Since everything is looking like a Trump win now, what are your actual predictions for the trajectory of the Ukraine war?
Mostly the same trajectory as the last year: Russia continues to make slow, steady, and small gains in the Donbas while continuing to overheat its economy, western aid comes in fits disrupted by internal politics, and the Ukrainians continue not to cascade-collapse. Some pro forma attempt at peace talks are attempted, but Russia's inability to compel war termination, the wrong-actor coordination issue of various Russian war demands, and Putin's own habit for strategic procrastination in hopes of a more favorable deal later lead to the failure of talks and a more or less continued western sustainment of Ukraine. Already-underway western industrial expansion continues, and starts to approach Russian production of some key items (particularly artillery ammo), but falls behind 2023 predictions of the 2025 catch-up because of (a) implementation issues in 2023/2024 and (b) the addition of major North Korean arms flows into Russia.
On looser predictions of what 'new' things happen... Putin attempts new and probably counter-productive pressure efforts to try and coerce the Europeans / US into concessions but which also further undermine casefire prospects. If Russia manages to seize the administrative boundaries of the Donbas, Putin attempts to declare a unilateral ceasefire and end the war declaring it won and that Russia would only be fighting in self defense, but I also expect any such effort to fall flat and Russia to attempt to build coercive leverage by attacking elsewhere, further undermining ceasefire prospects. European aid efforts shift as Europeans deal with consequences of Trump. What those shifts mean varies from country to country, but efforts led by France at least to consolidate European military aid at an EU level in the name of European strategic autonomy.
As for talks themselves... maybe late 2025, but probably inconclusive.
Trump is a wild card, but less because there's any particular reason to believe that Trump would cut supplies to force a truce and more that he's been deliberately unforthcoming and his margin of winning from last night means he has previously-non-existing incentives to continue support.
That narrative that Trump would compel a truce is largely based on the reporting covering two non-Trump Trump advisors whose Ukraine proposal was included limits to aid if Ukraine refused to participate in talks, but which also included a lot more aid for Ukraine in general and conditioned nothing on accepting terms Russia was willing to agree to. In short, viewer projection is required to assume what Trump's view of a reasonable deal is, and that the Russian offer would meet it, and that Trump would / could compel Ukraine to accept it, and most of these viewer perceptions were deliberately shaped so during the US election season.
By contrast, Trump has not expressed his own view of Ukraine war termination in any meaningful way in the last two years, and probably won't for another half-year yet as Trump's political priorities are domestic rather than foreign. For Trump to prioritize Ukraine means putting it ahead not only of Israel-Palestine, which he had a personal hand in due to the Israel-Arab normalization efforts he led, but also domestic priorities including domestic agency staffing and removing Biden/Obama opponents. This is not 2016 where Trump thought the opposition would go away, and I have not heard a compelling reason why Trump should care more about ending Ukraine than other issues, particularly when tying support to Ukraine to his own domestic priorities is probably the most credible way of breaking the Democratic attempts at party unity.
My personal prediction is that this is actually the main interest that will motivate Trump regarding Ukraine, and will push him to provide aid conditional on Democratic policy concessions rather than conditional on Ukrainian acceptance of Russian terms. The Ukraine (and to a lesser extent, Gaza) wars will complicate Democrat efforts to recreate the 2016 maximum-anti-trump opposition stance, since that iteration lacked the Ukraine (or Gaza) wars that the ruling party could frame budgetary opposition to as hindering. With the Democrats deeply divided by the Gaza War, and heavily politically invested in the Ukraine War, supporting funding will be a way to break off Democrats to support / bolster narrow Republic majorities, which in turn gives Trump more leeway within the Republican coalition.
Since that will be most relevant in fiscal year budget negotiations, which will be taking place across mid-2025, and which also provide the negotiating leverage of Ukrainian aid to raise against Russia, I wouldn't expect Trump to make a priority of Ukraine until fall 2025 at the earliest.
Further- and even more important to the timing- is the Europeans.
Just from a Putin acceptable-terms perspective, Putin is a strategic procrastinator who often delays when he thinks he can wait out a foe for better conditions and thus better terms. This will most notably come with the end-of-September 2025 German elections, in which the current pro-Ukraine coalition will likely be replaced with something... well, more plausibly less pro-Ukraine. My position across 2024 was that Russian was over-extending its economy and military expenditures (including manpower, material, and monetary) in unsustainable ways to maximize perceived Russian gains in a period of relative industrial advantage and to hopefully shape elections (such as the US one). This same line of logic applies into 2025 for the German as well- the industrial gap momentum will possibly be reversing by the end of 2025, providing the window of relative advantage, and the Germans are the key stakeholders in the European Union budget providing equally-critical economic assistance. Whatever Trump may / may not be willing try to compel, Ukraine could likely be compelled to concede more with a less favorable German government.
