Talking With Phillips O'Brien

As the war goes on ...

I spoke a while back with Phillips O’Brien, a military historian who completely changed my understanding of World War Two and has been, as I read it, one of the most level-headed analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war — a war all too many analysts keep getting wrong. After the horrible Alaska summit — and after another Russian “breakthrough” trumpeted by the press, which even I knew enough to realize was nothing of the sort — I thought I’d check in with him again. Transcript follows.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Phillips O’Brien

(recorded 8/20/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. I'm speaking for a second time with Phillips O'Brien, a military historian. He's had a lot of influence on how I think about history even before Ukraine. His book, How the War Was Won, completely changed how I thought about World War II. He’s often contrarian but almost always right in his comments since this whole Ukraine thing started. And I thought that after this past week with Alaska and then the gang of Europeans coming to DC, it would be a good time to check in again. So hi, Phillips.

Phillips O’Brien: Hi Paul.

Krugman: I want to get to your new book towards the end and I want to talk about the diplomacy or whatever it was that we just saw in Washington shortly, but first I'd like to talk a little bit about the war in Ukraine.

O’Brien: Okay.

Krugman: You recently wrote that we have the worst military analysis community in the history of military analysis communities. And I want to talk about that a bit because I think I have some notion of what you mean.

O’Brien: Yeah. They just don't know how to judge war. Never have. This is the same group of analysts that said Kiev would fall in three days and Russia is a great power and the war would be quick and fast. And now they seem to be watching and obsessing about every little—not even village—almost every little farm field in the Donbas, and impregnating all of these tiny little Russian advances or failures to advance as some part of the indication of an impending Ukrainian collapse or anything in the like. They just don't understand, I think, how to judge a war and what really matters.

Now, the battlefield is what the battlefield is. I mean, it's one of those things where, technologically, they were wrong. The analysts were all telling us how tanks were going to rule the battlefield early in the war. They didn't understand that. So they thought, “Drones? Who cares about drones?” They simply, I think, have an old paradigm, like, the battle-centric paradigm, where literally, if Russia takes a farm field, that indicates something. But it never really does. I mean, we have seen the same basic war for two years now. The Russians have made very small, very bloody advances for 1% of Ukraine. Now, Ukraine isn't turning the tide of the war with that, but it's not about to collapse. I think that's the problem in their analysis.

But actually, the real part of the war that I think people have to pay much more attention to is what we'll call the strategic air war. The war in some ways is going to turn a lot on the strategic air war.

Krugman: So let's just back up for a second about the ground war. Last week, there was a Russian incursion near Pokrovsk. And I've been reading about the strategic city of Pokrovsk has been imminently falling for well over a year now. And it's not clear how strategic it is. But there were these screaming headlines about a Russian breakthrough. And this is not my field, but even I thought I understood that this is not that kind of war, right?

O’Brien: Mm-hmm. There can't be a breakthrough, Paul, because what you can't do is mass vehicles near the front. You can't support supply depots and logistics depots because they'll be blown up by ranged weapons, like drones, artillery. So you can make a hole or infiltrate with very small numbers of infantry, which is what the Russians did.

They got infantry on motorcycles and on foot sneaking through the lines. They found a weak part in the Ukrainian line, but there was no way they could exploit it because there's no follow-up. You can't actually have another echelon ready to go. And it's just sort of a weird view of what they thought was happening. One of the analysts said, “This might lead to a Russian operational breakthrough.” Operational breakthroughs are what the US did in the Second World War, when they broke through the lines and sent their tanks charging 50 miles. That just was never going to happen in Ukraine. And that's the thing that drives me crazy, that they seem to not understand the war they're looking at.

Krugman: I don't know what the Ukrainians think, but pro-Ukrainian sources claim there's this great victory with vast numbers of Russians trapped in a pocket. And again, what I learned from you from World War II was that even battles like Kursk—in terms of the actual losses—are irrelevant to the course of the war.

O’Brien: Russians didn't lose a lot there. I mean, the Russians are losing a thousand soldiers a day. If they infiltrated this line with a thousand soldiers or maybe two thousand soldiers at most and they lose 90% of them, that's basically two days loss in the war. So it's not like it's a transformative loss that will change the trajectory.

