"She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit." —John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821.
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Ukraine may have found a new internet tool for targeting Russia's energy infrastructure. That's good news for people who like punishing aggressors, and bad news for people who hate expensive diesel and inflation.
I am both of those people — real life is messy like that.
War is even worse, so let's take a look at what's going on over there, even though this week's essay isn't really about the Russo-Ukraine War. But it's a good place to start.
If you want to get something approximating the truth out of what's going on there, a good place to start is with Russia's unofficial military channel — the generally pro-war military bloggers on the Telegram platform. That might seem counterintuitive, but Vladimir Putin officially restricted Telegram earlier this year for reports and discussions that came uncomfortably close to the truth about the war's costs and apparent lack of progress.
Counterintuitive, but correct. "Telegram is kind of a big deal," I wrote back in February, just before the edict was issued. "Partly, it's a way to channel reliable battlefield information to higher-ups without (or at least with less) political influence — aka, lies. Partly, it's a safety valve for dissenters to blow off steam without doing anything to destabilize the regime."
So it remains. The restrictions were about as effective as you probably suspected they would be — which is to say, not at all.
"Can't stop the signal," the wise man once said. But sometimes, you can throttle it a little bit.
That's exactly what happened to Ukraine's military, when SpaceX temporarily put speed limits on Starlink terminals based in Ukraine. Not download speeds, mind you — speed-speeds. A Starlink Mini terminal mounted on a mid-size drone could provide timely and accurate targeting data, and it was easy to tell which terminals were mounted on a drone because they were flying through the air instead of just sitting there.
As last week's election drew closer without much relief on diesel prices here in the US, Trump called for an "energy ceasefire" between Kyiv and Moscow in October. Oil, gas, and diesel are global commodities, and taking out one source — the Kinef diesel refinery near Leningrad hit on Monday night, for just one of several recent examples — can cause prices to rise everywhere.
While I appreciate Trump's efforts to get the price of diesel down by whatever means are handy, no matter how distasteful I find us buying the Russian stuff, the fact is that we don't have enough refining capacity right here in the United States. And you can hardly blame Kyiv for vigorously reducing Russian capacity.
But here's the thing. We don't actually have the kind of influence over Kyiv we once did.
What we do still have is global leadership in orbital internet connectivity — something Ukraine depends upon — and a tight friendship between POTUS and the man who created Starlink.
Elon Musk said a few weeks ago that rigging drones with Starlink transceivers violated Starlink’s terms of service by using the civilian network “for offensive drone strikes to kill people,” and that “that loophole was closed.” At the very least, Musk's heavy involvement in the November election suggests that politics played a part in Musk's sudden TOS enforcement.
The administration appeared to be caught off guard, despite reported discussions with Musk. Whatever the case, President Donald Trump soon asked that the speed limits be removed.
Some Democrats made it ugly, with demands we nationalize SpaceX because of a temporary restriction on some of Kyiv's drone warfare.
But Kyiv may have decided not to allow its drone forces to be held at somebody else's mercy, and that's where this week's Telegram report gets interesting.
And Another Thing: I won't get into the bickering between Washington and Kyiv, because let's face it, Volodymyr Zelensky's one great moment — "I need ammunition, not a ride" — was a long time ago.
International affairs analyst Anna Komsa follows Telegram, and reported early Tuesday that "Russians are panicking over Ukraine’s new refinery strike tactics," seemingly enabled by switching from Starlink to Israeli HiSKY SmartLight terminals.
I'm not a Russian speaker, so I had to rely on the translations, but "panic" isn't the word I'd use. "Concerned but still completely rational" would be much more accurate.
That aside, using HiSky "Ukrainian operators can monitor strikes in real time and redirect incoming drones while they are still in flight." Previously, "Ukrainian drones were sent toward predetermined targets. If the first drones successfully hit a refinery unit, the rest continued toward the same target."
That's a lot of wasted drones, hitting the same destroyed part of a refinery again and again on the same night. But now, one HiSky reports a hit, "subsequent drones can be redirected toward storage tanks, cracking units, electrical substations or other critical equipment."
More damage, fewer wasted drones — again, according to Russian milbloggers on Telegram.
The Russian source concluded that the Starlink ruckus and Ukraine's subsequent shift to HiSky means that "Trump has simply lost his leverage over Kyiv’s long-range strikes."
It's a long war with no end in sight, so I wouldn't say anything about it with that much finality. But we also shouldn't ignore the fact that both sides ignored Trump's energy ceasefire even when one side was still reliant on Starlink to help target invading soldiers.
"Ukraine has slipped off the American leash and found a commercial alternative that the White House cannot switch off with a phone call."
Good for them, not so good for American influence — which for good and ill, has been partly based on our ability to do business with some shady characters when strategic necessity demanded it. In the southwest Pacific during the Cold War, for example, our choice wasn't between the Philippines getting robbed by Ferdinand Marcos while still serving as a bulwark against communism, or having the Philippines run as a model republic while also serving as a bulwark against communism.
