sanctions documents. A new administration will face many choices like this; people who want to exercise power from Washington therefore need to prepare now and confront the choice early. It is better to start with a strong tool like sanctions rather than to disarm everywhere pre-emptively in order to avoid hard choices in a few places.
Wise observers of democratic transitions have said that democrats taking power after corrupt regimes should seek to be quick, effective and legal; but that they can be only two of the three. But sanctions might get a new administration closer to three out of three. They provide a legal tool that will help the next administration be quick and effective in stopping the insider enrichment typical of Trump foreign policy while coming with limits (no targeting of US citizens) and with the ability to adjust quickly. By taking up this tool, it will free itself of shackles that would come from those who seek to control the land and property important to peace in many parts of the world. But this will come to pass only if people begin to talk about it now. European leaders have the ability to help make sure that happens.
Cover image: picture alliance / photothek.de | Thomas Trutschel
Summary
The war in Ukraine will eventually end, but probably in a ceasefire that leaves Russia, Europe and America locked in open-ended, low-grade, chaotic confrontation.
Europe has the greatest stake. It is closest to the conflict and would carry much of the cost should it escalate. America will still have an interest in maintaining stability, but other, more pressing priorities will likely come first.
American and European policymakers should keep that confrontation stable enough to prevent it from tipping into another war. They should aim for a state of “managed disorder”, where rivalry continues but becomes less likely to escalate.
They can achieve managed disorder through a staged framework that combines credible deterrence, compartmentalised cooperation and conditional, reversible incentives.
To succeed, the framework will need to accommodate divisions between America and Europe, and within Europe itself. It will also need to give Ukraine, Russia, China and other players in the region clear incentives to comply with the framework, and clear costs for defecting from it.
After the ceasefire
It is 2028. The war in Ukraine ended in an uneasy ceasefire eighteen months ago. Russian forces remain in occupied territories, and Ukrainian forces hold defensive positions, armed with American weapons and European money. The ceasefire talks failed to establish either a buffer zone or an observer mission because the parties could not agree on the terms. Europeans have given vaguely formulated “security guarantees” with an ill-defined American backstop, but NATO has no clear presence near the contact line.
One morning, Ukrainian intelligence detects Russian armoured movements towards the ceasefire line. The government in Kyiv claims Russia is preparing for invasion; officials in Moscow insist it is routine repositioning. Within 48 hours, shooting starts and each side blames the other. Russian forces cross the ceasefire line at three points. Calls go out to European capitals and Washington, but no one agrees on what the intelligence shows. The security guarantors reach for the ceasefire documents and find they say different things depending on who is reading them.
Nobody knows what to do—whether NATO should respond militarily, whether European states should act alone, or whether America, focused since 2027 on a series of interventions in Latin America, should engage at all. Nobody has agreed what the rules are, what triggers intervention, what constitutes a proportionate response or who decides.
The outcome of this scenario is chaos and escalation driven by uncertainty and domestic political pressure. These are the conditions that precede catastrophic wars. The goal of this paper is to help prevent that scenario or, more precisely, to ensure clear answers exist before the shooting starts. The post-war environment in Europe will be unstable in the near term and perhaps for a generation or more because the war will almost certainly end without a genuine peace settlement that resolves key questions of sovereignty, security, power or identity. The wounds are too deep and the sides too evenly matched to agree on a comprehensive peace.
This is not an unusual situation after inconclusive wars. To adapt the historian Michael Howard’s insight, the end of fighting does not itself create peace. Between war and peace lies a large and dangerous space of armistices, frozen conflicts and unstable political settlements. The task for American and European policymakers will be to build enough structure around that dangerous space to prevent it from producing the next war.
America and Europe can do this by transitioning from chaotic confrontation with Russia to “managed disorder”: a state in which rivalry remains, but becomes less vulnerable to accident, panic and domestic political pressure.
To achieve this state of managed disorder, this paper proposes a staged framework built on verification, certification and conditional incentives. The framework would temporarily freeze facts on the ground, but not legitimise them, and give the main actors reason to adhere to agreements. This would help American and European policymakers maintain stability in Europe, defend Ukraine and deter further revisionism while reducing the risk of escalation. It would also give Russia a sense of safety and a seat at the table to discuss European security. Hostility would persist but it would be channelled into rules, limitations and predictable behaviour.
Managed disorder does not imply legitimising territorial conquest or rewarding aggression. It also falls well short of a durable settlement. Importantly, it does not require “trust”, a commodity that is generally lacking in international affairs and particularly in relations with Russia.
However, building such a system will be politically hard. Russia may prefer chaos to managed disorder. Ukraine may reject any arrangement that appears to freeze partition. European states will disagree over deterrence, sanctions, reconstruction, enlargement and engagement with Moscow, and the US may remain indispensable but unreliable. But these are not objections to managed disorder; they are the reasons it is needed. Its purpose is precisely to manage these political pressures through rules, incentives and procedures before a crisis makes improvisation the only option.
This paper traces the hard road to the modest achievement of managed disorder. It first outlines the sources of disorder after the war in Ukraine and why the key players might find managed disorder preferable to the alternatives. It then describes a staged plan to get from a ceasefire in Ukraine to a hopeful but realistic stability. The plan accepts that the future is contingent and will certainly surprise us. It therefore seeks to adapt to circumstances even as it keeps in mind where we want to go and what we want to avoid.
The sources of post-war disorder
The war in Ukraine is likely to leave relations between Russia, Europe and the United States in significant disorder. A ceasefire, armistice or exhausted pause in the fighting would stop large-scale violence but not settle the question of sovereignty over contested territories. Russian forces will probably remain on Ukrainian territory while Ukraine continues to assert its territorial integrity. Europe will still face a revisionist Russia on its borders and the United States will still have to decide how much of European security it intends to underwrite.
This state of affairs will be the first source of disorder. The ceasefire will probably not resolve any of the geopolitical ambiguity. It will also likely fail to clarify what counts as a violation or establish who monitors the ceasefire, who enforces it and who decides when one side has broken it. This is the central danger of the post-war moment. Although major combat may be absent, every movement of forces, artillery exchange, drone incident, act of sabotage and political crisis in Kyiv or Moscow could result in renewed escalation.
The second source of disorder lie within the West itself. America and Europe will not enter this period as a single strategic actor, even though they will retain important common interests—both will want to prevent a wider war, avoid nuclear escalation and stop Russia from conquering Ukraine outright. For the US, Russia will remain a nuclear power and a disruptive actor, but no longer the organising threat of American strategy. Washington will increasingly focus on China, the Western Hemisphere and the fiscal costs of global leadership. Europe will have no such luxury. Russia will stay a nearby military threat, and Ukraine’s reconstruction will become a European problem. Any failure of deterrence will unfold on Europe’s doorstep.