Krugman: So it's not just that you keep on having the same analytical error about the nature of the war, but it's the same people who get quoted again and again. I sometimes see something similar in my own home field, but tell me what do you think sustains that? Why does it work that way?

O’Brien: Because it's a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it's much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don't know what they're talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed.

And that community existed in the analytical community, it existed in the intelligence community, it existed in the Pentagon and the ministries of defense. And instead of having a real introspection—like what the heck have we got wrong?—they have gone into self-defense mode. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they're being treated as if they have any idea of what they're talking about when they don't.

Krugman: The parallel in economics is there were a lot of people predicting that getting down from the high inflation of 2022 would require mass unemployment which was utterly wrong. And, you know, we all make bad forecasts, but it was clearly analytically wrong. It just had the wrong model of what this inflation was about. And those same people are still out there, you know, talking to Bloomberg every couple of days and making confident pronouncements. So, yeah.

O’Brien: I mean, we’ve all seen community behavior where a community would rather defend itself than actually look at its own methods, it seems to me. And that's what we're seeing now. Protection of reputation is all. In towns like Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, it's so important to be smart, and to be seen to be smart.

Krugman: Well, anyway, tell me about what you think is the strategic air campaign.

O'Brien: Yeah, the strategic air coming. The Russians have a lot of these Shaheed type drones with their own cruise missiles and IC and ballistic missiles. They went after Ukrainian power. They seem to have dialed down a bit on that now, or maybe they've destroyed most of the large power plants they can. They're going after cities. They're trying to kill people, break Ukrainian morale.

And they're also trying to attack certain, I think, industrial targets, but it's hard to say which because the Ukrainians won't let us know what they hit. But the Russian campaign is nightly. When you hear about these flocks of drones coming over, that's part of the campaign to try and drive Ukraine to basically throw in the towel and I would say, accept a really bad peace by breaking the Ukrainian will to resist.

The Ukrainians are more interesting. Now, they're not as effective yet, but they are bringing on more and more systems. So they've developed a new cruise missile, supposedly, which was announced yesterday, which I think someone said had a one ton warhead. The Ukrainians are going to get some punch. They've had some very successful individual strikes. So they had the strikes when they used the drones against Russian strategic air power in Siberia. They've had a lot strikes against Russian oil facilities, but then they stopped.

So they've had sort of a sporadic on-off strategic air. I think the Ukrainians have partly been controlled by the US and European powers not wanting them to take this too far. But I think if they can develop some new systems and they look to be, they might try to actually go against what we'd call Russia's military industrial complex. Now, if they can do that, that would be a huge blow to Putin. And that's the thing I'm watching because that could change the trajectory. The battlefield is what the battlefield is. You'll change the battlefield if you change what gets to the battlefield, what can be made and deployed. And that's how the war will change.

Krugman: Okay, and pardon my amateur military history, but isn't sort of trying to terrorize the civilian population rather than going after more strategic targets, isn't that kind of the mistake that the Nazis made in the Battle of Britain?

O’Brien: Yeah, and that the Allies made against Germany too. The British bombing of German cities didn't seem to work. And it's probably not going to work with the Ukrainians. In other words, it's based on the assumption Russia is not going to conquer Ukraine, but might wear down the Ukrainian ability to resist and that they would therefore accept a worse peace. I think it's not a strategy to win because the Ukrainians will fight to the death. But it's the strategy to try and get the Ukrainians to accept perhaps handing over the Donbas or something like that, which I think Putin would take now. So I think it's that kind of strategy. It's not a war winning strategy, but it's getting a temporary ceasefire through hostility strategy.

Krugman: Okay, so we had the summit in Alaska [between Trump and Putin] which was obviously embarrassing and then this thing in Washington [with European leaders]. I think the story that’s emerged is kind of different from what we thought might have happened in Alaska.

O’Brien: Well, actually, I think people always underestimate Trump. Actually I think Trump is far cagier in getting what he wants than people think. So people are saying about Anchorage, “Oh, he didn't get a deal, it ended early, he was sort of humiliated.” Well, actually, no, it turns out he and Putin have sort of reached an understanding of how the war might end, at least temporarily, but if he can get the Ukrainians to turn over the Donbas, that might have some kind of temporary ceasefire. So, there's an attempt to say, “Oh, he's a buffoon,” and not actually pay him the credit he sometimes deserves.

