Jake Broe Remains Hopeful, but Does Well In Calling Out U.S. Diplomat to NATO Whitaker for His Lying
- john raymond
- Jul 20
- 3 min read
I like Jake Broe. I respect his consistency, his messaging discipline, and the vital morale role he plays in the wider Ukraine support community. But I always come back to the truth: hope is not a strategy. Jake leans hard into optimism—even when optimism runs directly against structural reality. His latest update reflects that same admirable spirit. But this time, he demonstrates something more—deeper clarity.
And for that, Jake deserves real credit. Because it shows that he is growing as a strategic thinker.
For starters, Jake calls out U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker—Trump’s man in Brussels—for what he is: a liar. Not a misinformed placeholder, not a confused diplomat, but a purposeful agent of disinformation, sent to launder the Trump regime’s sabotage of Ukraine aid into something resembling a coherent strategy.
Jake names this directly. He lays out the facts: the ramp in Poland dismantled, experienced logistics officials fired, aid bottlenecked or frozen entirely. And when Whitaker claims that aid is now flowing "with urgency," Jake doesn’t flinch—he calls it out for the lie it is.
This is an important moment. Because it shows Jake is not letting himself be used. Not by Trump. Not by Whitaker. Not by the facade of diplomacy masking structural betrayal.
Where Jake still leans too far into wishful framing is in his treatment of the recent House vote rejecting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-Ukraine amendment. Yes, 141 Republicans voted against her measure—but that doesn’t represent progress. It only reinforces the precariousness of the current equilibrium. The vote wasn't about a new mandate—it only mans that Trump hadn’t yet flexed control. And once he does, those numbers will likely move. His party isn’t unified in support of Ukraine; it’s simply fragmented while waiting for him to issue orders. Jake sees this as encouraging. I see it as evidence of just how shallow the support runs... More than 70 GOP House of Representative members are overtly traitorous to the Western alliance.
But the most important correction in this entire conversation—and where Jake, to his credit, is at least watching the right clock—is over the 50-day window. Let’s be very clear about what this deadline actually is. This is Trump’s bluff window—the period during which he has claimed he will bring Putin to the table via secondary sanctions on Russia’s allies like China and India, and through tariffs supposedly aimed at punishing Russia’s economy.
Except it’s already failing.
Why? Because the tariffs are meaningless. The U.S. doesn’t do significant direct trade with Russia, so applying tariffs is pure optics.
Worse, Trump is very likely to back out of the secondary sanctions altogether, because they are clearly a gambit to push Xi and Modi deeper into Putin’s arms. We saw this with the tariff war with China which culminated on May 9th. Once Xi kissed Putin’s ring, Trump backed down. He chickened out. We should expect the exact same thing here.
The entire 50-day construct is a theater piece, not a strategy. Its purpose was never to pressure Putin into a ceasefire. It was to kill the Senate sanction bill, to buy Trump time, to create the illusion of toughness, and to set up a blame structure for when he inevitably backs down: “We tried, but we can’t... for reasons.”
Jake is right to watch the countdown, but he’s still treating it like a policy clock when it’s really a narrative device. What Trump has built is not a pressure campaign—it’s a mechanism to cover his inaction, and worse, to lay the groundwork for a future betrayal of Ukraine and NATO under the guise of “failed diplomacy.”
Finally, Jake’s mention of the European arms purchasing program deserves more scrutiny. While he notes that France and Italy are opting out, he doesn’t press the point far enough. This program was never viable. It was a hostage tactic—Trump demanding that Europe buy American weapons for Ukraine as a condition for support, while simultaneously dismantling the aid pipeline itself.
Now that it’s unraveling, Jake should be clear: this collapse isn’t a policy failure, it’s the intended outcome. It feeds into the broader EU paradox: the more Europe supports Ukraine economically, the more vulnerable it becomes to Russian-aligned populist being elected.
And yet, through it all, Jake keeps his optimism. That’s his role. And I respect that. But this update shows something new—something sharper. He’s starting to separate rhetoric from reality. He’s not being lulled by the theatrics of Trump’s diplomacy. He’s beginning to identify disinformation agents in real time.
Jake Broe is still hopeful. But now he’s watching the bluff.
And that’s is a good step toward understanding the war we’re actually in.
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