Fran Hersh | November 11, 2026
I once met a CIA agent who was trying to explain to me how patriotic he was. He spoke about how much he loved his country, how proud he was of his work, and how everything he did was ultimately about protecting America and the American people.
I don’t doubt that he believed what he was saying. But I remember thinking about what patriotism actually means. Does loving your country mean serving its government, defending its institutions, and carrying out whatever operations your superiors consider necessary? Or does it mean defending the principles upon which that country was founded?
Because I see nothing patriotic about deceiving the American public, manipulating its fears, or concealing government actions that the people might never have approved had they known the truth. What exactly are you protecting when you deceive the very people whose freedom you claim to defend?
The United States was founded upon the principle that political authority derives from the people. They are supposed to determine the direction of their country, hold their government accountable, and decide what sacrifices they are prepared to make. But how can they exercise that authority when the information upon which their judgment depends is deliberately concealed, distorted, or presented to serve political objectives?
A democracy cannot function without an informed public. If intelligence agencies and political leaders believe they have the right to manipulate public opinion for the supposed benefit of the nation, they are undermining the very principles they claim to protect.
And if lying to the American people has become an act of patriotism, then patriotism has been turned against the foundations of the American republic.
The history of American intelligence operations in Ukraine offers a particularly disturbing example of how institutions established to protect national security can become instruments of geopolitical confrontation, political interference, and the creation of enemies.
And how their activities can eventually make the very country they claim to protect considerably less safe.
The CIA’s Forgotten War in Ukraine
On September 5, 1949, an American military transport aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and dropped two Ukrainian agents near Lviv. They carried forged documents, weapons, communications equipment, gold coins, and suicide pills. Their mission was to establish contact with anti-Soviet resistance movements and prepare the ground for an armed uprising.
Both agents disappeared.
Additional missions followed, with similar results. Most of the agents were captured or killed, but the CIA continued trying to destabilize Soviet Ukraine through clandestine operations and support for nationalist organizations.
These operations formed part of Project AERODYNAMIC, one of the longest-running covert programs in American intelligence history. As historian Stephen Kinzer explains in his new book, Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, Ukraine became an instrument of American strategic policy long before most Americans understood why the country mattered.
This is no conspiracy theory. The history is documented in American government archives.
In 2010, the United States National Archives published Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, an investigation based on declassified intelligence records.
Its chapter on Ukrainian nationalist organizations describes the CIA’s cooperation with the Hrinioch-Lebed network, including Mykola Lebed, a leading member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
And here we encounter something particularly disturbing.
Lebed was not merely a controversial nationalist with an unfortunate wartime past. He had been convicted in Poland for his involvement in the 1934 assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, receiving a death sentence subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped from prison following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
During the Second World War, Lebed became one of the leaders of the radical OUN-B faction associated with Stepan Bandera. According to the National Archives, he had received training at a Gestapo facility in Zakopane and was intended to become security minister in the Ukrainian state proclaimed by Bandera’s followers in 1941.
But his most disturbing historical involvement concerns the mass killings of civilians.
In 1943, Ukrainian nationalist forces began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Polish communities in Volhynia, subsequently extending the violence into Eastern Galicia and other territories. Entire villages were attacked, families were murdered, and civilians were targeted because of their nationality. According to Polish historical research, approximately 100,000 Polish civilians were killed in the massacres. Ukrainian nationalist formations were also involved in the killing of Jews during the Nazi occupation.
The National Archives report records that in April 1943, Lebed proposed removing the Polish population from the territories claimed by Ukrainian nationalists. It also documents his identification by Ukrainian émigrés in New York as a leader responsible for mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.
In his November 4, 2026, lecture at Brown University, Stephen Kinzer described Lebed’s role in the 1943 killing campaign, in which tens of thousands of Poles and Jews died. Although historians have debated the precise operational responsibilities of individual OUN and UPA commanders, Lebed occupied a position of leadership within the movement responsible for those atrocities.
And the CIA knew enough about his background to understand exactly what kind of man it was employing.
