Anthropic v DoW
Second Breakfast takes it on!
Eight hours to the deadline. We break down the standoff, then get into the Cuba boat raid, Iran, and four years of war in Ukraine.
Jordan Schneider, Eric Robinson, Tony Stark, and Justin Mc
Today we cover…
The Anthropic-Pentagon showdown: what Hegseth actually wants, the Maduro raid Claude controversy, and why Dario’s position is more nuanced than “no kill bots”
Domestic surveillance: FISA, NSA, and Eric’s story about getting a call from the Department of Justice
The Defense Production Act as a magic button — and why Congress is starting to push back
Military-civil fusion, American style: are we becoming the thing we critique?
Florida Man tries to invade Cuba with 10 guys on a 24-foot boat
Iran: the naval strain, Witkoff and Kushner as our top negotiators, and the near-miss in Venezuela
Ukraine at year four: European rearmament, the shadow fleet, and whether the 5% NATO target is designed to humiliate
The Secretary of Defense problem: from Lloyd Austin going missing to Pete Hegseth’s Make-A-Wish Foundation
Listen now on iTunes or Spotify.
Claude Goes to War
Jordan Schneider: So I had Claude Code build me the Claude of War, — a responsible approach to killing people. At least it has a sense of humor about it!
Happy Friday, February 27th. We are now eight hours and counting from the 5:01 deadline that Pete Hegseth set. Eric, take us away.
Eric Robinson: So why are we talking about Anthropic? It is one of maybe a half dozen industry leaders in generative AI and large language modeling. If you had asked about it maybe nine months or a year ago, I don’t think it would necessarily be spoken of in the same sentence as OpenAI or DeepSeek, but they have been on a breakout run — primarily because Claude has demonstrably shifted the way people interact with AI-enabled coding.
The tension at the moment is that Anthropic has, for reasons that remain unclear, caught the hostile attention of the Secretary of Defense. It does seem to be almost a personal mission that Pete Hegseth has taken on.
Jordan Schneider: We’ve got a few dynamics going on, and I think we should start with the inauguration, where you had Sam Altman and the rest of the tech CEO elite all there with big smiles. Greg Brockman donating $25 million to the Trump super PAC. And then Dario kind of on the sidelines — he’s missed some of these meetings. I think it’s clear that his politics don’t necessarily align with where this administration is. That was fine. David Sacks made fun of them for being “woke AI.”
But as Eric said, it’s all well and good until this is the market leader, which they have been for the past six months, in a sort of ironic twist of fate. The market leader is the one with the most federal ramping going on. Anthropic that was most integrated into the various things the Department of War gets up to.
Anthropic tried to kiss the ring. It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that they asked 1789 Capital — Donald Jr.’s VC fund — to get in on their last round. Donald Jr. said no. And now the knives are out.
Tony Stark: There are two sticking points here. One is the “don’t put us in kill bots” thing, which we can talk about at a technical level. But there’s also the “no domestic surveillance” part, which is the part where everyone — even friends on the Hill — are like, “Hey, that’s kind of weird.” I would like to know, and I think the public deserves to know, more details about what this fight is specifically about.
Look, if you have contracts with defense contractors or with the DoD, I hate to tell you this, but the DoD is going to do DoD things. If your frustration is that your model is being used to support warfighting operations where people die — I’m not familiar with many warfighting operations where people don’t die.
Justin Mc: Humanitarian missions.
Tony Stark: Well, yes. But I think there are some issues about what business you were getting into.
Jordan Schneider: Here’s the nuance. The way I read the blog post is not that they are categorically opposed to their model killing people. It’s more like: look, it’s not ready for game time. We can do cute things around the edges, but the downside risk of putting our models at the very pointy end of a kill chain is likely to get the wrong people killed, or even get our own people killed.
The analogy I’m going to is almost a reverse Arthur Miller All My Sons, where they’re selling something qualified to go 200 miles an hour, and the DoD is like, “No, we’re going to have it go 400 miles an hour.” But it will just fly apart. And they don’t want to be a part of that.