This divergence means that the Atlantic alliance will become less automatic, even if it does not collapse. The US may remain essential for nuclear deterrence, intelligence, sanctions enforcement and crisis diplomacy with Moscow, but it may also grow less willing to sustain Ukraine’s conventional defence, less patient with European divisions and more tempted by bilateral understandings with Russia that promise quick gains or theatrical success. Europe will fear both American abandonment and American freelancing. It will need Washington to work towards managed disorder, but will no longer be able to count on it to take the lead.
Europe will also generate disorder of its own. The war has produced a rhetorical consensus—Ukraine must survive and Europe must do more for its own defence—that hides deep disagreements. Poland, Sweden and other eastern and northern states will judge any post-war arrangement through the lens of deterrence, vulnerability and Russian deception. Spain, Italy and others will place more weight on stability, fiscal pressures and eventual economic normalisation with Russia. Some governments, such as those in the Baltics, will want to accelerate Ukraine’s integration into the EU and the European defence economy. Yet others, like Poland, will worry that Ukraine’s accession—and its agricultural exports, corruption, security needs—could transform the bloc in ways it cannot control.
These divisions will shape security policy and domestic debates. Russia will try to exploit them. Any post-war arrangement must therefore manage Europe as much as it manages Russia. It must prevent European disunity from becoming an instrument of Russian strategy.
Ukraine itself will form a further source of disorder. It will depend on American and European weapons and money for years after the fighting stops—creating leverage but also resentment. If Ukraine concludes that a post-war order locks in partition while offering only vague promises of future integration, it may resist the whole idea. If Europe concludes that Ukraine is using its support to pursue military aims that Europe cannot sustain, European commitment may fracture. This arrangement, therefore, cannot simply constrain Ukraine. It must give Ukraine a visible future: a defensible state, deepening European integration, reconstruction and a credible non-military path to eventual territorial restoration.
Russia will create the most obvious source of disorder, but not necessarily through renewed invasion. Moscow may accept a ceasefire because it believes time is on its side. It may calculate that Ukraine will become politically divided, that European publics will tire, that American attention will wander and that sanctions will erode. It may use the pause in fighting to rebuild forces, probe American and European resolve, influence European politics and normalise its gains—all while formally conceding nothing. A ceasefire may therefore mark not the end of Russian revisionism, but its movement into a different register.
American and European policymakers should not assume Russia fears disorder the way they do. Disorder may serve Russian purposes. Ambiguity can help Moscow test thresholds. For instance, hybrid operations impose costs on the West while preserving deniability. Political interference can weaken European unity without triggering a military response. For America and Europe, deterring a second invasion of Ukraine may well be the easier task; the harder one will be to curb Russia’s appetite for exploiting turbulence around Europe’s borders.
The post-war order will also face regional spillover. Ukraine will remain the epicentre of the confrontation with Russia, but Moldova, the Black Sea and the Arctic could face intensified coercion too. Africa and the Middle East may offer Russia opportunities to punish Europe indirectly through migration, mercenary activity, energy disruption or political leverage. A system that manages only the line of contact in Ukraine will not contain all of the disorder stemming from the conflict.
China will add another layer of complexity. Its economic weight can cushion Russia from Western pressure, but Beijing’s interest in stability also constrains Moscow’s options.
The final source of disorder will come from the absence of accepted leaders. During the cold war, the US claimed and largely exercised the role of Western leader. That world will not return. Europe cannot yet replace America: the EU cannot speak with the speed or unity of a state. NATO can deter, but it cannot resolve every political dispute a bad ceasefire creates. Individual European leaders may speak to officials in Moscow, Washington or Kyiv, but none can credibly represent the whole continent. In that vacuum, others will try to manage the disorder: private envoys, Gulf intermediaries, business figures, transactional American negotiators or ad hoc coalitions formed in crisis. Without rules, the system will fill with middlemen.
These sources of disorder will keep producing flashpoints that risk a return to war. Maintaining stability in post-conflict Europe will take conscious, active management. A comprehensive settlement to the Russia question remains out of reach for now, so the aim should be to prevent a bad and incomplete peace from decaying into a more dangerous confrontation.
The incentives that will shape a settlement
Managed disorder will hold together only as long as its incentives do. America and Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and China each bring different interests, so the system of managed disorder must align incompatible motives around a limited common interest: avoiding a return to uncontrolled war.
Ukraine is the hinge
Stabilising and strengthening Ukraine is the foundation of the entire system. For that, Ukraine must want to comply with it rather than be forced to because it needs American and European money and weapons to rebuild itself and deter Russia. The benefits need to be tangible and politically defensible at home. Therefore, in addition to sustained military aid, joint defence production and reconstruction funding, a stable system must offer Ukraine a path into the EU and a credible route to recovering lost territory without renewed fighting. Ukraine will not abide by the rules of managed disorder if it experiences it only as a restraint on its actions rather than as a route to a stronger Ukrainian state.
The main part of that route goes through EU membership. Europe should tie the pace of Ukraine’s accession—market access, regulatory alignment, reconstruction funding—to its conduct within this system. Cooperation opens the door; obstruction closes it. No Ukrainian government can afford to turn its back on a European future.
That pull is real, but it has limits. EU membership is economic and political; the bloc’s mutual-assistance clause, Article 42.7, carries none of NATO’s integrated command structure or binding defence commitments. However, Ukrainian officials under domestic pressure may present accession as delivering that protection anyway, leaving the public expecting a NATO-style military response that Article 42.7 was never built to provide. Any actual security guarantee will need its own separate instrument with defined triggers, scope and decision-making process.
In any case, Ukraine will benefit more from sustained American and European military aid, joint defence production and a homegrown arms industry than from any ambiguous or unenforceable security guarantee. The country will need artillery, air defence, drones and the factories to build them for decades to come. But offensive or long-range systems—capable of striking deep into Russian territory—should come from Western allies only if Russia attacks again, keeping the line between defending Ukraine and arming it for renewed war visible to Moscow and to sceptical Western publics.
Ukraine’s own expanding arms industry will blur that line. Washington and European capitals can condition their weapons transfers, but they cannot control what Ukraine builds. To manage disorder, therefore, they should tie reconstruction, defence-industrial cooperation and military assistance to rules about defensive posture and escalation.
