What Caught My Eye (no. 41)

Some interesting articles and podcasts that caught my eye this week

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

• Ekaterina Bodyagyna & Ibrahim Naber, “How Russia keeps raising an army to replace its dead,” POLITICO, December 5, 2025. Bodyagyna and Nabr report that Russia has created a quasi-commercial recruitment industry, with freelance headhunters offering huge bonuses, debt relief, and criminal amnesties to attract volunteers. This system targets society’s most vulnerable men and brings in roughly 30,000 recruits each month, offsetting massive battlefield losses. The steady manpower flow strengthens Putin’s confidence in a long war of attrition and complicates peace negotiations, alarming European governments about Russia’s future ambitions.

• Elina Ribakova, “Ukraine, Europe and the new economics of war,” Financial Times, December 6, 2025. Ribakova, the vice-president for foreign policy at the Kyiv School of Economics, argues that Ukraine’s endurance against Russia has upended traditional ideas about wartime economics, showing that size and industrial mass matter less than resilience, innovation, and institutional strength. Despite Russia’s larger economy and military budget, Moscow’s autocratic inefficiencies, demographic decline, and technological dependence have limited its ability to convert resources into battlefield success. Ukrainian reforms since 2014, such as macroeconomic stabilization, digitalization, and fiscal overhaul, have allowed Kyiv to fight while maintaining economic stability.

• Christopher Flavelle, “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration,” The New York Times, December 7, 2025. In a deeply reported piece, The Times shows how Biden and his tight inner circle were warned before taking office that his immigration stance could trigger “chaos” at the southern border. As crossings surged to record levels, the White House treated immigration as a secondary issue, moved slowly and inconsistently on enforcement, and declined to fully back key legislative efforts. Biden eventually issued a sweeping order sharply restricting asylum just months before the 2024 election, but the shift came too late to repair political damage, helping pave the way for Trump’s return and a much harsher immigration regime.

• Sam Jones, “Russia’s hybrid warfare puts Europe to the test,” Financial Times, December 9, 2025. The FT’s European security correspondent, describes a widening Russian hybrid campaign across Europe, from parcel bombs and attempted train derailments to arson, infrastructure damage and suspicious drone incursions. Western intelligence increasingly believes these operations are part of longer-term preparation for a possible war with Europe by around 2029, with Russian services mapping bridges, railways and undersea cables and trying to plant trained sleeper saboteurs. This puts Europe under pressure to move from containment to deterrence but many governments remain constrained by legal concerns, fear of escalation, and political reluctance to “call it what it is: warfare against Europe.”

• Jake Sullivan, Jane Perlez, and Rana Mitter, “The Xi Factor,” Face-Off: The U.S. vs China, December 2, 2025. In a wide-ranging interview, former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan joins host Jane Perlez to describe what it was like to negotiate with Xi Jinping. Sullivan relies on more than a decade of experience, from their early meetings in 2013 to their last tense exchange in Beijing. Sullivan says Xi projects immense personal confidence and ego, relies heavily on scripted ideological talking points, and uses long monologues to dominate the room and test counterparts’ resolve. For Sullivan, the arc of those encounters illustrates how profoundly Xi’s worldview and strategic ambitions now shape the U.S.–China rivalry.

• Mark Leonard, “It’s time Europe got to grips with the MAGA challenge,” The Economist, December 8, 2025. The director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues that Europe’s leaders have focused too narrowly on managing day-to-day crises created by Trump while missing the deeper threat: a transatlantic ideological movement linking MAGA in the U.S. with Europe’s ascendant “new right.” Trump’s National Security Strategy openly seeks to cultivate resistance within Europe by empowering parties such as Reform UK and Germany’s AfD. All of which share a common worldview; anti-liberal, anti-globalist, nationalist, and committed to reshaping the state, borders, trade, and foreign policy. Leonard argues Europe must respond by crafting its own counter-narratives rooted in working-class concerns and by turning Trump into a political liability for his European admirers.

• Adam Serwer, “Trump’s New Imperialism,” The Atlantic, December 10, 2025. Serwer argues that despite Donald Trump’s denunciations of neoconservatives and “nation-builders,” his second-term foreign policy closely resembles a harsher, ethno-nationalist version of neoconservative interventionism. He contends that Trump’s approach mirrors the neocon belief that America must reshape the world to defend its own values, except that Trump’s values center not on democracy but on racial hierarchy and anti-multiculturalism, exporting “Great Replacement” ideology as U.S. grand strategy. The result, he warns, is a form of imperialism unmoored from liberal principles, where American power is deployed to punish pluralistic societies and reward authoritarians who embrace Trump’s worldview.

• Francesca Bria and José Bautista, “The Authoritarian Stack.” The multimedia tool argues that a tight-knit network of U.S. tech billionaires, venture funds, and defense companies is quietly building a “post-democratic” model of governance by turning core state functions into privatized platforms; what it calls the “Authoritarian Stack.” A revolving door of personnel and massive government contracts are allowing a handful of companies to capture key functions of the U.S. government. Europe is already falling into this stack, and democratic societies need to rapidly build their own public, accountable alternatives.

• Chris Prebble, Zach Cooper, and Melanie Marlowe, “‘Safer, Richer, Freer, Greater’? Trump’s New Strategy for American Power” Net Assessment Podcast, The Stimson Center, December 11, 2025. Hosts Chris, Zack, and Melanie dissect the Trump administration’s newly released National Security Strategy, questioning whether it constitutes a coherent framework for U.S. statecraft or merely rhetorical ambition. They examine Trump’s claims that the strategy will make America “safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever,” probing how diplomacy, military force, and economic leverage are expected to work together and whether the document reflects genuine priorities or ideological signaling.

Finally, in case you missed it here are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I joined David Rothkopf and Deep State Radio to discuss the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy and what it means for the Transatlantic relationship.

• I appeared on CNN to discuss Ukraine’s 20-point peace plan counter-proposal.

• I wrote in America Abroad on how far away a lasting peace in Ukraine remains, and how the current peace talks are designed to massage Trump’s ego, and will accomplish little else.

• I spoke with Jackie Northam of WGBH on Trump’s unraveling peace plans.

• Finally, this week’s World Review covered the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy in-depth and assessed what it means for Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the U.S.-China relationship.

Happy reading, watching, and listening!