Tony Stark: That’s fine. But for the audience here — there are basically two types of AI for the DoD. There’s AI in the bot or in a control node for the bot, which is autonomy for perception to do on-the-loop operations. Per DoD Directive 3000.09, it states pretty explicitly what you can and cannot do when it comes to these machines. So unless we’ve rewritten the directive, the guidance for the Pentagon is still 3000.09.
Then there’s AI at the higher level — the C2 echelon — where you’re controlling a bunch of things, controlling logistics, or doing planning. I don’t really know specifically what the instance with Venezuela was, where Claude fit into that. Who knows — Claude could have just been making maps.
Eric Robinson: Yeah, it was probably an information operations officer who queried Claude and said, “Hey, give me the top 10 Spanish-language broadcasts that are going to speak up about this,” which is perfectly responsible. You can say that on the margins it supported the operation, but there’s no MH-47 crew chief or pilot using Claude to do a load plan.
Tony Stark: You can’t just dump an LLM like Claude into a warbot. It takes a lot of work, and that’s not what’s happening here.
Justin Mc: I think you’re also seeing a bit of that personality difference — Amodei and Anthropic versus, say, at Palantir, who will sell a 20% solution and say “this thing will revolutionize warfare.” That’s a very important distinction. You have a person who’s very cautious, saying, “I don’t know that this is going to fit the parameters of what I’m being told it can do. I’m going to be truth in advertising. I’m uncomfortable if that’s where you’re saying this is going today.” That just sounds like a more frank discussion about how things are getting used.
When you couple that with the other thing — Anthropic is now a defense contractor whether they want to be or not. They have sold something to the Department of Defense. And this defense contractor is telling the truth. That’s novel. That’s a cool break in tradition.
The DoD could just say, “Yes, of course we’re not going to conduct surveillance on Americans — because of Posse Comitatus and the FISA court rulings and all the other things that say we can’t do that unless there is a warrant.” Then you take away both of Amodei’s complaints. But instead we have an ultimatum where it’s: “No, I don’t want to tell you anything. I don’t want to say that I have any restrictions.”
Tony Stark: I think this is, at minimum, a case of egos.
“Our Product is TRL 5”
Jordan Schneider: Let me read Anthropic’s paragraph on fully autonomous weapons. This is from a Dario statement from yesterday:
Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.
Eric Robinson: He’s saying his product is TRL 5. In acquisition speak, he’s giving a fair assessment. I think Justin triggered something really important: among the Stargate participants and the inauguration attendees, saying “I’m not ready” is culturally weird, because you’re supposed to say you’re going to be driving cars on Mars in six months.
Justin Mc: And when the leader — very clearly in some key categories the leader of AI development in the US — is saying “this stuff is not ready for what we’re saying,” that’s a cultural push that is different than what the DoD has been encountering. I worry that is also driving some of this. They want everybody to get in line because that is more in line with what the administration is saying about capabilities.
That’s the real danger of Anthropic coming out and saying “this stuff’s not ready.” If we’re top of the line, this stuff’s not going to do what we think it’s going to do.
Tony Stark: Back to the C2 thing — that does matter. If Claude is being used for command and control at a higher echelon, and something goes bad, you’re responsible for a mass casualty incident or a war crime. I think it’s smart on Anthropic’s part to fight that.
Justin Mc: “The pod made me do it.”
FISA, NSA, and a Call from the Department of Justice
Jordan Schneider: Can we do the domestic surveillance angle? What domestic surveillance does the Department of War do?
Tony Stark: Well, NSA is weird.
Eric Robinson: It goes through NSA. The department has certain intelligence collection authorities that are supposed to be internationally oriented, but there are support-to-law-enforcement missions. There are bundles of authority out there that the department can employ in a variety of different circumstances.
Justin Mc: During the protests — both during Trump One and then some of the No Kings protests at the beginning of Trump Two — there were reports of Air Force drones doing surveillance over the protests.
Eric Robinson: That was CBP in Minnesota.
Justin Mc: Right. And the courts already said, “Yes, that was legal, but we need the guidance to be more defined.” Because while technically they were within the bounds of the law, the courts didn’t agree that was the intent of the law going forward.