The territorial question needs careful handling. A settlement must preserve Ukraine’s claim to the occupied lands—legally, politically and morally. Refusing to recognise Russia’s conquests should remain a core principle. But America and Europe must be honest too: Ukraine cannot retake its territory by force. Restoration will come through Ukrainian resilience, European integration, legal non-recognition, diplomacy and long-term shifts in the balance of power—not a bet on a better war later. Ukraine can keep hoping for its territory back without believing that another war is the way to get it.
Coalition dynamics will shape compliance with managed disorder too. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—Ukraine’s strongest backers—will have to be part of any difficult trade-offs. If these countries can support a compromise, Ukrainian leaders can argue that managed disorder strengthens Ukraine rather than abandons it, and western European governments can show that restraint does not mean appeasement. If they oppose it, critics in Kyiv and across Europe will portray the arrangement as a deal made over Ukraine’s head and at the expense of Europe’s most vulnerable states. In that case, neither Ukrainian nor European leaders could easily sell compliance at home.
In the end, Western policymakers must design Ukraine’s decision space, not just hope it will make the right decisions. They must show that cooperation deliversEU integration, reconstruction, military assistance, long-term deterrence and a path to restoring territory by weakening Russia over time—West Germany pulled off exactly that with the East, decades later. Obstruction delivers economic stagnation, dwindling aid, isolation and an indefinite war footing with nothing to show for it. The goal is to make cooperation the rational, defensible choice for any government in Kyiv.
Russia’s calculations
This paper does not assume that Moscow wants peace or even managed disorder. The only assumption is that a ceasefire would reveal some Russian interest in pausing large-scale war. The task is to exploit that pause to make restraint more attractive to Moscow than going back to war.
The logic is structured choice. Russia should know exactly what it gets for playing by the rules and what it loses for breaking them. If Russia complies, the rewards should be tangible—for instance, sanctions relief is immediate but reversible. If Russia violates the rules, the costs should be just as immediate—for example, suspended sanctions snap back automatically.
Military realities can reinforce this logic. The war has cost Russia dearly in soldiers, equipment, ammunition and political attention. Yet Russian weakness should not lull the US and Europe into assuming that Moscow’s appetite for aggression has diminished. Russia’s calculation will change only if Ukraine, armed by Europe, can defend itself. A second full-scale invasion would offer no easy win. Russia would confront a better-prepared Ukraine, a more fortified eastern flank and a Western sanctions system built to escalate rather than merely restore previous penalties.
Economic incentives can also matter, though they will not by themselves drive Russian policy. The Kremlin has shown it will sacrifice prosperity for war and ideology. But Russians value access to markets, targeted relief and the ability to travel, which shape interests inside the system, especially once the immediate demands of wartime mobilisation recede. Sanctions can thus create constituencies for restraint. Relief should remain selective, staged and reversible. It should reward observable behaviour, not political promises. And it should be designed so that renewed escalation hurts the specific people and networks that benefit from playing along.
None of this guarantees Russian cooperation. Moscow may still conclude that exploitable disorder serves it better than regulated confrontation, particularly if it can strike a bilateral understanding with Washington over Europe’s head. Western policymakers should therefore expect Russian violations and aim to narrow Russia’s room to exploit ambiguity.
Moscow does not need to like managed disorder to live with it. It only needs to face a world in which restraint brings some gains and cheating brings higher costs. Of course, the Russian government has not always responded to such incentives. No amount of pressure guarantees good behaviour. All any arrangement can do is make every alternative worse.
Turkey as a partner
Turkey belongs in this system because the Black Sea cannot be managed without it. Ankara controls access to the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, has direct interests in maritime security and commerce, and has maintained working channels with both Russia and Ukraine throughout the war. Any post-war arrangement that touches naval access, grain routes, energy transport, Russian warship movements, or the security of Ukraine’s southern coast will require Turkish participation. Ankara can either reinforce the framework or complicate it. Managed disorder should therefore treat Turkey as a necessary regional partner.
China in the background
The other major power shaping Russia’s future options is China. The two are not formal allies, but their partnership is more than a marriage of convenience. Russia needs Chinafor markets, technology, diplomatic cover and long-term economic resilience. Moscow’s options depend as much on what Beijing will tolerate as on what Washington and European capitals will permit.
China need not endorse managed disorder for its interests to tacitly reinforce it. Beijing benefits from a stable Russia that checks American and European power, but not from a Russia that collapses or continually destabilises Europe. Endless war raises energy prices, invites secondary sanctions and risks escalation that could disrupt China’s own growth and global positioning. A structured post-war settlement that freezes borders, channels competition and conditions economic reintegration offers China predictability without forcing political alignment. If American and European sanctions tie relief to Russian conduct and penalises circumvention, Beijing may find it cheaper to let the system work than to help Russia rearm—provided the system leaves Russia viable as a geopolitical ally for China and a source of natural resources.
Economic interests pull in the same direction. Beijing values access to European markets and reconstruction opportunities in Ukraine. Western leaders should therefore make clear that stability unlocks better China-Europe economic ties, while a collapse of managed disorder would push Europe toward militarisation, protectionism and tighter technological coordination with the United States. China can benefit from this arrangement without choosing between Europe and Russia, so long as it prefers predictability and stability to escalation and sanctions spirals.
Managed disorder also needs a China clause. If Russia uses China to rearm and restock its munitions, the consequences cannot fall on Moscow alone. Europe should tighten its China policy, deepen coordination with America and target Chinese firms enabling violations with economic pressure. China must understand that helping Russia evade these rules costs Beijing more than it benefits it, while tolerating stability keeps the door to European markets open.
In this sense, China is neither an adversary nor an essential partner, but a structural constraint that can reinforce, undermine or passively enable whatever security order emerges in Europe. A system that links market access to stability, invites selective Chinese participation and penalises circumvention turns Beijing, intentionally or not, into a stakeholder in restraint.
The path to managed disorder
How the war in Ukraine ends will go a long way towards deciding the path to managed disorder. A fully disarmed or “neutralised” Ukraine is unacceptable to Kyiv and unsustainable for Europe. A permanently offensive Ukraine capable of striking deep into Russian territory would risk escalation and be unacceptable to Moscow. The same would be true if Ukraine were to host Western troops.
Between these poles lies the most workable model: a defensible, resilient Ukraine that is armed to deter, but not configured for offensive operations. This “steel porcupine” posture follows the same logic as cold war West Germany: strong enough to make conquest costly but not positioned as a launchpad for offensive war. It separates Ukraine’s legal and political claim to territorial restoration from the military means that could reignite the war, without conceding Russia’s territorial gains.
