Many analysts and journalists are still framing what's coming as roughly like a traditional presidency: led by the president, filled with appointees that have real roles, aiming to produce workable policy that serves US interests. I don’t think any of this is looking correct. Looking at the incoming administration picks from Gabbard to Kennedy to Gaetz to Hegseth, it seems pretty obvious that these are not serious nominations in the sense that they are expected to conduct government business in the way that’s normally understood of those roles.

I’ve seen several people argue that Trump might not be as bad on Ukraine as some suggest and cited his administration’s supply of arms to Kyiv as evidence for this. I understand why people are keen to find positives for Ukraine, but I think this is wrong. On arms: the claim is often that Trump supplied them after Obama blocked them. This is only partly true. The Obama administration allowed the commercial export of weapons to Ukraine, but did not supply them directly.

The greatest error that the US has made in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine is just the latest variant of the same error that US administrations have been making for nearly 30 years: not taking Russia seriously. An enormous 🧵 Immediately after the USSR collapsed, Bush 41 and Clinton took Russia seriously as a threat to international stability and security. The fate of the USSR’s nukes, the possibility of Russia disintegrating, or of a Red or Brown Russian president meant that the US prioritized Russia

One of the odd things about Putin’s statement that allowing Ukraine to use long range missiles inside Russia really is a red line – honest, not like all the other red lines – is that saying it so publicly makes it much harder for the US *not* to allow it. Having indicated that it’s now maybe, possibly, open to saying yes soon-ish, if the Biden administration changes its mind in response to this, it will make the US look coercible by adversaries. That’s not a signal the US wants to send to Russia and certainly not to China.

Coming to this late, but *if* the Biden administration is imposing limits on Ukraine because “the US will eventually want to reset relations with Moscow”, then they are making an enormous mistake. 🧵 politico.com/news/2024/08/2…
The use of the term ‘reset’ is instructive (and perhaps not surprising given the personnel overlap between the Obama and Biden administrations). To understand just how impossible another reset with Russia is for the foreseeable future, it’s worth looking at the last one.

I'm not sure it really matters what Putin's hold on Trump is, what matters is how consistent and how strong it seems to be.

https://twitter.com/lukeharding1968/status/1826298021883068572

Over the years, people have suggested lots of explanations for Trump's admiration for, even deference to, Putin: money, kompromat, manipulation by smarter people around him, a preference for dictators, a combination of some or all of these.

Not a fan of this simplistic form of Realism, but taking it on its own terms, this is not an accurate analysis. By Realist measures, we are not in a multipolar world, we are in a world with two great powers: the USA and China. Claims of multipolarity are Russian fantasy. For about 20 years, the Russian govt and the Russian analytical elite have been announcing the arrival of a multipolar order, in which several great powers will dominate international affairs. Unsurprisingly, they claim Russia is one of the.

Since Kremlin-friendly voices have once again dragged out the claim that NATO expansion provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, I thought it was worth explaining a couple of things in addition to this earlier thread. 🧵

https://twitter.com/ruth_deyermond/status/1804429379713298793

To repeat: there was no chance at all of Ukraine joining either NATO or the EU in the years before Russia decided to start its latest colonial campaign of stealing Ukrainian land and torturing, raping, and murdering Ukrainians.

One reason why this argument is nonsense is that in Feb 2022 there was zero prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU, as Putin and everyone else knew.

https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1804421118410797109

One widely acknowledged reason why Ukraine had zero chance of joining NATO in Feb 2022 was that Russia had been occupying parts of it for 8 years. Again, everyone including Putin knew this made NATO accession impossible - that was probably part of the reason Putin did it.