We have an intelligence apparatus that, yes, uses manpower from the DoD, but overwhelmingly that’s through warrants, not just because the DoD decides they want to do collection or surveillance on Americans.
Eric Robinson: If you’re covering a US person, it should be covered under FISA rules.
Justin Mc: Even if you’re overseas at embassy functions and you meet an American citizen living abroad — there are all kinds of restrictions on how you collect, how that person is safeguarded, how their identity is protected. Those apply to the DoD and the intelligence services writ large. That’s even external to the US. You come back inside the US, the FISA court is conceivably a bulwark against massive internal surveillance.
Eric Robinson: To illustrate that exact point: when I started at the National Counterterrorism Center about 15 years ago, I was kind of a low-level analyst. I moved into being an intelligence briefer. We had a pilot program that Attorney General Holder had negotiated where certain analysts at NCTC would have access to all of CIA and NSA reporting, but we would also have access to a substantial amount of FBI reporting. We had the Gorgon Stare, both domestically and internationally.
I was part of a small team that had access to raw FISA collected on US persons overseas — you could get like their Facebook pages or whatever. It was highly controlled. We had to go through very special training to gain access.
One morning, it was a little bit slow. I queried some raw files related to some other reporting — didn’t find anything interesting and just moved about my day. When I was done with my morning briefings and back at my desk, I got a call from the Department of Justice. They said, “Hey, we noticed you ran these queries, and we’re going to talk to you about it because this is unusual behavior.” I had an attorney from the National Security Division inspecting my queries because there was a recognition that what I was doing required an extraordinary degree of oversight.
I was completely above board. Granted, I never queried raw FISA again because I didn’t want to talk to a Department of Justice attorney. But the system is supposed to have guardrails.
Something we have to thread through the discussion with Anthropic, targeted killings in the Caribbean, or a forthcoming military campaign in Iran: there’s not really a functioning Office of General Counsel at the department right now. That OGC is not taking an adversarial look at the actions of services and components. It sees itself as a personal law firm on behalf of the Secretary and, to an extent, the Deputy Secretary.
When I make references to normal intelligence collection guardrails, I am sympathetic to people like the head of Anthropic and other defense contractors who recognize that there is no legal architecture governing what they’re being told.
I was speaking socially with a fairly senior representative of a defense prime recently, after the Supreme Court struck down the president’s national security tariffs. FedEx has gone public saying they want their rebates. A few other companies are trying to advocate for the same. What I’ve heard is that there’s been a network of asks under the table: “Hey, Pentagon, pay us back for these tariffs.” And the Pentagon, without any sort of legal review, just says: go fuck yourselves. Eat shit, American industry. This is part of the golden age. Get ready.
What we’re seeing with Anthropic or the targeted killings in the Caribbean — it’s all part of the same ethos of “eat shit, you’re not on the team.”
Art of the Deal, DPA Edition
Jordan Schneider: The underlying thing is: if you don’t trust these people to do above-board things with your technology, you’re going to want more understanding of what it’s being used for. Anthropic is trying to meet them halfway. He could have just canceled all the contracts January 21st. But being told “no” ever, or “let’s discuss this” ever, is not part of the ethos of this administration or this Department of War.
Tony Stark: This is where I start to get concerned about the discourse. If they go forward with this, there’s going to be a lot of legal hearings, congressional hearings. Defense tech is going to be hurting.
But there’s a broader issue: this is the first time since Kath Hicks announced Replicator that the public is getting a look at how the department intends to use autonomy. This is not good for us.
My major concern is that I’m already seeing the social media discourse of “Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon wants to use robots with no guidelines,” which is not true. That’s not what defense tech wants. That’s not what most of DoD wants. It’s probably not what Congress wants. Foreign partners don’t want it.
If that discourse runs into midterms and you get a backlash, I am very concerned about what that means for the things we actually need on the battlefield. And it also means any reasonable discussion about how we use AI in the future probably goes out the window.
