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"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:
https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:
I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.
Today those bridges are more than a century old, and they are still too low for city buses to pass under them, and this continues to mean that people who don't own private vehicles find it more difficult to get to the beach, and as it's still the case that race is a predictor of low incomes, those are still racist bridges.
II. Artifacts whose politics are accidental but unavoidable. Winner cites a kind of tomato harvester that vastly improved the efficiency of tomato pickers. These harvesters became very popular, which allowed tomato farmers to lay off large numbers of agricultural workers, and also allowed them to price the mechanically harvested tomatoes so cheaply that they crowded out other kinds of tomatoes.
Because these machines created a large pool of unemployed workers, they shifted power from labor to capital, and because these picking machines were too rough for all but the hardest varietals of tomato, they changed the flavor profile of tomatoes in America for the worse, towards a bland, tough tomato.
These picking machines were not designed to make workers poorer, nor were they designed to make tomatoes taste worse, but because of their technical characteristics, this was the unavoidable outcome, the inextricable politics of these machines.
III. Artifacts whose politics are intrinsic to their design. Here, Winner contrasts solar panels with nuclear reactors. Solar panels may require highly centralized industrial systems to produce, but once they are in the field, solar panels are compatible with looser, less coordinated political arrangements. A world of small anarchist communes is fully compatible with solar energy.
Contrast this with nuclear reactors: the prudent ongoing operation of a reactor requires a highly centralized state that is capable of fielding reliable, trustworthy independent inspectors. This state must also be capable of exercising the coercive power to shut down badly maintained or incompetently operated reactors.
The politics of nukes are the politics of a centralized, powerful state; the politics of solar are less determined. Solar is compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including (but not limited to) weak, decentralized states.
(For a further exploration of "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" I highly recommend Ginger Coons' reading guide:)
https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/
I really like Winner's framework for exploring technopolitics, but I have my own gloss on it. Winner's framework doesn't explicitly contemplate the idea of technological countermeasures. For example, what if someone were to design a city bus that was low enough to fit under Robert Moses's bridges? At that point, they'd cease to be "racist bridges," and merely become "bridges built by a racist":
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/
Which brings me to the technopolitics of ad-tech. Lots of people think that advertising is "the original sin of the internet," setting in motion the surveillance dystopia that is closing in on us from all sides today:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech
I think this is wrong. I think that finding ways to communicate ideas and pitches to the general public is fine. Without some channel for reaching people with ideas and propositions they may not be familiar with, it would be infinitely harder to reach people for political causes. It would also be harder for new books, movies and music to find new audiences. It would be much harder to get people out to your independent craft fair, your zine show, or your No Kings march.
For me, the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws. The last consumer privacy law we got in America was a bill that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
(As I type these words, the Supreme Court is poised to eliminate even that dried-up old crumb of privacy protection:)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/supreme-court-privacy-rights-case-bork-kavanaugh.html
The widespread phenomenon of ad-tech companies spying on us is the result of the decision to allow them to do so. That decision has had innumerable negative downstream effects, such as skyrocketing "surveillance prices":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography
And collapsing "surveillance wages":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
It's created vast surveillance databases that are critical to Trump's racist pogroms, providing dossiers and precise location data on the people ICE kidnaps to Salvadoran slave-labor camps:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes
Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois
These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability.
Any time we forget this, we let spying tech bosses off the hook. After all, if advertising demands surveillance, then tech bosses are just the avatars of the great forces of history, prisoners of the imperative to spy in order to advertise. By remembering that surveillance advertising is a choice, we put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the guillotineable oligarchs who made that choice, and amassed spectacular fortunes thereby.
Surveillance is political, but surveillance advertising has its own distinct technopolitics, and to understand those technopolitics, we must contrast them with the technopolitics of contextual advertising. Up until a decade or two ago, contextual advertising was simply called "advertising." Contextual advertising is the practice of running refrigerator ads next to articles on cooking and kitchen remodeling; ads for roadside restaurants on highway billboards; ads for Disney vacations in parenting magazines.
Your intuition probably insists that context advertising is less effective than surveillance advertising. After all, surveillance advertising allows a running shoe company to target users who are training for a marathon no matter where they are and no matter what they're doing. Surely this translates into increased "conversions" (clicks and/or purchases, depending on who you're talking to)?
It does, but not by much. Advertisers get about 5% more value from surveillance ads than they do from context ads:
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf
Partly, that's because surveillance ad companies grossly overrate the efficacy of surveillance advertising:
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
But surveillance advertising's anemic returns to advertisers are down to another aspect of the system: its tendency towards monopolization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)
Surveillance is a capital-intensive activity: spying on billions of people as they move through the digital and physical world is incredibly expensive. That is a good part of the reason that online advertising has collapsed into the Meta/Google duopoly, who control about 80% of display advertising.
The harms of surveillance monopolies have a severely distorting effect on policy debates. For example, it's led some anti-monopolists to call for government-issued surveillance identifiers that follow us from birth to death in order to facilitate commercial spying to foster more competition in surveillance:
https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/
Here's the thing about monopolists: they cheat. Google and Meta have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the advertising market, overcharging advertisers and underpaying publishers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The ad-tech giants have taken in hundreds of billions that they simply can't account for. It's disappeared down a fraud-hole:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars
All of this has driven the majority of web users to install a privacy-blocker (like EFF's Privacybadger.org), meaning that surveillance ads are disproportionately likely to not even show up in a reader's browser:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
So while it's possible that, in a state of nature, a surveillance ad would outperform a context ad, delivering more sales for advertisers and more revenue for publishers, the monopolistic tendency of ad-tech means that publishers earn less from surveillance ads (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher commissions), and advertisers see fewer sales from them (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher prices).
Context ads, meanwhile, are always going to give power to publishers, because publishers will always understand the materials they publish better than any ad-tech platform could. Commissioning, editing and publishing an article, podcast or video gives a publisher unique and inalienable insight into that material.
Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.
It's possible to run "programmatic ads" without surveillance. Rather than building an ad-tech stack through which publishers transmit sensitive information about their audiences ("Who will pay me to advertise to this 18-34 year old man-child from the outer boroughs who owns an Xbox and has recently researched gonorrhea symptoms?"), we can build systems through which publishers transmit information about their own materials ("Who will advertise to a user with a New York IP address who is reading an article comparing running shoe brands?").
Not only is this possible, but it actually generates more revenues for publishers than the surveillance-based ad-tech stack:
On top of that, publishers who don't gather personal information about users also don't need to show their users those awful pop-up ads asking their permission to gather their data. Everyone hates those notices, and they are yet another negative aspect of surveillance advertising that disappears with the switch to context ads.
An ad-tech stack for context ads is far less prone to monopolization. Such a stack can be "federated," with multiple "demand-side platforms" (the part of the system that advertisers use to place bids for the right to show their ads) all communicating with the same "supply-side platform" (the part of the system publishers use to transmit opportunities to place ads).
This is also in the technopolitics of context ads: they do not tend toward the "efficiencies of scale" that lead to abusive monopolistic middlemen who steal from publishers and advertisers and sell out the public to fascists who want to arrest them and deport them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
When the ad-tech sector is composed of smaller companies that are more competitive with one another, it is much harder for any of them to collude to rig the market. That fierce competition also means it's harder to create a cozy conspiracy to lobby together to block privacy laws, and it leaves the companies with lower margins and less retained earnings to spend on those lobbying efforts.