So this means that 'serious' talks won't occur until likely until November 2025, when (a) the nature of the new German government has been identified and thus a sense of how much Putin can push for on that end, and (b) when Trump has been able to make political hay out of Ukraine aid to divide Democrats and bolster his domestic priorities.
Post-Posting Major Edit: And in other news that may throw this entirely out of whack, within hours of posting this the German government entered a stability crisis when the German Chancellor fired the Finance Minister, setting the ground for a snap election. This obviously changes the previous predicted timeline reasoning, as a snap election could be held in January-March, but removes the October delay incentive.
I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring.
Separate from the presidency itself, it looks like a takeaway from the night is that the Republicans are taking back control of the Senate.
Assuming Trump wins, this would give the Republican party to make various federal appointments, including Supreme Court judges. Four of the current judges- Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Roberts- will all be 70 or older next year, and all of theme are Obama, Bush, or H.W. Bush appointees. Meaning long-term implications for the balance of the court if any, especially Sotomayor, does, though alternatively entrenching a Republican justice in place if the oldest (Thomas) leaves.
Not clear at this point but maybe possible is a government trifect if Trump wins the presidency and the Republicans win the house. While potentially very powerful, the narrow Republican majorities will likely limit any organized effectiveness of this, bar some signature legislation push.
There have been two notable female candidates for the American Presidency in the last half century. One was a clearly ambitious, unprincipled, anti-charismatic party member with debatable interest in legality who ran because it was her turn and the party machine cleared the way. The other was Hillary Clinton.
There are jokes about which was the better role model for young women, but the key point is that neither ran or rose the position on the power of their popularity. This is something of an obstacle in democratic elections, which are basically weighted popularity contests.
Dean
15d ago
I don't think it's accurate to say Harris launched the candidate coup against Biden. She clearly knew about it to some degree, given how prepared she was to start advertisements mid-weekend, but the names in most political scuttlebut have very much been party elders.
Dean
15d ago
It will be interesting on how this plays out in internal democratic party politics over the next few years.
This election has definitely shown the limits and the breakdown of the Obama wing of the party. I forget who first made the comparison of Obama's having a Chicago political machine approach to national politics, but this election had so many of the tropes of a machine-led political campaign. Starting from the efforts to build a controlled-opposition via Cheney's wing in the 2021, to the organized lawfare campaigns, to the heavy media influence efforts, to the Democratic candidate switch and even harder narrative efforts. Even these last few weeks of polling and polling coverage have been weird- not just the outliers, and what I now suspect were attempts to paper over / prevent a despair spiral, but coverage of topics not actually matching to voter sentiment. It was a political machine trying to do what a political machine does.
It's also clearly broken down without Obama's star power to drive it, and Obama's technocratic wing of the party always hinged on the argument of 'we're the best at winning.' It's kind of clearly not, a lot of the Democratic old guard is on the way our if not already done so, and so a lot of the party is going to be up for competition going forward.
One thing that is going to matter, though- and one of the things that keeps a political machine working as a machine and is why the Democratic Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world- is the role of loyalty to the machine. The muslim wing voting as a block made a point about power, but it also made a point about reliability. That, specifically, will not be resolved so easily as some accommodation, especially when the anti-Israeli opinion is still a minority position for most of the American electorate.
Dean
15d ago
Oh, certainly. Her poll was obviously motivated. If the Democratic party's army of pollsters looking for good news weren't able to see such trends, it wasn't for a lack of looking.
I'm thinking more of the other herding polls. I suspect some of them may have been pushed slightly higher not just on grounds of uncertainty, but to avoid a self-fulfilling doom spiral from dispiriting the Democrats in the final phase. That level of uniformity between polls is extremely unlikely, particularly when there are plenty of incentives to lean out.
Herding is a defense if you believe organizational embarrassment is a priority, but I don't think that applies to many of the organizations that were herding.
Dean
15d ago
I want to see more of PA/WI/MI, but at the least it seems the Selzer poll was... wrong.
I suspect that not just the Selzer poll was trying to lead opinion rather than reflect it.
The question mark of North Carolina is how much the hurricane disrupted election infrastructure. IIRC, the hurricane most devastated the western part of the state, which is the redder.
I don't claim to have looked closely at how post-hurricane election efforts resolved, but between displacements and flood aftermaths that is the sort of situation where slow recovery leads to depressed turnout.
