Governance by Subtraction

Peace talks without peace, elections without guardrails, climate policy without science and a ballroom that won’t shrink.

Good morning! Geneva gave us two hours of “peace.” That’s how long the latest round of U.S.-brokered Ukraine talks lasted before everyone packed up their briefing folders and went back to their respective corners. Moscow called the session “tough but businesslike.” Kyiv said there was “progress” on security mechanisms but no details to share. Translation: the military people can sketch how a ceasefire might be monitored; the politicians are still arguing over whether Ukraine should surrender one-fifth of its country and call it diplomacy.

Russia continues to demand full control of Donetsk, including territory it hasn’t managed to conquer in twelve years, while occupying roughly 20 percent of Ukraine outright. Zelensky has warned that “Russia is trying to drag out the negotiations,” and the incentives are obvious: every night of drone strikes strengthens Moscow’s leverage. As he put it plainly, “The priority is security guarantees for Ukraine.” He knows what a paper ceasefire without enforcement looks like. He’s lived through it.

Hovering over the talks are President Trump’s chosen envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the real estate developer and the son-in-law, now rebranded as America’s freelance diplomatic corps. The New York Times calls it “diplomacy without diplomats,” which feels charitable. The State Department and National Security Council, institutions that have handled nuclear brinkmanship and European wars for nearly eighty years, are mostly spectators while deal guys shuttle between Iran in the morning and Russia in the afternoon.

Our adversaries are not amateurs. They are patient state actors who understand delay as strategy. Putin believes he gains leverage every night his drones hit Ukraine’s power grid. Iran understands that running out the clock is sometimes more valuable than winning the room. The American side is experimenting with warmth, enthusiasm, and transactional energy, plus the occasional aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.

While Geneva talks about “security parameters,” a separate investigation from the Kyiv Independent reveals what modern war really runs on: shipping manifests. A tiny Austrian rotary encoder manufactured in 2024, after sanctions were in place, ended up inside a Russian Geran-2 drone. It traveled through Hong Kong, then China, then into a Russian plant. A Bosch spark plug produced in China in 2024 turned up in another drone engine. German semiconductors, American components, Taiwanese parts, all in one model produced at Russia’s Alabuga facility, Ukrainian intelligence counted 294 foreign components.

Russia is now producing up to 3,000 Shahed drones a month. In 2025, Ukraine endured attacks on 357 nights out of 365. In the first six weeks of 2026 alone, more than 4,600 of these drones were launched.

The range of the Geran-2? About 2,000 kilometers. Which means nearly all of Europe is within reach. So while diplomats debate territory, European microchips are quietly embedded in the machines that plunge Ukrainian cities into darkness. We’ve spent months worrying about semiconductors sold to the UAE potentially strengthening China’s AI ecosystem. Meanwhile, European components are already flowing through third countries into Russian weapons. The problem isn’t just who you sell to. It’s what happens two borders later.

Back home, the war over elections is heating up just in time for midterms. House Republicans have already pushed through a strict proof-of-citizenship bill. Next up is what one member is calling the Save America Act “on steroids,” banning universal vote-by-mail, prohibiting the counting of ballots received after Election Day, outlawing ranked-choice voting, tightening voter ID requirements, and expanding DHS access to voter rolls. Representative Tim Burchett was unusually blunt about the stakes: “If we don’t, we lose the midterms and we lose the country.” Bryan Steil insists that “elections should end on Election Day,” echoing Trump’s post-2020 fixation on ballots counted after the fact. And Speaker Mike Johnson has made clear this isn’t a passing concern but a permanent drumbeat: “That is something that’s going to be a continuing theme here; it’s something we’ll continue to push.” All of it is justified by the evergreen claim of widespread noncitizen voting, a problem Democrats note is “almost nonexistent.” The strategy is not subtle. If you fear losses, reshape the electorate. If you can’t reshape it enough, question its legitimacy.

Other democracies look at this and blink. In Britain, politicians are barred from participating in redistricting. In Canada, voters grew so fed up with partisan map-drawing that both parties agreed to hand the process to independent commissions. In France, openly redrawing maps to help your party win would be “completely unacceptable.” In Hungary, however, redistricting helped Viktor Orbán engineer durable supermajorities, a path that eventually led the European Parliament to label the country an “electoral autocracy.” America now finds itself in a mid-decade redistricting war that looks less like Westminster and more like Budapest.

As for Trump, he has been notably absent from the press since returning from Florida on Monday. A Politico report clarifies that a recent cabinet-level strategy meeting was presided over by Susie Wiles, not Trump himself. Still, his late-night Truth Social posts carried a familiar tone: “Crooked elections cannot be allowed in the USA.” It’s the same script as 2020, just printed in advance this time. The real danger isn’t that elections disappear overnight. It’s that legitimacy is pre-drained so that only one outcome is ever acceptable.

Then there’s the climate front. More than a dozen public health and environmental justice groups have now sued Trump’s EPA over its repeal of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. That finding is the legal keystone of modern U.S. climate regulation. It exists because the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA must determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act and regulate them if they do.

The EPA did. In 2009, it concluded that greenhouse gases harm human health. That determination underpins vehicle standards, power plant rules, methane limits, everything. Now the agency has erased it.

Trump calls the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.” That may be accurate, and it is also an attempt to strip climate science of its legal standing and dare a far more conservative Supreme Court to bless the rewrite. If the courts side with the administration, regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act could be over. Congress would have to pass a new national climate law. Go ahead and laugh. I did.

Finally, because subtlety has left the building, let’s discuss the ballroom. Trump’s latest East Wing ballroom designs have been submitted for approval. There are cosmetic tweaks, one pediment removed, an extra arched window added, new doorways leading into a reimagined garden that replaces the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. The overall footprint, however, remains unchanged. It is still enormous.

The east pediment rises four feet taller than the executive residence roofline. The South Lawn pathway is no longer symmetrical because the proposed wing is so large. Architects are now floating the idea of adding a “modest” West Colonnade extension to restore symmetry because when you build something too big, the obvious solution is to build more. The White House is being reshaped around one man’s aesthetic. Even the garden is getting a grand staircase.

Here, far from Geneva conference rooms and Capitol Hill voting schemes, it snowed last night, a rare little miracle on the Southern Oregon Coast. Just a light dusting of white, enough to make the world look briefly gentler than it has any right to. The early sun is already burning it off in patches, steam rising where the light hits, throwing long shadows across the ground that Marz finds absolutely riveting, as if winter itself has become a puzzle worth studying. Today’s work will be carried out in freezing temperatures, coffee in hand, the news still grim, the stakes still high, but for a moment, the morning is quiet, bright, and strangely beautiful. We take what we can get.