"Betrayed!," shouts the headline in Der Spiegel, Germany's top left-wing news outlet.

"Trump's embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe," declares Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Daily Telegraph.

The putatively pro-Trump New York Post devoted its Feb. 21 front page to an extended screed against the US president by neocon wordsmith Douglas Murray.

From the howling in the war camp, you'd think it was the end of the world. But it's not the end of the world: It's just the end of them. Nothing fails like failure, and the twenty-year campaign to launch regime change in Russia from Ukraine failed miserably, as the Russian Federation built more weapons than the whole of NATO combined. Relentless Russian gains hollowed out the Ukraine Army.

The war party's only hope is to blame their failure on Trump, and to spin out the conflict until it becomes a permanent state of war. 

Trump has offered a grand design for a global builddown of armaments that would allow the United States to cut its defense budget in half and avert an eventual American debt crisis. That would leave the permanent national security establishment in Washington, Brussels, and London irrelevant and unemployed. The establishment won't go down without a fight.

The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under US sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, "The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half." On the contrary, real per capita GDP in Russia was 6% higher in 2024 than in 2021. Russia's round-the-clock war economy has produced inflation and high interest rates, but Russians produce and consume more now than they did before the war began. 

The entirety of the foreign policy establishment—from liberal globalists like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to neocon Republicans like Trump's dismissed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Defense Secretary James Mattis insisted that Ukraine would crush Russia with sufficient Western help. They were thunderingly wrong.