{"id":318653,"date":"2026-07-27T12:01:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T11:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=318653"},"modified":"2026-07-22T18:37:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T17:37:25","slug":"ukraine-the-us-enduring-proxy-war-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/07\/ukraine-the-us-enduring-proxy-war-on-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine, the US Enduring Proxy War on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eisenhower\u2019s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

21 Jul 2026 – <\/em>In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned North Americans against the \u201cacquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the\u00a0military-industrial complex<\/a>,\u201d and the danger that \u201cpublic policy could itself become the\u00a0captive of a scientific-technological elite<\/a>.\u201d Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower\u2019s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. US\u00a0democracy<\/a>\u00a0hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs US foreign policy over the objections of the North American people.<\/p>\n

The aim is US primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of US elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that\u00a0Wall Street<\/a>, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and\u00a0Big Oil<\/a>\u00a0control US foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.<\/p>\n

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as \u201cregime control,\u201d directed at subordinating the rest of the world\u2019s governments to the\u00a0United States<\/a>. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of\u00a0trade<\/a>\u00a0barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic\u00a0sanctions<\/a>; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with\u00a0corruption<\/a>\u00a0claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical Pivots and US Primacy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Zbigniew Brzezinski\u2019s\u00a0The Grand Chessboard<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which US global primacy must be secured. To succeed, the US should dominate \u201cgeopolitical pivots,\u201d meaning states that are unimportant to US per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was\u00a0Ukraine<\/a>. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures US hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast\u00a0oil<\/a>, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.<\/p>\n

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy.\u00a0Bill Clinton<\/a>\u00a0set out to enlarge\u00a0NATO<\/a>\u00a0to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an US-ordered Eurasia.<\/p>\n

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan\u2019s warning that it was \u201cthe most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era<\/a>\u201d and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move \u201cnot one inch eastward<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0George W. Bush<\/a>\u00a0withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in\u00a0Moscow<\/a>\u00a0and later\u00a0CIA<\/a>\u00a0director, privately called \u201cthe brightest of all redlines<\/a>\u201d for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama\u2019s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland\u2019s intercepted call where she discusses\u00a0choosing the next prime minister<\/a>), and then supported the new regime\u2019s bid to join NATO.\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas.\u00a0Joe Biden<\/a>\u00a0brushed aside Russia\u2019s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled\u00a0the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul<\/a>\u00a0in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises<\/strong><\/p>\n

Donald Trump<\/a>\u00a0campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end USA\u2019s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.<\/p>\n

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President\u00a0Volodymyr Zelenskyy<\/a>\u00a0in February, the taunt that Ukraine had \u201cno cards,\u201d and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an US war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine\u2019s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the\u00a0White House<\/a>\u00a0pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The\u00a0US military<\/a>\u00a0spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the US military role since 2022.<\/p>\n

In June 2025, Trump signed\u00a0Executive Order 14307<\/a>, \u201cUnleashing US Drone Dominance,\u201d directing the rebuilding of the US drone industrial base and instructing that the\u00a0Pentagon<\/a>\u00a0\u201cmust be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.\u201d In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to \u201cunleash\u201d military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times\u2019 later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.<\/p>\n

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine\u2019s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials\u2019 account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of\u00a0Extended Range Attack Munitions<\/a>\u00a0for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy\u00a0infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0deep inside Russia, a step the\u00a0Biden administration<\/a>\u00a0itself had refused as too escalatory, while\u00a0Washington<\/a>\u00a0pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated\u00a0Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow<\/a>. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency\u2019s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had\u00a0spent billions building Ukraine\u2019s drone program<\/a>\u00a0from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.<\/p>\n

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

The Laboratory<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eisenhower\u2019s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the\u00a0Ukraine war<\/a>. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary\u2019s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.<\/p>\n

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon\u2019s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a\u00a0revolving door<\/a>\u00a0that includes a former MI6 chief among\u00a0more than 30 UK officials<\/a>\u00a0hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs \u201cmost of the targeting<\/a>\u201d done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine\u2019s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the \u201cBrave1 Dataroom\u201d to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to \u201ctransfer the war onto Russian territory<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski\u2019s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have\u00a0deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones<\/a>; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

Kissinger\u2019s Admonition to Friends of the US<\/strong><\/p>\n

Henry Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.<\/p>\n

Ukraine is dying at US hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for US primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month\u2019s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine\u2019s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the \u201ckey partner;\u201d and summarily\u00a0sacked Mykhailo Fedorov<\/a>, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.<\/p>\n

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the North American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir,\u00a0BlackRock<\/a>, SpaceX,\u00a0Chevron<\/a>, and their ilk, the battlefield \u201claboratories\u201d will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for US \u201cfriendship.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General [Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. His books include <\/em>The End of Poverty<\/a>, Common Wealth<\/a>, The Age of Sustainable Development<\/a>, Building the New American Economy<\/a>, and most recently,<\/em> A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism<\/a>. Sachs was also an advisor to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \u00a0Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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