Surveillance ads also promote all kinds of parasitic businesses. The fact that a publisher can serve ads related to users rather than the subject of their media means that sensationalistic and deceptive websites can sell ads that run against content that's totally unrelated to advertisers' products and services. And because it's cheaper to produce lies and garbage, these publishers can undercut the ad prices demanded by high quality outlets and let advertisers reach the same users. This is the whole reason that "chumboxes" exist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
Just as nuclear power favors a centralized state, surveillance advertising:
tends toward monopoly;
favors low-quality media over high-quality production;
impedes the passage of privacy laws;
provides authoritarian states with an off-the-books, warrantless source of surveillance data.
And just as solar allows for decentralized, anti-authoritarian societies, context advertising:
tends towards pluralism and diversity of voices;
favors high-quality media by reserving the lion's share of the rewards to the producers;
does not rely on a weak privacy environment;
does not militate for "democratizing spying" by issuing every person with a permanent advertising identifier.
There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with building systems to tell people about things you want them to know. There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with paying for media with ads. It's possible for both of these things to go awry, but they are not in and of themselves bad. They have contingent technopolitics.
But surveillance ads have completely unavoidable, absolutely ghastly technopolitics. Surveillance ads are bad for publishers, for advertisers, and for democracy. We should ban surveillance ads:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
(Image: Jess, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified).
US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers “ownership,” not “a license” https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/us-rep-proposes-bill-to-give-video-game-buyers-ownership-not-a-license/
Saviour or Scoundrel? https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/14308c3b-4f2a-4f39-a365-192c0206f886
Tiny Little Office https://tinylittleoffice.com/
Future? No Thanks! – an ecosocialist game https://futurenothanks.com/
#25yrsago Patrick Nielsen Hayden interviews Mike Ford https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126
#20yrsago Singapore bans Far East Economic Review https://web.archive.org/web/20061010002951/https://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0610/free/p006.html
#20yrsago Publishing isn’t bestseller-driven https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/conventional_un/
#20yrsago Why architecture and security don’t mix https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/architecture_an.html
#20yrsago Vista licence: Microsoft’s abusive relationship with you https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html
#20yrsago Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20061110065012/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/news/archive/2006/10/20/entertainment/e110452D84.DTL
#15yrsago Canadian Tories admit that Canadians don’t want DRM rules, push for them anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20111022210131/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6071/125
#15yrsago Visualizing Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20111021103517/http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/9-9-9-in-one-really-long-graph/
#15yrsago Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube https://web.archive.org/web/20111020145336/http://freebieber.org/
#15yrsago Belarusian central bank auctions off its sugar bowls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/belarus-central-bank-sells-office-furniture
#15yrsago Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE https://web.archive.org/web/20111022022046/http://www.occupygeorge.com/
#15yrsago HOWTO avoid a copyright shakedown legal threat: be famous, a politician, a cop, a soldier or a corpse https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-cops-and-politicians-escape-bittorrent-lawsuit-111013/
#10yrsago Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type https://web.archive.org/web/20170914051800/https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/
#10yrsago Digital Defenders: a free open-licensed booklet for kids about privacy and cryptography https://edri.org/files/privacy4kids_booklet_web.pdf
#10yrsago Public universities and even the US Navy have sold hundreds of patents to America’s most notorious troll https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/inside-intellectual-ventures-portfolio-nearly-500-university-patents
#10yrsago Airportraits: composite photos of all the daily takeoffs from the world’s airports https://mikekelley.art/?category=airportraits
#10yrsago Rich people can afford to buy more sleep than poor people https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/the-rich-can-sleep-in-thanks-to-better-transit/
#10yrsago Harry Shearer sues studio over Spinal Tap, says he’s received $98 in royalties over 30 years https://web.archive.org/web/20161224224142/https://www.yahoo.com/movies/harry-shearer-files-125-million-spinal-tap-fraud-suit-copyright-termination-150031664.html
#10yrsago ACLU asks court to reveal 23 secret surveillance laws https://web.archive.org/web/20161019224447/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/aclu-wants-secret-surveillance-laws-made-public/
#10yrsago Montana judge unrepentant after sentencing man to 60 days for repeatedly raping his own 12 year old daughter https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/19/us/montana-judge-incest-case-trnd/index.html
#10yrago Turkish court fines bystander/tourist who sued police for shooting out his eye https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kyrgyz-tourist-wounded-in-gezi-protests-ordered-to-pay-debt-to-turkish-state–104964
#10yrsago By stealing from innocents, Chicago PD amassed tens of millions in a secret black budget for surveillance gear https://web.archive.org/web/20160929143255/https://chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-department-civil-forfeiture-investigation/Content?oid=23728922
#10yrsago Turing’s law: UK to retroactively pardon thousands of men prosecuted for having sex with men https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518
#5yrsago The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#capital-as-power
#5yrsago Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast
#5yrsago The true, Terry Pratchett-esque origins of the trillion-dollar coin https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/19/moist-von-lipwig/#gimmick-v-gimmick
#1yrago The mad king's digital killswitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Donald Trump’s latest moves on Russia and Ukraine have alarmed Kyiv and European capitals alike. But rather than scrambling to contain the fallout, EU leaders are keeping their cool. Zoya Sheftalovich and Nick Vinocur explore Europe’s strategy for weathering Trump’s midterm storm — and what it means for Ukraine.
Then, France reels from a weekend of violent protests, with more than 1,800 arrests and widespread destruction. As political leaders trade accusations, we look at how the unrest is shaping the battle ahead of the 2027 presidential election from Paris.
Plus, hackers turn supermarket fridges into heaters, exposing some surprisingly basic cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
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DONALD TRUMP’S “OCTOBER SURPRISE” of a renewed bromance with Vladimir Putin has developed with startling rapidity. Maybe he’s delusional enough to think that buying a few days’ worth of diesel fuel from Putin and blaming Volodymyr Zelensky for the high prices will save him from a Republican midterm bloodbath. Maybe he anticipates that a Democratic House—and perhaps a Democratic Senate—will constrain him after the elections and sees a last chance to advance a pro-Russian agenda with a free hand. Either way, it has been a very grim development in the war in Ukraine: Whatever the eventual fallout, it has already done tremendous damage on account of the disruption of Starlink/Starshield communication signals that are, among other things, essential to the interception of Russian drones.
But one may find some dark humor in the plight of pundits on the right who have long maintained that, ackshually, Ukraine had no better friend than Trump. Take Washington Post columnist (and former George W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen, whose greatest hits include, “Putin is stalling and Trump is angry. It’s time for ‘maximum pressure’” (March 31, 2025), “Watch Trump make good on his Ukraine promises” (July 9, 2025), and “Putin made a big mistake with Trump” (September 25, 2025). In recent days, Thiessen has been mostly quiet on the subject; in his tweets, he has occasionally pushed back against inane anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia right-wing commentary but also chided Volodymyr Zelensky for being imprudently confrontational in response to Trump’s insults.