Europe is likely to bear long-term responsibility for Ukraine’s rebuilding, military assistance and eventual integration into European institutions. Even a supportive United States may commit fewer resources over time. A framework for managed disorder must ensure that Europe can sustain Ukrainian security on its own if America steps back, while leaving room for deeper US involvement should political conditions allow.
To reach that state, American and European policymakers will need to work amid mistrust, division and partial compliance. They must create a system in which Ukrainian restraint earns visible progress, and Russian violations bring consequences and compliance rewards. Importantly, they should also ensure European disagreement does not become paralysis and American involvement strengthens the system without owning it.
Designing around a divided West
Washington and European capitals share core interests yet diverge in priorities, attention and risk tolerance. The challenge will be to design a system that can operate with those differences built in.
America
A future American administration, whether populist or merely pragmatic, is likely to approach Russia as a file to manage rather than a sustained strategic priority beyond its nuclear dimension. To the extent it figures in US strategic calculations, Russia is more likely to be seen as part of America’s larger competition with China. Commitments to European security that once seemed permanent will depend on electoral cycles and budgetary politics.
That is why managed disorder should rely on European initiative and pre-agreed processes rather than sustained American focus: durability must be built into the mechanism itself, not assumed from Washington’s resolve.
Europe
European nations will see the landscape through a nearer lens. Russia is not a distant power but a neighbour capable of altering borders by force. European governments agree that Ukraine must survive yet disagree on what survival means: integrated or merely defended, heavily armed or cautiously defensible, anchored fully to Europe or held at strategic arm’s length. Populist and anti-migrant parties are often averse to sustained defence expenditure and will sometimes be open to friendly relations with Russia.
Given the European disagreements and the American focus on China, a genuine transatlantic consensus on a post-war order is unlikely to emerge. What is achievable and necessary is interoperability: a structure in which Europe and the US can act together when aligned and continue functioning when they are not. A framework to achieve managed disorder will therefore need to do two things. First, its stages, tracks and certification mechanisms should be designed to keep working whether or not Washington and European capitals are pulling in the same direction. Second, it should be designed for a permanently divided Europe. Its purpose should be to prevent disagreement from becoming paralysis.
That means creating aEuropean core group: a few countries that can negotiate sanctions positions, military support thresholds, monitoring standards and responses to Russian violations before each crisis arrives. It should include the countries with the greatest military weight, financial capacity and geographic exposure—France, Germany, Poland and the UK, as well as the Nordic and Baltic states. The core group should drive the security logic; EU institutions should anchor the economic, sanctions, enlargement and legitimacy logic.
How to stop Russia from setting the security debate
Russia will seek to widen any post-war process beyond the line of contact in Ukraine. It will want to discuss NATO enlargement, American and Western European basing, missile deployments, military exercises, the Black Sea and the military balance along its western frontier. Europe and the US should expect these demands, but they should neither dismiss them reflexively nor accept them on Russia’s terms. Some issues do raise genuine risks of miscalculation between Russia and NATO. Large military exercises near borders, missile deployments, ambiguous troop movements, air and naval incidents, cyber operations against critical infrastructure and uncontrolled activity in the Black Sea can create crises regardless of the justice of the underlying political claims.
To stop Russia from setting the terms of the debate, European leaders should pursue two distinct negotiations. The first would revolve around the ceasefire and subsequent security arrangement in Ukraine, and must preserve Ukraine as a principal actor. The second concerns the wider Russia-Europe security environment and must prevent either Moscow or Washington from treating Europe as an object of negotiation. Russia will try to conflate the two tracks so that it can use NATO-Russia talks to extract constraints on Ukraine or claim that whatever Kyiv gives up, the West gave up too. European policymakers should resist this and keep the two discussions separate, though separation also has risks: if either track collapses, the other will suffer because both tracks are needed to ensure regional security. The first maintains immediate stability along the line of contact between Russia and Ukraine; the second tackles the wider geopolitics.
Russia will prefer to discuss regional security with America rather than with Europe. It will try to cast Europe as the object of negotiation, not a participant in it. If the American leadership is distracted by other priorities or tempted by bilateral deals with Moscow, it might even support that Russian position. The answer for Europe is to define the terms of engagement with Russia in advance, with frontline states fully involved and with clear limits on what can and cannot be negotiated.
To do that, Europeans need the core group to define common positions before the United States and Russia enter any serious dialogue. European leaders cannot prevent every American side channel with Moscow, but they can limit the damage by insisting in advance on the principles that should govern any regional security conversation. These might include no recognition of territorial conquest, no Russian veto over its neighbours’ alliance decisions, no limits on Ukraine’s sovereign choices and no economic relief without behavioural restraint.
This regional security agenda will make many European leaders uncomfortable. Frontline states will fear that any discussion of basing, exercises, missiles or notification requirements gives Moscow a path back to influence over their security. They have reason to worry. Russia has used previous security conversations to claim rights over its neighbours. It has, for example, consistently used the indivisible security clause of the 1999 Charter for European Security to assert that it has the right to deny its neighbours membership in Western security organisations such as NATO. Despite this record, to exclude regional security from the framework would leave Moscow free to raise it bilaterally with Washington or exploit it during crises.
Regional security therefore is one of the central tests of managed disorder. If the US and Europe refuse to discuss it at all, Russia will use the refusal to justify probing, escalating and direct talks with America over Europe’s head. If they discuss it on Moscow’s terms, it will legitimise coercion and weaken the states most exposed to its power. The only viable course lies between those failures: to create a framework that channels Russian security demands into reciprocal, verifiable and limited mechanisms.
A framework for managed disorder
Every actor has reason to tolerate managed disorder over the alternatives, but tolerance does not sustain itself; it has to be built into rules. Managed disorder therefore rests on at least three mutually reinforcing principles:
Separate where necessary:Europe should first reduce its exposure to Russia with stronger defences and less dependence on Russian energy. Ukraine should tie itself economically more closely to Europe and be able to hold its ground militarily. Effective deterrence is a precondition for any dialogue.
Compartmentalise where you can:Certain issues—nuclear risk, Arctic exploitation, climate change and counter-proliferation—are in everyone’s interest to manage together. Even Russia wants to avoid, say, nuclear war or environmental collapse. The parties should fence such issues off from more neuralgic ones, such as Ukrainian sovereignty, to prevent crises from cascading into areas of mutual benefit. Cooperation here is a limited and mutually beneficial transaction, not the embryo of a broader relationship.
Make engagement conditional: Russia should earn sanctions relief, diplomatic reintegration and economic access by meeting specific, verifiable benchmarks. These rewards should be reversible and calibrated, so that, for Russia, compliance pays and violations are costly. This system does not require faith—just working mechanisms.