A couple guesses / theories.
For one, Florida was the Covid refugee state for a lot of the New York / North East lockdown dissidents, when covid-driven migrations largely trailed the election. New York saw a lot of out-migration during the lockdowns as part of a broader emegration trend, and despite the stereotypes / theories that people go back to voting for what they just left, there's a separate dynamic in that the discontents are the first to go and the most to go. A flip side to this, in turn, was emigration of Florida democrats to other places. LGBT-aligned Democratics reportedly (though I've never found strong numbers) left the state in significant numbers during various culture war fights for friendlier ideological neighbors. Culture war national media fights like the 'Don't Say Gay' fights had their own impacts to local voter pools.
Second, the Cuba lobby has stopped being competitive and strongly dislikes the Biden Administration's policies and became straight up [R]. The linked article from Responsible Statecraft casts that as a failure of the lobby rather than of the democratic party, but the issue is that the 'Cuba Lobby' isn't really just Cubans anymore- it also has substantial crossover with the Venezuela block, where most Venezuelans who've fled over the last two decades have ended up (other than Texas) in Flordia. Now, obviously the illegal migrants themselves aren't the voting block, but rather the legal resident / citizen families, and communities. There is a substantial and under-appreciated (or unheard) hispanic anti-socialist block, where anything that comes across as pro-latin-american-left is looked at with suspicion.
You can see here from Florida voting data that third-generation migrants in particular are considerably more likely to vote for Republican than Democrat, even though Democrats have slight leads on first and second generation migrants. That reads to me in Florida as Cuban and Cuban-adjacent migrants in particular, incorporated into the cuban political machine.
A third point is that since 2012 DeSantis broke the back of the local Florida Democratic Party while building a much stronger voter registration base. One of the things the Florida Republicans have done is functionally limit the role of out-of-state registration/mobilization groups, which limits the ability of the Democratic national party aparatus and various activist groups to substitute for Florida Democratic Party shortfalls.
In short, a FDP doom-loop where a loss of Democratic organizers led to fewer voters led to less ability to organize leading to worse results leading to dispirited partisans leading to more emigration leading to less mobilization ability, even as the Republicans had a win-loop of increasing Cuban-support, sympathetic immigration, and organizational advantages that built upon each other.
Dean
15d ago
Dean
15d ago
Very significant, and much more likely if it holds.
African Americans have been voting Democrat at about 80% or above for the last half-century, and in the upper 80s/low 90s since 2000. Any sort of notable decrease from that has significant follow-on consequences.
The reason for that is that by the nature of bi-partisan gerrymandering, parties want narrow-but-reliable margins in various voting districts (so as the maximize the value of their voters / increase the wasted votes of the as-big-as-possible-but-minority opposition. For several census periods, African Americans have been that reliable voting block. As such, a decrease in their turnout threatens to flip various narrow-held seats. This could, for example, help ensure a Republican Senate for the next two years (which would mean considerably more for a Trump presidency on issues like judges).
It also matters because African American are a core part of the lower-income-strata of the Democratic coalition, and so serve as a better proxy for that end of the Democratic base turnout than the upper-middle-class Professional Managerial Class (PMCs). Kamalla Harris was specifically chosen as Biden's VP / became the candidate specifically because she was supported by the African-American political machine wing of the Democratic Party, who were Biden allies. Harris is supposed to run exceptionally well with them, and thus if her strongest part of the coalition is underperforming, it's more likely that related parts of the coalition will also do so.
If Harris loses the Democrat's working class, she loses, as the PMCs are too concentrated in urban centers and the coasts to carry the rest of the country.
Dean
17d ago
Except for a few the program is already perceived by the kids as geeky and uncool enough as is. For those who actually want to be there and those who enjoy it, but won't say as much, it's demoralizing and embarrassing. (There are inter-school events & competitions to be embarrassed at.)
Sounds like there's a story there. What sort of competitions embarrassed you?
Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing.
And yet, has Motte moderating not moderated feuding in this very thread?
This thread has not, in fact, devolved into a personal antipathy feud despite the instigating callout via @username to ensure notification, the attempt to litigate new arguments not even raised in response to the original AAQC while using pejorative framings, and aggressive follow-ups trying to re-argue the topic with multiple people. The instigator of this round did not face punishment for disagreeing or disliking the person they were trying to incense.
Neither will you, despite adding yet another item to my list of memorable pejorative characterizations as a american-jewish-polish-anglo-slavic neocon-fascist-zionist-neoliberal man-bitch. (Yes, this is humorous to me. No, I am not insulted. I have not / do not / would not support any report against you for it.)