The Europeans are the worst for this. So they come over and they've obviously got their briefing papers that say, “Suck up to Trump and we'll get what we want. And they go and they tell him how wonderful it is. And he throws out very vague things about security guarantees. And they go home and pat themselves on the back. Well, guess what's happened? What has changed in the last week since these summits? Sanctions on Russia are off the table. This was a thing two weeks ago. Sanctions on Russia were gonna be the big thing now. Europeans said, “We must have sanctions. We want to hit Russia.” Now that's gone. Trump has won that fight. He's gotten sanctions gone, which he's always wanted to do. He's never wanted to sanction Putin.

Krugman: Okay. Yeah.

O’Brien: But he's always played along that he might, and now he killed them off, at least for now. And the other thing he got is the Europeans are now talking about what land Ukraine might have to give to Russia. The Europeans are talking about this. The Latvian foreign minister—a Baltic state—yesterday said, “Well, you know, the Ukrainians might have to be reasonable and at least have de facto recognition, which is really uncomfortable.” So the Europeans love to think they're clever and that they know how to manipulate Trump. But actually, I think he manipulates them far more than they understand.

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, the starting point here really always ought to be that fundamentally Trump supports Putin, right? I mean, the constant messaging that Trump has finally had enough and he's going to actually start to put pressure on Putin, I've read that story at least every six weeks, for years now.

O’Brien: Do you remember the pivot in July? “Trump has pivoted towards Ukraine.” It was all nonsense. There was nothing to this pivot. Yeah, there were a few tweets, but he did nothing to help Ukraine in any material way. All he did was delay sanctions on Putin. I think you saw in Anchorage, he rolled out the red carpet. He invited Putin into the limo. He likes Putin. He wants to work with Putin. That is his base position.

Krugman: Neither of us is a psychologist here, but what do you think that's about?

O’Brien: Well, with Trump, it's always money. I think there's got to be some financial history incentive. I've heard that he had an interesting history with Russia in the past. They know a lot about his business dealings and other dealings so it's much better for him to get along with the Russians. So it could be that.

Krugman: Yeah, I have to say that the compromise theory has this problem that as far as we can tell, Trump supporters wouldn't care.

O’Brien: That's it. They really won't care. He could do anything. Trump is, in that sense, an extraordinary politician. He is bulletproof. And I've never seen anything like it in my life.

Krugman: So, the Europeans have not lifted their sanctions, of course, it's just that the United States is not doing anything.

O’Brien: Well, you know the economics better than I do. But my understanding is if they don't keep updating the sanctions and toughening them, and they're not updating them and they're not toughening them, then Russia finds ways around them and can take advantage of that. So the sanctions are not some immobile feast. There's some things that need to be adapted. And since he's been president, Trump has not brought in a new sanction and he's keeping the Europeans from it. So the Russians are finding more ways around the sanctions because they're certainly the old sanction regime. So that's what's going on. He's actually protecting Putin by not allowing new sanctions in and the Russians are being very good at getting around the existing ones.

Krugman: Okay. And my amateur sense is that US military aid has become gradually less critical to the war. But we're not at the point of irrelevance yet, right?

O'Brien: Well, basically Trump aid is really small. There's a new Patriot battery that came from Israel through Germany and maybe another two Patriot batteries. But when we're talking about US military aid to Ukraine, almost all of it is legacy Biden aid. Even now, it's been legacy Biden aid. That's the thing about Trump. He always says, “well, you know that I don't want to give Ukraine aid. The Ukrainians will buy 50 billion dollars. They've asked to buy 50 billion dollars in US weapons.” Amazingly, only like a hundred million here, a hundred million there gets approved. So they're not even selling Ukraine weaponry in the way that they could, which is an indication that he was truly just mercenary and whoever wanted to give him money, he'd take it. He'd take the Ukrainian money, but he's not doing that. So what is getting to Ukraine now is either European or European-purchased or Biden aid, but the Biden aid is almost gone.