Within these pillars, Europe can emphasise defensive resilience and sanctions, while America manages nuclear and global issues. Both are compatible with the same architecture, if properly sequenced.
The stages of managed disorder
Managed disorder will not arrive by some grand bargain. It must grow semi-organically from whatever unsatisfactory deal ends the Ukraine conflict. Progress will be uneven and contingent: each stage will require stability in the previous one and give Russia incentives to value restraint over escalation. Optimistically, it will take years to move from ceasefire management to durable rules, and probably a decade or more before habits, institutions and political constituencies for restraint begin to take root. The framework will thus also need to “fail well” in the sense that Ukraine and Europe need to be able to bounce back if there is a setback.
The sequencing below shows how war-termination mechanisms can become stabilisation tools, then arms-control practice, then institutions. This is deliberate. America and Europe should commit openly to this trajectory, making clear that progress depends on Russia sticking to core principles. Even so, however technical the criteria for moving from one stage to the next may look, all the parties will accept progress only if their domestic politics allow it.
Stage 0: Secure a ceasefire (prerequisite)
A ceasefire, negotiated principally between Ukraine and Russia, is the prerequisite for everything that follows. It would be good if that ceasefire laid the groundwork for a more stable peace, but experience suggests that it will only nod in that direction and leave much unsaid. In the end, the purpose of a ceasefire is to stop the shooting rather than to ensure permanent peace. In Ukraine, that would be an accomplishment in itself and would at least open the door to the more sustainable process outlined below.
Stage 1: Freeze the status quo (~years 0-2 after ceasefire)
The first phase is about preventing a return to large-scale violence, preserving Ukraine’s survival and creating minimum conditions for a wider managed confrontation. It should embed the principle that behaviour has consequences. Monitoring and verification should come first—they enable later agreements by normalising inspections, data exchanges and the idea of measurable compliance. Those, in turn, provide the basis for rewarding Russian restraint.
This phase should establish baseline rules and mechanisms.
Military movements
No renewed large-scale offensive action.
No forcible changes to a clearly delineated line of control.
No systematic attacks on European critical infrastructure.
No escalatory hybrid campaign against EU or NATO states.
Restrictions on long-range missiles and strike platforms near the line of contact.
The goal is to contain friction along the line of control and normalise external verification so that incidents do not spiral.
Communication and monitoring
Humanitarian corridors and prisoner-of-war exchanges as first channels of dialogue.
A Russian-Ukrainian military hotline with protocols for reporting ceasefire violations, troop movements, drone incidents and humanitarian emergencies.
A joint or tripartite monitoring mechanism, potentially with UN endorsement even if not UN-staffed.
Monitoring in this phase should not be confused with Western intelligence assessments. A ceasefire mechanism needs visible procedures that both Russia and Ukraine can invoke when incidents occur. The American and European governments will also rely on classified intelligence, satellite imagery and Ukrainian reporting to assess whether Russia is preparing to attack again, but Russia need not accept those assessments for America and Europe to act on them. The two systems serve different purposes: the ceasefire mechanism manages incidents and referees disputes; intelligence assessments guide deterrence and enforcement.
Administrative
A process for property claims, compensation and occupied-territory inventories.
Property claims will likely be one of the war’s most politically corrosive legacies. The framework must acknowledge them early, even if it cannot resolve them. Ukrainians have lost homes, businesses and land in occupied territories. Russian state assets and other linked private assets are frozen or seized across Europe. European nationals, companies and institutions have outstanding claims from pre-war investments. Left unaddressed, these grievances will curdle into domestic pressure against any government trying to sustain the framework. Experience from other post-conflict settlements suggests that unresolved property claims only get harder to settle and easier for spoilers to exploit the longer they sit.
This stage should therefore set up a dedicated arbitration channel for property claims, compensation and an inventory of assets in occupied territories. It should give affected populations a visible, legitimate process they can trust to address their claims eventually, even if immediate restitution is impossible. Otherwise, these issues become structural weaknesses that Russia, populist parties or affected lobbies can later exploit to fracture European cohesion.
No formal milestone marks the end of Stage 1—readiness to advance is a practical judgement. Triggers for progression to the next stage could include six to twelve months without major violations, inspectors consistently granted access or functioning communication demonstrated during minor incidents.
Stage 2: Stabilise the front (~years 2-4)
Once violence subsides, the next task is to keep it that way. This requires partial demilitarisation and transparency along the Ukraine-Russia and NATO-Russia contact lines. The logic resembles the earliest cold war confidence-building measures: small, technical arrangements that reduce risk without requiring political alignment.
Two tracks
Stage 2 creates, as noted, the two parallel negotiation tracks with Russia: one on the Ukraine-Russia contact line, Track A, and the other on NATO-Russia, Track B. Progress or failure in one track should have no bearing on the other, and the scope of Track B explicitly excludes Ukraine’s sovereign choices. Ukraine should be consulted before any Track B arrangement that materially affects its security. It should have no veto over NATO decisions, but it should not be treated as an object of them either.
The purpose of the negotiations would be to make the signs towards confrontation easier to read. Russia should be able to tell which US and European actions reflect routine deterrence from those signalling preparation for escalation, just as America and Europe need a clear read on which Russian moves stay within declared force posture and which mark renewed aggression. Ukraine, in turn, should know what kinds of Russian movements will trigger US and European responses—and frontline European states should trust that de-escalation measures will not come at their expense. The framework seeks to reduce the danger that military ambiguity becomes political panic.
Transparency measures and limits on destabilising deployments would increase predictability without weakening deterrence. The test is practical: a measure belongs in the framework if it reduces miscalculation while preserving the ability to defend Ukraine and NATO territory.
Examples of measures for each track include:
Track A—Contact line management (Ukraine-Russia, Western-facilitated)
Reduced-force and weapon-limited zones on both sides of the line of contact.
Restrictions on long-range strike systems or designated platforms near the line.
Direct communication channels between local Ukrainian and Russian commanders, with agreed protocols for use during incidents.
On-the-ground monitoring and inspection access, potentially with neutral observers.
Verified pullbacks of heavy artillery or long-range systems from designated exclusion belts.
Track B—NATO-Russia military transparency (NATO-led, Ukraine consulted)
Advance notification of exercises above a defined unit size along NATO’s eastern flank.
Hotlines between NATO and Russian military commands with agreed rules of use.
Observer arrangements for major exercises under agreed formats.
Early data exchange on force levels and positions where this increases predictability without weakening deterrence.