Instead, the mod-hat was invoked on grounds of... characterization of evidence (such as the ease of finding), and characterization of opposing arguments (whether a single opening paragraph in the opening of a three-phase argument is the core argument), and eventually moderation practice (when the instigator chose to escalate a minor pushback), rather than the characterization of character.
And this was in no small part because I was considering the moderation team's response when I declined to take the bait / rise to the offer.
It was certainly tempting to indulge- it was a quiet weekend, it would have been easy to play to a crowd, I even had a much longer post lined up and everything- but I declined and deleted a non-trivial amount of time's work and limited myself to a minor riposte and explicit disengagement because of the moderation team's past efforts to cultivate a climate where feuding is discouraged. Further, the restrained response came before moderator involvement occurred, and was maintained afterwards despite apparent moderator sympathy increasing the freedom to action in what one could get away with without significant censure.
Because it was discouraged, I declined. Because I declined, there was no back and forth between users. Because there was no back and forth between users, there was no mutual feuding. Because there was no mutual feuding, moderation could occur on content-neutral ground of how the feud attempt was approached rather than cleaning up the aftermath of one.
To reframe- a user credited even by a self-identified critic for single-minded determination and attention to detail restrained themselves from engaging in impassioned defense. The absolute level of feuding was visibly lowered by the absence of what easily could have been indulged in with those very traits. The user who invited feud was neither punished or threatened with punishment for character criticism, but the content-neutral approach they took to it and their response to that.
This should be what success in moderating feuding looks like. We are seeing the absence of feuding- twice even, thanks to you and I- between people are known to strongly disagree.
Dean
18d ago
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about.
The OP is aware of this because the OP was told so at the time, in the response to the response to the AAQC.
To quote myself-
You seem to have misunderstood the point of the opening, which was to contest your characterization of the limit of child soldiers, which itself wasn't limited to Hamas. A child soldier is not a 16 year old. A child soldier is a child who is used in the function of war, regardless of their age, and as such age alone does not disprove someone from being a combatant unless the age is so low that they physically cannot.
The issue of child soldiers was raised as was a definitional dispute, and as an omission not addressed by the NYT editorial that served as the OP's basis of posting. Moreover, child soldiers had nothing to do with the majority of arguments in the post nominated for the AAQC, and it was only one of three opening arguments of omissions from the first third of that argument's post. The concluding arguments didn't even raise child soldiers as a basis for the children being shot when listing a half dozen competing hypothesis.
Since this clarifying argument was not disputed, challenged, or otherwise responded to, and the entire subject of child soldiers was only used in the AAQC as the introductory lead-in / hook and to establish a relevant topic missing from the NYT editorial, it is possible that the clarification has simply been ignored to further advance criticism of the position, just as the sources discussing to the Hamas youth wing child soldier activity within the last decade that was referenced within your article was also ignored.
For those who haven't read the article...
Nara's article was "Child soldiers in Palestinian groups: forced recruitment and use of minors as a violation of International Humanitarian Law". A Hamas/Gaza relevant section after a global islamic review is the pg. 28 section.
There is also a sustained allegation in international reports of military training of minors in summer camps run by Palestinian authorities (Child Soldiers International, 2001). This is something that continues to occur today, where every summer Hamas summons thousands of Palestinian children and adolescents to its ‘summer camps’ (Truzman, 2021). The armed wing of the Gazan organisation argues for sustaining these military instructions within the strategy against Israel and among the sacrifices necessary to curb the Israeli occupation (Truzman, 2021).
The camps of the ‘Liberation Vanguard’ - the name Hamas gives to its youngest members who train with the al-Qassam Brigades - have been going on for years and train them with tough physical Daniel Pérez-García Child soldiers in Palestinian groups: forced recruitment and use of minors as a violation of International Humanitarian Law and mental tests (Mustafa, 2017). In addition to training in the handling of weapons such as the well-known AK-47, they are trained in the same way as the armed forces of a conventional army and in irregular tactics (Mustafa, 2017). Among other special training in asymmetric and irregular warfare, the armed factions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad teach their youngest members to kidnap IDF soldiers (Truzman, 2021). In the propaganda publications of both groups, it can be seen how the individuals in question are minors and how these methods are disseminated on digital channels such as Telegram (Mustafa, 2021).
Truzman, 2021 is in turn referring to "Hamas defends its military summer camps for children and teenagers" By Joe Truzman | July 1, 2021 | FDD's Long War Journal, which covers Hamas's military wing's own self-coverage of their camps for children and teenagers. (Notably, these videos may include children younger than 14, though I'm personally uninterested in quibbling over exact frames or individual child assessments.)