So the US now will only be what the Trump administration allows the Europeans to send to Ukraine. And then the US will backfill what the Europeans sent. We don't know how much that is, but it's not going to be anything like it was under Biden. It's up to the Europeans now. This is their conflict. As Trump says, they're going to have to help Ukraine.

Krugman: And they are getting substantial amounts of stuff, right?

O’Brien: They are doing better than they were. There are certain things they can't do. The air defense will struggle without a lot of American equipment. But in terms of weapons development, the Ukrainians are actually a success story and the Europeans are helping with that. What they have to really then do is work on producing up to scale. It's fine to develop a cruise missile, but if you can't develop it at scale, then it's not a great deal of help. So what the Europeans nearly need to do is work with the Ukrainians to grow a lot of their war industry.

Krugman: Okay, this is a change. It's from US-supplied weapons at the beginning to now largely Ukrainian-produced weapons with a lot of the money coming from Europe. But they still really want Patriot missile defense systems.

O’Brien: Well, that's another example of Trump helping Putin. The Russians, they've been able to run down Ukrainian air defense, and now the Americans are sort of slipping a little bit more in. But it's not nearly enough to defend the Ukrainian cities in the way that they want. So the Russians are starting to really hammer Ukrainian cities every night. Every night they're sending over large numbers of attack systems and the Ukrainians are having to fight them off. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Krugman: Wow, this really is a weird war just in general because there really is no front line.

O’Brien: Or there is a front line that doesn't move much. Yeah.

Krugman: Well, there's a kind of 40 kilometer wide no man’s land, as I understand it, right?

O’Brien: Well, that's the key thing, yeah. And what's interesting is there's not a lot of Ukrainian soldiers on the front line because the Ukrainians are using drones. If you have a soldier on the front line, like you had with the lines of trenches, the soldier in those trenches is going to be found and killed. They wouldn't have much time because of the drones flying overhead and particularly now that they have these ones on fiber optic cables, which can't be drowned with electronic warfare.

It's just very deadly. When the Russians did that infiltration, they hit a line where there probably were very few, if any, Ukrainians. They can't have soldiers near the front line because of the casualties. So you have what you would call masses of observation and killing ability in a very concentrated area. And only soldiers that really have a high percentage chance of dying are in that area.

Krugman: Okay, and then no air superiority really for either side.

O’Brien: The Russians had it for a while in the sense that they could drop these glide bombs and there's no way that the Ukrainians could stop them. But really, it does seem to now be a duel of UAVs and, you know, the Russians still have much better aircraft. The Ukrainians have a handful of F-16s and not a lot, but the Russians haven't been able to use their air power in a decisive way on the battlefield and that's good.

Krugman: Right. But nowhere is safe in either country. You can be struck one way or another by UAVs of some kind, even thousands of kilometers from the front.

O’Brien: Yep, you can be struck anywhere. I mean, people in Lviv are under threat. People in Siberia can be attacked. There's far more [range] over the battlefield. So you would say that there is nowhere to hide within 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers of the other side's frontline. There's just nowhere to hide. But when you're anywhere even closer, the Russians do these human safaris in Kherson where they literally just fly over drones to kill a civilian waiting at a bus stop. That's the kind of war it's become.

Krugman: So it's a war of, not even really attrition, but of strategic attempts to undermine the other guy's ability to fight.

O’Brien: That's absolutely right. The battlefield is what the battlefield is. If Ukraine runs out of soldiers, then they will have a crisis. But they're not about to run out of soldiers right now. But this war will probably be determined by how successful the ranged attacks are on either side. That's one thing with Trump in a sense changing sides and becoming pro-Putin for the United States. The Ukrainians are going to have a little less restraint in what they'll attack in Russia.

The Biden administration really didn't want to threaten Putin too much. But with Trump now siding with Putin, I think the Ukrainians, if they can develop these systems, will go after things they have so far been a little reluctant to finish off. I mean, if they could go after the Russian oil industry and really cripple it, that would be a very damaging thing for the Russians.

Krugman: Okay, and the end result of this diplomatic flurry basically just strengthened Putin's hand.

O’Brien: Well, certainly right now, Putin has been given no sanctions. The United States president has endorsed the policy of handing over unconquered Ukrainian land to Russia, the rest of the Donbas—where Ukrainians live in Ukrainian citie—and handing these to Russia as part of a deal. And he's now got the Europeans at least discussing that. So that's actually not a bad situation for Putin to be in. And the Ukrainians are all okay having discussed giving up their land.