A pro-Trump, pro-Ukraine position has always required awkward mental gymnastics, but now it demands downright contortionism. In one cringeworthy moment, radio host and Fox News contributor Hugh Hewitt was caught in the middle of a Fox appearance when informed of Trump’s remark to the press that Ukraine needs a new president. Hewitt, visibly taken aback, conceded that it was “shocking,” but quickly bounced back to suggest that it was just “jaw-jaw”—Trump venting his frustrations about the “international economy” and diesel fuel prices. Not to worry, he reassured his audience: Zelensky is here to stay, and “Russia is the bad guy. The president knows that.” Are you sure, Hugh? Trump, at that point, was saying things like, “Zelensky could have settled this war many times—many, many times” and “I think, actually, Putin wants to make a deal more than Zelensky.” (Meanwhile, as anybody with a brain that hasn’t been fried by Trumpism can tell you, it’s Putin who has repeatedly rejected Zelensky’s offers for a ceasefire and direct talks.)
And Trump shows no sign of reversing himself. He has indefinitely delayed the sanctions on Russia spelled out in the Lindsey Graham sanctions bill, which he had only recently signed. His latest social media rant explains that he doesn’t want to endanger a peace deal with Russia, on which “great progress is being made.” He claims that Ukraine is “in shambles.” He also viciously bashes Zelensky, accusing the Ukrainian president not only of driving up diesel fuel prices with his strikes on Russian oil refineries—a claim refuted by a lot of people, including Thiessen—but of wanting to keep the war going for his own greed, because of the money he’s getting from Europe.1
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THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES over the past year and a half when a Trump pro-Ukraine “pivot” seemed possible. On a few occasions, Trump did vent his frustration about being jerked around by Putin and did sound troubled by Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities in which civilians, including children, died. He did, a little over a year ago, call Russia a “paper tiger” while praising Ukrainian battlefield prowess. Meanwhile, Zelensky seemed to have developed impressive Trump-whisperer skills, showing remarkable flexibility and grace even after being publicly berated in the infamous Oval Office showdown in early 2025. And many hoped that the American president, in whose vocabulary “loser” is the ultimate insult, would be sufficiently impressed by Ukrainian successes to decide that Zelensky, not Putin, had the proverbial cards. Maybe, once he saw that Putin had failed to make much progress in the Donbas despite stalling for time—and that Ukraine was making headway—he would decide to back the winners.
If so, now would have been the perfect time for that decisive pivot. Ukraine has wrested the momentum back from Russia on the frontlines and is bringing the war home to Russia in ways even the most wild-eyed optimist could not have predicted in 2022. (On Sunday, it launched a massive drone attack on St. Petersburg, striking a major oil terminal and a data center.) Claims of Russian territorial gains publicly made by Putin and by Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, are so ludicrous that even Russian war-hawk bloggers are refuting them. And yet Trump is pivoting in the other direction harder than ever. Even some conservative pundits who are still pooh-poohing “hysteria” about Trump’s affinity for Putin and insisting that the Democrats were crying wolf all along are conceding that . . . wait a minute, maybe there is a wolf.
We can concede that some “Russian collusion” claims have been hyperbolic. No evidence ever emerged that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian agents to steal emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2016 (only that people linked to the campaign were actively working to obtain those hacked emails). Nor is there any real evidence that Putin has Trump on a leash because of kompromat (whether “pee tape” or Epstein related), or because he was recruited by the KGB decades ago.
Yet many of Trump’s recent actions certainly raise the familiar question: If he were a Russian agent, what would he do differently? It’s possible to think of a few answers—like removing Venezuela’s Russia-friendly dictator Nicolás Maduro, seizing a Venezuela-bound Russian-flagged tanker, or pressuring India to stop buying Russian oil. But it is also abundantly clear that for the most part, Trump sees his interests as coinciding with Putin’s—and that his view of the war in Ukraine has always been broadly favorable to the Russian side. As Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov put it in a YouTube interview:
[Trump] has always admired Putin. . . . He never hides his strong sympathies for Putin, for Xi Jinping, for Kim Jong-un. He’s always saying what great guys they are—first and foremost, because they don’t have to listen to anyone. And Trump would love to be able not to listen to anyone. That stupid Supreme Court, those stupid Congress members, Democrats—they all get in his way. But no one is getting in Putin’s way. And that’s part of his worldview. First of all, he likes tough guys who can whack anyone they want—preferably with a cannon. Secondly, he is convinced that the world is divided among these three tough guys: himself as top dog; Putin, who is his role model; and Xi Jinping, whom he has to accommodate. Everyone else must submit.
Expatriate Russian writer Dmitry Bykov has made a somewhat similar point in recent interviews. Trump, he believes, regards Zelensky as “a beam in his eye” because the Ukrainian president represents everything Trump despises: “politics based on values” and resistance to a worldview that revolves around the right of the strong and the art of the deal. To this, one could add that Trump will never stop seeing Zelensky and Ukraine as Joe Biden’s project and the war itself as Biden’s fault, with Zelensky as Biden’s errand boy. He also sees Russia as a far more attractive business partner. And, no matter how successful Ukraine’s war effort can be, it’s doubtful that its successes can shake Trump’s base narrative: that Russia is unbeatable because it’s much bigger, has more resources, and supposedly wins all its wars, and Ukraine should submit for its own good. Trump may even believe that if the Ukrainians are doing well, it’s only thanks to American aid—therefore, Zelensky should shut up and do as he’s told.
The reality is that, for whatever reason, Trump is now acting as Putin’s ally—even if the constraints of American politics will only let him “pivot” so far.
That leaves pro-Ukraine, pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump) conservatives in an extremely awkward position. Right now, some are simply ignoring the issue—like Fox News columnist David Marcus, who hailed Trump’s Venezuela operation in January as part of a strategy “tightening the noose around Russia” and as a likely prelude to a ceasefire in Ukraine. (He doesn’t seem to have posted about Ukraine on X since early September.) Others, like National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, quoted above, are willing to vocally condemn Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine while refusing to consider that their earlier anti-anti-Trumpism may have been wrong. Still others, like pro-MAGA tech tycoon Palmer Luckey, are whatabouting Trump’s diesel deal with Putin by pointing out that the European Union buys a lot more Russian fuel.
The EU’s energy policies that have helped Putin stay solvent are certainly open to plenty of criticism. But it’s worth noting that EU countries have sharply reduced their imports of Russian oil and are set to phase out natural gas imports next year. No less important, they are not trying to strong-arm Ukraine into ending strikes on Russian energy targets or disrupting key assistance in a fit of pique at Zelensky’s refusal to comply.
Could Trump “pivot” again if he decides it’s to his advantage? Maybe—but no one should wait to find out. For now, the Trump/Putin alliance seems to be the order of the day: Putin, no doubt emboldened by his rapprochement with Trump, is already floating a three-way summit with Trump and Xi to decide the fate of Ukraine. At this point, anyone committed to Ukraine’s freedom and sovereignty must be committed to stopping Trump. And professed Ukraine supporters who have acted as his enablers could start by admitting that they were wrong instead of lecturing Zelensky on manners.
Another remarkable thing about Trump’s latest post is that he acknowledges Russia is helping Iran, just . . . not much. That’s all right then!
