Trump's Latest Ukraine Reversal Reveals a Disturbing Truth About the Administration

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The Trump administration's clown car keeps sputtering along, impervious to speed bumps, red lights, fire truck sirens, and other warning signs of dangers and detours ahead.

Take the latest mind bender: the on-again, off-again, on-again release-then-cutoff-then-release of US weapons to Ukraine.

Late last month, officials at the Pentagon signed an order halting delivery of a wide variety of weapons—including much-needed air-defense missiles—just as Russia was launching its most intense drone and missile volleys since the war began almost three and a half years ago. The rationale was that the US needed to safeguard its own stockpiles, which were nearing dangerously low levels, though some analysts later contested this claim .

After a week of panic and President Donald Trump's July 4 phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the Kremlin chief affirmed his intent to keep fighting, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and told him that he wasn't responsible for the weapons halt —that he (the president of the United States and commander in chief of the US armed forces) didn't know that the deliveries had been halted and that, in any case, the arms shipments would be resumed .

So what's going on here? Was Trump lying to Zelensky? Had Trump forgotten about the arms cutoff, an order that had reportedly been issued a month earlier—a long, long time ago by the measure of this president's density of newsmaking? Or is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a rogue actor, perhaps creating policy that he assumes Trump would approve but without getting formal approval?

And, finally, which of these possibilities fills you with the deepest dread? All of them are plausible, and that alone is gulp-worthy.

We now know why, after his phone call with Trump, Zelensky described it as their “ best conversation in all this time .” However, Putin seemed to come away from his chat, just hours before, equally satisfied; in fact, Russia launched its most intense bombing of Kyiv yet following that phone call. Afterward, Putin's aides openly gloated about the halt in deliveries , seeing the move as much as Trump's abandonment of Ukraine. After Trump's subsequent reversal, Dmitry Medvedev , deputy chairman of Russia's security council, mocked the American president for “once again swinging back and forth on his favorite political views.”

Whether or not Trump knew about the determination to halt the weapons transfers, the cause of this mayhem is the same—the absence of any strategy or systematic decision-making apparatus in his foreign policy. The absence of an apparatus is deliberate: Trump doesn't think he needs one; he discounts expert advice, and has in fact fired many of the experts; and regards his gut instincts as a wiser guide than any professional policy analysis or intelligence assessment. That all makes him—and the rest of us, whose lives are affected by his judgments—vulnerable to adversaries, snake-oil salesmen, or sheer lunatics who talk a good game, especially if it aligns with Trump's own moods or prejudices.

Say what you will about the policies of previous presidents—a decision of this magnitude would not have been made lightly. The president would have called a National Security Council meeting to weigh the options. If he decided to cut off arms shipments after a thorough discussion, he would have done so formally. Certainly no subordinate, even a Cabinet secretary, could have gone off and done it unilaterally.

In this case, none of Trump's top aides other than Hegseth seemed to know about the move; the news reports took even Marco Rubio—who is secretary of state and acting national security adviser— by surprise .

If Hegseth did make this call, perhaps in anticipation of what he figured the boss in the White House wanted, he would not have done it entirely on his own. For anything resembling strategic rumination (beyond praising “warriors,” dismissing high-ranking female and Black staffers as “DEI hires,” and yelling at entering reporters at news conferences), Hegseth relies on Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy.

Forty-five-year-old Colby, a grandson of the late former CIA Director William Colby, has been a prominent if controversial figure in national security think tanks over the past decade. More to the point, he is the author of a 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial , that argued that the US should cut back on its military commitments to Europe, whose nations should do more to defend themselves, and restore good relations with Russia so that Moscow and Washington could join forces to contain Chinese aggression.

In short, to Colby, halting delivery of Joe Biden's latest arms shipments to Ukraine fits Trump's hostility toward Biden and his own ideas about America's geostrategic priorities. In his book, Colby also wrote of the Middle East, and even the possibility of a nuclear Iran, as a minor concern. (In a world where the Senate was less compliant to Trump's demands, this detail might have sunk Colby's chances for confirmation.) In the initial news stories about the arms cutoff, Colby was reported to be the author of Hegseth's memo.