Democrats, Please Take Note: Peace Is Good Politics

The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.


A group of National Guardsmen walk past the Win Without War Billboard Truck displaying the message “No War With Iran” in front of the U.S. Capitol on State Of The Union Day on February 24, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Win Without War)

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Nov 05, 2026

Common Dreams

Voters across the United States were loud and clear on Tuesday in their historic drubbing of Trumpism. The election was a decisive rejection of Trump’s war on Iran and its staggering costs at home. While savoring their victory and the historic opportunity to restore America’s constitutional order, the Democrats should take the anti-war message of the election to heart, because they suffered the same verdict two years ago, when voters rejected the Biden administration’s wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Last week Israeli voters rejected Netanyahu’s reckless wars, and European voters are also rejecting parties that prolong the Ukraine War. The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.

On election night Trump conceded to Fox News, “I think a part of it was Iran.” The next day Vice President JD Vance was far blunter, posting on X: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.... everyone knows why we lost.” In the AP Voter Poll, about 60 percent of voters said the decision to use military force against Iran was wrong, and about 90 percent called the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote.

The war and the cost of living were of course utterly intertwined. Gasoline prices, around $2.80 per gallon before the war began on February 28, had risen by about 55 percent by mid-May and reached a monthly average of $4.43 in September. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed from below 4 percent before the war to above 5 percent in the autumn, and the Pentagon sought more than $200 billion in supplemental war funding. Every family with a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card balance suffered from the war.

Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy.

The first duty of the new Congress is to restore its constitutional authority over war and its power of the purse to ensure that US forces are not sent back into combat in Iran or anywhere else on the whim of a president and the behest of domestic or foreign lobbies. Trump must of course refrain from restarting the war, which was never remotely necessary or justified. Remember that on February 28, the day the US and Israel launched the war, Oman’s foreign minister, who was mediating the U.S.-Iran talks, had said that a deal was within reach.

The Democrats should not imagine that the anti-war lesson applies only to Republicans. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because voters held the Biden administration responsible for the costs of its own wars. The energy shock that followed the escalation of the Ukraine war in 2022 drove up inflation, and gasoline topped $5 per gallon for the first time in June 2022. Biden twice rejected negotiations that could have ended the conflict: in December 2021, when his administration refused to negotiate on NATO enlargement in response to Russia’s draft security treaty, and in April 2022, when the Istanbul talks were abandoned at the behest of the US and UK.

The Gaza genocide also cost the Democrats directly. Among Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, 29 percent named ending Israel’s violence in Gaza as the main factor in their decision, the most frequently cited issue. The party’s voters have moved far ahead of its leaders. A New York Times/Siena poll in May 2026 found that roughly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US military and economic assistance to Israel.

Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy. On October 27, after Israeli wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Netanyahu lost his majority. Similarly, European leaders who have tied themselves to open-ended war in Ukraine are being rejected by the voters. Only 10 percent of Germans are satisfied with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the lowest rating ever recorded for a German chancellor. Emmanuel Macron’s approval fell to 15 percent in October. In Bulgaria, Iliana Iotova, who favors dialogue with Moscow, won the presidency on November 1 with more than 58 percent of the vote.

A key upcoming key test for the Democrats will be Ukraine. They must stop their party’s typical Russia-bashing and instead support a diplomatic end to the war.

As a start, the Democrats should remember why the war started. In 1990 the United States assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward.” The Clinton administration broke that promise. In 2008 the Bush administration pushed through the Bucharest declaration that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” despite Ambassador William Burns’s warning that this was the brightest of all red lines for Russia. In 2014 the United States backed the coup against Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, as the leaked Nuland-Pyatt call made clear. In April 2022, when negotiators in Istanbul came close to a peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality, the US and UK actually intervened to block the agreement. Today 75 percent of Ukrainians support negotiations with Russia to end the war.

The Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars.