Technology-enabled transparency—such as satellite imagery, opensource intelligence aggregation, pattern detection—to support rather than replace agreed notification and inspection procedures.
A restart of American-Russian strategic stability talks.
Crisis channels
Stage 2 should also expand crisis communications into separate channels, each with a limited purpose. A Ukraine-Russia channel should manage incidents along the line of contact. Exercises, air and naval encounters, forward deployments and missile notifications would run through a separate NATO-Russia military channel. A political channel—bringing together the European core group, the US, Ukraine and Russia—should handle cases that risk triggering sanctions snapback or military escalation. And the Black Sea requires a fourth channel, covering naval movements, commercial shipping, mine clearance, port access and other maritime incidents, with Turkey centrally involved.
The Black Sea requires special attention. Ukraine’s security depends on its land frontier as much as it does on Odesa—the country’s principal port and the conduit for the bulk of its grain exports, without which Ukraine would be cut off from global maritime trade. Turkey’s control of the Black Sea and its diplomatic channels to both Moscow and Kyiv make it indispensable here.
These channels should be linked by notification rules but should not be merged into a single negotiation. Their value lies precisely in compartmentalisation: failure in one channel should not bring down the rest.
Overall, these measures create predictability rather than normality. The metrics are practical: fewer surprises, lower risk of misinterpretation, calmer borders. Communication at the tactical level buys stability at the strategic one. The aim of the monitoring is to make suspicious behaviour visible enough, early enough that American and European governments can respond before ambiguity becomes paralysis.
Informal progression to Stage 3 could follow after 9–18 months of ceasefire compliance, a functioning inspection regime or verified pullbacks of heavy artillery or long-range systems from designated exclusion belts.
Stage 3: Manage deterrence (~years 4-7)
If stabilisation holds, America and Europe should shift their focus from military capability to deterrence. The relationship with Russia may remain adversarial, but it must be clear why and, within limits, predictable.
This stage should distinguish rearmament from deployment. At first, it should leave Europe, Ukraine and Russia to rebuild their armed forces. Capping rearmament outright would be unpopular, difficult to verify and potentially damaging to deterrence. The early aim is narrower: to curb the most destabilising forms of rearmament by regulating where forces are placed, how movements are notified, which exercises require observers, which long-range systems create escalation risks and what kinds of external assistance to Russia would trigger penalties. In short, managed disorder should allow rearmament but make it less surprising, less offensive in posture and less likely to spark a crisis.
Hybrid activity is a harder problem because Moscow has made it part of its regional strategy. Disinformation and cyberattacks cannot be managed through traditional arms control. The US and Europe cannot negotiate a clean cyber or hybrid non-aggression pact with Russia, but they can set conditions for participation in a wider framework. Russia cannot stop the drone war in Ukraine while continuing an infrastructure war across Europe and still expect sanctions relief and cooperation. A reduction in major hybrid attacks should become part of the price of entry into the framework.
This will require clear thresholds. Not every disinformation campaign warrants a crisis response, and not every cyber incident will carry a signature that all governments accept. But hybrid attacks on critical infrastructure, electoral processes, or political figures should carry consequences when evidence reaches agreed standards. The US and Europe should create a certification process that assesses such activity and links it to sanctions, diplomatic access and the pace of wider engagement. Attribution will remain contested, but the absence of perfect attribution cannot excuse permanent grey-zone coercion.
Both sets of rules—on rearmament and on hybrid activity—belong to the same emerging arms-control agenda, which could include:
Geographically bounded force ceilings near Ukraine and NATO’s eastern flank.
Reciprocal notification of major troop movements and exercises.
Observer access to certain drills under agreed formats.
A dialogue on missile deployments and dual-use systems, initially without formal treaties.
Additional transparency measures for storage or deployment locations of sensitive weapons.
Agreed thresholds for major hybrid activity, including sabotage of critical infrastructure, coercive migration operations, cyber operations against essential services and attacks on defence production, linked to certification and penalties rather than formal arms-control limits.
The US would lead this part because of nuclear considerations, while Europe anchors the conventional posture. Russia may well test boundaries, so deterrence must remain credible. But even imperfect predictability is safer than total opacity.
Triggers for informal progression to the next stage could include routine functioning of transparency mechanisms, no large undisclosed deployments near the line or political space inside EU and US capitals for conditional economic measures.
Cooperation in limited areas can help keep the wider framework from collapsing. Even after a ceasefire in Ukraine, Russia will still be able to destabilise Europe indirectly through hybrid operations within European borders and its wider neighbourhood. A managed framework will therefore need to go beyond Ukraine without assuming that cooperation in one domain signals goodwill or leads to broader reconciliation.
The purpose of functional cooperation is twofold. First, it can give Russia limited, visible benefits from predictable behaviour. Moscow values status, access and the recognition that it is an indispensable interlocutor. Carefully chosen cooperation channels can provide these at relatively low cost, provided they remain conditional and reversible. Second, such channels can reduce Russia’s incentive to use theatres outside Europe as pressure points. If Russia gains a stake in, say, Arctic safety, it may have more to lose from turning it into a battlefield.
The US and Europe should choose these areas carefully. Cooperation should start soon after a ceasefire wherever interests overlap. It can include humanitarian and economic essentials—fertiliser and food exports, prisoner-of-war exchanges—alongside maritime and safety measures such as Black Sea commercial shipping and nuclear safety. The early purpose is to improve people’s safety and daily lives rather than to preserve the peace. If the framework holds, functional cooperation can institutionalise and spread into two further clusters: maritime and Arctic cooperation, such as search-and-rescue and maritime deconfliction; and technical safety cooperation, such as space debris monitoring, counter-proliferation and climate and environmental data exchange.
The Arctic presents a distinct challenge. Before the war, it was one of the few spaces where Russia, America and Europe cooperated despite wider tensions, but that cooperation has since collapsed. Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO, Russia’s militarisation of the High North, competition over energy and shipping routes, and Chinese interest in Arctic access have turned the region into a sharper theatre of rivalry. A functional Arctic track could help prevent accidents, manage search-and-rescue obligations, preserve basic environmental data exchange, and reduce the risk that military incidents in the High North spill into wider confrontation.
Functional cooperation could also help manage the Black Sea, building on the channel already established in Stage 2. The aim should be to cut the risk that a naval incident spirals into a wider escalation.