Justin Mc: Modern warfare, as we’re seeing in Ukraine, is highly electromagnetic-spectrum contested. Radios and com links are jammed, GPS is denied. It’s very difficult and hazardous to your health to communicate because of jammers, spoofers, locators, and rapid artillery barrages fired on emissions. So there does become a point where when we say we’re going to enable weapons with on-device, on-edge compute capabilities, we are admitting there is going to be some form of autonomy. What we have to hope for is that by the time they lose that link, it is refined enough to make a good decision — they know the difference between a tank and a school.
If we’re already at the point where one of the leaders in this field says “I have reservations,” and then the Pentagon says “we don’t want any guardrails” — not even saying “we think we have a system in place for the guardrails, the way that we do collateral damage assessments, and Anthropic, we’re going to put you on the oversight board as we experiment with autonomy at the edge” — that becomes a very different conversation. The narrative right now is: you don’t get to set guardrails, there are no guardrails, we get to use it however we want. That’s rightfully scary to a lot of people, even within the defense industry.
Jordan Schneider: It’s already metastasizing. We have an open letter — notdivided.org — with a few hundred researchers from OpenAI and Google saying, “Yeah, we’re not so cool with this either.” This conversation has clearly broken containment beyond the Second Breakfast listener base.
Eric Robinson: And since we started speaking, The Wall Street Journal just ran a report that Sam Altman has convened an all-hands and has decided to broker a truce between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
Jordan Schneider: They can’t even hold hands!
Eric Robinson: And Emil Michael, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, has waded in and said Anthropic has nothing to worry about — mass surveillance is unlawful under the Fourth Amendment.
Tony Stark: That’s Congress calling DoD and being like, “What the hell?” Probably the White House too, honestly. There’s this weird thing where obviously a lot of this administration doesn’t want guidelines, but a lot of them still grew up in the space of “domestic surveillance is very bad.” There’s that weird contingent of the people who want to do everything versus the people who are like, “This is not the libertarian conservatism I was raised on.”
I expect to see a pretty big split in the administration on this. And there’s already a split between Pete and the White House.
Jordan Schneider: There’s also the “let’s not bust the AI bubble” angle. You’re going to label the most important company in the world a supply chain risk before you label Alibaba or Tencent? Come on.
Tony Stark: Yeah, let’s continue to sell chips to the Chinese while labeling Claude a supply chain risk. That’ll go great.
Justin Mc: We’re going to note that we know DeepSeek was trained on Nvidia Blackwells and not do anything about it, but we’re going to blacklist Claude. Cool. We have our priorities in order.
Jordan Schneider: There’s some chunk of this administration that is still very much not on board with selling chips to China. They’re like, “Yeah, Inner Mongolia, we see you DeepSeek — cute stuff you guys are doing.” Dario has more China hawk points than Pete does. He’s been screaming about export controls for a long time. They’re banning Chinese users. They put out a report calling out Minimax, Moonshot, and DeepSeek for trying to distill their models.
The DPA as Magic Button
Jordan Schneider: Let’s walk through this scenario. What does the Defense Production Act allow you to do?
Eric Robinson: DPA these days — especially at this Pentagon — is effectively God in a box. It’s their deus ex machina: slam DPA and get results. The MP Materials transaction from July, where the Pentagon took a $400 million preferred stock position in a publicly traded company — that was a DPA button. A DPA does not exist for that, but the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel said “go ahead.” They have a pattern of using this Korean War-era legislation to intervene in the American economy in new and inventive ways.
Tony Stark: The DPA is broad enough that you could drive a truck through it. But it was always written as a gentleman’s agreement in the sense that you can press a lot of economic buttons, but there will always be economic and political feedback. Which is why people have been very selective about invoking it over the last 70 years.
It gives you a lot of potential, in the same way that if I put a V8 in my car I can drive really fast. However, I would not recommend doing that on the streets of DC, because I will crash. That is what you risk if you really go hard with DPA authorities.
Jordan Schneider: Fun fact — we’re going to have a DPA renewal. There’s a stopgap expiration to September 30th of this year. I don’t think this renewal will be the low-key nichey defense topic it usually is.