There's a good chance this doesn't result to anything in the short term. The Ukrainians will say no, I think. They actually constitutionally can't hand over any of their land. So the Ukrainians will say no. And what we don't know is what happens then. The worst situation, which part of me fears, is that the Europeans put pressure on the Ukrainians to just do it. Okay, hand over the territory, we'll declare peace and go, which I don't think will be peace, but that would be for another day. The opposite scenario is that the war keeps going for a few more months, at least into 2026. And we see where things stand.

I mean, that mitigates towards war lasting say another year, or year and a half to all of 2026 and then both these sides are exhausted. The Ukrainians have suffered. Russians have also suffered massive casualties. And they are not a limitless machine. They're actually running out of vehicles from what we can tell. So we could have some kind of temporary agreement or not in the next few months.

Krugman: Wow. And giving up the whole of Donbas would mean sort of also giving up of a fortress belt, right?

O’Brien: This is what Ukraine's been fighting for: Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, these cities which they've defended. One thing that's really hard is once you get into a city, fighting through it is really hard too. We know that cities have been very useful as fortress breaks from Bakhmut to Abdiivka. Once you get into a city, Ukrainians actually do a very good job of bleeding the Russians. And you would just be handing over these cities, you'd hand over the defensive belts, you would bring the Russians far more into Ukraine than they are now and give them more strategic possibilities. It would be a catastrophe for Ukraine to hand it over. Think about handing over New Jersey. That's what it would be like.

Krugman: Right. Horrifying thought. And Europeans are not stupid. They understand all of this.

O’Brien: You know, Paul, one thing that has been a shock to me in the last few years, is that I just don't think the Europeans have the capacity now to think for themselves. I think the US domination has been so strong that they have become infantilized strategically and they don't look at the world from a real strategic, European perspective. They ultimately look on the world as, “we need the US to defend us. So let's get the US on our side and then we can do other things.” I think they still are operating within this world that they have to keep the US on their side first. I think both economically, strategically and almost psychologically, it would be better for Europe now to move on from the USA. And I say this as an American living in Europe that what we see now is really unhealthy. Like they prostrate themselves and call him daddy. It's just not good.

So I don't actually think the Europeans have shown the capacity now to defend themselves in the way that I would like. And that is actually a question of imagination, strategic imagination. There's signs that they're changing, but they still have a long way to go.

Krugman: I have to say, Europe has a 25 trillion dollar economy, their industrial base is still quite powerful, and they still act as if they're utterly dependent upon the United States for leadership and God knows.

O’Brien: It's bizarre. It's like the Stockholm syndrome. Basically, it's a continent suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.

Krugman: Okay, let's talk about War and Power. Now, I have an advanced copy which you sent me, which I strategically left in the wrong city. But why don't you talk a little bit about the thesis of it, and then maybe we'll have a few other topics to discuss.

O’Brien: Well, it came out of the frustration that I've shown, that I don't think a lot of the discussions understand power and war. Maybe we had a way of addressing the problems that came from this period of US domination. The US was the most powerful nation. So we can talk about US power and the US military could do this and it could do that. But that era is over.

And what we have left is, therefore, an inability to really judge the nuances of power. China is a power like the US, but we need a way of understanding that. So it's a thought book. Compared to the normal things I write, it's actually quite short, 230 pages or so. It asks, what is a way of understanding power? What variables matter, because I don’t think a helpful international relations theory is based on the idea that all states are doing things similarly. That is clearly not the case. They don't. I think we can now say that individual leaders are a problem, as well.

So I said, okay what matters is that you have to have the economic and technological capabilities that's sine qua non. But that in and of itself is not enough. You need to have the right leadership, political structures, societal cohesion. You have to look at the military as a product, not an end in and of itself. We often think of the military as if the military itself indicates something. The military is created by these other factors. And by looking at those other factors, you'll have a better idea about the military than you will by playing a war game with in which the war game tends to have them all behave in the same way.

