If President Donald Trump is serious about brokering peace in Eastern Europe, the move he reportedly just made is baffling.

According to an exclusive Wall Street Journal report published late on Wednesday:

The U.S. will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure, American officials said, as the Trump administration weighs sending Kyiv powerful weapons that could put in range more targets within Russia.

Trump personally signed off on the move, and government officials are enrolling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations to do the same. Per the Journal:

U.S. officials are asking [NATO] allies to provide similar support, [the officials] said. The expanded intelligence-sharing with Kyiv is the latest sign that Trump is deepening support for Ukraine as his efforts to advance peace talks have stalled. It is the first time, officials say, that the Trump administration will aid Ukrainian strikes with long-range missiles against energy targets deep inside Russian territory.

U.S. officials are waiting for written permission from the White House to share the intelligence, one official told the Journal.

The goal here is to enable the Ukrainians to destroy Russian refineries, pipelines, power stations, and other infrastructure pieces vital to the Kremlin’s ability to finance its war. The thousands of sanctions and, more recently, secondary tariffs leveled by the West since 2022 have proved futile. The Kremlin’s main energy clients are the two most populous nations in the world, India and China, which have significantly increased the amount of oil, gas, and coal they buy from Russia as the war has continued.

American leadership is also considering giving Ukraine Tomahawks, Barracudas, and other American ground- and air-launched missiles, the Journal reported. U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg made comments earlier this week suggesting that permission has already been granted.

Since the beginning of the war, the U.S. has provided weapons and limited intel to Ukraine. But even Joe Biden’s administration refused to arm the Ukrainians with long-range capabilities.  If this recent Journal report is accurate, U.S. involvement may be significantly ramping up.

Russian-controlled media reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “Russia will respond ‘appropriately’ if US-made Tomahawk missiles are delivered to Ukraine.”

Russian head of state Vladimir Putin has said in the past that if Western nations allow Ukraine to strike deep within Russia, it will be considered an act of war. And Putin recently stressed during a speech in Sochi, Russia, that people need to be ready for “anything”:

Both practice and recent events show that we must be ready for anything. In such times, every person’s responsibility is especially great — responsibility for their own destiny, for the future of their country, and for the entire world. The stakes, in this case, are extremely high.

Indeed they are.

The obvious question is, as liberty icon Dr. Ron Paul asked in his recent Liberty Report podcast, “Does this mean an escalation?”

Trump has become disillusioned with Putin since the two met in Alaska last month. They emerged from the meeting with no deal, but Trump appeared hopeful that the Russians really did want peace. Since then, the fighting in Ukraine has only intensified, and Trump, whose feelings toward Putin have swung from neutral to outright disappointment, seems to have settled on the latter as of now. Based on multiple comments, Trump may believe Putin is playing him and not interested in peace. The president is likely hearing from people who are telling him the former KGB officer is stringing him along with no intention of stopping the conflict.

Despite his many faults and foibles, Trump has likely pursued a peace deal with Putin in good faith. A number of other, more successful, peace mediations this year alone bolster this notion. Whether for personal glory or simply the good of humankind, it is undeniably true that Trump has facilitated peace deals.  

But many are asking, If he truly wants peace, why would he bolster Ukraine’s capabilities? Wouldn’t that just prolong the war?

Perhaps the president has been convinced that if the Russians lose their source of revenue, they will become more open to a deal.

Another commonly held position is that the war would end faster if the U.S. took its thumb off the scale. Stop sharing intel, cut off the flow of weapons, and Ukraine has no choice but to give up. The Europeans, for all their saber-rattling, don’t have the backbone or the resources to jump in, especially if the U.S. stops selling weapons to NATO.

But it’s difficult to see how this most recent decision, if it goes through, fosters peace. “Even if nothing comes of this, it’s looking [like a] possibility that it could end up in escalation,” Paul said.

Paul also brought up a major reason this war is raging in the first place. “NATO fell down on their promises,” he said. He elaborated, adding that after the official collapse of the Soviet Union, Western leaders vowed not to stretch NATO membership to countries east of Germany. By 2004, though, 10 European countries east of Germany had joined NATO. And after two more decades, more countries had joined, including several bordering Russia.

The Russians drew a red line at Ukraine, which would put enemy NATO bases under their belly. The Kremlin has offered to end the war if Ukraine agrees to drop any bid for NATO membership, and Trump has supported this. But there is no record of the Ukrainians, or the Europeans, agreeing to this. In April, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said that, one way or another, there will be NATO bases in Ukraine:

We decided in Washington that the path of Ukraine into NATO is irreversible. We are building the bridge by everything we’re doing with Ukraine, getting Ukraine as interoperable as possible with NATO. But it was never promised to Ukraine that NATO membership would be part of a peace deal. I mean, that is also true.

And Ukraine’s head of state Volodymyr Zelensky met with Rutte and other NATO officials to discuss “Ukraine-NATO cooperation.”

“The stage has been set” for escalation, Paul commented, thanks to “this very foolish foreign policy.” And the prospect of escalation only favors the globalists, who have used both 20th-century world wars as an excuse to prop up world government — first with the failed League of Nations, then with the United Nations.

American citizens must create a pressure campaign to get the U.S. out of NATO and cut off all involvement in this war. As we said in our Feb. 14, 2022 print issue, it’s not our fight.