How Trump Pulled Us Back from the Brink of World War III

There is a view, once dismissed as alarmist, now vindicated by events and evidence. It holds that under President Biden, the United States was not merely aiding Ukraine but actively accelerating toward a military confrontation with Russia. This was not incidental. It was the logical endpoint of a policy of steady escalation, one decision compounding the next, all without a discernible off-ramp. Only the change in presidential administration averted disaster.

At the outset of the Ukraine conflict in early 2022, President Biden acknowledged the gravity of escalation. He warned that transferring high-grade American weapons such as Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, and F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, or enabling strikes within Russian territory, risked triggering World War III. He used the term "Armageddon" to describe what might follow if these lines were crossed. Such a pronouncement ought to have anchored restraint. Instead, it served as a prelude to each of those very lines being crossed.

The list of armaments eventually transferred speaks for itself: M1 Abrams tanks, HIMARS artillery systems, Patriot missiles, ATACMS, F-16s. Each item represented a rung on the escalation ladder. At each juncture, the administration justified the move as proportionate, necessary, and within the bounds of deterrence. Yet this rhetorical restraint could not disguise the operational reality. By spring 2024, U.S.-supplied missiles were striking Russian soil. The red line Biden once vowed to respect had not only been crossed, it had been rendered meaningless.

To grasp the full measure of recklessness here, one must understand the nature of modern warfare. The concept of the "kill chain" refers to the process of finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, engaging, and assessing a military objective. In traditional wars, sovereign militaries execute these steps autonomously. But Ukraine, by its own admission and by the New York Times’ reporting, depends heavily on U.S. satellite intelligence, targeting coordination, and battlefield planning. We are not simply the arsenal of democracy, we are part of the targeting process itself. That is, a co-belligerent in all but name.

The Times article, published in April 2025, made plain what the administration refused to admit. American intelligence personnel were not merely supplying hardware, they were actively helping Ukraine plan strikes, including those that reached into the Russian Federation. American generals coordinated battlefield strategies. U.S. satellite imagery and electronic intercepts were used to identify and strike targets in Belgorod and Kursk. The official denials of direct involvement ring increasingly hollow.

Some will object that this cooperation is no different from what we did during the Cold War, arming mujahideen or supporting South Vietnam. But that analogy fails. Neither the Taliban nor the Viet Cong had access to American targeting satellites, nor were they striking targets within a nuclear-armed superpower. Those conflicts, grim as they were, occurred at the periphery of the Cold War. Here, we are in the heart of it, and the risk is of direct thermonuclear exchange.

This is why the shift in administration matters. President Trump, inaugurated in January 2025, inherited not a war, but a war policy on autopilot. His critics accuse him of isolationism. But this misunderstands the distinction between disengagement and diplomacy. The Trump doctrine, to the extent it can be reduced to a single axiom, is transactional realism. It favors talks over trenches, leverage over lectures. Within weeks of taking office, Trump reestablished direct diplomatic channels with Russia, the first substantive dialogue in nearly three years.

Steve Wickoff, Trump’s National Security Advisor, has worked diligently to stabilize the nuclear balance. Contrary to Beltway mythology, diplomacy with adversaries is not appeasement. It is prudence. And prudence, to invoke Burke, is the first of all virtues in politics. The failure to even speak with Moscow under the prior administration was not idealism, it was negligence.

Consider the counterfactual. Had the Biden policy continued unabated, what might have occurred? Ukraine, with American satellites, missiles, and coordinates, continues to strike deep into Russian territory. Russia, perceiving these as de facto U.S. attacks, escalates. Perhaps it strikes NATO infrastructure in Poland or Romania. Article 5 is invoked. U.S. troops mobilize. The spiral tightens. Each move reciprocated, each act interpreted through the prism of existential threat. We are now well within the range of nuclear miscalculation.

This is not conjecture. The 2023 RAND Corporation report, "Pathways to a U.S.-Russia Conflict," detailed precisely this scenario. The study warned that even limited U.S. involvement in Ukrainian targeting could lead to Russian counter-escalation, including cyberattacks, anti-satellite strikes, or even the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. RAND's language was clinical, but the message was plain: entanglement carries exponential risk.

Biden officials, perhaps sensing the danger, became increasingly evasive about red lines. One official told the Washington Post in 2024 that "escalation is subjective." That statement, stripped of its bureaucratic sheen, is a confession. They no longer knew what the boundaries were, or how to enforce them.

It is to President Trump’s credit that he restored a boundary: the boundary of American self-preservation. The decision to slow arms transfers, reopen diplomacy, and explore ceasefire frameworks has drawn predictable ire from the usual foreign policy clerisy. Yet these critics have no answers to the central question: if Russia interprets our actions as acts of war, what then? Do we fight a nuclear superpower to the last Ukrainian? Do we let our own cities burn to avenge Mariupol?

Some might ask: isn’t Russia the aggressor? Of course. But moral clarity does not imply strategic myopia. The aim of policy is not to expiate global sins, but to secure the republic. The American president does not swear an oath to Kyiv.

In closing, let us recall what Biden himself said in 2022. That sending F-16s or allowing strikes on Russian territory could lead to World War III. He was right. Then he did it anyway. We are fortunate that policy, like history, is reversible. But only just. Without Trump’s intervention, the glide path to nuclear war might have continued unbroken. Instead, we now have what we lacked for years: a brake, a boundary, and a belief that diplomacy is not surrender but survival.

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