From the link in the article, you can in turn watch footage of the camps, originally published by relevant organizations. Here are two videos that were posted on X (formally twitter).
A separate children camp video, this one from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (which is another major Gaza-based group that coordinates with but is not formally part of Hamas, but which is a part of the Oct 7 war) shows children training on hostage taking.
In both of these cases, not only was the material from within the last decade, but the video footage shows the watermarks of organizational channels producing / distributing these videos. These were, in short, self-publicized propaganda pieces, though not intended for an English-speaking audience.
An expressed inability to find these videos is not evidence of absence.
...and this is just on the 'yes, they are training children for combat activities,' by relatively uncontestable sources (i.e. derived from the Gazan groups themselves self-publishing). There are certainly semantic quibbles I'd expect on 'well, that's just training, that's not proof of intent to use them while they're children,' which certainly a take for an ongoing practice in the current war.
A practice that coincidentally aligns with the 2020s intifada-era reporting that was disqualified by the time bounding. A time bounding which also establishes a limit of over a half-decade of Hamas having centralized control over the gaza strip and asserting increasing influence over the gazan media sphere. A media influence done following the late-2000s drubbings the Palestinians received for their use of child soldiers during the Intifada. Media efforts demonstrated in the Hamas 2014 media policy to shape coverage and thus foreign perception of how Hamas conducts attacks, including by limiting showing the preparations of attacks. Policies that have largely remained in effect for non-Isaeli-backed media working from Hamas-controlled territory.
But such takes occurring is the reason that child soldier conventions are very, very clear on military training as the form of induction, indoctrination, and preparation for having trained children on hand able to fight as children. There is no military necessity argument for training children instead of adults if you want adult soldiers.
This is not covering other militarily-relevant roles for children in war, which can include use as observers, couriers, workers, or other forms of aid that remove forms of protection, including the long-recognized Hamas practice of children amongst the human shields. (I particularly appreciate the photo on the bottom of page 9.)
It is also not covering easily-findable but also easily-dismissed-on-account-of-(Israeli-)sourcing from the current war, which includes reports of children-sized explosive belts, children carrying explosives in vegetable bags to hamas ambush points, and of course the role of the child hostages taken in Oct 7 as bait to lead Israelis into ambushes.
(Yes, the last one is complicated. Yes, it also counts. Using children as bait to lure or help trigger ambushes is a form of child warfare. No, the child does not need to be willing, or even there. Child warfare is what children are used in warfare for.)
Dean
18d ago
I have always regarded the AAQC process as a very important "carrot" for the community, and one of the best things to come out of the old SSC subreddit.
For the sake of positive reinforcement- I appreciate them, I welcome the chance to read them, and I hope they continue for some time to come, by you or otherwise.
Thank you and the team for maintaining the system that lets this happen.
Well, that's one way to argue off you own limitations, I suppose. I appreciate the simultaneous temporal qualifier to dismiss any older findings from the multiple international observers mentioned, and the qualifier of your own search efforts when you weren't aware of those older reports in the first place.
As such, I still stand by the post I left off with when I departed that topic.
And if you wish to claim that Israelis shoot children, and then launch screeds on the jews being uniquely evil, you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children, instead of claims that children were shot without an attribution as to by whom.
Which serves as another basis of the non-linking, since the lack of relevant sourcing to support a surprising and significant claim (like 'the Jews are deliberately one-shotting children') has been a reoccuring theme of this thread.
But to compare my submission to a contribution like Dean's series of comments-- these are in a different weight class with regards to quality, insight, and effort.
In defense of everyone else, I was on bed rest for about half of those, which explains both the availability of time.
I also highly appreciate the inputs that everyone makes that make it into the AAQC list. Don't underestimate yourself and what might strike a chord.
Dean
20d ago
This is months after you wrote this and I was not the intended audience, but after re-seeing this by chance of you linking it in another post I want to leave my regards to it. There is hard-earned wisdom in this that speak to me. It has been an aid in resisting certain mindsets I am not immune from, and I would be a lesser person without it at times, which is to say I would be a better person if I remembered it more often.
Thank you for writing it, and I hope you keep linking back to it in the future.
Dean
22d ago
Politico's MO changed in the years since the 2021 purchase by Axel Springer, which is a major German media conglomerate. What used to be a US-centric paper with a major EU counterpart wing has more or less been reversed by an Atlanticist-German ownership.
Not as many overt changes as one would expect, but very much a 'this is the uniparty' sort of dynamic.
At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.
18 million hours? Jesus Christ, that was before Jesus Christ!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
So assuming a second Trump term, do you expect him to actually be good on foreign policy?