A 1947 American Counter Intelligence Corps report described Lebed as a German collaborator and sadist. CIA handlers later referred to his Gestapo connections and ruthlessness. Yet the agency considered him exceptionally valuable.
In May 1952, CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles personally intervened to secure Lebed’s immigration status, describing him as essential to American intelligence operations. The agency protected him from investigation, brought him to the United States, and made him a principal operative in its clandestine campaign against Soviet Ukraine.
Consider the moral contradiction.
The United States had just fought a world war against Nazi Germany. Millions of people had died, Europe had been devastated, and the world had witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet within a few years, American intelligence was willing to protect and employ a man implicated in nationalist organizations responsible for murdering civilians during that same war.
Why?
Because he hated Moscow, possessed useful networks, and could serve American strategic interests.
The enemy had changed. And apparently, that was enough to change the moral judgment as well.
The consequences of this history are still felt today, particularly in relations between Ukraine and Poland.
For Poland, the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia are not some obscure historical disagreement. They represent one of the most painful episodes of the Second World War, remembered as genocide against Polish civilians. Families were destroyed, entire communities disappeared, and generations inherited the memory of those crimes.
Yet some of the nationalist figures associated with that period continue to be honored in Ukraine for their struggle against Soviet domination.
The dispute erupted again in October 2026, when the Lviv regional council voted to designate 2027 as a year commemorating the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Roman Shukhevych, one of its principal wartime commanders. The decision provoked strong condemnation in Poland, including from Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and Ukrainian national authorities subsequently moved to prevent the regional resolution from taking effect.
These commemorations concerned Shukhevych and the UPA, rather than Lebed personally, but they illustrate the continuing controversy surrounding the nationalist movement in which Lebed had been a leading figure.
How are Polish families supposed to feel when organizations associated with the murder of their relatives are celebrated as national heroes? How can neighboring nations build trust and reconciliation when one country’s symbols of liberation are connected to another country’s memories of mass murder?
These are not questions of collective guilt. They concern historical responsibility and the danger of turning political movements into national myths that leave no room for examining their crimes.
And the CIA’s relationship with Lebed reveals an even broader problem: for American intelligence, the moral history of its allies could become secondary to their usefulness against a geopolitical adversary.
When the early armed operations failed, the agency changed its methods.
Instead of sending more agents into Soviet territory, it increasingly turned toward publishing, broadcasting, political influence, and intelligence collection. Under CIA supervision, Lebed’s organization developed the Prolog Research and Publishing Association, which produced newspapers, books, pamphlets, and radio programs intended for Ukrainian audiences.
In 1957 alone, according to the National Archives, Prolog distributed approximately 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 pamphlets while broadcasting around 1,200 radio programs with CIA support.
The CIA’s involvement was concealed, and many writers did not know they were participating in an intelligence operation.
Think about that.
An American intelligence agency was secretly financing political literature, influencing public attitudes, and supporting nationalist movements inside another country’s territory. It was not merely collecting information for the American government. It was attempting to shape political developments to serve Washington’s geopolitical objectives.
Certainly, Ukrainians had genuine grievances against Soviet rule. They had experienced repression, famine, and restrictions on their national independence. The CIA did not invent those grievances.
But it recognized their strategic value and exploited them.
This is how foreign political interference works. A government does not need to manufacture divisions within another society. It can identify existing ones, strengthen selected factions, provide financing and organizational support, and gradually transform domestic political disputes into instruments of geopolitical competition.
And these methods did not disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Soviet Union Disappeared. Why Didn’t the Confrontation?
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Warsaw Pact disappeared, communist governments fell throughout Eastern Europe, and Russia began its difficult transition toward a new political and economic system. The confrontation that had dominated international relations for almost half a century appeared to be over.
For the first time in generations, Europe had an extraordinary opportunity to establish a security arrangement that included Russia rather than organizing the continent against it.
Imagine what that could have meant.
