Dear Paul Warburg, We Don’t Have to Fall into Conspiratorial Thinking to Get Trump Right
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
We do not need secret dossiers, hidden tapes, or speculative recruitment narratives to understand President Trump’s role in the current collapse of alliance trust. We do not need conspiratorial thinking. The data is public. The history is documented. The pattern is legible.
What is required is not imagination, but correct attribution of agency. Your recent work continues to misframe the problem by speaking of “the United States” as the actor when the decisive variable is President Trump himself. That misclassification now distorts your otherwise solid analysis.
The core correction: agency matters
Your latest video on intelligence leverage and Ukraine is analytically competent in many respects. You correctly show how coercive use of aid and intelligence accelerated European substitution, reduced U.S. leverage, and paradoxically weakened Washington’s strategic position. But throughout, you repeatedly ascribe these actions to “the United States.”
This is the central error.
The United States is not Ukraine’s enemy. The United States is not NATO’s enemy. The United States is not attempting to dismantle the alliance from within. President Trump is. When analysis collapses a captured executive into an undifferentiated national actor, it obscures responsibility and delays the necessary strategic update.
This distinction is not semantic. In asymmetric warfare, misidentifying the attacker is how damage compounds.
Why this is not conspiracy—and never was
There is a persistent hesitation among analysts to name Trump directly, often justified by fear of sounding conspiratorial. That fear is misplaced.
Conspiratorial thinking relies on hidden causes. This argument relies on observable continuity.
President Trump’s hostility to NATO is not a post-2016 aberration. It is a matter of public record extending back decades. In 1987—after traveling to Moscow—Trump took out full-page newspaper advertisements attacking NATO, arguing that the U.S. should stop defending allies and should extract payment or withdraw protection. This was not whispered; it was broadcast. It was not ambiguous; it was explicit.
From that moment forward, the same themes recur with remarkable consistency:
Allies are freeloaders.
Collective defense is a bad deal.
U.S. protection should be conditional and transactional.
Sovereignty is subordinate to leverage.
No conspiracy theory is required to connect those dots. Pattern recognition suffices.
Where Vexler and Kurzin clarify the terrain
This is where Vlad Vexler and Pyotr Kurzin sharpen what your framework currently blurs.
Vexler explains why democracies struggle to see this clearly. Once democracies are “out to sea,” they lose the stabilizing assumptions that once allowed good-faith interpretation. They keep searching for misunderstanding when the correct model is adversarial intent. That is not paranoia; it is a known failure mode of democratic systems under asymmetric attack.
Kurzin, in turn, recognizes that this is not episodic. Greenland, Ukraine coercion, tariff threats, intelligence leverage—these are not disconnected policy mishaps. They are tests of hierarchy and submission inside the alliance. His line—hope is not a strategy—is an admission that the old interpretive tools no longer work because the environment itself has changed.
You describe the erosion. Vexler explains the blindness. Kurzin recognizes the structural shift. What remains is to name the actor.
The minimax threshold you have not yet crossed
Your own analysis supplies the inference, even if you stop short of stating it fully.
You describe how:
Aid and intelligence were used coercively.
That coercion harmed Ukraine at critical moments.
Europe responded by routing around the United States.
U.S. credibility and influence declined as a result.
Objectively, these outcomes advantage the Kremlin. Repeatedly. Consistently.
At a certain point, minimax logic applies: when an actor repeatedly produces outcomes that harm you and benefit your enemy, you update classification. You do not continue to ask whether the actor is confused, overconfident, or merely unlucky.
This is not an accusation of secret coordination. It is an inference from behavior.
Why naming Trump changes the analysis
Saying “the United States” turns deliberate sabotage into tragic decline. Saying “President Trump” restores causality.
It allows us all to see that:
Large parts of the U.S. system are resisting this trajectory.
Congress, agencies, and allies are adapting defensively.
The damage is not inevitable—it is being inflicted.
Failing to name Trump preserves the illusion that equilibrium will return on its own. Naming him forces the recognition that continued pressure is the strategy, not a mistake.
So, Paul...
Paul, your work remains valuable where it analyzes Russia and structural power diffusion. But at the alliance level, precision now matters more than comfort. We do not need conspiracies to understand Trump. We need to stop anonymizing him.
The history is known. The actions are public. The pattern is consistent.
When someone attacks an alliance over and over again, you stop asking whether they are a misunderstood ally. You treat them as what they have proven themselves to be.
Not because it is dramatic. Not because it is fashionable. But because in asymmetric warfare, misnaming the threat is how defeat happens.