If Trump wants a peace deal, he has no choice but to accept the Russians' two principal demands (neutrality and territorial recognition), because there is no alternative—if he doesn't accept those demands, the war will continue indefinitely.

Huge numbers of people in the West operate under the illusion that Ukraine is doing fine and all we need to do is give them more weapons and fine-tune the fighting machine and they will stymie the Russians and eventually roll them back.

The Trump administration wants to have good relations with the Russians and peel the Russians away from the Chinese, following the Nixon administration model that brought China to the American side to avoid China-Soviet alliance.

J.D. Vance was making the point in Munich that the ideological straitjacket is like the Soviet Union used to be in Europe, preventing open discourse.

When the Cold War ended and Soviets were pulling out of Eastern Europe, they wanted the United States to remain in Europe because they saw Americans as a pacifier and wanted Germany integrated into alliance run by Americans.

The first major tranche of NATO expansion was 1999 when Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic were brought in; the Russians could live with this.

The April 2008 decision to expand NATO to Ukraine was fatal because it crossed a Russian red line that was not crossed by previous tranches.

If NATO had stopped after 2004 and worked out meaningful security relationship with Russians for remaining areas, there would be a peaceful situation in Eastern Europe because Russia didn't have intentions or capabilities to overrun Ukraine, Belarus, or Eastern Europe.

Putin, despite the picture most people have of him in the West, is not a highly aggressive individual and in fact gets beat up in Russian social media for not being aggressive enough and not waging the war aggressively enough in Ukraine.

NATO expansion was packaged with EU expansion and color revolutions, including efforts to foment color revolution inside Russia when Michael McFaul was US ambassador to Moscow.

The difficulty of putting an agreement together combined with the danger that Russians will end up capturing a lot more territory makes it very hard to see how a successful peace agreement will work out.

In the 1990s, the phrase 'expand or die' became associated with NATO, suggesting that NATO needed to expand or would wither on the vine.

Americans provide the glue that holds Europe together because you have massive collective action problems when 20+ nations try to figure out what to do on economic or security front.

Russians have had two central demands since at least June 14th: Ukraine will be genuinely neutral and not in NATO either de jure or de facto, and the West and Ukraine will recognize the annexation of four oblasts in eastern Ukraine plus Crimea.

While negotiations proceed, Russians are winning on the battlefield and it is possible that discourse about peace will sow doubts in Ukrainian military minds, making them less willing to fight and facilitating the breakdown of the Ukrainian army, allowing Russians to conquer more territory.

At some point Trump will have to bring the Europeans and Ukrainians into a deal, making it not just a US-Russia deal, and the Ukrainians and Europeans will be roadblocks because they are opposed to the terms being discussed.

Hegseth, speaking for the administration, was saying that the US accepts the two principal demands that the Russians have made about Ukrainian neutrality and territorial annexation, which represents a major turnaround.

Ukraine and the West would be better off reaching a settlement now based on accepting Russian territorial gains, but this settlement will be disastrous from Ukraine's point of view because we have pursued a remarkably foolish policy for so long.

It is essential that people be brutally honest about what's going on in national security issues, regardless of whether they like it, because basic intellectual integrity is essential for good strategy.

Taking Americans away from Europe leaves you with a number of independent nations that sometimes will be at each other's throats, not a unified 'Europe'.