Eric Robinson: This is a rare moment where the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee are actually putting some screws to the Pentagon. If we go back to some of the deal-making at the Deputy Secretary’s office, they originally wanted long-term commercial offtake agreements with mining companies for their critical minerals campaign. Congress effectively said, “We do not approve of decade-long purchase agreements for rare earth elements. This is not DPA authority.”
That led to the administration using other vehicles — Project Vault with the Export-Import Bank, trying to come up with an international system within the G7 for a tariff-based price swap, DARPA launching a commodities market. You’re seeing one instance of Article I authority being used to check the administration’s ambition. And it is on what is ultimately a $6 billion market — small potatoes.
Justin Mc: They’re talking about DPA and labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk. Those are two distinct labels and uses. DPA says “we want unfettered access and we should be able to use this however we want.” Labeling them a supply chain risk says “nobody can use this because we see this as an existential threat with the ability to be used for coercive purposes.” The department has said both. And it’s like — what does it mean?
Jordan Schneider: It’s just big toxic. It’s a giant toxic relationship, which I don’t think this leadership is unfamiliar with. We have this quote in Axios basically saying the only reason they’re giving Dario the time of day is because he has the best model — which is true. And by the way, if you don’t want to marry us and sign without a prenup and move to the hills and cut yourself off from all your other relations, we’re going to try to throw you in jail.
Eric Robinson: “That’s a nice $300 billion company you got. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” It’s like Fat Tony from The Simpsons.
Justin Mc: It’s funny that you just made marriage and a cult sound exactly the same.
Military-Civil Fusion, American Style
Tony Stark: I’ve seen several people cite this as “our version of military-civil fusion.” For those who don’t know, it’s basically the Chinese model of: hey, you have these companies, they build great things, you belong to us, gimme. By doing this, we are mirroring what the PRC does to its companies — putting the boot on the neck and saying “you will do what we say or you’re not going to have business in the United States.”
That’s basically what labeling Claude a supply chain risk would do. Nearly every major company, defense tech or not, touches the DoD or the US government in some way. That’s a very scary moment for free enterprise.
But here’s the thing: we know the military-civil fusion model doesn’t work in the long run because it kills innovation. You might get it at the outset, but it doesn’t sustain itself. I think you already see that with workforce burnout in the PRC. And that’s in a culture that has been under a regime for decades. The culture here is not going to survive that.
Justin Mc: If one large corporation acqui-hiring one small startup was going to “destroy the innovation ecosystem,” what do you think happens if we destroy Anthropic because they decide they don’t want to play ball?
Tony Stark: I see a lot of friends on the left saying “nationalize X company” as a punishment. I hate to tell you — SpaceX is not SpaceX if you nationalize it. It’s NASA. And if you’ve looked at NASA’s production rate lately, it’s not doing so hot.
Justin Mc: The horseshoe theory is more apparent every day. Both sides just meet at the bottom, and it’s “nationalize everything.” Can we just keep the capitalism thing going? It’s worked pretty good so far.
Eric Robinson: I think the coziness between government and private industry is not new. The employment of a cudgel, like what the Department of Commerce did with Intel, is distinct and troubling. It’s going to cause market inefficiency and a process of thematic alignment with political power centers that is fundamentally opposed to the traditional concept of federalism and divided powers. Companies have to conduct themselves on the whim of the presidency, rather than doing what’s best for their stockholders, communities, or employees. I think it all ends in tears, but we’re going to get more t-shirts with “Made in America” stamped on the inside out of it, so I guess it’s probably a wash.
Florida Man Invades Cuba
Tony Stark: I want to talk about this week’s Florida Man. Ten Cuban nationals from Florida who tried to invade the islands.
Eric Robinson: The Comoros Islands campaign of Margaret Thatcher’s son — showing up and trying to overthrow the Castros.