In view of these causes of the war, I have recently set out a straightforward diplomatic framework for peace in Ukraine that would end the war. NATO would end its eastward expansion. Ukraine would adopt permanent neutrality on the model of Austria in 1955. An armistice line would be drawn, with both sides renouncing the use of force to change it. Ukraine would pursue membership in the European Union as a permanently neutral state. The Democrats should support such a diplomatic approach. It’s what can end the war, save Ukraine, and win the backing of both the Ukrainian and American people.

Most importantly, the Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars. The new Democratic majority should quickly reassert the constitutional authority of Congress over war and peace, champion a negotiated peace in Ukraine, end support for Israel’s wars, cut the military budget, and redirect the savings toward lowering the cost of living and repairing the public finances.

These positions are not only right but are good politics. For the Democrats to win the White House in 2028, they should become the party of peace. Better yet, both parties should become parties of peace and conduct the 2028 campaign on which party will best address America’s needs for decent jobs, affordability, healthcare, housing, a safe environment, and quality education.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
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With 74% of Voters Saying Iran War Was Big Factor in Midterms, Dems Urged to Become Peace Party

“Will Democrats finally get it?” asked one progressive expert. “Americans are tired of war. They want a new foreign policy.

People oppose US war on Iran and support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza during a June 22, 2025 protest in Los Angeles.
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Nov 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Nearly three-quarters of Americans who voted in Tuesday’s midterm elections said that President Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice on Iran was a significant factor in their vote, a figure that opponents of US militarism said underscored the need for the Democrats to become a true anti-war party.

According to NBC News exit polling, 74% of voters called the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran a “crucial” or “major” factor in their vote, with Democrats winning 63% of people who responded that way. Meanwhile, 63% of voters said the Trump administration made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran, compared with 37% who said it was the right decision.

“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday in a lengthy social media post. “One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.”

“But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” the vice president continued. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”

Indeed, Trump acknowledged that the war harmed Republicans, telling Fox News, “I think a part of it was Iran,” but nevertheless defended the 35-week military campaign, insisting that “people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump was similarly unapologetic, declaring: “I did the right thing. I would have done it again.”

Numerous observers contended that Tuesday’s results offered an opportunity for Democrats to do more than simply capitalize on Republican mistakes.

“Among other things, this is an absolute rebuke of the war in Iran. Democrats would be wise to heed that lesson and truly become the anti-war party,” said commentator Ben Rhodes—who, while serving as a senior national security adviser to then-President Barack Obama, supported US intervention in countries including Iraq, Libya, and Syria, as well as Obama’s wider drone war campaign.

Geopolitics scholar Van Jackson opined on social media that “if Democrats remain the party of the national security state, they will lose everything in 2028. If they become the anti-war party, they’ll consolidate this wave with the presidency.”

A Wednesday analysis on the libertarian site Reason by Matthew Petti argued that Democrats now have an opportunity to exercise Congress’ constitutional power over the war, including by withholding military funding.

Petti noted that Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Fox News last week, “The House and the Senate should stop the funding for any further actions in the Iran War,” just like “we did to stop the Vietnam War.”

However, Petti cautioned that Democratic electoral victories usually don’t lead to anti-war foreign policy.

“Party leadership that is willing to attack Republicans’ execution of the war may not share a principled anti-war commitment,” he wrote, recalling how Democrats who swept the 2006 midterms over public anger with the Iraq War but then struggled to use their control of both chambers of Congress to end it.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wants his party to cut off funding for Trump’s war and said Democrats can do so by demanding explicit restrictions on war spending as a condition of supporting the fiscal year 2027 government funding bill that expires next month.

“Right now, the continuing resolution goes through December 11,” Van Hollen told The Lever on Tuesday. “And my view is that Democrats should not advance spending to continue to fund this war.”

“The Vietnam War ended only when Congress defunded it,” he added. “This is an illegal war, and we need to make sure that taxpayer monies are not used to continue an illegal war.”