These channels should also serve as tests of Russian behaviour. Russia cannot expect cooperation in the Arctic while sabotaging European energy infrastructure, or maritime deconfliction while strangling Ukraine’s economy in the Black Sea. Functional cooperation should therefore rest on a spoiler clause: major destabilisation in one domain should cut benefits in others, though minor incidents, such as temporary denial of port access, should not automatically break compartmentalised cooperation. The point is to preserve communication during confrontation, but without allowing these channels to become sanctuaries for Russian bad behaviour. A standing certification mechanism should assess whether Russian actions remain compatible with continued participation; major violations, such as sabotage of critical infrastructure or using mercenary forces to destabilise European interests abroad, should trigger wider consequences.
Functional silos can also discipline European divisions by allowing limited contact with Russia where it serves security, while preventing that contact from becoming a general political thaw. This distinction lets hardline states accept narrow, security-driven engagement without conceding that Russia has been forgiven, while allowing more accommodating states to engage practically without waiting for a broader reconciliation that may never come. Silos also give European publics a clear rationale: certain risks require communication even among enemies.
The task for the bilateral re-engagement is to prevent unconditional normalisation by channelling it: bilateral contacts should be registered, reported to the core group where security-relevant and subject to spoiler clauses. Left unmanaged, bilateral contacts could become the pathway through which sanctions erode and Europe fragments.
China may play a limited role in this stage in areas where its interests—Arctic access, nuclear stability, maritime trade—align with predictability. Beijing will understand that stability preserves the economic access it values; Russian defection narrows it.
After a sustained period of compliance, the framework should offer Russia visible but reversible dividends for restraint: expanded diplomatic channels, ministerial-level meetings, greater facilitation of agricultural and fertiliser exports, enhanced participation in Black Sea or nuclear-safety mechanisms, and broader bilateral contacts. The aim is to show that restraint changes the terms of engagement.
The trigger for the next stage might be two to four years of stable front lines, deterrence and transparency mechanisms working as intended, and proof that narrow cooperation holds without spilling over or being exploited.
If earlier stages mature and survive disruptions, an institutional architecture can begin to consolidate. Many elements may start earlier but will take shape over the long term. Institutionalisation marks a recognition that competition must be permanently managed. This day may never arrive, but it matters as an aspiration. Comparable cold war institutions took 25 years or more to emerge. For example, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) was launched in the early 1970s but it only became a standing institution, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in 1995.
Potential forms for institutions include:
A US-Europe-Russia Risk Reduction Commission meeting at ministerial and military-to-military levels.
A modular arms-control instrument replacing parts of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces frameworks, eventually bringing in other countries—notably China.
A dual-track diplomatic structure: Washington–Moscow for nuclear or global issues; Europe–Moscow for regional security and Ukraine arrangements.
A standing crisis-management protocol with predefined escalation control steps.
An institutional layer consolidating the crisis channels of earlier stages, created through standing bodies, regularised military contacts and agreed evidentiary standards.
This stage is ambitious, uncertain and far off. It would require political durability inside Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe. But it should remain visible as the horizon. The framework must offer a picture of a stable destination even if the road there is long.
The path to stability runs through this framework; it structures a rivalry that will continue whether we prepare for it or not. The logic is incremental: ceasefire enables monitoring, monitoring enables transparency, transparency enables limits, limits enable rules, rules enable institutions. Each step must be earned through behaviour, not granted on faith. None of this works, however, if Europe cannot act as one.
How to overcome division paralysis in Europe
European cohesion will require a system that stops any single state from vetoing responses that the group has already agreed. The model should borrow from the Iran nuclear deal of 2015: participating states determine upfront what counts as a violation and what counts as a compliance milestone. Those criteria, once set, cannot be revised downward. The states most exposed to Russian pressure would write their red lines into the rules before the politics of the moment can erode them. A standing committee of the participating states then decides by qualified majority whether Russia has met a given criterion. If it has, the agreed reward or penalty follows automatically—unless a majority votes to block it.
This process flips the usual logic. The current system requires consensus to impose a snapback or advance a tranche of sanctions relief; the new one will require consensus to waive either. A hypothetical pro-Russian Hungarian or Slovak government seeking to delay consequences will need to openly vote to do so and bear public responsibility for that choice, rather than block it quietly through procedural abstention. Similarly, a frontline state such as Poland or a Baltic country will need to find a majority to block rewards once Russia demonstrably meets an agreed milestone. Frontline states appear to lose power here, but their red lines have already been written into the rules.
Spelling out in advance which consequences are appropriate for a breach would also help keep Europe united: cautious states will not tolerate escalation over every minor incident, and hawkish ones will not tolerate impunity for major violations. Proportionality will keep both cautious and hawkish states invested in the framework, rather than defecting to national responses. A three-tier system would make this balance work: minor procedural breaches might suspend talks or freeze a tranche of sanctions relief; material violations—such as denial of inspection access—may trigger limited snapback; major ones, such as attacks on defence production, should trigger full enforcement. This governance mechanism is only part of what will enable Europe to act cohesively within the framework; practical principles must also operate across every stage, beginning with crisis communication.
Operating rules
Several rules should apply throughout the framework. Managed disorder cannot rest on hopeful assumptions about Russian restraint or rationality. The framework must treat future violations as probable and place the burden on Russia to prove it is complying, not on America or Europe to show that it is not. In practice, that means adopting a presumption-of-violation approach: if, say, Russia denies inspectors access to a missile site, the refusal counts as a breach and triggers penalties. Sanctions relief, military deployments and cooperation channels continue only when Russia’s behaviour is visible and verifiable. If Moscow wants the benefits of a more predictable relationship, it must make compliance easy to see.
Crisis communication should begin from the outset. In a post-war environment, contact matters more than cooperation. Channels should allow the parties to clarify incidents and prevent local violence from escalating. These channels should be compartmentalised—for example, a line-of-contact mechanism should not depend on progress in NATO-Russia talks—so no single crisis can consume the whole framework.
Technology can help in this process, but monitoring cannot depend on it alone. Surveillance, satellite imagery, financial tracking, customs data, open-source intelligence and AI-assisted pattern detection can all improve visibility. But they cannot substitute for political judgment, agreed evidentiary standards and negotiated consequences.
In all stages, sanctions relief should be tied to periodic certification rather than ad hoc diplomacy. The certification mechanism described above—which includes the EU, the US, Ukraine and relevant European core group states—should govern the pace of sanctions relief, the triggering of snapback provisions, and the determination of whether conditions for stage progression have been met. It cannot eliminate political discretion, as that is impossible, but it can narrow it by defining operational and measurable criteria as precisely as possible. If Russia blocks inspections, moves forces without notification, conducts major hybrid attacks or violates agreed military limits, the default should be suspension or reversal of relief unless participating governments decide otherwise.