Consider this your permission slip to think a little weird. The Aquarius Moon favors oddball ideas, so the plan that sounds ridiculous at first might be the smartest one you’ve had in months. Let the skeptics catch up later. Love and money get a reality check as Pluto squares Venus, stargazer, and anyone coasting on your goodwill could get found out. If a deal or a date feels off, believe yourself. Mercury goes retrograde Saturday, so lock in plans and double-check the details. Tempers could fray late tonight while the Moon opposes Mars, especially among the overtired. Skip the petty arguments with loved ones and save your fire for what actually counts tomorrow.
Read your horoscope for the week, and see what the stars have in store for your sign today.
Expect at least one person to test your patience before bed. The Aquarius Moon opposes Mars tonight, so a stray hot take could get under your skin, Aries. Saturn’s trine to Mars is past its peak but still backing your self-control. Let them write their paragraph-long reply. Leave them on read and go to sleep. Wake up the undefeated champ of keeping your cool.
Somebody has a very persuasive pitch ready for you, and your stomach already knows the answer. Pluto’s square to Venus peaks tomorrow, so pressure around money or love is cranked up, Taurus. Luckily, Venus is conjunct Haumea, tuning up your instincts. With Venus retrograde, take your time. That famous stubborn streak is a superpower today. Smile politely and say you’ll think about it.
Those half-typed texts sitting in your drafts won’t send themselves. Mercury is slowing down ahead of Saturday’s retrograde, Gemini, so wrap up loose conversations while signals are still crisp. Jupiter’s square to Mercury tempts you to start five new threads instead. Resist. The Aquarius Moon trines your sign, giving you the charm to close each one gracefully. Hit send, then enjoy the empty inbox.
Weirdly, other people’s drama might bounce right off you today. The Moon moves through cool, detached Aquarius and trines Uranus, giving you a break from feeling everything for everyone, Cancer. Enjoy the vacation. An evening sextile to Saturn helps you finish chores without guilt. Late tonight, the Moon opposes Mars, so save heavy talks for another day. Tomorrow your big heart reopens for business.
One unimpressed coworker can rattle even the proudest lion. Pluto starts squaring the Sun today, Leo, so someone might push back on your ideas or poke at your ego. Venus is also moving toward the Sun, though, giving you extra charm to work with. Skip the power struggle. Win them over with warmth instead. A little curiosity about their side goes a long way.
Today’s least glamorous act of self-care is a full backup of your phone and laptop. Mercury is tapping the brakes before this weekend’s retrograde, Virgo, and tech hiccups love a distracted user. Jupiter’s square to Mercury makes everything feel bigger than it is, including small glitches. Pick the boring safeguards first. Future you, staring at a frozen screen next week, will feel incredibly smug.
Quick tally of the last five plans: you made every single one. If that sounds familiar, Libra, Pluto’s square to Venus is bringing that imbalance to the surface right before tomorrow’s peak. Venus also teams up with Haumea, so trust the gut feeling you keep politely ignoring. Ask for more effort, kindly and clearly. The ones who value you will gladly match your energy.
No judgment if you wake up in the middle of the night and look up an old flame. The Moon joins Pluto early, pulling buried feelings up, Scorpio, and Pluto’s square to Venus amps up the urge to know everything. Curiosity is natural. Obsession is optional. Close the tab and put the phone face down. Your peace is hotter than any answer.
A friend’s bold new life choice is about to test your poker face. Jupiter’s square to Mercury makes your honest opinions come out bigger and blunter than intended, Sagittarius. Jupiter’s sextile to the Sun is fading but leaves enough warmth to soften the delivery. Lead with a question before offering a verdict. Your truth is most welcome when someone asks for it.
Credit where it’s due includes you, too. Saturn opposes Makemake, so you might find yourself championing everyone else’s wins while downplaying your own, Capricorn. Saturn’s trine to Mars is easing but still fuels your drive, and an evening Moon-Saturn sextile makes it easy to state your case calmly. Mention your contribution at the next meeting. Your hard work earned a byline.
An actual emotion may sneak past your big-brain defenses today. The Moon sits in your sign and trines Uranus, so feelings arrive as flashes of insight, Aquarius, which is the only way you trust them anyway. Uranus is retrograde, asking you to rebel against your own aloofness. Tell one person you missed them. Weird and warm is your best combo.
Before agreeing to one more favor, check who keeps doing all the asking. Neptune is retrograde in bold Aries, peeling back illusions about who’s truly in your corner, Pisces. A soft overnight sextile from the Moon leaves you dreamy but intuitive, so your first impressions are spot-on. Save your generosity for people who return it. You’re allowed to say “not this time.”
The post Daily Horoscope: October 19, 2026 appeared first on VICE.
Today’s world would be a fascinating object of study if one weren’t also living in it. The price of energy isn’t the cause of Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But for months it’s been driving it to new depths. The price of oil plateaued in early October which seemed to blunt some of Democrats’ electoral momentum. On Friday though it jumped up again, with the Brent Crude price hitting $110 a barrel, the highest since May. That was the worst of all possible worlds for Trump and that clearly played a key role in his decision to waive sanctions against Russia. Reuters reports that the prospect of greater supply from Russia knocked oil off those highs in early Monday trading in Asia. That was clearly the main goal of that waiver. But just in the last hour reports have come out that Ukraine launched a massive volley of 1,000 drones targeting Russian energy infrastructure.
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Ein mögliches rot-grün-rotes Bündnis in Berlin schlägt bundespolitisch hohe Wellen. Während z.B. Grünen-Chef Felix Banaszak vor radikalen Kräften warnt und die Tür zur CDU taktisch offen halten will, ist Friedrich Merz wiederum hart und unerbittlich im Ton gegenüber Grünen und der SPD, wenn es um die Gespräche mit radikalen linken Kräften geht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, wie nun auch in der SPD der Widerstand wächst und Parteichef Lars Klingbeil sich derweil zurückhält.
Die Junge Union fordert derweil drastische Konsequenzen: Eine künftige Berliner Landesregierung soll z.B. von Geheimdienstinformationen des Bundes abgeschnitten werden. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der CDU-Abgeordnete Johannes Volkmann, warum er Teile der Berliner Linken als Sicherheitsrisiko sieht und eine politische Ächtung der Partei verlangt.
Auf internationaler Bühne sorgt die Kehrtwende der USA für Entsetzen, nachdem Donald Trump die Sanktionen gegen Russlands Schattenflotte auf Eis gelegt hat. Hans von der Burchard analysiert, wie dieser Schritt Europa sicherheitspolitisch erneut herausfordert und welche Folgen der Wegfall amerikanischer Unterstützung für die Ukraine im nahenden Winter haben könnte.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
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Deutschland muss Wachstum wieder stärker ins Zentrum seiner Wirtschaftspolitik rücken. Doch bevor wir darüber sprechen, wo wir 2030 sein wollen, sollten wir genau hinschauen, wo unsere Unternehmen heute stehen.
Seit mehr als zwei Jahren beobachten wir mit dem DATEV Mittelstandsindex eine wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, die weniger einem plötzlichen Einbruch als einer schleichenden Erschöpfung gleicht. Die Umsätze kommen nicht nachhaltig in Schwung, während Löhne und andere Kosten weiter steigen. Die Beschäftigung, lange ein Stabilitätsanker des Mittelstands, gerät zunehmend unter Druck. Der Mittelstand hält sich, aber er ist nicht im Aufschwung.