And the final thing I wanted to scream out loud is that people de-emphasize alliances. Alliances are very important. I mean, US dominance has been based on the fact that it had subservient alliances in Europe and Asia, which for some reason the United States is now in the process of throwing away.

Krugman: Right.

O’Brien: When we look at war, what we constantly get wrong is the short idea, that a war starts and you can’t have any idea how it will end when it starts. You'll have no idea. If you're to start a war, you're going to basically have no idea what's going to happen in the end. It's going to be very different than you think. And these are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself about how a war would develop. How can you regenerate force? Whatever the military enters with in a war, that will be gone in a few months. Threen and a half years in, the Russians and Ukrainians have utterly different militaries than the ones they had at the start of the war. Technologically vastly different. The original soldiers have mostly been killed or made prisoners or wounded. So they've had to generate utterly different armies doing completely different things. A test of the war is how you can adapt to that kind of challenge, not how you can run a military war game when the war starts.

Krugman: Yeah, it does strike me just as an amateur observer that the pace at which the fundamental technology of the war has changed, the weapons, is faster than ever before. That the armies of 1944, although very different in many ways, still bore some family resemblance to the armies of 1941, but now we went from handheld missiles to drones and it's unrecognizable.

O’Brien: Maybe one of the things is that US dominance has been such for a while that it restrained the importance of technological development because the US military was so much more advanced. In many ways, no one tried to compete with it. Whereas when the Russians and Ukrainians fight, they're fighting for every advantage of every kind. And that's forcing adaptation on a souped up scale.

I've been hearing from Ukrainians that literally the adaptation cycle is about six weeks. Within six weeks, the fundamental lessons of how you're going to protect your drone and operate it will be different than it was six weeks earlier. And yet you're constantly trying to update what you're doing. So it's not a matter of years, it's a matter of weeks at times. And the change can come in very rapidly. Someone had to come up with a solution to electronic warfare stopping all your drones—what happens if you run out of cable? Once they [figured out] going with these fiber optic cables, that instantly changed the entire drone warfare.

Krugman: I gotta say, the idea that we're back to fly-by-wire and that's the cutting edge. That just boggles the mind.

O’Brien: This is one of the areas where I try to admit when I get things wrong. I didn't think this would have the dramatic impact that it did, to fly-by-wire. Because I assume they get tangled in trees, they get tangled with each other, that there would be a lot of problems in operating them in large numbers. But it seems to be that they can operate them in large numbers. A lot of it is that the area of fighting has been so blown up that it’s like operating on a bit of a moonscape which allows, I think, the fly-by-wire to work. But they've been extraordinary because all of sudden it took the teeth out of electronic warfare, which everyone had been talking about. Everyone worries about electronic warfare. Well, this is their way around electronic warfare.

Krugman: I actually worry a lot about if the next time the US or Europe gets into armed conflict, are we just going to be actually hopelessly behind the times?

O’Brien: I've been told that NATO did a maneuver with a Ukrainian drone unit and the Ukrainian drone unit destroyed a full NATO armored brigade in a few hours because they simply had no way to respond to what the Ukrainians were doing. They didn't have any equipment, didn't have any hint, it was an intellectual hinterland. So the Ukrainians were just flying their drones all around them, destroying whatever they wanted, and the NATO unit failed. So they're not used to this kind of war. They're going to have to learn it, but right now they don't know how to do it.

Krugman: Oh boy. A brief anecdote: Years ago, I was speaking with someone from the aircraft industry, and asked whether they derived a lot of benefit from spillovers from the military side. And he said no, not really, because the civilian aircraft are just so much more advanced.

O’Brien: Mm-hmm.

Krugman: I just worry that, you know, our military has really gotten used to not having to deal with what smart people who are not in their stovepipe do.

O’Brien: I agree. Yeah, the militaries are not always that reflective and they are very bureaucratic and very defensive in their way of doing business and they assume they know. That's the difference. Every military should be saying to themselves now, “We screwed up. We did not see this war. We did not understand this war. What are we doing to adjust to it?” And you know, they're not really doing that.

Krugman: I would hope, that West Point has been sending observers to Ukraine to find out what modern war actually looks like.

O’Brien: Well, let's see if they start developing new armored fighting vehicles now. I think we're going to have to change the entire concept of how you arm units. The Ukrainians and Russians are [operating with] very small numbers of soldiers with a lot of autonomous systems and a lot of smaller systems flying around.