Russia possessed enormous natural resources, Europe had advanced industries and technologies, and Ukraine stood between them with fertile agricultural land, manufacturing capacity, and a highly educated population. Economic cooperation could have created prosperity across the continent while gradually reducing the importance of military alliances and geopolitical divisions.
Ukraine itself had expressed an intention to become permanently neutral in its 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty.
There was no inherent necessity for Ukraine to become an instrument of confrontation between Washington and Moscow. It could have remained politically independent, economically connected to both regions, and militarily neutral under internationally guaranteed arrangements.
Instead, NATO continued expanding eastward.
In 1997, George F. Kennan, one of the principal architects of America’s Cold War containment strategy, publicly warned that NATO enlargement would revive nationalist and anti-Western tendencies in Russia.
In February 2008, American ambassador William Burns reported to Washington that Ukrainian NATO membership was regarded as a serious threat across much of the Russian political establishment. Two months later, NATO announced at its Bucharest summit that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members.
The alliance made a geopolitical promise without establishing the security arrangements necessary to manage its consequences.
The warnings were not imaginary, nor were they issued by Russian propagandists. They came from experienced American diplomats who understood the historical and strategic sensitivities of the region.
And they were ignored.
Of course, Russia had no right to dictate Ukraine’s entire political future. Smaller countries are not property belonging to larger neighbors. But neither can responsible international security be reduced to the claim that every military alliance is entitled to expand wherever it wishes, regardless of the consequences for other countries.
That contradiction was never adequately resolved.
Meanwhile, American political involvement in Ukraine continued.
During the Maidan crisis of 2013–2014, American diplomats openly supported the protest movement and discussed the composition of a future Ukrainian government. In the now-famous leaked conversation between Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, senior U.S. officials discussed which Ukrainian opposition figures should assume important positions.
In December 2013, Nuland had publicly stated that the United States had invested more than $5 billion in Ukraine since independence, supporting political institutions, civic participation, governance, and other objectives intended to encourage Ukraine’s Western orientation.
Five billion dollars is a substantial commitment to the political development of another country. It demonstrates that Washington’s interest in Ukraine was not a sudden response to the Maidan demonstrations. The United States had spent more than two decades building relationships with Ukrainian institutions, political organizations, and civil society.
Then came the revolution.
Senior American officials appeared in Kyiv, publicly encouraged the opposition, and discussed which politicians they preferred to see in a future government. The leaked Nuland-Pyatt conversation provides an extraordinary glimpse into those discussions, including Nuland’s preference for Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
And the American role may have gone considerably further than public diplomacy.
Covert operations are designed to conceal their participants, financing, and operational methods. Historians investigating them rarely begin with a complete set of orders signed by intelligence directors. They reconstruct events through financial relationships, organizational networks, communications, testimony, and the evidence that becomes available over time.
In the case of Maidan, that circumstantial evidence deserves serious attention.
Washington had financed political organizations and cultivated relationships within Ukraine for decades. American officials openly supported the opposition and discussed the leadership they wished to see emerge. Kinzer argues that American-funded networks helped sustain the organizational infrastructure of the uprising, including logistical support necessary for demonstrators to maintain their occupation of the square.
My assessment is that CIA involvement in organizing or supporting parts of Maidan is highly probable. I cannot identify the agency’s precise operational role from the public records, but the accumulated evidence of American political involvement, the CIA’s long history of operations in Ukraine, and the testimony concerning the organizational infrastructure make the possibility far too substantial to dismiss.
What would settle the matter is not another repetition of official assurances, but examination of the funding networks, contacts, instructions, and classified records concerning the period.
The fact that an operation is covert should make us more determined to investigate it, not less.
And the subsequent developments make the question even more important.
Within days of Yanukovych’s fall, the new Ukrainian intelligence leadership was seeking direct assistance from the CIA. According to the 2024 New York Times investigation, Ukraine’s new security officials contacted American and British intelligence representatives on February 24, 2014, to establish a partnership.
After Russia seized Crimea and armed conflict developed in Donbas, that relationship expanded dramatically.