Wenn Erlöse über einen langen Zeitraum kaum wachsen und gleichzeitig die Kosten steigen, schrumpfen die Spielräume für das, was unser Land dringend braucht: Investitionen und wirtschaftliche Erneuerung. Deshalb müssen wir die Bedingungen verbessern, unter denen wirtschaftliche Dynamik entstehen kann.
Investitionen schaffen Zukunft
Viele Unternehmen konzentrieren unter den aktuellen Rahmenbedingungen ihre verfügbaren Mittel zunehmend darauf, den Bestand zu sichern. Investiert wird in Ersatz und Erhalt, während Erweiterungen, neue Technologien oder zusätzliche Kapazitäten schwieriger zu finanzieren sind. Das hat langfristige Konsequenzen. Digitalisierung, künstliche Intelligenz, klimaneutrale Produktion oder neue Geschäftsmodelle entstehen nicht allein durch politische Zielsetzungen. Sie müssen in Unternehmen konkret umgesetzt und finanziert werden. Dafür brauchen Unternehmen wirtschaftlichen Spielraum.
Wenn Erlöse über einen langen Zeitraum kaum wachsen und gleichzeitig die Kosten steigen, schrumpfen die Spielräume für das, was unser Land dringend braucht: Investitionen und wirtschaftliche Erneuerung.
Gerade aus kleinen, dynamischen Unternehmen können disruptive Innovationen und damit die großen Unternehmen von morgen entstehen. Doch Unternehmen können Risiken nur eingehen, wenn sie über ausreichende Reserven verfügen und darauf vertrauen können, dass sich langfristige Investitionen am Standort Deutschland lohnen. Statt unternehmerische Dynamik vor allem mit neuen Förderprogrammen erzeugen zu wollen, sollten wir Unternehmen wieder mehr Raum, bessere Rahmenbedingungen und mehr Planungssicherheit für eigene Entscheidungen geben.
Deutschland braucht einen schlankeren Staat
Zu guten Standortbedingungen gehört auch ein leistungsfähiger Staat. Genehmigungsverfahren, Berichtspflichten, Steuerverfahren und Verwaltungsprozesse kosten Zeit und binden Personal. Das trifft auch große Konzerne, kleine und mittlere Unternehmen aber besonders stark, weil sie regulatorische Anforderungen nicht auf große Fachabteilungen verteilen können.
Gleichzeitig ist der Staat selbst immer größer geworden. 2025 lag die Staatsquote bei über 50 Prozent. Das ist keine Kennzahl, mit der wir uns abfinden sollten. Deutschland braucht einen schlankeren Staat – nicht als Selbstzweck, sondern weil ein Staat, der immer mehr Ressourcen bindet, diese Mittel und Arbeitskräfte dem privaten Sektor entzieht. Wir sollten eine unbequeme Wahrheit aussprechen: Deutschland hat kein Einnahmenproblem. Die entscheidende Frage ist, was wir mit den vorhandenen Mitteln machen und welche Aufgaben der Staat tatsächlich übernehmen muss. Immer neue Einnahmen zu mobilisieren, während Unternehmen unter hohen Kosten und schwachen Umsätzen leiden, ist keine Wachstumsstrategie.
Das gilt auch für zusätzliche steuerliche Belastungen. Ein höherer Spitzensteuersatz trifft nicht nur gutverdienende Privatpersonen. Er trifft unmittelbar viele mittelständische Unternehmen. Für Personengesellschaften und Einzelunternehmen ist die Einkommensteuer die Unternehmenssteuer. Wer diesen Unternehmen zusätzliche Mittel entzieht, darf sich nicht wundern, wenn anschließend das Geld für Investitionen fehlt.
Europa darf deshalb nicht nur ein großer regulierter Markt sein. Es muss auch ein großer Markt für Wachstum werden.
Auch der Staat selbst steht vor dem demografischen Wandel. Digitalisierung und künstliche Intelligenz bieten die Chance, staatliche Aufgaben künftig effizienter zu erfüllen. Ein schlankerer Staat darf dabei kein schwächerer Staat sein. Er muss sich auf seine Aufgaben konzentrieren und diese schneller und verlässlicher erfüllen.
Europa muss Wachstum ermöglichen
Deutschland kann seine wirtschaftliche Stärke dauerhaft nur in einem wirtschaftlich starken Europa sichern. Der europäische Binnenmarkt ist einer unserer größten Vorteile. Im Alltag erleben Unternehmen Europa aber noch zu häufig als fragmentiert. Unterschiedliche Verfahren, zusätzliche Dokumentationspflichten und nationale Sonderwege erschweren grenzüberschreitendes Wachstum. Besonders sichtbar wird das bei jungen, erfolgreichen Unternehmen, die den nächsten Wachstumsschritt gehen wollen. Für sie muss Europa zum gemeinsamen Markt mit besseren Bedingungen werden, um zu wachsen und Kapital für die nächste Entwicklungsstufe mobilisieren zu können.
Europa darf deshalb nicht nur ein großer regulierter Markt sein. Es muss auch ein großer Markt für Wachstum werden. Es muss seine Größe auch als wirtschaftlichen Vorteil nutzen. Dafür müssen nationale Sonderwege abgebaut und Bedingungen geschaffen werden, unter denen aus erfolgreichen Gründungen globale Unternehmen werden können. Sonst riskieren wir, dass Ideen hier entstehen, die daraus resultierende Wertschöpfung aber anderswo wächst.
Widerstandskraft allein reicht nicht
Zwei Jahre DATEV Mittelstandsindex zeigen, wie lange Unternehmen Belastungen auffangen können. Aber eine Volkswirtschaft kann nicht davon leben, dass ihre Unternehmen immer nur widerstandsfähiger werden. Sie braucht neben starken Betrieben auch neue Unternehmen, aus denen die Mittelständler und Weltmarktführer von morgen wachsen können.
Der Mittelstand hat Arbeitsplätze lange gehalten, obwohl die Umsatzentwicklung schwach blieb und die Löhne weiter stiegen. Erst mit Verzögerung ist auch die Beschäftigung unter Druck geraten. Auch viele Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmer absorbieren Belastungen zunächst selbst.
Denn wirtschaftliche Dynamik entsteht in Unternehmen. Geben wir ihnen dafür wieder den nötigen Spielraum.
Gleichzeitig ziehen sich Betriebe aus dem Markt zurück, weil Nachfolge fehlt, Rentabilität sinkt oder die Perspektive nicht mehr ausreicht. Umso wichtiger ist ein Umfeld, in dem Menschen bereit sind, Verantwortung und unternehmerisches Risiko zu übernehmen.
Deutschland 2030 braucht einen Kurswechsel
Bis 2030 werden Digitalisierung, künstliche Intelligenz, demografischer Wandel und geopolitische Veränderungen unsere Wirtschaft tiefgreifend verändern. Die Antwort darauf kann nicht sein, Unternehmen immer neue Belastungen aufzubürden.
Deutschland braucht einen Kurswechsel: weniger Bürokratie und steuerliche Belastung, einen schlankeren und leistungsfähigeren Staat und ein Europa, das seine Stärke als gemeinsamer Markt ausspielt. Der Mittelstand hat in den vergangenen Jahren gezeigt, wie viel Belastung er tragen kann. Das sollte die Politik nicht als Einladung verstehen, ihm noch mehr zuzumuten. Denn wirtschaftliche Dynamik entsteht in Unternehmen. Geben wir ihnen dafür wieder den nötigen Spielraum.
