President Trump is a man who likes to bet on a winner. And so, it was both unsurprising and correct that he not only reversed the Pentagon’s recent unilateral decision to halt military assistance to Ukraine but also announced additional lifesaving aid worth billions of dollars. Halting weapons shipments to Ukraine sent the wrong message to America’s allies and, most glaringly, tied the U.S. to Russia’s dead-end cause. In both Russia and Iran, the macro-level trends are ominous and, if they persist, the northern and the southern shores of the Caspian Sea will likely be flanked by decrepit and decaying regimes. Russia—like Iran—is a country that fails because it is structurally set up to fail.