In many ways I am more pessimistic about the international environment than most people, and while I am optimistic in some respects (particularly on Western versus PRC/RUS/IRN axis competition) my position could boil down to 'I don't think anyone can be expected to do 'good' on foreign policy over the next years/decades,' because drones.
What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term. I believe that drone warfare has hit a tipping point where we are already seeing a transition in the balance of power between offensive and defense in favor of the strategic defense, and that this has major implications for all forms of expeditionary and aggressive warfare, i.e. what the US is already built to do, and what revaunchist powers like Russia and China have aspired to be able to do. Drone technology is emerging in a way that is providing a historically unparalleled ability to debilitate state resources, and that is going to fundamentally change how nations approach military defense (and offense) in the next 30 years compared to the last 300.
This is a bit conceptual, so I am going to try and break it down a bit.
In the field of military history, there's two related and distinct concepts you may or may not have heard of: a military revolution, and a revolution of military affairs.
Military revolutions are major changes in tactics and strategies that are driven by emerging technologies. This is things like how guns changed reliance on bows and arrows and melee, how rapid reload / sustained fire weapons changed Napoleonic armies to trench warfare, how tanks and motorized vehicles changed trench warfare to maneuver warfare, and so on.
Military revolutions are, by their nature, often very bloody because they represent periods where new optimizations can have disproportionate effect, and rebalance the balance of offense vs defense in ways that make previous strategies or paradigms unworkable. For example- the AK-47 represented a modest military revolution because the ability to mass produce cheap, reliable, and effective light infantry weapons that could be distributed to guerilla groups made colonial empires fundamentally unviable. Empires could not justify the cost-benefit of maintaining colonial holding by force, and so the strategy of the post-WW2 era gradually became to disengage from colonial empires.
A Revolution in Military Affairs is worse / bloodier / more significant.
A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is not just a change in tactics, but when technological or organizational changes irrevocably change how warfare itself is pursued- particularly by changing the relationship between the populace and how war is conducted. These can be technological changes, but they can also be organizational or social changes.
The exact criteria and lists may differ, but five examples include rise of the seventeenth-century state system (where permanent standing armies were maintained by the state rather than reliance on ad-hoc raisings of mass armies or fuedal forces), the French revolution (where nationalism changed the relationship that the populace had with the state and the execution of warfare), the industrial revolution (where military-industrial capacity not only became critical for arming mass armies with advanced capabilities but could be used to bolster other forces by sparing surplus capacity at a scale never previously done), World War I (where machine guns, trench warfare, and special weapons like gas led to historically unprecedented killing potential with demographic-levels of impact), and superpower nuclear competition (where the conduct and selection of wars to fight over sharply veered away from ever-larger conflicts to avoiding total wars of annihalation between not only nuclear states, but other states in general).
RMAs are rarer but more significant than MRs because of the social change dynamic at play. Going beyond changes in tactics, the changes in how organizations or polities pursue these new paradigms often lead to disproportionate, and thus self-feeding, effects where actors pursue not just the technology to use in the old way, but pursue the new social and institutional evolutions that further propel the technology. For example, the rise of precision bombing from the US gulf war has changed how countriess across the globe approach airpower- no one builds for carpet bombing fleets anymore, and instead precision fires or precision-missiles in lieu of precision-bombers dominate.
My view is that weaponized drones represent both a military revolution (they are effective weapons changing tactics and strategies, as seen with how the Russia-Ukraine War has adopted to both sides using them and trying to counter their use), and a revolution in military affairs.
The Ukraine War in particular, but also the Iranian use of drones in their proxy conflicts, have demonstrated how societies themselves can basically grass-roots up militarily significant contributions from common commercial product. Weaponing small commercial-off-the-shelf drones with what amounts to hobby-shop equipment is what allows a 1,000 dollar drone project to destroy a 100,000,000 dollar piece of military equipment at a 100,000-to-1 cost ratio.
Which is another way of saying, for the cost of one modern fighter jet, you could conceivably invest in more drones-that-can-kill-parked-fighter jets than there are fighter jets in the world. That is something that no state in the modern world can afford to brute-force through, and in the current era counter-UAS is hard but drone warfare is easy. Typically far less cost-effective than the drone-to-aircraft example, but still easy and still cost effective.
What makes it a RMA and not just a MR, however, is the accessibility to non-advanced economies and non-state actors.