By 2016, the CIA was training Ukrainian intelligence officers and specialized units. It helped develop surveillance capabilities, intelligence networks, and facilities directed toward gathering information about Russia.
The New York Times, drawing upon more than 200 interviews with American, Ukrainian, and European intelligence officials, revealed a network that eventually included twelve secret CIA-supported intelligence bases along Russia’s border.
Consider what had happened.
Ukraine, which had once declared an intention to remain neutral, had become the location of an extensive American intelligence operation directed against Russia. The relationship was developed amid a conflict in which Ukrainian and Russian security fears reinforced one another.
And the American public knew remarkably little about the scale of this partnership.
Was this making America safer? Or had an intelligence service originally established to protect the country become deeply involved in a confrontation whose escalation could threaten the lives of millions?
That is a question the American people deserve to answer for themselves.
When Intelligence Becomes an Instrument of Public Persuasion
An intelligence agency should provide reliable information to those responsible for making national decisions. It should identify threats, explain uncertainties, evaluate intentions, and help prevent mistakes that could endanger the country.
But the CIA is not merely an intelligence-gathering institution. Its legal mandate also includes covert action—activities intended to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad while concealing the American government’s role.
Here lies an institutional conflict of interest.
An organization participating in geopolitical operations can also contribute intelligence assessments about the consequences of those operations. Its information may shape the decisions of political leaders who authorize further intervention. Parts of that intelligence may then be selectively disclosed to journalists, whose reporting influences public opinion.
The danger is obvious. Information can cease to function merely as a means of understanding events and become an instrument for influencing how society responds to them.
We have seen this before.
During the Vietnam War, government officials publicly presented a far more optimistic account of the conflict than their internal assessments justified. The Pentagon Papers eventually revealed how successive administrations concealed doubts, military failures, and political calculations from the American people.
Iraq provided another example. Intelligence assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction contained substantial uncertainties, but the political presentation transformed disputed conclusions into apparent certainties. The public was encouraged to regard war as necessary before the evidence could withstand serious scrutiny.
Ukraine introduces another variation of the same problem.
In April 2022, NBC News reported that American officials were releasing intelligence about Russia as part of an information strategy, sometimes without firm evidence supporting particular claims.
One prominent example concerned warnings that Russia might use chemical weapons. Officials subsequently told NBC that they had no evidence Russian chemical weapons had actually been moved near Ukraine. The information had been released partly to deter a possible Russian action.
The purpose was therefore not exclusively to inform the public about established facts. It was also to influence the behavior of another government.
In February 2024, TIME described how the White House had developed a systematic program for selectively declassifying and releasing intelligence to advance strategic objectives. CIA Director William Burns, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and national security officials were involved in the broader process.
This is a remarkable development. Intelligence, which citizens generally understand as information collected to help their government make informed decisions, was being deliberately used to shape public perceptions and influence an international confrontation.
Some of the disclosures were accurate. American intelligence correctly anticipated Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. But intelligence accuracy and intelligence messaging are different matters. The ability to reveal genuine threats does not justify presenting uncertain claims as established facts or selecting information according to its political usefulness.
As I argue in Flawed Democracy and How to Fix It, the most effective deception does not always require inventing facts.
Sometimes it is enough to present truthful facts inside a profoundly incomplete picture.
A government can truthfully report that Russia invaded Ukraine while largely excluding the preceding history of American operations, NATO expansion, disputed security arrangements, and failed diplomatic opportunities.
Every individual statement may be true, but the public is left with an explanation that makes only one conclusion appear reasonable.
And once that conclusion becomes accepted, the next policy decision becomes easier.
More weapons. More sanctions. More military deployments. More intelligence operations. More confrontation.
All presented as the unavoidable consequences of an enemy’s behavior.
But what about the decisions that helped create the confrontation?
Why are those decisions so rarely subjected to the same scrutiny?
The Making of an Enemy
In January 2022, shortly before Russia’s invasion, a Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of Americans regarded Russia as an enemy of the United States.