Our choice was between Marcos and the communists.
The next country off the leash will probably be Israel, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Let's go back to May 2024 and some of the worst fighting of the Gaza War. ABC News reported at the time that the “US withheld bomb shipment to Israel out of fears it could be used in Rafah.” Presidentish Joe Biden confirmed it, telling CNN, "I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah."
That was just one example of a hostile US administration using Israeli dependence on American arms sales to force Israel into acting against its own interests. Hell, Biden forced Bibi Netanyahu to act against our interests in the region.
Then there's the matter of our $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel, almost all of which comes right back to this country as arms sales. Like Biden in 2024, Barack Obama in 2014 threatened to cut off or curtail aid during that year's Gaza conflict.
And Another Thing: Reread that Biden quote, and notice how he doesn't quite make sense. It's as though he remembered the gist of what he was supposed to say, but never understood the meaning. God only knows which Obama holdover made the actual decision and tried to put the right words in Biden's mush-mouth.
Earlier this month — and it has been years in the making — Trump said America's decades-old military aid agreement with Israel comes to an end this year. "Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that -- we give Israel $4 billion a year -- and we made a deal months ago that we're stopping, and ... they're fine with it because, you know, they've become a very successful country. They don't need it, and we won't be paying any more," the president told Fox News last week.
Netanyahu said there will be a gradual phase-out, so it seems we have yet to reach a final agreement.
But it's time.
It will be a long time (if ever) before Israel is wholly self-reliant, but ending the decades-old military aid program removes a sticking point between two natural allies — friends, even — and helps protect Israel from the next Obama or Biden.
It's also best for both parties if the one whose actual existence is at stake 24/7/365 gets to make its own decisions without fear of reprisal from its most important ally.
So like in Ukraine, we'll lose some of that hard-power influence we've grown so fond of since 1945. Maybe too fond.
Some — most? — of it was probably inevitable.
Ukraine isn't our backyard, and it's correct for Europe to do the heavy lifting against Russian aggression. Israel is a grownup David now, responsible and capable.
It's the rest of the world that's a hot mess.
Things were much more black and white during Cold War One. The Soviets didn't just want to dominate; they wanted global revolution. It behooved Western European elites to get on board with Washington, because the Russians would literally have them shot or sent to the gulag.
In Cold War Two, our rival is only nominally communist, albeit fully authoritarian. Beijing really doesn't care about ideological conformity in other countries just so long as they get on board with the Middle Kingdom's growing dominance in manufacturing, global trade, and (soon) A.I. The same now goes for Vladimir Putin's post-Soviet/post-reform Russia.
Leaders that would never have pivoted toward Beijing or Moscow 50 years ago can now do so with impunity — and profitably — because they know their necks are safe. So we have various German, Hungarian, Turkish, and South Korean figures playing footsie with our rivals in ways they wouldn't have dared before.
And besides, China is flush with cash and skilled at espionage and compromising rival business and political leaders. That's a dangerous combination, and we've been slow to recognize the danger.
There's also the little matter that the lid blew off our post-Cold War "Unipolar Moment" on Sept. 11, 2001, and constant low-level warfare is the new normal — except for the occasional large-scale flare-up and the real possibility of a Great Pacific War against China in the not-so-distant future.
I feel for the people of Kyiv, held hostage to Russian drone and missile attacks against hospitals, apartment buildings, refugee centers, civilian electrical stations, and the like. But there's a global interceptor shortage, and until we rebuild our defense industrial base, our days of largess are over.
That, too, comes with a loss of influence.
There's a real feeling of loss for anyone roughly 55 and older. We remember a (mostly) united West (usually) standing confidently against the Communist threat. And even, if briefly, again after 9/11. Now we watch helplessly as our major OG allies — Britain, France, and Germany — appease the Islamic crocodiles in their midst, hoping to be eaten last.
I've already written twice this week about the Red-Green alliance threatening to destroy the French economy and whatever remains of French liberty, just to thwart Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in April's presidential election — and I'd rather not have to go back to it any time soon.
Britain is increasingly like Orwell's Airstrip One from 1984, but with an Islamic flair he could never have imagined 80 years ago.
If the Germans aren't as far along, they're marching quickly to catch up. Spiked this week was just the latest to report how "Islamists have Berlin’s politicians in their grip." The city's presumptive leftist mayor, Elif Eralp, is currently in negotiations to form the city-state's new government with the help of Muslim forces, even though "she lives in fear of some of her own pro-Palestine supporters."
For those of us who remember Chancellor Helmut Kohl standing shoulder to shoulder with Ronald Reagan against the Soviet threat — and against communist protestors in his own country — the last two decades have been a savage letdown.
But there are bright spots.
Poland is one. Israel, another. Japan yet a third. There are more.
Plus America.
Always America.
Last Thursday: So That Happened