Tony Stark: For those who haven’t seen it: it looks like Marco Rubio missed his best opportunity to invade the island, because 10 allegedly drunk people from Florida with bulletproof vests, rifles, and IEDs — according to the Cubans — got on a 24-foot boat. For those who don’t know, it’s really hard to fit 10 people on a 24-foot boat. They sailed to Cuba, allegedly shot first, and the Cubans shot four dead and injured six others. Even Marco Rubio’s actual quote was like, “That’s weird.”
Eric Robinson: How drunk do you have to be to keep your buzz going for the two-hour trip?
Justin Mc: You take the drinks with you. I don’t understand the question. Sorry, it’s Florida.
Tony Stark: But where do you fit the drinks?
Eric Robinson: If you’re loaded up with fuel, 10 extraordinary doofuses, and a basic load of ammunition — at a certain point, something’s gotta give.
Justin Mc: I think we missed the inverse. They probably also had cocaine they were taking to Cuba.
Tony Stark: And you know, this would have been a great opportunity for us had we not put all our air power in the Indian Ocean.
Justin Mc: And Marco Rubio is currently in the running to be the next leader of the Sinaloa cartel. The memes that have been coming out this week are amazing.
Tony Stark: I thought he was going to be a board member of Anthropic.
Iran and the Near-Miss in Venezuela
Jordan Schneider: Nothing has happened with Iran since last week’s show. We’re kind of twiddling our thumbs. What if they actually bomb Iran at 5:02 — the minute after the Anthropic deadline — in order to use Claude for the targeting?
No, you do it at 4:59. You use Claude, and then you say, “Now you guys are restricted. Gotcha.”
Eric Robinson: It is a reflection of the increased residentialism of American politics that the two point people leading the negotiations with the Iranians are Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. They have no formal training. They have a multitude of business interests that come first. They are effectively the trigger point between this relative moment of peace and a renewed war between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
It’s absurd. It’s another part of the DOGE-era direct attack on government professionalism. It’s downrange from a culture of “government can’t do anything right.” It’s not just whether a chicken processor in Maryland is being effectively monitored by the FDA. It’s making countries rise or fall in warfare. There are two to three hundred combat aircraft coiled to start moving against Iranian targets for reasons that have not been articulated to anyone outside of the president and his inner circle. When you say it out loud, it is an extraordinary indictment of American political culture.
Tony Stark: There was an article in the New York Times about how these Iran deployments are starting to bend and break the naval force. The Iranians can reach out and touch us — the Chinese are selling them more YJ-12s, with roughly a 200-to-300-kilometer range. The threat of retaliation this time around seems more serious.
Justin Mc: I also wonder if the risk calculus has changed now that we know, after the State of the Union, that Venezuela was not the clean in-and-out that was claimed. We were a few bullets in slightly different locations from losing an entire Chinook full of Delta operators. That should have scared the shit out of the administration.
Tony Stark: The world looks a lot different if those bullets are a little bit left, a little bit right.
Justin Mc: The 160th is amazing. Those pilots are amazing. But if that Chinook goes down, it’s Black Hawk Down with Delta operators in the middle of Caracas. Then you have SEAL Team Six that has to respond. The world changes dramatically.
Now we’re going to take not the most exquisite and prepared force in the world to go do a discrete military operation — we’re going to go do it in Iran, which has integrated air defenses. How much suppression of enemy air defense aircraft do we have? How much capability do we have to continually fly Growlers and electronic warfare aircraft? When do we lose something? It is a hard problem.
Last week, a report came out where General Cain was basically saying, “I don’t think this will be as easy as everybody thinks.” He had expressed concerns within the administration.
Eric Robinson: Both the Journal and CNN had independent versions of the same theme. The chairman understands the mechanics of these operations. When I worked for him, he was a one-star at JSOC. He knows it intimately, and he’s a fighter pilot. He’s like the last military professional who’s there. He is probably a lonely voice who’s going to be asked to depart. This operation is going to go forward whether he likes it or not. He’s sufficiently sophisticated to understand that at a certain point he was going to be put in a Mark Milley–style situation where he was going to have to put his rank on the line. This is him making it known. And he’s going to lose the argument.
