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If what the Ukrainian security service has told the public is even half true, their long-range strikes against the Russian air force on June 1 were an . The Ukrainians say that they damaged or destroyed roughly a third of Russia’s strategic cruise-missile carriers, striking targets at bases from the Arctic Circle in Murmansk all the way to the far end of the Eurasian steppe along the Mongolian border in Irkutsk. Russia’s vast depths failed to contribute to their customary strategic advantage.

The raids also demonstrated that the future of war is now. To overcome Russia’s advantage in distance and evade its air defenses, the Ukrainians infiltrated cheap drones in trucks, launched them remotely in close proximity to their targets, and apparently networks for control, though reportedly using some degree of autonomy as well—the details are not clear. Some of the targeted aircraft are no longer in production and are thus likely irreplicable. The Ukrainians say the tab in damaged or destroyed equipment for the Russians is in the vicinity of $7 billion. The cost of the attack was certainly orders of magnitude less than that—just as of Russia’s Black Sea fleet cost much less than the destroyed assets themselves. We knew that an “anti-navy� was a feature of the modern battlefield; logically an “anti-air force� was just as plausible.

The dramatic variation in price tags continues a trend notable in other theaters. For instance, in America’s recent in the Red Sea, multimillion-dollar interceptors and munitions were regularly expended against much cheaper Iranian-axis drones and targets, with the Houthis living to tell the tale and continuing to threaten shipping. (This is one of many dimensions where what’s new is quite old�10-rupee jezails [long Afghan rifles] have been providing “asymmetric� advantages to weaker forces for a very long time.) But the operation was also a dress rehearsal for a nightmare scenario already much on the mind of some analysts, where the West’s under-defended major assets could be wiped out in sudden attacks in the opening moments of a direct great-power conflict: for example, American assets during a war with China over the future of Taiwan.

As the missile defense expert recently put it to me, “People talk about a ‘Cyber� Pearl Harbor, and a ‘Space� Pearl Harbor. I worry about a ‘Pearl Harbor� Pearl Harbor.� Pearl Harbor itself and bases in the first island chain would obviously be vulnerable to China, as would American ships at quayside in San Diego and even Norfolk, Virginia, not to mention . There are a lot of shipping containers in America sitting on the backs of trucks and aboard cargo vessels. We will never know what is in them. Such attacks could occur simultaneously with other, more traditional kinds of strikes at targets far from the primary theater of conflict—which is to say, we may need to rethink what we are talking about when we speak of military theaters. The special significance of Sunday’s raids is to settle beyond question that the time for accepting the emergency nature of such threats is past. Meanwhile, the time for preparing adequate countermeasures could run out at any moment.

We also should not ignore the obvious. Sunday’s strikes emphasize, for all their newfangled employment of modern technology to solve cutting-edge problems, the essential role of surprise. This is perhaps counterintuitive in an era of bloodletting defined by the widespread proliferation of sensors and precision-strike technology, the net effect of which would seem to be to render surprise extremely difficult. But, if anything, the consequence of the visible battlefield and the widespread employment of sensor-strike complexes (first used in their modern sense by the United States in the Gulf War, later imitated by the Chinese to create their in the Western Pacific, and now available even to para-state groups like the Houthis) has been to make surprise even more important—a virtually necessary precondition of successful maneuver in any form.

Surprise was the necessary ingredient in Hamas’s operational success on October 7, 2023, in which was loaded and launched from a tiny intelligence petri dish upon an unsuspecting first-rate military, only because of a highly sophisticated multiyear deception campaign. Israel repaid the favor to Hezbollah the following autumn, when it dismantled its northern adversary, long feared to be capable of devastating the Jewish state’s population and economy with massive barrages of missiles. But Hezbollah’s leaders were already dead or maimed before they had a chance to push the button. The use of intelligence, the brilliant supply-chain leadership strikes through , precision itself, and finally the —the whole Israeli campaign relied on ambiguity, deception, intellectual manipulation—what we once would have called stratagems. Maneuver and the offense more broadly can succeed in warfare in 2025, and not only through the brute application of attritional mass—but through trickiness.