Institute for Middle East Understanding executive director Margaret DeReus pleaded on social media, “For the love of all that is good, Democrats, do not squander this.”

“The voters have given you a mandate. Use it. Be the party of working people. Be the anti-war party. Be the anti-corruption party,” she added. “We cannot go back to business as usual.”

Matt Duss, a former top aide to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who serves as executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, noted that “Trump ran and won as an anti-war candidate in 2024 because Democrats left that lane wide open for him.”

“Voters have just brutally punished him and the GOP for breaking that promise. Will Democrats finally get it?” Duss added. “Americans are tired of war. They want a new foreign policy.”

Trump Weighing Executive Order to Label Disliked Nonprofits as ‘Terrorist’ Groups: Report

“There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”


White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (L) smiles as US President Donald Trump holds signed executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 6, 2026.
(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Nov 06, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a major escalation of his war against left-wing nonprofits with an executive order that would seek to suspend their tax-exempt status with the stroke of a pen.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the order plans to label some nonprofit groups as having “terrorist” ties—an act that would immediately suspend their tax-exempt status, dramatically imperiling their ability to operate and raise money.

According to the report, the administration is seeking to use a little-known provision in the federal tax code to strip nonprofits of their status without going through the normal Internal Revenue Service investigation and appeals process.

The law, signed in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush, allows the president to identify an organization in an executive order as supporting or engaging in terrorism. The law also prevents organizations from challenging designation or suspension in proceedings concerning federal tax liability.

It’s not clear yet which groups will be targeted, but the administration and its allies in Congress have already signaled their intent to go after left-leaning groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The latter was forced to cease operations in Florida Thursday following a state-level “terrorism” designation by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.




In September 2025, weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which identified “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as ideological characteristics associated with “domestic terrorism.”

The memo directed the IRS and other federal agencies to investigate nonprofits and their funders for alleged connections to political violence.

Shanna Singh Hughey, a policy strategist at the anti-authoritarian watchdog group Protect Democracy, said in September that the memo’s vague and subjective language gave the administration expansive powers to target the nonprofits of its political foes.

“It goes way beyond that to the organizations that are connected to the folks who might be accused [of violence], including board members and staff, as long as that organization is accused of either funding or facilitating the violence done by the target,” she told Inside Philanthropy.

“This is exactly what we expect to see when authoritarians attempt to consolidate and hold power,” she said. “There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”

Then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller speaks during an event with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on August 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump’s reported plan to attack nonprofits comes on the same day that he named Stephen Miller, the chief architect of NSPM-7, as his new White House chief of staff.

Weeks before the memo was signed, Miller vowed to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.” He has said that descriptions of Trump and his immigration policies as “authoritarian” or “fascist” were examples of language that “incites” violence.

He has also referred to the Democratic Party itself as “not a political party,” but “a domestic extremist organization.”

During a State Department ministerial on terrorism in July, Miller said that under NSPM-7, the administration was empowered to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” what it called terrorist organizations.

In the same speech, he claimed that left-wing extremists invoke “civil liberties” disingenuously to evade criminal punishment.

Describing leftists as the “enemies of civilization,” he said, “It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears.”

Hormuz Oil Flows Unlikely to Return to Pre-War Levels, Rystad Says

By Michael Kern - Nov 03, 2026



The United States and Iran could reach some form of a limited agreement by the middle of 2027, which would allow oil flows from the Strait of Hormuz to continue to gradually recover, but fundamental differences will remain, and the Middle East situation will remain far from normal next year, according to Rystad Energy.

“Achieving a comprehensive settlement would require addressing issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, Tehran-backed armed groups in the region, and the security of maritime shipping, while also taking into account Israel’s security interests,” Rystad Energy said in a report cited by Azeri news agency Trend.

“We consider it unlikely that all these points of contention can be resolved within the coming year,” the analysts led by Rystad’s Head of Geopolitical Analysis, Jorge León, wrote in the report.

Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz will continue to recover gradually, but are unlikely to reach pre-war levels in a normalized trade flow, according to the energy intelligence firm.

Rystad Energy has estimated that crude oil exports from Persian Gulf producers averaged nearly 12 million barrels per day (bpd) in September and the first 20 days of October.

“While this is well above the lows recorded earlier in the conflict, it remains substantially below the pre-war level of approximately 18 million barrels per day,” the report reads.

While flows have recovered substantially from the lows in the spring, the security situation in and near the Strait of Hormuz has actually deteriorated, with a higher number of attacks on tankers in recent weeks, according to Rystad Energy.

In the near term, the risk of renewed military escalation following the U.S. midterm elections could be another setback to the recovering Hormuz oil flows.

Early on Tuesday, as voting in the midterms began on the U.S. East Coast, oil prices rebounded from Monday’s 7% loss following a Wall Street Journal report about a U.S. strike on Iran’s Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

ICYMI

Alleged Russian Funding Prompts Executive Exodus at U.S. LNG Firm

By Charles Kennedy - Oct 26, 2026

• Polar LNG's senior executives have resigned amid allegations of undisclosed Russian funding, claiming Novatek was financing and influencing the Alaska LNG startup.
• 
  
• The proposed Alaska LNG project faces potential sanctions complications, with U.S. approval still pending for the purchase of equipment from Novatek.
• 
  
• Polar LNG denies wrongdoing and disputes its former CEO's account, insisting its activities comply with U.S. law while targeting first gas deliveries by 2030.
• 
  

The top executives of U.S. energy startup Polar LNG have all resigned in recent weeks, just six months after the company was launched, amid a controversy over alleged funding and control of the venture’s strategy by Russia’s biggest LNG developer and exporter, privately-held Novatek.

The senior managers who left Polar LNG say they resigned in September after learning earlier during the month that Novatek was at least partly funding the U.S. company, which looks to build a project on Alaska’s North Slope.

Polar LNG was created in March 2026, pitching its proposed North Slope location as offering “one of the shortest shipping routes from North America to key Asian markets” to expand U.S. LNG exports to Asia.

Polar LNG also specifically said it “is not in competition with the proposed Alaska LNG pipeline. The North Slope contains far more gas than any single project can develop, and success depends on advancing multiple efforts in parallel.”

Polar LNG touted its investment proposition as a project that would use a modular gravity-based structure (GBS) to process and liquefy the gas directly at the source to accelerate construction and lower costs. The startup plans to buy an unfinished GBS from Novatek and has applied to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to be authorized to do so.

U.S. authorization hasn’t been granted yet.

However, the former Polar LNG employees say they are concerned about potential violations of the U.S. sanctions on Russia. While the U.S. has not sanctioned Novatek, it blacklisted in 2023 Novatek’s Arctic LNG-2 project whose expansion has since stalled.

Joel Riddle, who resigned as CEO of Polar LNG in September, told the Financial Times last week that he discovered Novatek was actually calling the shots and providing capital to the project without approval from the Treasury’s OFAC or other agencies of the U.S. Administration.

“I resigned as chief executive of Polar LNG because I felt uncomfortable that the Russian company Novatek was financing and ultimately controlling the strategic direction of the company,” Riddle told FT.

Furthermore, two former Polar LNG executives told The Wall Street Journal this weekend that senior executives at the company had shared concerns about Novatek’s role with the Administration in early September and that government officials had also expressed concern.

Abu Dhabi-based TechWave, an engineering firm, has provided capital to Polar LNG.

Bjorn Gundersen, a former executive at Novatek, is now at TechWave, sources with knowledge of the matter told the Journal.

During discussions about new funding for the U.S. project this summer, Riddle found out that Novatek was already financing Polar LNG and directing its operations before U.S. approvals were obtained.