The Ukraine War has demonstrated how you can have a distributed practically grass-roots drone warfare program put together in a matter of months across a coherent society even when being directly attacked by an existential invasion threat. The Iranians and IRGC have demonstrated how proxy drone warfare can be deliberately proliferated across sectarian group alliances to have impacts across entire geopolitical regions, to a point where quasi-stat / substate actors like the Houthis can produce their own drones despite being under regional blockades and air power. Terrorist groups like ISIS and criminal groups around the world have demonstrated how even non-state actors can access and utilize customized drones for operations.
What this means is that drones represent one of the biggest challenges to state military capacity in history. What the AK-47 did to the viability of colonial empires, drones may do to the entire concept of expeditionary organized armies, where any state that tries to organize a military to take unwilling territory by force will face cost-disproportionate losses that wreck the cost-benefit justifications for going to war in the first place.
This also means that states will have exceptional incentives to develop security states able to detect, trace, and go after drone use. Partly for normal law enforcement, but partly to mitigate the risks of asymetric wariors / insurgents moving in to start attacking high-cost targets in core regions. This will likely lead to vastly expanded / normalized security state technologies to track people and computers and drones, far beyond the sort of counter-terrorism authorities introduced in 9-11. These means to mitigate UAS threats can, in turn, counter the ability of other states to penetrate protected population centers that would normally be done for prepatory operations.
This, in turn, means that various forms of military conquest / forced entry into unwelcome areas is going to be less possible than ever. No one looks at the Russian experience in Ukraine and thinks 'I want to win like that,' and drone proxy warfare will likely make that increasingly a norm rather than exception. Any state that tries to force itself into another state is risking itself to proxy support for the invaded by any number of states with their own attack UAS capability, quite possibly AI-trained to recognize the military equipment being used to invade. There are some contexts where proxy resupply may be impossible- I think Taiwan is credibly screwed due to blockade vulnerabilities- but in general I am not concerned about China invading or establishing puppet states from asia to africa.
The flip side, though, is that I am concerned on the ability of the US to maintain air bases or war stocks in foreign countries where the local government/people don't want it to be there. I don't think the US could have maintained the Iraq or Afghan occupations for as long as it did if the US had invaded in 2023 rather than 2003. Not unless it was willing to make some significantly different decisions regarding partition or siding with ethnic majorities. This will credibly not only apply to the specific territories where a small state might welcome a US presence, but also to the neighbors who might host / turn a blind eye to anti-US militant activity crossing borders. (An example here would be how the Houthis in western Yemen were able to use UAVs against the UAE all the way across eastern Yemen.)
In other words, the drone revolution- both as a military revolution and revolution in military affairs- cuts both ways. It will drastically increase the cost of American adversaries trying to pursue revanchist invasions. It will also drastically increase the cost of American expeditionary adventures abroad, or even to US opponents in any given conflict who can send asymmetric forces to attack distant airbases elsewhere. It is going to lead to a lot of blood in parts of the world where things aren't so clear cut, whether it's already ongoing conflicts, sectarian divisions where both sides can credibly reach drone capabilities, and/or efforts by geopolitical actors to create drone-empowered insurgencies where they don't already exist. Costs and casualties will climb.
If you noticed that there was no reference to political candidates in this, that was the point- this is a foreign policy problem driven by dynamics beyond any candidate's ability to prevent. No matter what a candidate does, great harm and damages will occur around the world regardless- and thus everyone will 'fail.' Anyone with an interest in saying 'they didn't succeed' will have more than enough to fill the confirmation bias regardless of how well they do relatively, and there is unlikely to be any credible or plausible metric of what 'success' looks like going forward.
What is he going to do about Ukraine, about Israel, about Iran, and about China?
Unironically, if he does 'nothing'- does not start a conflict, does not join a conflict, does not participate in a conflict- that could be a better action (or inaction) than doing anything 'about' them.
Americans often have a bias for action- 'don't just stand there, do something'- that would typically be associated with being proactive and more impactful policies, but in the context of the drone RMA represents a major risk. If you forward deploy extremely expensive forces, you are putting them in range of drone users, and if you actually commit those forces to a conflict then you are giving those opponents the reason / basis to actually act against them. This would be the case if, say, the US joined Israeli airstrikes on Iran- Iran would seek to retaliate with its drones, and there are American logistic bases in Kuwait right across the water.
In this sort of context, the better posture / strategy is to not be participating, but being ready to, to establish a deterrence factor that allows you more limited but below-threshold actions. Those American bases in Kuwait may not be able to support attacks against Iran, but maybe they can shoot down Iranian drones sent against Israel, which is a desirable effect in and of itself. In the meantime Iran knows that if they tried to attack those Kuwaiti bases, then while they might do damage they would receive far more damage than they currently are as the US would enter its own 'use it or lose it' dynamic and would utililze what it could as much as it could before drones rendered it unable to. In this way, the US preserves its ability to maintain a beneficial effect (mitigating Iranian attacks on Israel) for a longer period, and at a lower cost (which is what allows it to persist for longer).