Ukraine at Year Four
Tony Stark: It’s now four years into the full-scale war in Ukraine — twelve years since the Russians first took Crimea and we did nothing about it. UK MOD reports 1.1 million Russians killed or injured. Ukrainians are somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. Millions displaced. Trillions of dollars of economic damage.
We’re no closer to a resolution. It remains unclear who retains the advantage on the battlefield. The Ukrainians can still carry out local tactical counteroffensives at the battalion level. The Russians keep throwing human waves at it, which is going to break their force at some point.
I am reticent to say Ukraine is an entire American policy failure because Ukraine is still there, and had we not helped, it would not be. I will say the policy failure was misunderstanding what it takes to fight the Russians and then having an over-obsession with nuclear war every time the Russians said the word “nuke.”
Justin Mc: It’s not just a US policy issue — it’s a European one. How long did it take the Germans to stop buying LNG from Russia? How long did it take to sanction all the banks? Europe, which had the most on the line and you’d think would have drawn the harshest line, was not ready because of the leadership in Germany.
Now you see fracturing within the EU. The Baltic States are saying, “The EU probably isn’t going to help us. The Americans may not help us. We’ve got to help ourselves.” Poland is on the “we’re going to protect Poland first and foremost.” Meanwhile, you have a simultaneous rise of Putin-friendly-ish central European and western European governments.
Tony Stark: The inconvenient truth for the Europeans is that the reason they can have a wonderful social safety net is because of American extended deterrence. The Russian threat is back, American extended deterrence — who knows? Now politicians are caught between risking the return of militarism to Europe or basically bending to the Russians.
I really think Europe is going to hit a political breaking point soon. And the populations are not going to like it.
Justin Mc: They may have to work 40-hour work weeks again.
Tony Stark: See, that’s true fascism.
Eric Robinson: There are indications of a renewed spirit. If you look at military aid to Ukraine in 2025, Europe has made up for American abandonment. Is that sustainable? It’s uncertain.
There’s also the issue of sanction circumvention. Wonderful infographics about Kyrgyzstan suddenly receiving more luxury German sedans than any other country in Asia — pure sanction circumvention where you export to Kyrgyzstan and then the Russians still get their slick autos.
There are other indications beyond the Baltics continually telling the truth. The Bundestag is starting to look at additional efforts to increase German defense readiness. Will all of this balance to a better European-wide readiness? It’s a maybe.
Twenty years ago, Europe was in a breach with the United States over Iraq. The European Union response was to create EU battle groups — ad hoc task forces of 1,500 soldiers that were allegedly available to deploy internationally on a moment’s notice. It turned out they were nonsensical, like a weekend with your ROTC battalion. They didn’t take it seriously because fundamentally they didn’t have to.
The stakes are different now. Nobody went to Munich and gave a speech like Secretary of State Rubio did. There is a recognition of American unreliability, and that despite the grievous casualties the Russians have suffered, their rate of artillery production has recovered. They’re conducting directed sabotage in Poland, against commercial airports in Denmark. The Russians, even with a bloody nose and a broken leg, have not given up their imperial designs.
I think Europe is recognizing the paradigm shift. What I’m fearful about is that it’s not necessarily going to be fundamentally good guys like Emmanuel Macron leading the charge. It’s going to be far-right actors saying “Europe first,” with profound ugliness directed against migrants and immigrants. Europe may rearm and be a more formidable conventional threat, but that doesn’t mean their bayonets are going to be pointed in the right direction.
Justin Mc: Even the American argument — “they don’t pay their way” — the US hasn’t met its own 5% commitment to defense spending for NATO since 1993, with the exception of two years during the Iraq war.
Eric Robinson: It was 2% forever. The 5% is just designed to humiliate the Europeans who are trying to cooperate.
Justin Mc: In Poland, Tusk is like, “Well, we’ve got our 5%. Where’s everybody else?”
Tony Stark: The Greeks spend like 4.8%, but most of that’s on pensions and corruption, so it’s a stupid metric regardless.
Justin Mc: The Greeks also spend like three times that funding the shadow fleet to move oil to Russia. Nobody’s talking about that either.
