As President Trump wrestles to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war on Ukraine by helping to bring about a negotiated peace deal, the effort has, in part, been undermined by an escalating exchange of kamikaze drones by both sides.

The last week especially saw a sharp escalation, with Ukraine launching thousands of drones deep into Russia—most of which the Russians claim to have intercepted—and Russia, in turn, stepping up its drone attacks in Ukraine. The Russian strikes over the weekend got a lot of coverage in the American media, especially an aerial assault on Saturday night where parts of some of the largest drone swarms launched in the war so far hit residential buildings around the Ukrainian armament factories Russia claimed to be targeting.

That series of strikes led Trump to issue his sharpest rebuke of Vladamir Putin to date. He called the Russian president crazy and voiced frustration with how Putin has changed since their phone call together—after which Trump had characterized Putin as reasonable and interested in a ceasefire.

The establishment press gleefully seized on Trump’s comments to argue that even he is now waking up to what they’ve been saying this whole time: that Putin is an unhinged maniac who cannot be reasoned with because he is motivated solely by bloodlust and delusions of conquering Europe. They then, predictably, bring it back to their broader argument that Trump’s “naïve” effort to “appease” Putin with a peace agreement and then “retreat from Europe” to usher in a new age of American isolationism is futile and dangerous and that he ought to instead recommit to the establishment’s preferred strategy of heavy-handed interventionism. …

There is no easy path out of this mess. It’s not as if NATO governments have some special weapons system they haven’t sent to Ukraine yet that could begin to turn the tide of the war. If they had, they would have sent it already. Short of sending American troops into combat with the Russians, there is little more that can be done to prop up Ukrainian forces. And, as Scott Horton noted in his recent talk here at the Mises Institute, even if Trump genuinely tried to reverse course and repair relations between Washington and Moscow, the Russians would probably just assume, understandably, that any progress he made would be undone by the next Democrat to win the presidency.

That’s why, if we’re ever going to see a true end to this unnecessary second Cold War with Russia, it requires that more Americans understand how it truly came about in the first place. It needs to be widely understood that if our government’s priority were really keeping us safe, they would have done everything in their power to avoid kickstarting a new conflict with the most heavily nuclear-armed government in the world. And yet, they seemed to have done the precise opposite.

What the path out certainly does not involve is doubling down on the same exact policies that both created this mess in the first place and that are being championed by those who want to see this war drag on indefinitely in a vile attempt to use Ukrainians to weaken Russia a little bit more.