The Dumbest Gamble in American Strategy
The real-world consequences of cutting military aid to Ukraine while pretending to contain the authoritarian axis.
What amazes me in this whole missile freeze story is just how unbelievably stupid these people are.
People have been warning about Elbridge Colby and how dangerous he is for Ukraine for quite a while. At the time of his appointment, many pointed out that he would effectively be the real Secretary of Defense while Hegset just played the face. Colby is known as a supposed hardliner on China, an advocate of the idea of “maximum containment of China,” for which, supposedly, the U.S. must throw Ukraine under the bus, cut off its aid, withdraw from NATO, and try to appease Russia through spheres of influence in order to “pull it away” from China. Basically, the same trash we heard in the early days of Trump’s return (actually, even as early as February 2024—but who was listening, right?)
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Let’s say—okay. But… then you fight a 12-day war with Iran, burn through up to 20% of all your THAAD missiles, blow half of your annual PAC-3 supply, panic, and run to throw Ukraine under the bus.
Let’s say—okay. But… then you’re expanding missile production by 100 per year: 300 in 2022, 400 in 2023, 500 in 2024, 600 in 2025. Meanwhile, you’re de facto lifting sanctions on Russia. The dismantling of export control departments has resulted in a flood of machinery, military tech, and parts into Russia. Moscow has begun massive expansion of its Shahed drone factory, its strategic bomber production, and has already increased its ballistic and aeroballistic missile production several times over. And that’s just Russia. Don’t forget China, which has its own hypersonic and aeroballistic programs—only with production capacity 20 times higher than Russia’s.
So Colby’s entire bet hinges on the following:
If we cut aid to Ukraine, it will weaken and surrender to Moscow, and Russia will supposedly normalize relations with us and break from China.
If we cut aid to Ukraine, we can stockpile more missiles, and that “more” will be enough to fend off missiles from Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.
Both are highly questionable assumptions. Despite seeming appealing under the America First banner, it’s an incredibly dumb gamble.
Instead of finishing off Russia in Ukraine, decapitating its leadership, equipping Ukraine with tech and industry to dismantle the Russian military complex on a massive scale—
Instead of removing an entire hostile actor from the board—
All you're doing is empowering it in the blind hope that it won’t hit you when you finally square off with China.
God, this is just idiocy.
All Colby will achieve is revving up Russia’s military-industrial complex, which sooner or later will learn to churn out aeroballistic missiles faster than conservative, bureaucratic America can make air defense systems—especially at its sluggish “teaspoon-per-year” defense budget increases.
Russia will get stronger. China will get stronger. Iran will get stronger. North Korea will get stronger. And their combined ballistic production will simply outpace U.S. air defense. And on D-Day, they’ll just overwhelm the skies.
There is no universe where you can break this axis. Even a half-crippled Iran, supposedly knocked down, isn’t going along with any “split with China in exchange for sanction relief” nonsense. On the contrary, they’re flying to Beijing to deepen ties.
The only way the U.S. can win this race is by doing the exact opposite.
That means investing in Ukraine’s defense industry—which isn’t paralyzed by red tape and can launch full-scale production 10 times cheaper than U.S. equivalents within half a year.
It means giving Ukraine air defense licenses so they can mass-produce for you.
It means crushing Russia in Ukraine and giving Kyiv the tools to take out the Shahed factories, the Kinzhal factories, the Kalibr factories, and the strategic bomber factories.
It means finishing off Iran now that you’ve started—toppling the ayatollah regime and cutting its lifeline to China.
It means not playing nice with North Korea, shedding tears over Kim Jong-un’s love letters—but rather figuring out how to obliterate their capacity to assist Russia.
That is the only path.
The U.S. and Colby, who choose isolation instead—and believe that “we're the U.S., we’re always better,” and therefore Russia will crawl back for peace, Iran will rush into your arms, and we’ll magically make PAC-3s faster than China can churn out hypersonics—are absolute, total, and irredeemable fools.
Or... you become autocrat and make friends with other autocrats, which happens to be exactly the list you have here.
The fact that policy makers in this administration like to toss around the word realism to describe their decisions does not make it so. This choice is just as nonsensical as the rest of this administration's foreign policy actions, which are driven by ideology, not any meaningful understanding of realism or any other thoughtful foreign policy construct.
This administration has simply decided, against all evidence, that Putin and Russia are not threats to America. If anything, this decision is based on narcissism instead of good foreign policy sense. Trump wants to believe he's powerful and decisive and tough, the way he views Putin, and Putin plays on that to encourage him to ignore his blatant aggression.
Furthermore, Trump (and his sycophants) believe that Europeans are ungrateful, and should therefore be punished for not kowtowing to the image he has of himself as a great leader instead of a childish buffoon. They ignore the fact that 80 years of U.S. investment in Europe has contributed to the longest period of general peace in modern history—no major war in Europe in almost a century is unprecedented—and that streak could have remained unbroken had Trump not appeased Putin is such a obsequious manner during his first term, setting up the conditions for the invasion of Ukraine.
An actual realist would look at the situation from the perspective of the worst possible outcome and plan against that, as opposed to ideologically driven wishful thinking. Save for nuclear war, the worst possible outcome would be China starting a war in the Pacific at the same time Russia pushes deeper into Europe. The likelihood that they would ally together, or at least deconflict their operations, is almost certain. A true realist would be seeking allies to balance the threat from both directions, working to build up proxies who can fight on our behalf or partners to fight with us, and then confronting aggression on both sides by not only building up our own forces, but working with allies to take the initiative and employ tit-for-tat moves that force both adversaries back within their previous spheres of influence.
The reality is that the policy of abandoning Ukraine, ignoring the threat of Russia, and alienating allies across the board with tariffs—especially on our strongest military allies and trading partners—is the OPPOSITE of realism. It is, as the author said, plain old stupid.
Note: The issue of involvement in the Middle East is almost a non sequitur. No, we don't want to get bogged down in another war in the Middle East, but that has little impact on the policy we should be following towards both Russia and China, which involves confronting their aggression and expansionist tendencies smartly, while reinforcing our allies on both side. The real relevance of the Middle East is logistical—we need to ensure freedom of navigation through the Suez and access to oil in order to prevent the possibility that our adversaries could isolate one potential front from the other.