By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 10/25/26
The recent article in The Atlantic by Shane Harris titled “The Man in the Middle of Trump’s Deeply Conflicted Ukraine Policy” provides an interesting, yet unsurprising, take on the strategic contradictions prevalent in American foreign policy. At the center of it is CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose organization is deeply involved in the ongoing proxy war against Russia while serving a president who appears to be seeking an exit from this conflict through some kind of a diplomatic accommodation with Moscow.
The article’s fundamental weakness lies in the assumptions underpinning the author’s interpretation of the conflict. It consistently conflates tactical success for strategic victory, treats Western intelligence assessments as authoritative and does not provide any consideration to the consequences of America’s active involvement in a war against a nuclear-armed power. The result is an article that exposes the intellectual limitations of Washington’s national security establishment while legitimizing the very consequences that serious journalism ought to critically examine.
The Illusion of Russian Strategic Failure
The essay’s most questionable argument is that Russia has “failed to make meaningful advances” suggesting that its military campaign is a strategic failure. Western mainstream media has been regurgitating this narrative since February 2022. It is therefore unsurprising.
This interpretation also reflects a persistent misunderstanding of attritional warfare. Territorial capture is not the only determinant of military success. In a prolonged conflict, the more consequential variables include industrial production, ammunition and weapons stocks, force regeneration, operational endurance and the ability to impose unsustainable costs on the adversary. Russia’s territorial advances have been slow but methodical, focusing on dismantling one fortification after another in Ukraine’s extensive defensive network in the Donbas. Furthermore, it is able to finance its campaign as opposed to Ukraine that is fully dependent on Western economic, military and intelligence support.
In my previous essays, I examined these dimensions of modern warfare through the lens of Soviet and Russian military doctrine. These essays argue how the conflict has evolved into a contest between military learning systems in which the ability to absorb battlefield lessons, adapt tactics, accelerate technological innovation and regenerate combat power may prove more consequential than territorial acquisition.
This understanding is also deeply rooted in Soviet military tradition, especially the concept of the correlation of forces, which will be discussed in a forthcoming essay. This framework goes beyond just a numerical comparison of military forces to assessing the relationship between military capabilities, political cohesion, strategic endurance and industrial resources. It discusses why battlefield outcomes must be understood in the context of the larger material and institutional systems that sustain military power.
Clearly, none of these factors seem to matter to Harris as he provides no comparable assessment of Russia’s military position. Any serious analysis must examine not just territory capture, but how effectively the Russian military system is learning, adapting, regenerating and sustaining itself relative to its opponents. Without that analysis, pronouncements about Russia pursuing a lost cause remain conjecture instead of credible strategic judgment.
Conflating Tactical Damage with Strategic Victory
Harris argues that Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries have “hobbled its economy and choked Putin’s war machine”. There is no doubt that attacks on refineries have caused serious disruption in Russia. The International Energy Agency has documented impacts on petroleum product exports. However, Harris makes another significant leap from damage to refineries to Russian military capabilities being paralyzed. Disruptions to refining throughput does not necessarily mean that military fuel has been proportionally reduced. Neither does it mean that reductions in the export of petroleum products has curtailed Russia’s ability to finance its campaign. For any of these conclusions to be valid, there would need to be some evidence of impact on military logistics, industrial adaptation, fuel allocations, repair capacity and state revenues. Harris provides no such evidence.
Harris also does not acknowledge the international consequences of such attacks. Russian fuel supplies are part of an interconnected global energy market. As the turmoil in the Middle East has demonstrated, disruptions to energy supplies have repercussions far beyond the country concerned. Furthermore, President Trump’s desire to curtail Ukrainian attacks on refineries may reflect electoral considerations but can also be understood through the strategic and national interests of the United States. Consumers are facing rising prices and a prolonged global economic downturn. Reducing such concerns to presidential opportunism substitutes political characterization for serious analysis.
