President Donald Trump’s apparent decision to cut Ukraine’s military off from the use of a key technology that allows it to strike targets deep inside Russia is shortsighted and deeply unwise. It is yet another example of how the president’s penchant for rapid, 180-degree shifts in policy undermines America’s ability to work with allies, thereby undermining national security.
The technology at issue is Starshield, a military application of Elon Musk’s Starlink. Starshield apparently allows Ukraine’s drone operators to pilot and guide the drones over Russian airspace at high speeds. This allows the operators to avoid Russian air defenses and ensure the weapons hit their targets.
Last week, Ukrainian operators suddenly and without notice found they lost contact with their drones while they were en route. They discovered that Starshield had established a speed limit well below that at which the weapons were traveling. This limit made use of drone attacks either impossible or much riskier, thereby damaging Ukraine’s primary method of increasing the cost to Russia for its unjustified invasion.
America also simultaneously stopped sharing some intelligence that allowed Ukraine’s air defense forces to identify and track Russian ballistic missile attacks. While that capability has purportedly been restored, there were some days when Ukraine suffered losses, including civilians, that it theoretically could have prevented.
All of this has been done in secret, without any public explanation or even without private warning to Ukraine’s leaders. This leaves everyone in the dark as to what is actually happening and why, but it’s not hard to connect the dots to ascertain Trump’s motivations.
These decisions came on the heels of Trump’s deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to waive U.S. sanctions on the purchase of Russian diesel fuel for three months. That deal, widely trumpeted by Trump on his Truth Social account, is clearly designed to win votes in the midterm elections. Republican candidates in previously safe areas in agriculture-heavy regions in the Midwest are at risk of losing, in part because of the massive increase in diesel fuel prices since Trump attacked Iran. The diesel deal was transparently intended to increase the supply of the fuel and lower its price, presumably something that will ease farmers’ and truckers’ pain and cause them to return to the Republican Party fold.
Starshield comes into play because Ukraine has attacked a number of Russian refineries in an effort to put economic pressure on Putin. Trump apparently believes that these attacks have contributed to the diesel shortage and thus have played a part in raising prices. Limiting Starshield’s use, in this view, means Ukraine may be unable to successfully take out more Russian refining capacity, thereby lessening the pressure on diesel prices on the eve of the election.
Trump, however, is wrong about this. Diesel prices have risen mainly because of the dramatic reduction in the amount of oil that has been shipped from the Middle East since the war began. A chart prepared by the Institute for the Study of War shows that U.S. diesel prices rose dramatically when the war started, declined when it appeared Trump would make a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and rose even more sharply after that effort collapsed. Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries had at most a marginal effect on those movements.
His betrayal of Ukraine, then, will have almost no effect on the midterm elections. It nonetheless has an important impact elsewhere. It reinforces the growing notion that America’s word means nothing.
In this photo provided by Ukraine’s 65th Mechanized Brigade press service, A Ukrainian serviceman launches a drone towards Russian positions at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Wednesday Oct. 7, 2026. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine’s 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP)
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In this photo provided by Ukraine’s 65th Mechanized Brigade press service, a Ukrainian serviceman launches a drone toward Russian positions at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine’s 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP)
Like it or not, America’s national defense strategy depends on our network of global allies. They host American military bases that allow us to project force far from our shores. They share intelligence with us that permits us to fight terrorist threats at home and abroad, and which also lets us know what our major adversaries are up to. Their militaries, small as many are, are nonetheless significant enough that Russia, China, and other nations must take the combined force into account when deciding whether to confront the United States militarily.
That structure is grounded ultimately in trust. We have to trust that the allies won’t kick us out or manipulate intelligence to hurt our security. They have to trust that we will keep our promises to fight on their behalf if they are attacked. Undermine that trust, and the alliance weakens, in fact, even if the nominal power it could wield remains undiminished.
Withdrawing the intelligence and technology Ukraine relies on during wartime sends a chilling signal to our allies. If America does it to Ukraine, they reason, it could also do it to us. That makes them less likely to cooperate with America in the short term and more likely to wean themselves from the alliance structure itself as quickly as possible.
A weakened alliance structure would be catastrophic for American security. We face no serious threat from nations in our own hemisphere. The drug trafficking and mass immigration that come from our south are very problematic, but they do not threaten to undermine our freedom. Only global Sino-Russian hegemony can do that, and their combined power cannot match ours so long as our alliance structure is robust.
Trump is rightly trying to increase that robustness by pushing allies to increase their own defense capabilities dramatically. His methods have sometimes been rough: Vice President JD Vance’s 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference shocked and angered our European allies. But their response — finally taking the alliance pledges to increase defense spending seriously — shows the uncouth talk had the desired effect. NATO will be much stronger five years from now when European militaries are stronger.
That only works to our benefit, however, if the NATO countries remain our allies. They will do that if, and only if, America is responsive to their security concerns regarding Russia. The sudden betrayal of Ukraine is yet another sign that they cannot trust that America will do that, even as they strain their economies and budgets to meet America’s demands.
Asian allies see the same looming threat. They see China or North Korea as their primary security threats, and none of these small or mid-sized nations could stand up to China without American support. Could America betray South Korea if it is attacked by the North? Could Japan count on American aid if its outer island territories are seized without warning by China? There was no doubt about American intentions three years ago. Now, there is, and the past week’s actions simply intensify those gnawing fears.
America has been dominant globally for so long that the thought it may not be is almost unthinkable for many, but imagine a world without our alliances. Imagine a world where the powerful Asian economies of the Near East are brought under China’s sway. Imagine a world where Europe becomes neutral, seeing America as threatening to its freedom as Russia or far-away China. Imagine a world where America has no foreign bases and no global intelligence reach.
That’s a world where an ambitious dictator can think about challenging America’s dominance within its own hemisphere. Indeed, it’s a world where Brazil and other Latin American countries may see their future interest and development lying with Beijing rather than Washington. That’s a world where one can easily see a slowly tightening noose placed around America’s neck, a noose we would be increasingly powerless to resist because the correlation of global power will have turned against us.
Trump is right to want to recast the global alliance structure so that our allies can contribute more and rely on us less. Acts like the recent betrayal of Ukraine undermine that effort by undermining the trust upon which our security relies. The fact that Trump seems oblivious to this is troubling. The fact that he is pushing our allies away to pursue an unreachable short-term political goal is maddening.
TRUMP’S WORSE-THAN-USELESS RUSSIAN DIESEL DEAL
Diesel prices are not going to plummet in the next two weeks despite Trump’s desire. One can hope that once the midterm election is over, he will return to the policy he has generally pursued: recasting our alliances rather than wrecking them.
Restoring Ukraine’s access to Starshield as quickly as possible is a necessary first step toward rebuilding the trust that he all too often has unconsciously undermined.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
