Jeffrey Sachs: The Enduring US War on Russia

Eisenhower’s warning that U.S. policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite explains why Washington sustains the war in Ukraine as a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares
Common Dreams

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations.

What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points.

The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States.

The instruments used for regime control include:

• the imposition or removal of trade barriers;
• the access to or denial of technologies;
• the introduction or removal of economic sanctions;
• the ownership and manipulation of foreign media;
• electoral interference of varying extent;
• political assassinations, color revolutions, C.I.A.-backed coups;
• the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit;
• the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets;
• the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping;
• and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war.

The U.S. wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots & American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor.

Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power.

Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power.

He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region.

It is no surprise that U.S. wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of five seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy.

Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object.

He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the U.S. to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later C.I.A. director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite.

Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO.

Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the U.S.-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas.

Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war.

And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises 

Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

That week proved two things.

First, this is an American war: Deprived of U.S. intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded.

Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The U.S. military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.”

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the U.S. supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself.

In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying.

By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow.

Through it all, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign.

The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the C.I.A. throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that U.S. policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason that the U.S. sustains the Ukraine war.

Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of C.I.A. seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 U.K. officials hired or contracted by the company.

Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine.

In January 2026 Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

??Ukraine launches Brave1 Dataroom — a secure environment for training military AI

The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine @DefenceU , together with the Ministry of Digital Transformation @mintsyfra , the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Military Intelligence Research Institute, and… pic.twitter.com/YSiTDJhcJ8

— Army Media ?? (@armyinformcomua) January 21, 2026

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga.

Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot.

Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf.

Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the U.S. would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands.

Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues.

This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelensky dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem.

A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the U.S. in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect and indivisible security.

Yet the U.S. does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris.

Peace in Ukraine requires only that the U.S. relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia.

Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy: it defines it.

Until the American people reclaim their democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.

Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

This article is from Common Dreams

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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