By late March, the figure had risen to 70 percent.
Russia’s invasion naturally played a major role in that transformation. Americans saw Ukrainian cities being attacked, millions fleeing their homes, and a major European war unfolding on their television screens.
But how was that anger interpreted, reinforced, and directed? What political conclusions were Americans encouraged to draw from the events? And what history was largely absent from the explanation they received?
Condemning a government’s military decisions is not the same as regarding an entire nation as an enemy. Russians are not collectively responsible for every decision made by the Kremlin, just as Americans are not collectively responsible for every covert operation authorized by Washington.
Yet international conflicts regularly encourage precisely this confusion.
Political disputes become national identities. Governments become peoples. Military confrontation becomes moral hostility. A conflict that might have been resolved through negotiation becomes a struggle in which compromise appears dishonorable because the other side has become the embodiment of everything we are supposed to oppose.
This is extraordinarily useful to political systems built around competition.
In my book, I describe how polarization creates political opportunities. Leaders mobilize followers by identifying dangers, defining enemies, and presenting themselves as the people capable of protecting society. Political parties thrive on divisions because divisions create loyal constituencies. Foreign policy operates through similar mechanisms, except that the consequences can involve entire nations and nuclear arsenals.
When an enemy exists, governments can demand extraordinary sacrifices.
Military budgets become necessities. Surveillance becomes protection. Secret operations become national security. Political dissent becomes questionable loyalty. Military escalation becomes a demonstration of strength, while diplomacy can be presented as weakness.
The result is a society increasingly prepared for confrontation rather than cooperation.
And what happens to the people who question it?
They may be accused of defending an adversary merely because they ask whether the confrontation could have been prevented.
That is a dangerous way to organize democratic debate.
A genuine democracy should be capable of condemning Russia’s invasion while also examining America’s historical involvement in Ukraine. It should be capable of supporting Ukrainian political independence while questioning whether NATO expansion provided the best conditions for European security. It should be capable of acknowledging Russian abuses without pretending that American foreign policy has always been innocent.
These positions are not contradictory.
They become contradictory only when politics is reduced to choosing sides.
Why Permanent Confrontation Serves Powerful Interests
Now we come to the deeper problem.
Why does the national security establishment repeatedly gravitate toward confrontation, even when more cooperative international relationships might produce better long-term outcomes?
I do not believe we can explain this solely through the personalities of individual politicians or intelligence officers. The more important explanation lies in institutional incentives.
Intelligence agencies have legitimate reasons to exist even in peacetime. Governments need to understand foreign developments, detect real threats, and protect national security.
But permanent confrontation also expands the importance of the institutions responsible for managing it. Threat assessments justify budgets. Intelligence operations establish new networks. Military cooperation generates additional commitments. Each commitment may then require further protection, funding, and political support.
The original danger becomes the justification for preserving the machinery built to confront it.
There is a similar economic mechanism.
In July 2025, Brown University’s Costs of War project reported that private contractors received approximately $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts between 2020 and 2024, representing about 54 percent of the department’s discretionary spending during that period.
Five major weapons manufacturers—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—received approximately $771 billion.
We are not talking about a marginal industry.
We are talking about an enormous economic structure dependent on public expenditure, with substantial lobbying networks, political connections, research funding, and influence over national security discussions.
Its products are weapons and military technologies. Its commercial opportunities expand when governments increase procurement and prepare for possible conflicts.
And the political consequences of those incentives deserve much greater attention than they receive.
In 2019, the RAND Corporation published Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, a study examining possible American strategies for exploiting Russia’s vulnerabilities.
Among the options discussed were geopolitical measures, increased military assistance to Ukraine, and ways to impose additional costs on Russia. The report explicitly examined escalation risks and warned that some measures could provoke dangerous Russian counteractions.
Consider the underlying logic.
The objective was not primarily to discover how Russia and the United States could build mutually beneficial relationships. It was to identify opportunities for imposing costs on a strategic competitor.