This is where a non-interventionist instinct is a directionally correct strategic bias vis-a-vis a more interventionist impulse. Instinct alone is not sufficient- there are going to be costs and risk taking regardless, there is more to a neutral jing strategy than doing literally nothing, and there are contexts where the general trends would not apply. I am not making a general claim that any war the US enters in will lead to it being dogpiled across the world and all bases destroyed by drone swarms. But erring on the side of caution by expecting clear interests and clear partner buy-in is going to be an increasing positive as potential costs raise.
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To return to your question, you ask 'what would trump do about -topics-', but my response is that it's more important what he is NOT likely to do- try to get directly involved.
Unlike the foreign policy establishment opponents broadly aligned against him, Trump is not likely to embrace an R2P intervention (which would expose a US presence to proxy militants supported by hostile competitors), or maintain an indefinite exposure to asymmetric drone attacks (the Iraq/Syria presence, which he was thwarted in his withdrawal from in his first term), or stay to assume the costs of fighting for a country that doesn't want to fight for itself (the Afghanistan context). He is unlikely to prioritize the harmony and good regard of host partners over systemic cost trends and risks. He is unlikely to expand US commitments or exposures to new areas or partners without clear interests and gains for doing so. He is likely to engage in limited tit-for-tat strikes or counterstrikes that will lead people to accuse him of failing or falling into that escalation spiral, but tit for tat is probably the best response possible and a more stable strategic equilibrium than outright ignorring proxy attacks.
This will almost certainly come at the opportunity cost of things he could do more of but isn't inclined towards. People who think the US should intervene for the right thing are probably going to be disappointed by a lack of interventions in general. Anyone whose self-image of what it means to be an American on the world stage may cringe at the missed opportunities, the tolerance for the intolerable foreign leaders, and so on.
But- per my thoughts on drones- this is a feature, not a bug. The expectations Americans have of relatively low-cost/low-casualty wars are not keeping up with technological reality. The Gulf War standard of conflict success is gone and is not coming back any time soon. The best bet the US has for maximizing effects and minimizing costs is to help those who are willing to fight (and pay) for themselves, rather than assuming the burdens of fighting (and paying the costs) for them.
This, however, is not going to come easy, and it's certainly not going to be held in high regard by partners who prefer the US operate under a different paradigm (and assume the costs of doing so).
Democratic over-reliance on media shaping to paper over party weaknesses that might have been detrimental to acknowledge in the short term, but which are important in the long term.
Trump's victory is fundamentally a turnout victory, but his margin of victory- including the popular vote- was because Harris underperformed Biden's 2020 performance. This wasn't just in relative terms, but apparently in many cases absolute terms, which is significant because when Trump lost in 2020 he had more actual votes than in 2016 and in 2024.
This difference between 'we have a larger number of votes, but smaller share' and 'we have a smaller number of votes, and a smaller share' has different implications and political compensations. To pick a non-US equivalent, this was the issue with the Corbyn-Labour party in the UK, when Labour Party membership swelled but Corbyn was so politically toxic that Labour was trounced amongst their own historic voting base. When Corbyn was booted, many of those he brought in were lost as well... but this increased relative percentage, despite losing absolute numbers. Increasing the base matters, but not as much as its relationship with how that base change changes the relative standing.
In the last week(s) of polling, there was likely a deliberate effort by the Democrats to try and lead the electorate rather than reflect the electorate. Polls showing things closer than they are both might encourage turnout (we still have a chance!), but can also prevent self-fulfilling doom spirals (don't show up to the polls because you're going to lose which leads to actually losing). In the short term (last week(s) of campaigning) this is understandable / normal, but as a long-term strategy (over months / years) this is detrimental because polities need accurate information to accomodate for reality (such as what more people actually feel over time).
And for the Harris campaign this was a long-term strategy, because it was one well underway in the Harris-Biden strategy when Democrats were pushing against uncomfortable awareness of his age, or inflation, or progressive policy implementation. The Democratic party machine was focused on trying to control the perception of reality, to the detriment of creating a worse reality (that they were out of touch with).
The mechanical means by which this happened are many- overly-strong political alliances with major media groups, the creation of parallel information institutions in X and the Republican social media spheres, the nature of the Democratic centralization of party control in party elders like Biden himself- but ultimately it was a knowledge-acknowledgement issue.
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