Polar LNG last week issued a statement referring to the leadership change following “concerns regarding a disgruntled former employee, Joel Riddle.”

“Riddle was recently terminated from the company for cause. The company is investigating claims concerning Riddle that may result in litigation. To preserve the integrity of that process, the company will not comment further on the matters under discussion and asks other parties to exercise similar restraint,” Polar LNG said.

It added that “TechWave has provided financing to Polar LNG and initiated preliminary engineering work involving U.S. contractors. The project is seeking American investors and implementation partners.”

“Development activities are being pursued in full compliance with applicable U.S. laws,” said the U.S. start-up, which has submitted an application to OFAC “for a license authorizing the proposed purchase of an unfinished GBS from privately-owned Russian private company NOVATEK.”

There has been no progress in securing a license, various sources tell the Journal.

The alleged Russian funding and the potential sanctions threat could derail the Polar LNG project, which currently targets beginning natural gas deliveries “by the end of 2030, subject to securing necessary permits, financing, engineering and other development requirements.”

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

 

Indian Seafarer Killed in Strike in Strait of Hormuz

Survivors of the Al Jufuri attack, November 3 (Indian social media)

By The Maritime Executive 2026-11-02 

On Monday, an Indian dhow was hit at a position off Limah, Oman, the latest in a long string of vessels damaged in the ongoing U.S.-Iranian hostilities. One crewmember died of injuries sustained in the strike, and 13 were rescued by the Omani Coast Guard. 

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs confirmed the incident in a statement, and it said that its embassy in Oman is working on repatriating the survivors. 

"The targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure in the region must end, and free and unimpeded navigation and commerce through the international waterways in the region, in keeping with international law, must be restored at the earliest," the ministry said in a statement. 

The vessel was a coaster, the Al Jusufi, according to Indian shipping minister Sarbananda Sonowal. In a statement, Sonowal identified the deceased crewmember as Gujarat resident Gandhar Nahim Ajij. 

Indian seafarers have borne a disproportionate share of casualties in the Hormuz crisis, as well as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, and union FSIU called on governments everywhere for more effective intervention. 

"We demand: Immediate, enforceable protection measures; accountability for attacks on commercial shipping; full support, compensation and justice for families," FSUI said in a statement. "Advisories are not protection. Seafarers are civilians, not combatants. The world has failed them."

Strikes reported at Qeshm

Separately, U.S. forces have conducted a series of small-scale strikes against targets on Qeshm, a strategic island at the north end of the Strait of Hormuz. It is a stronghold of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and has been hit repeatedly over the course of the monthslong conflict to secure control of the strait; U.S. officials were quick to downplay the severity of the engagement. 

The strike was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Officials downplayed the severity of the operation, but acknowledged that it was the latest in a series of skirmishes with Iran's shoreside forces. For months, U.S. aviation assets have provided cover for an energy shipping corridor through Omani waters, undermining Iran's attempts to close off the strait to traffic from the GCC states. 

Most of the engagements involve shooting down incoming Iranian drones, but on Monday, the IRGC attempt to shoot down a U.S. fighter jet with a surface-to-air missile, the officials told the Journal - prompting a limited counterattack to remove the threat. 

President Donald Trump has declined to telegraph his thoughts on the possibility of restarting major hostilities with Iran. A large-scale force buildup in the Mideast gives him options, and he has hinted at several different outcomes: a successfully-negotiated peace agreement; continuation of the punishing blockade on Iran's economy; or a massive military strike, with plans said to incorporate attacks on Iran's energy infrastructure. 

Russia's military budget buys close to 90% of America's in artillery shells - IntelliNews Lambda

Russia's war budget is a fifth of the Pentagon's in dollars, but counted in shells, tanks and jets rather than dollars, the gap is far narrower. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin November 2, 2026

Russia's military budget is a fifth of America's in dollars, but counted in artillery shells rather than dollars, it buys close to 90% as much.

