Today Was Not a Good Day for Ukraine—William Spaniel Got Played
- john raymond
- Jul 14
- 4 min read
On July 14, 2025, William Spaniel opened his video by asking if this was “the best day of the war this year for Ukraine.” What followed was a measured, organized breakdown of weapons transfers, secondary sanctions, NATO spending, and internal GOP dynamics—but it missed the forest for the trees.
Because the answer to his opening question is no. Not even close. In fact, this day—like so many under Trump’s second term—is a hollow spectacle, a pageant of “action” designed to confuse the press, co-opt analysts like Spaniel, and ultimately delay real consequences for Vladimir Putin.
This is the point Spaniel almost—but never quite—makes.
Trump’s Theater of Governance
The most fundamental mistake in Spaniel’s analysis is his failure to call out Trump’s complete violation of presidential norms. A functioning president doesn’t announce sanctions by issuing ultimatums with arbitrary 50-day delays. He doesn’t circumvent Congress by dictating executive muscle as if the legislature doesn’t exist. Nor does he force NATO partners into expensive decisions that may politically weaken them at home, just to avoid spending U.S. dollars.
In fact, Trump and Putin both understand how American governance is supposed to work. That’s why they violate it so openly—because breaking the expected process creates confusion, delays accountability, and weakens institutional credibility.
Feet-Dragging Isn’t Incompetence. It’s Strategy.
Spaniel admirably tries to lay out how the forward-and-backfill military pipeline will work. But even as he describes it, he admits: nothing has happened yet. Ukraine hasn’t received new weapons. Europe must still find the money. Procurement must still begin. And all of that will take months.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s soldiers are fighting—and dying—now.
This is what asymmetric warfare looks like: delay dressed as diplomacy. A hollow spectacle of policy designed to obscure inaction. While the EU fumbles through red tape, Russia keeps killing civilians, taking territory, and burning through Ukrainian defenses. The only beneficiaries of delay are Putin and Trump.
The Paradox That Spaniel Ignores
Spaniel also fails to grasp a deeper strategic contradiction that Trump is deliberately exploiting. The more Europe spends on Ukraine, the less it can spend on domestic programs. And the more that happens, the more likely populist, anti-Ukraine, pro-Russian governments rise to power in Europe.
This is not theoretical. It is a well-worn Putin playbook.
So while Spaniel praises the size and scope of the NATO announcement, he ignores how Trump is weaponizing NATO’s own burden-sharing model to fracture the alliance.
Every euro spent on a long procurement cycle is a euro not spent on healthcare, jobs, or energy subsidies—and every unmet need becomes a Russian talking point in the next election.
The Sanctions Are Smoke. The Tariffs Are Mirrors.
The other half of the announcement—secondary sanctions and a 100% tariff on Russia—are even more hollow. As Spaniel himself admits, U.S.–Russia trade is already minimal. The tariff is a gesture aimed at nothing.
Meanwhile, the secondary sanctions give a 50-day window for Russia, China, and India to “change course”—exactly the kind of time buffer Putin needs to reposition. We saw this already play out once with Trump's Chinese "tariff war" which pushed Xi back into Putin's arms.
And the real sanctions package, the one backed by bipartisan lawmakers like Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal? Nowhere in the announcement. Not expedited. Not prioritized. Not even acknowledged.
So even as Spaniel acknowledges caveats, he misses the bigger point: this announcement isn’t designed to help Ukraine. It’s designed to confuse the West while Trump dodges real accountability.
The Performance, Not the Policy
Spaniel’s final, unspoken concession is this: Trump was being backed into a corner.
The pressure from NATO, the Pentagon, and parts of his own party have forced him to perform. But this is not real policy. It is political theater calibrated to fool the very people analyzing it.
And Spaniel, for all his technical fluency, reads the show as if it were real. He never asks: Why now? Because the Senate was threatening real action. Why the delay? Because delay gives him and Putin time to organize the next gambit. Why the omissions? Because if we stare at the shiny thing long enough, we forget what really matters—action now.
The result is a video that accidentally endorses the illusion of momentum, giving Trump rhetorical credit for action that hasn’t occurred, while Ukraine remains under fire and Putin continues to advance.
A Day of Loss, Not of Gain
This is not Ukraine’s best day of the year. It may, in fact, be one of its most costly. Because it gives Trump credit without consequence, time without pressure, and plausibility without performance.
William Spaniel gets it wrong—not because he lacks intelligence or precision, but because he fails to view the situation through the lens of asymmetric war, where each delay is a defeat, and all theater is sabotage.
And until more analysts learn to see this, Ukraine will keep losing ground—politically, militarily, and strategically—while the West applauds another act in Trump’s misdirection campaign.
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