And when governments organize their foreign policy around exploiting rivals’ weaknesses, every regional dispute becomes an opportunity for pressure, every alliance becomes an instrument of competition, and every crisis becomes another calculation of advantage.
The defense industry benefits from the resulting procurement. Intelligence institutions receive additional missions. Political leaders gain opportunities to demonstrate resolve.
Meanwhile, ordinary people pay the price.
Ukrainians lose their homes, their families, their infrastructure, and their economic future. Russians lose their sons and daughters. Europeans face heightened security risks and enormous military commitments. American taxpayers finance a confrontation that carries the danger of escalation between nuclear powers.
And the people making these decisions rarely bear anything resembling the same risks.
This is the structural problem I identify throughout Flawed Democracy: political and economic power becomes concentrated among institutions that can benefit from decisions whose consequences are imposed upon everyone else.
It does not require every participant to be corrupt or dishonest.
It requires a system in which the incentives of powerful institutions become increasingly disconnected from the interests of ordinary people.
We Did Not Need This Confrontation
Let us imagine another path.
After the Cold War, the United States could have pursued a comprehensive European security agreement incorporating Russia, Ukraine, and the European countries into a system of reciprocal guarantees.
Ukraine could have remained politically independent, economically connected to Europe and Russia, and militarily neutral under agreements protecting it from outside domination.
Russia would have received credible guarantees against hostile military deployments along its borders, while Ukraine would have received equally credible protection against Russian coercion or invasion.
American and European governments could have invested their resources in economic cooperation, industrial development, infrastructure, and peaceful relationships rather than allowing Ukraine to become the center of an escalating strategic struggle.
Would such an arrangement have guaranteed peace?
No. Governments might still have violated their commitments, domestic political disputes could still have emerged, and Russia might still have pursued ambitions incompatible with Ukrainian independence.
But at least the most dangerous strategic contradiction would have been addressed through agreed rules rather than left to escalating threats and military calculations.
That opportunity was not adequately pursued.
Instead, the international system continued operating through rival alliances, secret intelligence operations, military deterrence, and political interference.
And when the confrontation finally produced war, it was presented as though the only available options were military victory or submission.
But the world is not condemned to choose between those alternatives forever.
We can change the rules.
The Doctrine of Reciprocal Strategic Security
In my previous article, How to End the War in Ukraine: The Doctrine of Reciprocal Strategic Security, I proposed a framework designed to prevent precisely this type of confrontation.
The doctrine begins with a simple proposition:
No country has the right to pursue its geopolitical advantage by deliberately creating a threatening military confrontation on another country’s territory.
Its purpose is not to resolve every disagreement between nations. It is to prevent governments from turning neighboring countries into instruments of strategic competition and to establish responsibilities before confrontation develops into war.
It rests on six principles.
1. Reciprocal strategic restraint
Countries located in especially sensitive security zones along the borders of great powers should remain militarily neutral or voluntarily aligned with their neighboring power under arrangements that do not threaten other states.
Such arrangements must be negotiated, reciprocal, and accompanied by enforceable guarantees protecting the smaller country’s independence.
The United States cannot demand that hostile military powers remain outside its immediate neighborhood while claiming an unrestricted right to establish threatening military relationships along Russia’s or China’s borders.
The same restriction must apply to Russia and China.
Neutrality must not become a disguised form of domination. A neighboring power receiving security guarantees must respect the political independence, economic development, and sovereign institutions of the neutral country.
2. Prohibition of hostile foreign political interference
Governments must not organize or finance unconstitutional political subversion, covert regime change, or political operations intended to establish prohibited hostile military influence inside another country.
This restriction must apply to intelligence agencies, military institutions, government-financed political organizations, and other entities acting on behalf of foreign strategic interests.
Legitimate diplomacy, cultural exchange, humanitarian assistance, and transparent civic cooperation remain possible.
But neither Washington nor Moscow should be permitted to use another country’s domestic political divisions as an instrument for establishing strategic dominance over its rivals.
Political independence must be protected from both sides.
