That William Spaniel Is Only Now Just Beginning to See the Obvious Dysfunction in the White House Disqualifies Him as a Serious Analyst
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
At this stage of the Ukraine war, a minimally competent analyst must be able to do three things at once: look at the public record of President Trump’s 28-point “peace” plan, understand that it is structurally pro-Kremlin, and recognize that the chaos inside the White House is the direct consequence of that alignment, not a random accident of personalities.
William Spaniel’s latest video finally admits there is “chaos” and factional infighting around the plan—but he still treats it as ordinary policy dysfunction in a normal presidency. That lag in recognition, and the frame he uses once he does notice it, is disqualifying.
The facts are not in dispute. We now know the essence of the 28-point plan Trump is trying to force on Ukraine by a Thanksgiving deadline: Ukraine would have to cede de facto or de jure control of occupied territories including Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, drastically reduce the size of its military, accept a constitutional ban on NATO membership, and live under “security guarantees” that evaporate if it ever hits Russian cities or violates a demilitarized buffer.
In exchange, the West would help channel hundreds of billions in frozen Russian assets into reconstruction and joint ventures that reintegrate Russia into the global economy and even code for a return to the G8.
European allies were not meaningfully consulted in the drafting; several senators have openly described the original document as a Russian “wishlist” that the United States then tried to launder through Kyiv.
President Trump originally backed this plan with an ultimatum: Zelensky must agree by Thanksgiving or risk losing U.S. military aid and intelligence support. Zelensky then described the moment as one of the darkest in Ukraine’s history, an “impossible choice” between an unjust peace that sacrifices sovereignty and a continued war without American support.
Overlay that with the casting. Trump’s chosen point men for this “peace”: real-estate developer Steve Witkoff, coordinating with Russian investment figure Kirill Dmitriev; Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a close Yale Law friend of Vice President JD Vance, suddenly elevated from “drone guy” to lead envoy; and a sidelined official envoy, Keith Kellogg, reportedly more sympathetic to Kyiv and now being pushed to the margins.
Vance himself is on record describing his criteria for a plan—stop the killing, preserve sovereignty, be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine, prevent a restart of the war—and then gives us whiplash by promoting a framework that in practice mirrors Russian maximalist demands while ignoring Ukrainian red lines.
On the other side of the internal fight stands Marco Rubio, installed as Secretary of State with heavy Senate involvement and now frantically trying to distance himself from the original text—telling senators in Halifax that it was essentially a Russian wishlist passed along by the U.S., only to publicly reverse himself hours later and claim that Washington authored the plan.
The lies and contradictions are not subtle. Congress, European governments, and serious policy shops have already arrived at the same conclusion: this “peace plan” weakens Ukraine, divides Europe from America, prepares the ground for a larger future war, and delivers core strategic gains to Moscow.
This is the context in which Spaniel has now finally discovered “dysfunction.” In his own summary, there is “a lot of conflicting information,” a power struggle between Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, and internal confusion even about timelines and authorship.
Spaniel notices that Vance is using Driscoll as his proxy, that Driscoll’s diplomatic inexperience is remarkable, that Rubio is worried about being chained to a “Munich-like” capitulation, and that he does not support territorial concessions. All of this is basically true, as far as it goes. But what Spaniel does with these observations is the problem.
He continues to model this as if it were a textbook case of bureaucratic politics: a hands-off president, two ambitious lieutenants jockeying for 2028, and a controversial policy in the middle. He talks about “distributional consequences” of different lines on the map, about the need for any deal to be acceptable to both parties, about the Kremlin’s “sub-goal” of kicking the can down the road.
The animating question in his frame is: which faction inside the Trump administration will win this round of the policy fight, and how will that shape the Republican Party’s future?
What is completely missing is the Bayesian prior, and without the prior Spaniel’s analysis is unserious. The prior is that President Trump’s pattern of behavior in this war—his secret work with Russian counterparts on a plan structured around Ukrainian concessions, his ultimatum to a besieged ally, his dismissal of European concerns, his demand for de facto recognition of Russian territorial gains and limits on Ukrainian rearmament—aligns squarely with the Kremlin’s long-term objective: a crippled Ukraine, a fractured NATO, and a West divided against itself.
Once you acknowledge that, the “dysfunction” stops being a neutral property of the administration and becomes the visible consequence of a captured center. Vance, Witkoff, and Driscoll are not just “retrenchers” or “realists” who want America to step back; they are the faction whose goal is to make a Kremlin-compatible settlement acceptable to Trump-Putin while still being survivable in the realm of American domestic politics.
Rubio is not just a slightly more hawkish conservative navigating 2028; he is the Senate’s frail attempt to bolt one semi-conventional actor into a system whose president is pressing an enemy-friendly framework on an ally under threat. The rest of the apparatus—the conflicting leaks, the shifting descriptions of authorship, the half-hearted “updates” to the plan—is the noise generated when people know they are working with a structurally corrupt project and are trying not to be crushed under it.
Spaniel’s failure is not that he misreads a poll cross-tab or underestimates European artillery production. It is that he refuses to promote the only question that matters to first place: why does every iteration of this process, from the secret drafting with Russian input to the ultimatum to Zelensky to the casting of Vance’s friends and donors, produce outcomes that enhance Putin’s regime security and degrade Ukraine’s?
That refusal forces Spaniel back into a 101-level template—“let’s see how this plays out,” “this may just be faux momentum like Alaska,” “there is a big power struggle inside Washington”—at precisely the moment when the basic structure of the betrayal is on the front page of every serious outlet.
A serious analyst cannot wait until the sixth or seventh leak of the same story to admit that there is “chaos in the Trump administration right now” and then stop at labeling the factions.
The obligation is to say what the chaos is doing: it is masking the steady presentation of a Russian-friendly solution as if it were an American peace initiative, and it is exhausting publics and elites so that, when the next iteration appears, it will seem like a relief.
Recognizing that there are Vance people and Rubio people in the room is the beginning of analysis, not the end. The end point is naming the reality that both factions are operating inside: a White House whose stated goals—“ending the war,” “stopping the killing,” “making Europe pay its share”—are no longer meaningfully connected to the effect of its policies on the battlefield.
Spaniel is a capable explainer of game-theory diagrams and bargaining ranges in contexts where the principal is at least trying to pull in the direction of national interest. But here he is grading undergraduate essays in a burning building and still pretending the smoke is just bad ventilation.
That is why the timing matters. When it takes this long for someone to even acknowledge the obvious dysfunction, and when he still refuses to anchor that dysfunction in President Trump’s alignment with Kremlin interests, he is no longer just “behind the curve.” He is normalizing a pro-Kremlin operation as if it were one more clumsy attempt at diplomacy.
That is not serious analysis; it is an attractive anesthetic at the exact moment people need to be fully awake.