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BRUSSELS — NATO is beginning talks this month on the forces and weapons allies would need to defend against a Russian attack — and how they would pay for them.
The talks will set capability targets for 2029, requiring each of NATO’s 32 member countries to provide specific forces and equipment.
The deadline raises the stakes: European officials have warned that Russia could be ready to attack a NATO country by then.
At the same time, the Trump administration is weighing a sharp reduction in U.S. forces in Europe, which could leave the alliance short of troops and critical capabilities with fewer like refueling aircraft, long-range missiles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets.
The negotiations will test how much each country is willing to spend, how much Europe can do without the U.S. and whether NATO’s military plans should make greater use of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
“It’s going to be tough,” said one senior NATO diplomat, who, like others, was granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive issue. “Burden sharing, the U.S., how to combine the level of ambition with political priorities … it’s huge.”
NATO allies will begin discussing the broad mandate for the new targets — known as Political Guidance — in the coming days. It’s the first step in a five-part effort called the NATO Defence Planning Process.
“The ambition … is for this to be a transformation cycle and not one that’s just off the shelf,” said French Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and the alliance’s chief for future warfare.
POLITICO spoke to 15 current and former NATO officials and diplomats to get a sense of the five key debates likely to define the negotiations.
The most significant issue will be deciding exactly how many troops and military capabilities allies want to provide — known as the level of ambition.
Historically, NATO allies have agreed that beyond the forces needed for major operations, they should have 18 spare brigades — each a unit of about 5,000 soldiers — to carry out smaller crisis-management missions outside alliance territory, like Afghanistan or Kosovo.
But U.S. pressure to hand off more security responsibility to European allies — dubbed NATO 3.0 — could put pressure on allies to reduce or even eliminate requirements for any smaller operations.
Discussions will also cover whether to speed up the process itself in future in response to the furious pace of battlefield innovation, from AI to ground robots.
Allies are also likely to tackle how to provide conventional military support — like ground troops or aircraft — to nuclear-armed countries like the U.K. and U.S.
“Conventional support … capabilities are absolutely part of the NDPP process,” said Nassima Barrows, NATO’s nuclear policy director, “so that is one of the big messages that we underline as a part of the next [negotiations].”
Looming over the talks is the Pentagon’s upcoming review of American forces in Europe. Washington earlier this year already pulled assets like strategic bombers, fighter jets, drones, submarines and warships from the pool of forces NATO can draw on.
The review lands in December, midway through the NATO talks, prompting concerns it may delay negotiations. There are worries that the U.S. could pull out assets Europe needs, like heavy transport aircraft.
Washington’s drive to curb its military presence in Europe will set off a scramble among allies to replace its capabilities. That will open discussions on how to share the burden fairly, likely to be very difficult as national budgets are increasingly squeezed.
“Not so long ago, the whole NATO process was … you do the math on what NATO needs, and then when you realize you don’t have everything, the U.S. fills in the gaps,” said Camille Grand, head of the ASD defense lobby and a former senior NATO official. “This is no longer the case.”
One way to tackle that is to shift away from specific weapons requirements to assigning objectives to countries, such as having their forces eliminate Russian command outposts. That could create more flexibility for European allies to who can’t access U.S. weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“We don’t have to have thousands of Tomahawks … but we can have thousands cheaper, low-cost alternatives,” said Fabrice Pothier, a former NATO policy planning director who is now CEO of the Rasmussen Global consultancy.
The focus on Russia is likely to cause friction with allies worried about other threats.
On paper, NATO espouses a “360-degree” approach to security. In practice, the alliance’s focus has shifted eastward since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and northward in the past year as it set up an Arctic mission (largely in response to pressure from Donald Trump over Greenland).
Some allies would like to see more attention given to the alliance’s southern and southeastern flanks. Issues include Russian mercenary presence in Libya, the potential for weaponized migration and increased submarine activity, alongside drone attacks on vessels in the Black Sea.
“There is too much north,” said a second NATO diplomat. “We should reset.”
The drone warfare dominating the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to force a debate on the balance between adding unmanned capabilities and continuing to build up conventional military equipment like tanks and artillery.
Most allies are making plans to increase their use of unmanned systems.
The U.K. this year announced a “hybrid fleet” that leans on autonomous vessels like Type 93 uncrewed underwater vehicles. France has earmarked roughly €8.4 billion for drones and loitering munitions while Germany is establishing its first dedicated drone regiment next year.
Europe’s difficulties in recruiting soldiers also feed into the debate, said Grand. “One thing that is driving everybody in the direction of more unmanned [systems] is we have aging societies — we have a manpower issue.”
Countries also have to figure out how to match Russia’s technological developments without breaking national defense budgets.
Vandier said Russia produces 9 million drones a year, a figure that requires a “pretty radical effort” from the alliance. He suggested one fix could be a subscription-style model for hardware updates to keep weapons systems from becoming obsolete.
Most NATO allies agree that Ukraine contributes to their security thanks to its large and battle-hardened military and its rapid technological developments in air, sea and ground drones, air defenses, missiles, and its advanced Delta battlefield management system.
That has some countries calling for closer military and industrial cooperation, even as others urge caution because the war in Ukraine is different from NATO’s doctrine, which calls for rapid-maneuver warfare, air superiority and standoff precision strikes.
“There are tremendous lessons from the conflict that we need to capture,” NATO’s top commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, told the European Parliament earlier this month. But “we do not want to fight that kind of war.”
The cyberattack last week that hit hundreds of French supermarket refrigerators had Europeans wondering if the nonstop warnings about AI risks had finally landed in the real world.
They hadn’t — at least, not yet.
Experts say the attack, which forced hundreds of retailers to throw away defrosted food and spoiled milk, was mostly a reminder of the importance of old-school cybersecurity in safeguarding essential goods and services.
The attack is a “typical example” of how “low-key cyber-enabled sabotage can affect very crucial supply for society,” said Ferdinand Gehringer, hybrid threats lead at FTI Consulting.
It’s arguably the most consequential hack in the European Union this year, with tangible, disruptive real-world repercussions. France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu personally managed the fallout, which prompted coordination and information-sharing at the EU level.
The perpetrators, whose identity and motives are currently unknown, hacked into digital systems to remotely raise the temperature of refrigerators in supermarkets including Intermarché and Carrefour.
One cybersecurity expert working with Lecornu’s office said the French government held meetings after the attack to try to map all the potentially affected sectors, beyond supermarkets. “We’re in the middle of the flu vaccination campaign,” he said, referring to vaccine storage, which also relies on temperature control solutions, though no such attacks have been registered.
To add to the fear and confusion, supermarkets in the Netherlands and Belgium experienced unrelated cyber incidents that same week. Though there was limited impact in those cases, they were a good example of “how big our reliance is in the food supply chain on IT and network systems,” Dutch food security minister Silvio Erkens told POLITICO.
The attacks come after citizens and policymakers have spent months being bombarded with warnings about scenarios in which unpredictable advanced artificial intelligence models escape human control.
While most good and bad actors on the internet are increasingly using AI models to increase speed and capacity, cyber experts say the hackers in question in the French case most likely used traditional methods to take advantage of devices needlessly exposed to the internet.