Manufacturing the Specter of a Wider Russian War
Harris cites the alleged concerns of European intelligence officials that Russia might send forces into Estonia as it did in Crimea in 2014. He doesn’t consider how profoundly problematic this line of thinking is. Estonia is a NATO member with collective defense protections. Russia has avoided retaliating against NATO states for legitimate concerns around widening the conflict. Crimea was a completely different strategic environment. Moreover, Harris presents no evidence of Russian intentions for an attack on Estonia. There are no public statements, identified invasion preparations and no clear explanation of what strategic benefits would Moscow gain by expanding the conflict beyond Ukraine. In fact NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte contradicted this assertion by stating on October 14, 2026, that
“we see no imminent threat against NATO. If there is a build-up, like there was before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, then we will see it and we will deal with it…”1
European military and intelligence officials routinely make pronouncements about Russia threatening to attack Europe but consistently fail to provide any evidence.
Intelligence as an Unquestioned Strategic Good
Harris’s recount of the CIA’s role in building and training Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus after 2014 is revealing. He accords the CIA’s institutional perspective considerable weight while paying no attention to how Moscow interprets American intelligence operations on its borders. Understanding Russian threat perceptions and how continued CIA operations could have exacerbated them is essential to understanding the conflict’s origins and the difficulties in resolving it.
There is also the issue of whether intelligence agencies should develop institutional commitments to foreign partners that become difficult to reconcile with a change in an elected leadership’s foreign policy. Harris portrays continuity of CIA support to Ukraine as an unquestioned virtue, but does not give due consideration to whether that continuity might complicate the president’s efforts to change American strategy. It is a troubling inversion of democratic accountability.
When Intelligence Becomes Foreign Policy
The article’s biggest contradiction concerns the relationship between government institutions and the political leadership. Harris portrays the CIA’s continued support to Ukraine as a reassuring constant in face of Trump’s unpredictable diplomacy. His narrative implicitly elevates the CIA’s involvement in the conflict above the question of whether its activities are serving America’s changing priorities.
Intelligence agencies do not possess an independent mandate to determine American foreign policy. They must provide objective assessments and lawfully execute operations as authorized by the political leadership. Perhaps the systemic breakdown of this established process is what the article implicitly highlights. After all, for analysts who have been studying the US national security state and the wars of the past decades, it is not surprising that, in reality, the American public has no visibility into how intelligence agencies are fueling global wars and how accountable they actually are to the political leadership.
Harris also describes Ratcliffe’s reported mission to Moscow in August and suggests that “If Ratcliffe could help convince Putin that he was pursuing a lost cause, perhaps he’d finally come to the table.” This formulation contains a major analytical leap. It assumes that Putin’s intelligence advisors could be misleading him and that the Russian president is unaware of Russia’s military position. His narrative encourages readers to regard the CIA director as uniquely qualified to explain the military reality to the Russian leadership. This is difficult to substantiate. Russia possesses its own military intelligence services, reconnaissance capabilities, battlefield reporting systems and defense-industrial assessments. Harris provides no evidence that the assessments of these agencies are less reliable than those of the CIA.
The Absence of Strategic Thinking
Harris’s article provides an interesting glimpse into the contradictions and competing impulses prevalent across institutions in Washington. However, it falls short as compelling strategic analysis. It mistakes limited territorial movement for strategic failure, damage to infrastructure as military paralysis and the CIA’s operational aggressiveness for strategic effectiveness.
The deeper failure of American policy is that its longstanding ambition to weaken Russia and create political change in Moscow has produced neither the strategic transformation that it sought nor a credible pathway to peace. Washington now appears trapped between an intelligence establishment committed to sustaining confrontation and a political leadership that is unable or unwilling to impose a coherent political strategy. Equally disturbing is the extent to which publications such as The Atlantic compound this strategic failure when they subordinate independent journalistic scrutiny to the assumptions and narratives of the national security establishment.
Harris’s article celebrating the CIA’s operational effectiveness against Russia inadvertently raises the far more troubling questions of whether intelligence agencies have acquired sufficient institutional autonomy to perpetuate policies that elected leaders cannot control. Therefore, the real story is not the CIA’s supposed success against Russia, but the erosion of accountability, the absence of coherent political direction and a Washington establishment seemingly incapable of distinguishing the continuation of conflict from the pursuit of national interests.
Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.