Eric Robinson: Let’s give credit where it’s due — the shadow fleet enforcement is a rare administration win. The Shadow Fleet is shorthand for a broader network of illicit tanker ships that fly under a multitude of national flags. They enter a port, turn off their transponder, change their name, have false bills of lading, crews who “didn’t see nothing.”
Some of the most egregious violators have now been subject to Coast Guard or Naval Special Warfare inspection, often led by the United States or in partnership with Britain. It’s long overdue.
But it goes back to a recurring theme: the war opened up four years ago, launched in 2014. If you’re going to do sanctions, do sanctions. The Biden team and the Obama team had assets. They had the ability to enforce these sanctions and elected not to. Democratic officialdom needs to answer for it.
The Secretary of Defense Problem
Eric Robinson: The Trump team, especially around the Pentagon, is able to move with such speed and aggression because they weren’t standing on much. The Austin era of the Pentagon was a series of formal delegations to the Shangri-La Dialogue and a nicely prepared speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum — and who gives a flying fuck about any of it?
Justin Mc: To be fair, Secretary Austin went missing for 25 days before anybody noticed.
Tony Stark: What was wild was that right after that news, I had a conversation with some politicos affiliated with the administration who were not in defense, and they were like, “What?” They had no idea the SecDef went missing and the DepSecDef was like, “I’m in Puerto Rico, the DoD can’t talk. There’s no way anybody can reach me on a plane, so I’m just going to stay on the beach.”
Eric Robinson: Secretary Austin had a substantial amount of military experience. In normal American politics, he would be a plausible candidate. But if you spent substantial time around him, if you witnessed the ebb and flow of the early phases of the counter-Islamic State war in 2014, you recognize he was not up to the task.
He was an interesting pick by President Biden for a few reasons. One, statute is supposed to ban this — you’re not supposed to be able to pick Jim Mattis or Lloyd Austin without an exception. Two, he did not have a reputation as a particularly adept strategic thinker. Three, he had no DC presence at all — no time at think tanks, no academia, no staff, no aides he could bring into the Pentagon. And fourth, he sort of got the position because he would go to mass with Beau Biden and the president saw a familial connection.
So he arrived at the Pentagon like a guy with a briefcase. He didn’t have a chief of staff to bring. He got staffed from Center for American Progress and the Truman Project. They went real far down the list for key developmental positions because he was just a professional island.
When he got extremely sick and left Kath Hicks on a beach in Puerto Rico holding the nuclear codes, it was a direct result of bad staffing. We are lucky that we didn’t have catastrophe come out of it. We only got a set of small disasters.
Tony Stark: He took everything personal. When Congress came around after he was voted in and said maybe we should change the law about putting generals in as SecDef, he took personal offense. He thought it was about him and people not liking him, not the fact that between him and Mattis, we’d had two generals in the past eight years.
Justin Mc: If you get offended by that, you’re actually telling us you aren’t qualified for this position. Because that exact reaction is why we’re worried. We need you to be able to look at people who grew up underneath you, who were part of your coaching tree, and tell them “no, that’s wrong.” It’s much harder when it’s your protégé.
We’ve now gone so far afield. We have somebody with absolutely no insight who also doesn’t have the DC presence — is an island unto himself, has to attach himself to the president, and can’t have a divergent opinion. Which is what makes the Anthropic thing so interesting: is this where the administration is on tech? Or is this Hegseth intuiting where he thinks the administration is?
Tony Stark: And on that terrible note, we’ll see you all next time.
Eric Robinson: We’ll see if Sam Altman can pull us back from the brink of an Anthropic disaster.
Justin Mc: The Wall Street Journal just released that federal officials have concerns with xAI. Multiple federal agencies. Notably, it doesn’t lead off with the DoD.
Jordan Schneider: I mean, they fucking should.
Eric Robinson: Yeah, of course. The child pornography development tool is somehow noxious? Of course.
Justin Mc: It says multiple federal agencies. Notably, it doesn’t lead off with the DoD having expressed concerns.
Jordan Schneider: Maybe they’re less crazy than we thought!