3. Protection of legitimate strategic interests during political crises
When the constitutional order of a strategically sensitive country collapses, existing strategic arrangements must remain protected through an emergency international procedure.
Military-base agreements, defensive installations, security treaties, and arrangements protecting vulnerable populations should not be placed in immediate danger simply because a government has fallen.
The doctrine would require independent investigation, temporary restrictions on hostile military realignment, and negotiations to preserve legitimate security guarantees.
Where an immediate and serious danger cannot otherwise be prevented, narrowly defined protective measures could be authorized under strict international rules, independent review, and obligations to protect civilians.
Temporary protection cannot automatically become permanent occupation or annexation.
The purpose is to prevent governments from improvising military responses under conditions of uncertainty when effective international safeguards should already exist.
4. Responsibility for creating a confrontation
International responsibility must begin with the decisions that created the danger, not merely with the moment military force was first used.
A confrontation can involve an outside power pursuing geopolitical objectives, a host government allowing its territory to become involved, and a neighboring state responding to the perceived threat.
Each bears responsibility for its own conduct.
An outside power that deliberately creates a prohibited strategic threat should not escape examination merely because another state subsequently uses military force.
Equally, foreign interference does not grant the responding state an unrestricted right to invade or annex territory.
The country that fires the first shot is not necessarily the country that created the confrontation.
That distinction must be incorporated into international law if we want to prevent wars rather than merely assign blame after they have begun.
5. Independent enforcement and personal accountability
International security agreements must be independently verified and enforceable.
Governments, intelligence agencies, political leaders, military commanders, and financiers involved in prohibited operations must be subject to investigation.
Where criminal conduct under applicable law is established, individuals should face prosecution through fair judicial procedures. Political responsibility and criminal liability must remain distinct.
National security cannot serve as an unlimited justification for secrecy, nor should government officials be able to escape responsibility merely because their operations were classified.
The same legal standards must apply to powerful and weaker states.
6. Universal application and peaceful coexistence
The doctrine must apply equally to the United States, Russia, China, and every other country.
It cannot become another instrument through which one bloc imposes restrictions upon its rivals while exempting itself.
Its ultimate purpose is not to freeze the world into permanent spheres of influence, but to prevent threatening military relationships while allowing economic, cultural, scientific, and political cooperation to develop freely.
A neutral country should not have to choose between prosperity and independence.
And great powers should not have to organize their security around the permanent fear of one another.
What Is Patriotic About Lying to Your Own People?
I return now to that CIA agent I met, and to his conviction that he was serving his country.
I have no reason to doubt his personal sincerity. Perhaps he genuinely believed that every operation he participated in helped protect Americans from danger. Perhaps he considered himself a defender of freedom, democracy, and the nation he loved.
But that is precisely why we must distinguish patriotism from obedience.
A person can love his country and still serve an institution whose actions undermine its principles. He can sincerely believe he is protecting the public while participating in policies that expose it to greater danger. And he can consider secrecy necessary without asking whether the people in whose name he acts would ever have consented to what was being done.
That is not an argument against intelligence gathering. Governments require reliable information about foreign threats, military capabilities, and international developments.
It is an argument against turning intelligence into political warfare while treating public accountability as an inconvenience.
The United States already recognizes part of this distinction in law. Under 50 U.S.C. § 3093, covert action intended to influence American public opinion, domestic political processes, policies, or media is expressly prohibited.
But the broader problem remains. The public has been asked to support policies carrying extraordinary financial and military risks while much of the history of American involvement, intelligence activity, and strategic decision-making has remained concealed or received inadequate scrutiny.
And whenever intelligence is selectively disclosed to influence public perceptions rather than simply to inform them, the boundary between national security and political manipulation becomes dangerously thin.
If the public is expected to support foreign policy, finance military operations, accept the risks of escalation, and bear the consequences of war, it deserves access to the evidence and relevant history necessary to judge those policies intelligently.
Otherwise, what does democracy actually mean?