Connecting devices to the internet in this way is “an old-fashioned bad practice,” said Amir Preminger, chief technology officer at Claroty, a cybersecurity company that identified a software flaw in a product made by Danfoss, one of the refrigeration companies targeted by the French hacks. Danfoss fixed that flaw in 2025.
The attacks come at a time when Europe’s food security is already under considerable pressure due to geopolitical insecurity and climate change. The continuing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are pushing up fuel and fertilizer prices at a time where farmers struggle with the fallout of extreme drought that caused lower yields in many parts of Europe. These problems are compounded by the blockade of the Black Sea which is fueling the rise of global food prices.
“It is very serious that cyber criminals attack our food systems,” said Else Groen, director general of trade body Independent Retail Europe. She nonetheless stressed that food supply chains are resilient, which reduces the chances that consumer food supply would be endangered — even if such attacks are already a “major blow” for retailers operating on razor-thin margins.
The incidents bring to the fore a long-running problem with so-called operational technology, meaning industrial devices with physical outputs, like refrigeration systems. Critical sectors are packed with these kinds of devices, many of which are old, poorly protected, unnecessarily connected to the Internet, or some combination of the three. They’re also obscure and sometimes forgotten, despite the ramifications if they’re tampered with.
And last week’s problems are far from solved. French and German cyber authorities warned that attacks were probably still ongoing, and the Greek cyber agency and an industry tracker said after the attack that there were hundreds of devices still connected to the internet.
Preminger too said there are still devices exposed, though he added that the number is declining, and not all are necessarily vulnerable to attack. Another research group found that the number of exposed Danfoss devices had significantly decreased.
What’s changed with the widespread diffusion of advanced AI models is that cyber attacks are now faster and easier to replicate. Claroty reproduced the original flaws in Danfoss products in 28 minutes at a cost of $6, it said.
In broad terms, AI makes it easier to carry out many types of cyberattacks and enables attackers to pounce on software flaws more quickly. Financially motivated cybercriminals — who have already spent years extorting businesses and disrupting essential services like hospitals — can use AI to simultaneously launch attacks on multiple targets.
Though the motive for the attacks on French supermarkets remains unknown, it is notable that there was no reported attempt at extortion. The strike did come as Russia ramps up its campaign of hybrid warfare against Europe, and senior EU and European leaders have consistently warned that Moscow could use cyberattacks to disrupt real-world services. Beyond food supplies, AI-enhanced targeting could be aimed at banking, hospitals and the functioning of the internet itself.
Still, these fears of bad human actors using AI should be distinguished from the science-fiction scenarios pushed by so-called AI doomers, in which bots themselves are motivated and able on their own to wipe out humanity.
Digital security experts, including the EU’s own in-house cyber team, are also turning to AI for defense. But it’s not a silver bullet, said Rémi Enjolras, a chief technology officer at Splunk, part of Cisco. Critical industries need to stop “seeing AI as a magical tool that will solve everything and go back to the fundamentals,” he said.
The EU has passed laws intended to force critical industries and product manufacturers to get those fundamentals right. But France, for example, is lagging in implementing such national regulations, and there are few other incentives to get companies to do that difficult and costly work.
Still, the images of empty supermarket shelves could provide a new incentive. “It should serve as a kind of a wake-up call,” Enjolras said.
Émile Marzolf contributed to this report.
Last week’s summit gave Brussels a taste of how hard it’s going to be to get a deal on the budget — or anything else.
By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC
in Brussels
Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
The EU is already struggling with how to get its largest-ever budget agreed, plug a massive financial hole for Ukraine and navigate geopolitical pressure from the U.S. and China. Now, it also faces being paralyzed by domestic political strife in the countries that collectively make up around 60% of its GDP and population.
“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides told POLITICO in an interview on the sidelines of last week’s European Council, referring to the bloc’s fraught budget negotiations.
But the Spanish election means that will no longer be possible, he said. And next year, “it’s going to be France, Italy” and others going to the polls, Christodoulides added, predicting even more complications for the bloc.
The EU is facing an unprecedented dilemma: Its four biggest economies are all heading into elections or political upheaval, potentially hamstringing the bloc’s ability to get anything done.
Spain will go to the polls next month, with the center right and far right on track to take power. France is changing presidents in April, with polls favoring far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen. The Alternative for Germany is ascendant, putting Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship in doubt. And Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s unusually long-serving government is also heading to an election in 2027.
The consequences are already becoming clear.
The bloc’s latest summit offered an early taste of what lies ahead: After two days of talks, leaders failed to make headway on the €2 trillion budget and instead became embroiled in an unexpectedly bitter row on energy policy. The summit’s conclusions notably omitted any mention of finding consensus on the budget before the end of the year, with member countries resisting a push by European Council President Antonio Costa for an end-2026 deadline, although there are summits scheduled for November and December.
If those meetings fail to produce a deal, then the already fractious talks will spill over into 2027, when electoral battles are likely to loom even larger over negotiations — and governments may be increasingly reluctant to make the compromises needed to reach agreement.
The paralysis Brussels fears as Europe’s election cycle gathers pace is already beginning to take hold, with last week’s summit exposing how difficult it is becoming to forge the compromises the bloc needs.
Rather than strike any big deals (a Franco-German accord on cars was the one exception), the leaders used the gathering to dig in on entrenched positions and seek tactical advantages over rival camps.
The pessimism was palpable, according to six diplomats and officials POLITICO spoke to, with several warning the EU faces sharp headwinds in the coming months. All were granted anonymity to speak freely.
“Next year, it will be worse,” said one senior EU diplomat.
“It’s true, because of this calendar for the elections … in the next year it’ll be much more difficult in the member states and inside the [European] Parliament,” said Carla Tavares, a senior MEP with the Socialists and Democrats and co-lead on budget negotiations.
The bloc’s internal malaise could hardly come at a worse time.
From U.S. President Donald Trump’s undermining of the transatlantic alliance to an ever-widening trade imbalance with China, the EU is facing mounting geopolitical and economic pressures on multiple fronts.
“They seek our division. They want our division,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever told reporters at a late-night briefing during the summit, not mentioning names but referring to countries to the east and west of Brussels. “And they have, of course, points where they can hurt us.”
Former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, now a visiting fellow at Stanford University, was less circumspect. “Now we are under assault from three sides: from the U.S., Russia and China,” he said.
Washington is questioning the old alliances that have underpinned European security for generations. Moscow is waging a shadow war across Europe, from cyberattacks and sabotage to an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport that Berlin blamed on the Kremlin. Beijing is tightening its grip on critical supply chains and flooding European markets with cheap exports.
Then there’s the Ukraine problem. The country is facing a budget shortfall of $30 billion to $35 billion next year, according to the IMF, with Russia battering its energy infrastructure ahead of a brutal winter. That’s despite the €90 billion the EU already agreed to stump up last year.
Landsbergis said the coming months are looking “extremely dire” for Kyiv. “Everything falls on European shoulders,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sounded a grim note at last week’s summit, telling reporters that if Ukraine falls, 20 million Ukrainians will flood into the EU. “Russia is killing us,” he said. “They don’t want to stop.”
