UKRAINE DEAL DEADGeorge Beebe on Iran, Trump’s shrinking leverage, and the crash coming in Ukraine
George Beebe was CIA Director for Russia analysis and is now Director of the Grand Strategy Programme at the Quincy Institute. In this conversation he describes a Trump Administration that wrote a coherent National Security Strategy and then walked away from it. This has left prospects for a credible peace deal for Ukraine remote at best. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Having just returned from my family holiday in Canada we began with the renewal in tension between both countries. Tariffs and the bilateral trade deficit with Ottawa is not the story. Beebe’s read is triangular: the White House thinks China is using Canada as a backdoor into the American market, and Ottawa is not playing along. Same pattern as Greenland and the Arctic. Melting ice, rare earths, space and communications geography, and Trump’s habit of opening with an outrageous threat to manufacture leverage. However, threatening to take Greenland by force, Beebe argues, did not create a better deal. It hardened Denmark and the rest of NATO and made a manageable arrangement less likely. The more important rupture is Iran. Beebe thought the Trump National Security Strategy was a genuine improvement on the post-Cold War documents that promised the world and funded a fraction of it. It tried to close what Walter Lippmann called the gap between ends and means. The Western Hemisphere first. Ambitions tied to capacity. Venezuela, whatever one thinks of it, could be stretched to fit that frame. Iran could not. His explanation is unsentimental. Operational success in Venezuela bred overconfidence. The analysis underneath the Iran strikes was wrong. The Iranian regime was treated as a house of cards. Knock out the leadership, and the theocracy falls. It did not fall. Rather, the attacks produced a rally-around-the-flag effect. The United States is now in a cul-de-sac: damaged reputation, strained forces, a distracted White House, and no clean exit that does not involve concessions. That matters for Ukraine because attention and political capital are finite within the Trump White House. Beebe’s strategic case for ending the war has not changed. A forever proxy war leaves Europe unstable, incentivises a tighter Russia-China partnership, and makes a China-first American strategy impossible. Russia, in his view, would still prefer a compromise closer to Istanbul and the later Anchorage discussion than the occupation of the whole of Ukraine. Governing a hostile country is not Moscow’s first choice. What has changed is Washington’s ability to deliver. Iran has taken the oxygen out of the room. Trump needs political juice to force a deal through a hostile Senate and a permanent bureaucracy that still treats detente with Russia as heresy. Beebe does not think he has that juice. Midterms loom. The president is fighting an unpopular war with a precarious economy. Other countries are already pricing him as a lame duck. If Moscow concludes the administration is not agreement-capable — cannot lock in NATO limits, cannot move sanctions — Plan B is the battlefield. That is not the conquest of Kyiv. It is a rump Ukraine, too weak to be rebuilt as a Western military outpost, and a worse peace for Ukrainians, Europeans and Americans alike. Then comes what Beebe calls it a hard crash. Time is not on Ukraine’s side. Manpower is failing. Energy infrastructure is already in tatters ahead of another winter. Russia can hit harder than Ukraine can endure. When the gap between Western media victory narratives and the facts becomes undeniable, Washington does not usually say “we did our best.” It goes into “do-something” mode. That is how mismanaged wars become direct NATO-Russia crises. I agree with him. Europe has no plan. It has a reflex: ask for more Patriots, flatter Trump, keep Kyiv fighting. That is not friendship. It is spending Ukrainian lives to delay an admission of failure. Beebe’s alternative is old-fashioned and unfashionable: a concert among the United States, Russia and China, starting with Iran and Ukraine, based on self-interest rather than trust. Whether this White House can still do that is the live question. Watch the full conversation here. George Beebe: quincyinst.org · Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Peacemonger, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2026 ian |