And the Kremlin is spending big - and more than it can afford. Nominally, Russia's military spending this year is on course to approach RUB17 trillion ($211bn), which is as much as RUB5 trillion ($62bn) more than it initially planned to spend at the start of this year. 

While official figures are opaque, the government's budget plan had pencilled in RUB12.1 trillion ($150bn) for "national defence" in 2026, while SIPRI estimated total actual planned military expenditure at RUB14.9 trillion ($185bn), or 6.3% of GDP, in March. Next year's 2027 budget will lift defence spending again to RUB17.1 trillion ($212bn), or a whopping 41% of all spending. 

It's a lot of money, but it is still only a fifth of what the $961.6bn the Pentagon requested for FY2026. And if President Donald Trump gets his way, that will rise to $1.5 trillion next year. 

However, spend a dollar in Russia and it goes a lot further than one spent in the US as wages and input costs are a lot lower. Consequently, economists prefer to compare PPP (purchase power parity) adjusted spending that takes this difference in price into account. 

At the Bank of Russia's official rate of RUB80.56 to the dollar, RUB17 trillion ($211bn) adjusted for PPP Russia's defence spending is  worth about $574bn - not 22% of US spending but close to 60% of the US figure - still a big gap, but may be enough to keep Russia in the game if it went to war with the US. 

The International Institute for Strategic Studies made the same kind of adjustment in its Military Balance 2025, valuing Russia's 2024 defence spending of RUB13.1 trillion ($163bn) at $462bn in PPP terms - more than the EU and the UK combined that would be in the frontline if war in Europe really does break out.

Artillery shell units 

The story doesn’t stop there as even the PPP adjustment flatters the US. The PPP adjustment is an aggregate adjustment to the value of the currency that takes everything into account, but military production is very specific. The difference between what a dollar spent in the market can buy you in the market is not the same as what it pays for in Russia’s drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan or the artillery shell plants in the depths of Siberia.

On the flip side, the US defence sector is bloated, and its products are, in comparative terms, badly overpriced. Instead of comparing dollar-for-adjusted dollars, it makes more sense to compare the cost of production of like-with-like. A dollar of Pentagon money buys fewer shells, tanks and jets than a dollar's worth of rubles does in Russia. Counting the military spending in terms of "artillery shell production units" then Russia's spending on the weapons it actually uses in its war in Ukraine is just under 90% of US spending. 

Artillery shell units are the basic comparison as everything that goes into making the Soviet-era standard 152mm shell is Russian: the metal, the gunpowder, the power, the labour. One shell costs an estimated $1000 to make, according to defence publication Militarnyi, whereas the Nato equivalent 155mm shell costs $4000 to make in the US, according to consultancy Bain & Company. The PPP adjustment implies the Russian shell should be about 2.7-times cheaper, but the actual difference is Russian shells are four-times cheaper to make than American shells. 

If the war were entirely about shelling the enemy then Russia and the US spending is almost on a par. 

Russia's 2026 military spending at the market rate, at PPP and in artillery-shell terms, against the Pentagon's FY2026 request. Source: Bank of Russia, US Department of Defense, Bain & Company, IntelliNews calculations

Artillery is the simplest place to start and they have played a key role in the early stages of the Ukraine conflict which was largely an artillery duel for the first two years; Russia was lobbying ten shells on to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for every one they could fire back. By 2023 Ukraine was already in crisis as it was running out of ammunition and the West scrambled to find more shells after its own stockpile was depleted.

The cost is not the only factor to consider in military spending comparisons: there is no point having more money to spend if you don't have the industrial capacity to make the shells. Bain reckoned Russia would turn out 4.5mn shells in 2024 against the combined production of 1.3mn in the US and the EU. Since then Russia has doubled or tripled its production capacity. 

The US is struggling to scale up. The Army raised 155mm output from 14,000 to 36,000 rounds a month by March 2026, or 432,000 a year, missing its goal of 100,000 a month by October 2025, the Pentagon's inspector general found in a report published on July 9.