Now that the party manifestos are out, I thought I’d take a look at what they have to say about support for Ukraine and the Russian threat to the UK. What the parties say about Ukraine and Russia tells us a perhaps surprising amount about them. A very long 🧵 First up: the Conservative manifesto. Unsurprisingly, it highlights the Sunak/Truss/Johnson government’s Ukraine policy – widely understood to be one of their major achievements:

There needs to be much better public understanding about this in the UK (and, I suspect elsewhere in NATO) in the context of debates about defence spending, anxieties about escalation, and wishful thinking about any cessation of war in Ukraine ending hostilities with Russia.

https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1789879343004483636

The idea that the West (its states, institutions, political culture, values) are Russia's main enemy and an existential threat is now built in to Putin's presidency. There's no way back from that as long as post-Feb 2022 Putinism is the structuring principle of the Russian state.

David Lammy is right about the critical importance for the UK of the relationship with the US, but implying that he's more focused on it than on the relationship with the rest of Europe ("I've been to America more times than I've been to France") is not ideal.

https://twitter.com/DavidLammy/status/1789199118448939177

European NATO members (the ones that don't have pro-Putin leaderships) need to think urgently about how they cooperate to ensure their security if Trump is re-elected in November. This message doesn't help with that.

Since it’s that time of year again, 12 end-of-year and start-of-new-year thoughts about Russia’s war against Ukraine and its implications. A long 🧵 1. Russia can’t win. In recent months, there’s been a lot of discussion in the West about Russian victory, but the Russian govt’s objectives were unrealistic from the start, and impossible to achieve almost as soon as the fighting started.

The idea that the US is to blame for Russia's war against Georgia in 2008 is partly correct, though not for reasons Lavrov claims to think. Quick 🧵

https://twitter.com/FormulaGe/status/1731598372237103529

By encouraging Georgia to seek NATO admission in 2008 without the necessary support from members, the US created a strong incentive for Russia - with its delusions of rights over its "near abroad" - to act to stop it before reluctant members changed their minds.

Given some of the reporting of the last week, it’s clear that we’re in for another wave of discussion about whether Ukraine should be pushed to the negotiating table. A 🧵 I don’t want to focus on the ethics, or otherwise, of trying to pressure Ukraine to make concessions in order to freeze the conflict. Instead, I want to look at the implications of these policies for regional, European, and therefore also US security.

Working on my book (post-Cold War US-Russia relations) and realised that the whole relationship can pretty much be summarised in pictures of the two presidents meeting. A thread. Bush 41-Gorbachev:

Hard to overstate how embarrassing this is for Russia. Armenia was one of its two closest allies among states formerly part of the USSR (Belarus the other). Russia's priority in the region has always been blocking US military influence/presence. What a failure of Russian strategy

https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1699382734710300929

And this is happening at the same time as the humiliation of Russia, allegedly one of the world's great military powers and previously a major arms exporter, having to turn to North Korea for weapons.

I mentioned at the start of my last thread that, in my experience, Western policymakers and advisors who are reluctant to see Ukraine de-occupy Crimea are concerned about nuclear dangers and the risk of Russian disintegration. A 🧵 on this second point. Since the USSR began to come apart in the very early 90s, there’s been a lot of Western anxiety about the consequences of Soviet, and then Russian, disintegration.

We’re seeing another round of media items about whether the US and some European states want to push Zelensky to make concessions, above all on Crimea. A 🧵 Anxiety among some Western policymakers about Ukraine doing too well and retaking Crimea seems, in my experience, to be focused on 2 things: fear that Russia will use nuclear weapons and fear of Russian collapse (which I may do a thread on tomorrow if I have time).

This feels like a potentially very important moment for Georgia, almost 20 years after the Rose Revolution. 🇬🇪

https://twitter.com/KShoshiashvili/status/1633484860747546624

Just yesterday my MA class was discussing Georgia and Moldova since the collapse of the USSR. Among other things, we talked about was the way the relative positions of the two states on membership of the EU and on European/Western identity has changed in the last decade.

Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking about the anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. One striking thing about the last year i how hard it is for people, particularly the media, to ditch the myth of Russian invincibility and Putin’s cunning. The decision to invade Ukraine was an error of staggering proportions, the most profoundly stupid decision made by a powerful state in living memory. The obvious and epic stupidity of it was one of the reasons that a lot of observers, including me, didn’t think it would happen.