We can believe that Washington, and London by extension, has for a long time been dominated by nutters. This being so, the war in Ukraine has been just another case of elite hysteria—like the COVID lockdowns, like the gender revolution, like Net Zero and all the rest. We could look at the senile ex-president, the TikTok press secretaries, the think tank interns in charge of weapons policy, and conclude that the Empire is simply collapsing into incoherence.

And maybe that’s true. Maybe we are ruled by a caste of demented opportunists, and sexual deviants who have no plan beyond looting the corpse of Western civilisation before China takes it away from them. Maybe the past decade has been the final orgy before the collapse.

But let’s suppose the opposite. Let’s suppose the people in charge know, and have known, exactly what they’re doing. Let us assume the American ruling class is and has been rational. Not moral, not wise, not humane—just cold, calculating, and determined to stay on top. Let us assume that what we’re watching isn’t confusion or incompetence, but something far worse: deliberate strategy.

You don’t get two decades of unbroken destruction—Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, now Ukraine—by accident. You get it by planning. Or at least by a system that rewards certain outcomes and penalises anything else. So if Ukraine looks like another expendable pawn bleeding out on the Empire’s borderlands, that’s because it is.

What’s changed, though, is the face of the empire. Donald Trump is back. The American people have just been allowed a Thermidorian Reaction—firing the lunatics, retiring the trannies, and putting the adults back in charge. Gone are the rainbow generals and adolescent spokesmen. In their place, men in suits with hard faces. Serious men. Men who use fewer words and fire more missiles. Men who have no interest in being liked and even less in being understood.

This has been mistaken, by some, as a victory for sanity. But that’s not quite right. It is a victory for a different kind of madness. The regime hasn’t been overthrown. It’s been re-armoured. The long experiment with soft power and moral humiliation—mass immigration, green austerity, critical race theory in the barracks—has run its course. That phase is over. The parasite nearly killed its host. The host got tired of the humiliation. And so, in a moment of grudging clarity, the ruling class cleaned house. Not to abandon the project. To save it.

Trump is the face of a new faction—the realists, the pragmatists, the men who want the Empire to work again. They don’t want peace. They want efficiency. They don’t want freedom. They want a stronger machine. That machine still needs fuel. And Ukraine is still part of the mechanism.

Let’s be clear: under Trump, the war in Ukraine doesn’t end. It evolves. The slogans disappear. The flag-waving stops. The NGOs pack up. The money continues to flow—but this time as leverage, not charity. Trump’s faction doesn’t want to free Ukraine. They want to own it.

The model is not moral crusade. It’s mafia enforcement. You pay, or you pay. You fight, or we find someone else who will. We’ll give you weapons, sure. But we want your minerals, your land, your submission. You can wave your little flag if you like. Just know who owns the flagpole. This is how a rational empire behaves once it loses the capacity to lies people into loving it. Instead, it stops pretending. It stops flattering. It just makes demands. And everyone downstream adapts.

Europe, of course, bends the knee. It always does. Germany rebrands its surrender as “strategic autonomy.” France sulks. Britain does what it’s told. The eastern countries squeal with gratitude as the Americans move another missile battery into their backyards. No one resists. They’re too addicted to the protection—and too scared to admit the cost.

The Trump administration sees this clearly. And it exploits it ruthlessly. Ukraine remains the tool. The Europeans remain the host. Russia remains the target. And all of it—the entire circus—is meant to buy time for the bigger war. Because none of this is ultimately about Ukraine. It’s about China. The Thermidorian regime in Washington knows that it cannot fight Russia and China at the same time. So it bleeds Russia now, hoping to break its back before Beijing decides the Pacific is open for business. If that means another year of Ukrainian cities turned to ash, so be it. If that means a million more Ukrainian men turned to meat, so be it. If that means Europe is permanently deindustrialised, so be it.

None of this is emotional. None of it is accidental. It is cold, mechanised strategy. A rational parasite calculates how much blood it can take before the host dies. An even more rational parasite replaces the intravenous needle with a surgical extraction process. Cleaner. Quieter. Less risk of revolt. Trump and his men understand this. That’s why they are not stopping the war. They are reconfiguring it. Away from moral pretexts. Toward operational value. This is not liberal empire. It’s imperial capitalism with the mask removed. But let no one mistake that for salvation.

Yes, it’s better to have serious men at the helm than the gallery of giggling eunuchs who ran things before. Yes, the new regime might stop the worst of the domestic insanity—might pause the castration of schoolboys and the financial strangulation of farmers. It may tell the British and European satrapies to do likewise. But this is a tactical correction. Not a moral conversion. They are still parasites. They are still building a world in which your country is a resource hub, your army a client militia, and your people disposable units on a spreadsheet. They just do it more efficiently.

And that brings us back to Ukraine. What is Ukraine, in this Thermidorian world? It is a test site. A sinkhole for obsolete munitions. A place to rehearse the new doctrine of proxy warfare. It is not an ally. It is not a democracy. It is a contract with no exit clause. The men running the show now don’t cry about democracy. They don’t care. They want results. And the result they want is clear: weaken Russia, lock down Europe, and get ready for the main event.

So yes—assume rationality in Washington. Assume the empire knows what it’s doing. Then you will understand why the war continues. Why the aid never stops. Why the promises never materialise. Why no one ever defines “victory.” Because victory isn’t the point. Control is.

The empire doesn’t need to win in Ukraine. It just needs to keep Ukraine from making its own decisions. It doesn’t need to restore Europe. It just needs Europe to obey. It doesn’t need Russia to collapse. It just needs Russia to stay pinned. And it doesn’t need peace. It needs structure. It needs containment. It needs leverage.

Yes, this is Thermidor. The regime has re-clothed itself in steel. The slogans are gone. The hard men are back. Do not mistake that for weakness. And do not, under any circumstances, mistake it for goodness.