Are citizens governing their country, or are they merely approving decisions made elsewhere after being presented with the information necessary to make those decisions appear reasonable?
That is why I regard the problem as much larger than the CIA.
The national security establishment, the political system that supervises it, the corporations benefiting from military spending, and the media through which official narratives reach the public all operate within relationships that can reward confrontation while limiting accountability.
And until those relationships change, replacing individual politicians or intelligence directors will not necessarily produce better results.
The CIA should be required to inform government truthfully, operate within clearly defined legal limits, and answer for operations that violate those limits. It should not be treated as an institution whose strategic judgments are beyond public challenge.
Nor should political leaders be permitted to turn national security into a permanent excuse for policies whose costs are borne by others.
The American people do not need a permanent enemy to live in safety.
They need responsible institutions, reliable information, peaceful relationships with other nations, and an international security system that makes dangerous confrontations less likely.
More than sixty years ago, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy urged Americans to reconsider their attitudes toward the Soviet Union and recognize the humanity of the Soviet people. The two nations had profound political disagreements, but they shared the same desire to survive, protect their children, and avoid nuclear destruction.
That recognition helped make arms-control negotiations possible.
Why have we moved so far away from that understanding?
Russians and Americans do not need to hate one another. Ukrainians and Russians do not need to be condemned to permanent hostility. Europe does not need another generation organized around military confrontation.
The conflicts between our governments are not immutable laws of nature. They arise from political decisions, institutional arrangements, and relationships that human beings have created.
And what we have created, we can change.
As I argue in Flawed Democracy and How to Fix It:
We do not change people. We change the relationships between people.
The same principle applies to nations.
If we build an international system that rewards political interference, strategic competition, military escalation, and the exploitation of rival countries’ weaknesses, we should not be surprised when the result is insecurity and war.
But if we establish reciprocal restraint, protect political independence, prohibit hostile interference, and make governments accountable for creating dangerous confrontations, we can begin moving toward a world in which cooperation becomes more advantageous than conflict.
That is the purpose of the Doctrine of Reciprocal Strategic Security.
We do not need another Cold War, another arms race, or another generation raised to believe that a nation on the other side of the world must be its enemy.
We have already wasted enough lives, money, and opportunities learning what happens when governments organize the world around fear.
And this is what I would say today to that CIA agent who so proudly explained how much he loved his country:
If you love America, defend the principles upon which it was founded. Protect the people’s freedom to know, to judge, and to decide. Tell them the truth, even when that truth embarrasses your government or challenges its policies. Because your loyalty should ultimately belong to the American people, not to the institutional interests of the agency employing you.
There is nothing patriotic about deceiving the people in the name of protecting them.
A democracy can survive mistakes, political disagreements, and even terrible crises. But it cannot remain a democracy if those entrusted with protecting it believe they have the right to govern through deception.
The moment lies become a patriotic duty, the principles they claim to defend have already been betrayed.
Sources and Further Reading
CIA operations, Lebed, and the wartime massacres
- Stephen Kinzer — Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine (2026)
- Brown University — Stephen Kinzer’s November 4, 2026 Lecture
- U.S. National Archives — Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (2010)
- Jared McBride — Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944
- Polish Institute of National Remembrance — World War II and the Volhynia Massacres
- TVP World — Poland Condemns Lviv’s Plan to Honor UPA and Shukhevych (October 2026)
Modern American involvement in Ukraine
- U.S. State Department — Victoria Nuland’s December 2013 Remarks
- BBC — Nuland-Pyatt Leaked Telephone Conversation (2014)
- The New York Times — The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin (2024)
- NATO — Bucharest Summit Declaration (2008)
Intelligence, public opinion, and strategic competition
- NBC News — U.S. Use of Declassified Intelligence in the Information War with Russia (2022)
- TIME — Inside the White House Program to Share America’s Secrets (2024)
- Pew Research Center — Seven-in-Ten Americans Now See Russia as an Enemy (2022)
- RAND Corporation — Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground (2019)
- Brown University — Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024 (2025)