Operational successes need to serve bigger strategic ideas, which themselves need to make sense. Hamas’s successful attacks of October 7 have in the long run been all but suicidal. On the other hand, Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah contributed to a decisive defeat in Lebanon and, as a bonus, the . It is too soon to say what the strategic effects (if any) of Sunday’s raids will be, though we can hazard some guesses.

The most concrete consequence will be to diminish, at least at the margins and possibly to a more significant extent, the potency of Russia’s ongoing strategic air campaign against the Ukrainian state, population, and economy. The destroyed and damaged bombers were part of Russia’s nuclear deterrent against America and the West, but they were also frequently employed to launch cruise missiles in the Ukraine war—difficult weapons to intercept, capable of delivering devastating payloads.

Reducing the number of such strikes seems a good day’s work in and of itself, as does the blow to Russian morale and the demonstration of capability to allies. But what will the broader impact of the raids be on the ongoing talks in Istanbul to settle the war, and on Ukraine’s relationship with the United States? One plausible theory is that they are unambiguously helpful—Russian president Vladimir Putin is not serious about stopping the war, as evidenced by the terms he has been demanding of the Ukrainians (in the , “surrender�). Showing the Russians that their continued prosecution of the war risks painful ongoing costs should plausibly contribute to greater Russian seriousness in the diplomatic process. Ideally, such efforts would be coordinated with robust American support to ensure maximal pressure and thus maximal incentive to reach an acceptable settlement.

But this is not the only theory, and we do not live in an ideal world. A number of voices in the broader Trump administration orbit in Washington reacted to the Ukrainian operation with concern and criticism. The raids, given that they targeted elements of Russia’s nuclear deterrent, were escalatory and risked a broader war. Rather than contribute to the seriousness of the diplomatic process, they seemed timed to spoil it. (Never mind that Russia has in recent days of the war against Ukraine.) According to these arguments, the Ukrainians need to show greater restraint or risk losing (more) American support. At the time of writing, President Donald Trump and other senior members of the administration have been silent on the issue.

What are the risks for Ukraine in the face of such sentiment—and are they in any practical way avoidable?

The tent of Trump’s political support is large enough to include numerous attitudes toward Ukraine, ranging from traditional Republican antipathy toward Russia and support for invaded American partners, to “realists� who have long called for warmer relations with Moscow in deference to a rational calculus of power politics, to those who enthusiastically wish for Ukraine’s outright defeat. The latter two groups form their own operational coalition on the question of Ukraine. Why would some Americans enthusiastically seek Ukraine’s defeat? Because (in the view of this third group) America’s liberal grand strategy since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War, has propped up a world system inimical to its values. Ukraine is an outpost of an essentially unjust and oppressive liberal imperium; Russia, meanwhile, is a potential partner in an anti-liberal concert that could maintain world order, perhaps even in coalition with China itself. The hostility to liberalism is the overarching idea, and Ukraine is but one question in a broader exam for humanity.

Such views do not appear to preoccupy Trump himself, who seems genuinely to want peace and is also frustrated that it is not forthcoming more quickly. He is his own sui generis strategic thinker, a mercantilist to an extent unusual in the modern era and, as his vision of Gaza’s future indicates, far from an isolationist. Such views are also not particularly popular in the United States, which is probably why one does not hear them expressed openly all that much. Dramatic outcomes like the fall of Kyiv would be as damaging for the current administration as the fall of Kabul was for Biden’s.

To the extent that Sunday’s raids might upset Trump and empower those around him who are especially hostile to Ukraine, they come at a risk. But to argue that the targeting of assets that are bombing Ukrainian targets should be avoided because it is escalatory is the same thing as saying that self-defense itself is escalatory. The natural American position would then be to actively seek Ukraine’s surrender. Washington has not arrived there yet and, again, Trump’s political instincts are keener than those around him with greater ideological fervor.

To cheer on the defeat of an invaded country fighting for its own survival certainly seems morally perverse—but the realists and advocates for MAGA International are quick to counsel us that such moralizing is what has caused all the trouble in American foreign policy in the first place. As yet undemonstrated is how conceding Eurasia to Sino-Russian dominance would in the long run enhance prospects for American freedom and prosperity.

This article was republished in The Free Press.