Hope Is Not a Strategy—So Why Is Chris Cappy Still Holding Out Hope for Trump?
- john raymond
- Aug 5
- 3 min read
Chris Cappy’s latest dispatch offers a detailed, technically rigorous analysis of Russia’s floundering summer offensive in Ukraine—highlighting strategic attrition, industrial depletion, and a desperate shift to Shahed drone saturation. It’s informative, well-structured, and filled with credible OSINT.
And yet, embedded beneath the analytic veneer is a naïve hope that belies the strategic reality: that Donald Trump—or his administration—might still do something good for Ukraine. That is not just improbable. It is delusional. Because hope, as we must remember, is not a strategy. It is a trap.
Cappy’s report is saturated with facts. He tells us how Russia’s tank fleet has been gutted, how their equipment losses have exceeded 20,000 units, how they are now dependent on rusting T-64s and North Korean infantry. He even rightly emphasizes that Moscow’s dreams of a mechanized breakthrough are impossible without armored columns they no longer possess. Russia’s pivot to drones is not innovation—it’s desperation. On the other side, Ukraine faces manpower deficits, not equipment shortages, and must race to retool defenses for a war where Shaheds have overtaken tanks as the primary threat.
So far, so good.
But then, almost casually, Cappy references “two giant stories” that supposedly shift the calculus: the movement of U.S. nuclear submarines toward Russia, and the announcement of tariffs against Russian oil partners, particularly India. In context, this is framed as decisive action from the United States, and by implication—from Trump.
This is where analysis collapses into wishful thinking.
Let’s be clear: the tariffs are not evidence of principled leadership. They are public-relations theater. Trump is a Russian compromised actor whose moves must be interpreted through the lens of asymmetric warfare and regime security. His goal is not to defeat Russia—but to appear adversarial just enough to distract critics while keeping Putin satisfied.
We’ve seen this before. From the May 9th “ceasefire for the parade” gambit, to the staged Medvedev “smack talk,” to the faux deadline of “50 days” to act, Trump repeatedly fakes escalation so that he can appear to de-escalate later and give Putin what he wants. The subs and tariffs are no different.
Secondary tariffs aimed at India will never be enforced in a way that meaningfully impacts the Russian war machine. Trump needs India. He needs the illusion of toughness without triggering market consequences that could hurt him politically. Just as he postures with nuclear submarines—an act more performative than strategic—he gestures at pressure without applying it.
Cappy’s error isn’t in the military detail. His battlefield coverage is sound. It’s his failure to apply the same rigor to the political dimension of war that makes his report dangerously incomplete. When he speculates about future U.S. escalations or meaningful economic sanctions that “might” shift the trajectory, he’s clinging to the idea that conventional actors are in charge—people who want Ukraine to win.
But Trump’s incentives are the opposite. He benefits from prolonged war, from European division, from Ukrainian exhaustion, and most of all, from avoiding real confrontation with his boss Putin. To believe otherwise is to ignore the obvious: that Trump has never prioritized Ukrainian victory. His loyalty lies with Russia.
Chris Cappy does not appear to be MAGA. He seems sincere, patriotic, and decently informed. But sincerity is no substitute for strategic clarity. And clarity requires letting go of hope. The same way a good commander must look at the map and accept that a lost city cannot be reclaimed, an honest analyst must acknowledge that Trump is not an ally of Ukrainian survival. No amount of posturing, no last-minute policy shift, no tariff headline, will change that.
Hope, in this context, is a form of denial. And denial kills.
What Ukraine needs is not another six months of hand-wringing or another YouTube video parsing whether Trump might wake up and see the light. Ukraine needs weapons. It needs manpower. It needs institutional clarity from the West. And it needs analysts like Cappy to say plainly what he surely suspects: Trump is not on our side. The longer we pretend otherwise, the more we enable the erosion of democratic resolve.
In this context, hope is not a strategy. It is a liability.
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