One solution to Ukraine’s funding woes could be the €200 billion in Russian assets that have been immobilized indefinitely in Brussels-based financial depository Euroclear. But there is no sign of the EU finding common ground on that front either, with Belgium, which vetoed previous efforts to use the assets to help Ukraine, still refusing to budge.
“Nothing has changed,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said as he exited last week’s summit early.
Other potential solutions, such as issuing more joint debt, will require messy compromises — just as Brussels finds itself with even less room to maneuver.
The EU’s problems go beyond its budget or individual policy files. With the political futures of several of Europe’s most powerful leaders in question, Brussels risks losing the stable alliances and long-serving national heavyweights needed to broker compromises.
“We now have Europe with no obvious leader,” another EU diplomat argued. Commission President Ursula “von der Leyen is powerful. But we do not have a Merkel or Mitterrand.”
French President Emmanuel Macron cannot constitutionally serve a third consecutive term and will have to find new digs in Paris after leaving the Élysée Palace in April. During a closed-door discussion at last week’s summit, Macron admitted he wouldn’t have a political mandate to sign a deal on the budget in his final months in power, four European diplomats said.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is on track for defeat after eight years in power, according to polls. Spaniards will vote on Nov. 29, meaning Sanchez will be in full election mode during EU leaders’ meetings on Nov. 13 and Nov. 26.
Costa, who has stressed the need to reach an agreement on the EU’s budget by the end of 2026 to make sure it’s ready to go by 2028, waved off fears that the bloc’s next spate of elections could get in the way.
“We are living in 27 democracies,” he said on Friday. “More or less every month we have one election. If it’s about elections, we never could approve a new budget.”
Regardless of the result, Madrid is not expected to form a government until January, which could derail the budget talks, according to two EU diplomats.
It’s anyone’s guess how long German Chancellor Merz has left in office. While the next federal election is not scheduled until 2029, the AfD’s growing strength and his own nosediving popularity complicate how much Merz might be willing to compromise.
Italy, too, is set for elections in October 2027. Another EU diplomat said they did not expect Meloni to wait that long, arguing she could call a vote much earlier.
There could be a sweet spot in January to get the budget over the line, a senior EU official suggested. It may be the last chance to strike a deal before Europe’s political upheaval makes compromise even harder to come by.
So far, the EU’s leaders have simply been “too slow,” said Siegfried Mureșan, the European People’s Party’s co-lead on the budget. “Time is running out.”
Nicholas Vinocur contributed reporting.
BRUSSELS — Europe’s three mainstream political groups must strike a deal to keep out the far right ahead of an election year that could reshape the EU, the head of the liberal Renew Europe group in the European Parliament told POLITICO.
“I’m truly convinced that nobody can afford to let the coalition erode from a very practical point of view because this is the only way to deliver an ambitious and a stronger Europe for our citizens,” said Valérie Hayer, a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, adding that there’s “no other way.”
Since the 2024 EU election shifted the Parliament to the right, the conservative European People’s Party — the largest in the assembly — has passed legislation with right-wing and far-right groups, angering its traditional liberal and social democratic allies. Hayer said Renew’s priority ahead of the next EU election, in 2029, is to rebuild the centrist alliance.
Speaking by phone after a gathering of EU liberals ahead of a leaders’ summit on Thursday, Hayer said “we need a strong European platform from the center to deliver for Europeans” on issues such as competitiveness, defense, climate change and decarbonization, especially with major EU countries facing national elections, including Spain in November and Italy, France and Poland in 2027. “We should be prepared for this new cycle of elections.”
To lock in the centrist majority, Hayer wants the three groups to strike a detailed coalition agreement. The EPP has largely voted with its centrist allies during the first half of the current term, but has occasionally turned to the right to pass legislation when disagreements with its traditional partners proved too difficult to bridge.
Hayer said Renew would not back any candidate for Parliament president without first agreeing on a detailed coalition deal. “A majority needs a program before it needs a president, so we need a coalition agreement before any leadership agreement, and no coalition agreement would mean no leadership deal.”
That could force the EPP to the negotiating table, as the conservatives want to get Roberta Metsola reelected for a third term in January. However, the EPP has in the past been reluctant to sign a detailed coalition agreement.
Hayer and the leaders of the EPP (Manfred Weber) and Socialists and Democrats (Iratxe García) already signed a two-page agreement to work with each other after the 2024 EU election, but the EPP has nonetheless voted on laws with far-right groups.
To prevent this, Hayer wants not only leaders but all “key members” of the groups, including vice-chairs, whips and coordinators, to negotiate and endorse the agreement.
“I want us to be very concrete, I want a midterm agreement that binds us to delivery on the budget, on the IAA, for example, on EU Inc.” — referring to the Industrial Accelerator Act (a proposal to steer public procurement and subsidies toward European manufacturers) and a plan to give startups a single set of rules.
She also wants the far right excluded from powerful posts in the Parliament, including vice-presidencies.
Hayer said the centrist leaders had “already discussed” the agreement and expressed confidence it could advance. García has said she is ready to negotiate with the EPP to reach an agreement, although Weber hasn’t publicly commented on the idea.
Hayer wants any candidate for Parliament president to be hands-on to ensure the center holds, because “you can’t say I’ve been elected and then I don’t care about the majority and the people who elected me.” Metsola says she needs to represent the entire hemicycle, but has voiced a preference for majorities built “from the center out.”
Hayer also wants commissioners to “bring the groups together” before proposing new laws, in order that they have “a first discussion and first kind of agreement.”
Asked if she trusted Weber to comply with any deal, Hayer said“we are working together every day” and that any deal “should be done in a fair way and sincere way.”
As for the socialists, she urged them to be “constructive in the negotiations.”
Live from Charlotte, the gang welcomes Pete Buttigieg for a night of politics among friends. This recording of Bulwark LIVE is exclusively for Bulwark+ members.
Note: Fast forward to 9:40 for the show start.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Donald Trump to face accusations of corruption after he first arrived in Washington in 2017. In fact, within seventy-two hours of being sworn in as president, he got hit with a lawsuit alleging he’d violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
But while the Democratic political class was outraged by Trump’s corruption—even turning his failure to “drain the swamp” into a key pillar of their 2018 midterm strategy—the harsh reality was that voters didn’t really care.
Focus groups Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell conducted at the end of Trump’s first term and in its aftermath showed wide ambivalence to the corruption charges. Many Trump supporters downplayed his immense wealth and refusal to show his tax returns by saying things like “he can’t be bought” and “what politician doesn’t do it?” As Carolyn, a disaffected 2016 Trump voter from Florida, put it in one 2020 focus group when asked about the various scandals: “It bothers me on a personal level, but I didn’t vote for him to be my friend.”
Or as Drew, a repeat Trump voter from Colorado, put it in 2023 when asked about Trump making millions selling t-shirts and other merchandise featuring his mugshot: “Well, more power to him then, right?”
Today, though, there’s reason to believe that the public’s earlier ambivalence has faded, and that Trump’s corruption is not only breaking through in a big way, but could sway the course of this year’s midterms. A recent Gallup survey found a record number of Americans believe government corruption is widespread, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans believe Trump has inappropriately profited since returning to office. A Fox News poll released last week showed that corruption in government was the top issue for registered voters, followed closely by inflation and high prices.
Far from fearful that they’re re-running a playbook that proved relatively ineffectual in 2018, the Democratic officials and strategists I talked to say
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