Why the alternatives are worse
Managed disorder will make no one happy. It will not deliver justice for Ukraine, reconciliation with Russia, strategic autonomy for Europe, or a restored US-European consensus on Russia. It will leave many questions unresolved and many grievances intact. But the relevant comparison is not with an ideal peace that cannot exist. The relevant comparison is with the conceivable alternatives. All of them are worse than managed disorder.
The alternatives below are ideal types. Few policymakers advocate for any of them in pure form. But examining each in isolation reveals why none can resolve the underlying problem and why mixing them without a governing framework tends to magnify their worst features.
The first alternative is regime change in Moscow. Many Europeans and Americans have concluded that no stable order with Russia can exist while Vladimir Putin or a Putinist system remains in power—a view with real force, given how central revisionism, militarism and hostility to the West have become to the current government’s legitimacy. But as a strategy, regime change offers no credible path from the world we inhabit to the world we want. Neither the US nor Europe can engineer a liberal transition in Moscow or build a European security order on the assumption that Russia will soon become a different country. Nor can they rely on sanctions, battlefield losses or elite discontent to produce a more palatable successor. A Russia after Putin could become less aggressive, but it could also become more nationalist, more chaotic or more determined to prove that the war was not lost.
The second alternative is permanent isolation. This approach would contain Russia through sanctions, diplomatic exclusion and military pressure. It has obvious appeal. Russia should pay a lasting price for aggression. But isolation alone will not manage the next phase. Sanctions will erode without a political strategy. European governments will divide over costs and enforcement. China, Turkey, the Gulf states and others will create channels around US and European pressure. Russia will adapt and wait for fatigue in the US and Europe. Permanent isolation may punish Russia, but it will not by itself create rules for regional security or Ukraine’s defence.
The third alternative is normalisation. This approach would treat a ceasefire as the end of the problem and move quickly toward restored diplomatic channels, trade and a wider European conversation with Moscow. Some governments and firms will want this as soon as large-scale fighting stops. They will argue that Europe needs stability to recover and a way to stop Russia from becoming still more dependent on China. Some engagement with Moscow will eventually prove necessary. But normalisation without conditions would reward aggression without securing restraint. It would tell Russia that conquest brings only a temporary crisis followed by eventual reintegration. It would weaken Ukraine, divide Europe and invite Moscow to test whether another round of coercion might yield another round of concessions. Engagement has value only when it forms part of a structure of leverage. Without that structure, it becomes appeasement by exhaustion.
The fourth alternative is unmanaged confrontation. This outcome is the most likely default because it requires no decision. Europe and America would continue to arm Ukraine unevenly, maintain sanctions haphazardly, talk to Russia episodically and respond to crises as they arise. NATO would reinforce some areas, neglect others and debate deployments after Russia tests them, leaving Ukraine dependent yet insecure. Russia, meanwhile, would keep probing European defences with hybrid tactics, even as Washington cuts its own deals with Moscow. European governments might denounce such freelancing while failing to offer a coherent alternative. In this world, rivalry persists and even grows, and no one sets the rules.
Unmanaged confrontation gives Russia more ambiguity to exploit, gives the United States more room to improvise over Europe’s head, and hands European governments more opportunities to defect from common positions. It also leaves Ukraine with less clarity about what the US and Europe will support and what they will not. Every crisis becomes a test of will, credibility and domestic politics. The result would not be principled firmness. It would be recurrent improvisation under pressure.
These alternatives also share a deeper flaw. Each assumes that one element of the problem can solve the whole: Russian transformation, Russian isolation, Russian reintegration or Western toughness. None can. The post-war confrontation will require deterrence and dialogue, punishment and incentives, European unity and coalitions of the willing, Ukrainian agency, American involvement and European hedging. Any strategy that chooses only one side of these tensions will collapse when reality supplies the other.
An operating system for a bad peace
If this trajectory does not take hold, the alternative is easy to imagine because it resembles the past decade: a ceasefire that freezes rather than manages the conflict, Russia regrouping and probing again when the balance shifts, Europe tiring under sanctions and domestic cost, the US distracted and inconsistent, and Ukraine trapped in recurrent wars. In such a world, escalation would be governed by crises rather than rules, and could arrive suddenly, triggered by accident, misunderstanding or opportunity.
America and Europe cannot choose a world without Russia, nor can they wish away their own disunity. But both Europeans and Americans can choose whether to confront Russia through chaos or through structure. Managed disorder is a strategy for containing escalation, preserving Ukrainian sovereignty, limiting Russian coercion and ensuring that rivalry remains predictable rather than world-ending.
The path forward begins in Ukraine. If policymakers treat war termination as the end of the problem, they will fail to respond to broader Russian concerns and leave Europe vulnerable to the next Russian offensive. If they instead treat war termination as the opening phase of a long process, they can shape the incentives and capacities that will govern the next decade.
A structured adversarial framework, rooted in credible deterrence and bounded by conditional cooperation, is the best available foundation. Managed disorder is not permanent peace, reconciliation or a just settlement. It is an operating system for a bad peace.
About the authors
Jeremy Shapiro is the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. His areas of focus include US foreign policy and transatlantic relations.
Samuel Charap is Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and a senior political scientist at RAND. His research interests include the foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; and US-Russia deterrence, strategic stability and arms control.
Bob Deen is the General Director of the Netherlands Institute for International Relations “Clingendael” and specialises in matters of European security, with a focus on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Before joining Clingendael in 2020, he worked as Head of Section and Senior Adviser to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities.
Hiski Haukkala is the director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. He is also an adjunct professor of international relations at Tampere University and a senior research associate at RAND Europe. He is the author of numerous books and articles on EU foreign policy, Russia and International Relations.
Ivan Krastev is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He is the author of “Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic”, among many other publications.
Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia programme at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Based in Berlin, she has written extensively about Russian foreign policy and is the author of We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West (W. W. Norton & Co).
Jim O’Brien is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Biden administration.
Acknowledgments
This paper is the collaborative product of a working group that met several times over the course of more than a year, comprising the authors above and Michael Kimmage of the Kennan Institute. Jeremy Shapiro took the pen on this paper, but the working group shaped, debated and contributed to it in essential ways. All of the members of the working group except Michael Kimmage fully endorse the paper.
The authors would also like to thank Kat Fytatzi for her patient and incisive editing. Kat’s editing was painful, but in exactly the right way. Nastassia Zenovich applied her usual genius for the graphical representation of extremely verbal ideas to a paper that badly needed it. She has our eternal gratitude. We’d also like to thank the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the funding and patience that made this project possible.
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