Krugman: And now, talk a little bit about alliances. The US economic hegemony depended a lot on alliances. And you're saying that’s also crucial in war.

O’Brien: Well, the greatest military power in Europe in the First World War was the German army. A lot of people said it was the best army in the first and second World Wars. So, why does Germany lose? Because it's confronted by more powerful alliances and its own allies are terrible.

So, Germany in the Second World War has Mussolini's Italy. In the First World War it has Austria-Hungary. These are not helpful countries fighting with you, but they're fighting an alliance that has the British, the Americans, the Russians and then Soviets. And alliances win wars, not individual powers. I think that's all. That has been a case for a long, long time. There are occasionally these small wars, like the Franco-Prussian War or whatever, where a country beats another country. But in most cases, alliances win wars.

And the key of the United States has been that it has maintained arguably the most successful alliance system in history since 1945. What the U.S. maintained with NATO, an alliance which kept Europe very much on the American orbit, in the American orbit, both economically and militarily, also with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and countries in Asia is, they constructed this alliance system which hugely amplified both America's economic possibilities but also its strategic possibilities. Whereas now we seem to be saying, it's all about zero-sum, what do I get from you? What do you give to me? And within that kind of world, that MAGA world, there's no scope for alliances because everything is zero-sum.

So Trump ends up screwing US allies more than he does, theoretically, US competitors like China. He's throwing it all away. And then it's going to end up in a few years with no allies. Unless the Europeans are so pathetic, they'll just end up hugging American shoes the entire time and holding on to the ankles. What the US is doing seems so extraordinarily self-defeating.

What I don't see is any real pushback against it. So much of the Trumpite rhetoric seems to just be passing by and not being challenged.

Krugman: Yeah, what always struck me, is that the U.S. had a specialty of creating international organizations that were formally equal, where we were all partners together. Now, everybody understood that the United States was actually in charge, but we went to great lengths to make sure that the World Trade Organization or NATO were alliances of equals, at least on paper. And it was a very effective trick. Clearly the people now in charge of the United States have no idea of what the advantages of that kind of thing are.

O’Brien: That’s because the United States was getting the substance of power but giving up the style. They would treat everyone as equal without actually being equal so they get the substance. They're now giving up the substance in exchange for acting like a great power, acting like this dominant force, but all they're doing is losing the substance of power. It just seems to me extraordinary what the United States is doing in an era where China is there and powerful. The United States is going to great lengths to antagonize its allies. I don't get it. None of this makes any sense to me.

Krugman: Well, unless you assume that the people in charge have no idea what they're doing, which is a reasonable hypothesis.

O’Brien: Or that they want to weaken the US. Part of me gets very sort of depressed and thinks they don't care. They don't mind blowing the whole thing up.

Krugman: Any final thoughts on war or peace and what happens next? What do you think the world will look like by the 2026 midterms?

O’Brien: Well, that’s the key thing, isn’t it? The 2026 midterms. I don't think people are paying enough attention, because they have to be run fairly. I do think the Democrats have a very good chance of winning them if they are run fairly and happen under normal conditions. But they could also be easily perverted from what we can. We don't know what's going to happen with the elements.

Krugman: Yeah.

O’Brien: I would say that 2026 elections will show not whether America can come back, but whether it has a chance to come back, or whether the period we're going into could be a lot longer and darker than we imagined.

Krugman: Okay, and Ukraine is probably both cause and effect of all of that, right? What happens there may have some impact here, and what happens here obviously has a huge impact there.

O’Brien: Particularly to Europe. I think what happens to Ukraine will determine how Europe deals with this. If Ukraine is sacrificed, I think Europe is going to have a terrible future. Because it's going to be dependent on the US, which has basically sacrificed Ukraine to Putin's Russia. Europe might even break apart, structurally, such that you'll have the Central Eastern Europeans, the ones who want to stand by Ukraine, the Finns, the Baltics, the Nordics going one way and then the Western Europeans sort of pretending things are okay. So I think people are underrating the chance of Europe splitting over Ukraine, which is why it's so important, I think, that Ukraine comes out of the war in good shape.