Just how wide the gap is between the US defence sector’s ability to make something as simple as shells was highlighted by the US military’s catastrophic failure to expand domestic explosives production.

The Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, operated by BAE Systems, is the country’s sole domestic producer of RDX and HMX - two powerful explosives used in missiles, bombs and artillery ammunition. The US Army committed one billion dollars to modernise the 84-year-old facility, but production increased a meagre 3% of its 1944 peak. Further upgrades intended to increase capacity have been delayed until at least 2029, and the plant faces a backlog of orders stretching one to two years. The lack of these two explosives threatens to become a crucial bottleneck that will severely hamper the US ability to wage war at a time when demand for munitions is sky high and rising.

At the same time the US only has three plants making the metal parts for shells which suffer from similar problems related to underinvestment. Output of shells is currently capped at 71,000 a month, according to the Wall Street Journal. Russia's howitzer output alone is about eight-times higher than the US rate.

At Bain's 4:1 ratio, Russia's $211bn buys as many shells as $844bn spent in the US, or 88% of the Pentagon's request. On the 2025 Russian contract price the ratio is 3.1:1, which still puts Russia's spending at about $654bn in US shell terms, or 68%.

Artillery shell	US / Nato	Russia
Standard round	155mm (M795 high-explosive)	152mm (OF25 high-explosive)
Estimated unit cost (Bain & Company, 2024)	about $4,000	about $1,000
Russian contract price, 2025	-	RUB104,000 ($1,291)
Shells bought for $1mn	250	about 775-1,000
Output	36,000 155mm rounds a month (March 2026)	3.4mn howitzer rounds in 2025; 7mn artillery rounds of all types
Russian spending in US shell terms	$962bn (US request)	$654bn-844bn (68%-88% of US)

Sources: Bain & Company via Sky News; Militarnyi; Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service; US Department of Defense Office of Inspector General; IntelliNews calculations

Tanks and fighter jets

Russia has a big advantage over the US in shell production, but the bigger, more complicated platforms show a smaller discount. A serial T-90M, the so-called Amarta Main Battle Tank, Russia's most modern in production, costs about RUB350mn ($4.3mn), military journalist Kirill Fedorov estimated in April, while the Kyiv Post has put it at about $4.5mn. Russia has never published the price. The US Army's FY2020 procurement budget gave a gross unit cost of $10.6mn for the M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams, the US' best tanks - about 2.5 times as much and on a par with the PPP dollar -adjusted spending. 

The Su-57 fifth-generation fighter costs about RUB2.2bn (34.6mnatthe2019averageexchangerate)aplanewhenthedefenceministryordered76foraboutRUB170bn(2.6bn) in 2019, Kommersant reported. By comparison the US' fifth generation F-35 has an average buy-and-fly cost of  $82.5mn - about 2.4 times the Su-57's price, and the latest contract for 296 jets came to $24.3bn for the airframes alone.

On armour and aircraft the multiplier of 2.4-2.5 sits just below the economy-wide PPP ratio of 2.7, putting Russia's spending at about 52%-54% of the US level in tank or jet units.

Platform	US	Russia	Cost ratio (US:Russia)
Main battle tank	M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams: $10.6mn (Army FY2020 budget)	T-90M: about RUB350mn ($4.3mn) to $4.5mn (estimates)	about 2.5:1
Fifth-generation fighter	F-35A: $82.5mn average flyaway (Lots 15-17)	Su-57: about RUB2.2bn ($34.6mn at 2019 rate) (2019 contract)	about 2.4:1

Russian prices are estimates or press-reported contract totals; US prices are official budget or programme figures. Sources: US Army, F-35 Joint Program Office, Kommersant, Kyiv Post, IntelliNews calculations

Drones and missiles

In drones the unit-price edge disappears altogether but the volume edge takes over.  IntelliNews published an infographic guide to Russia and Ukraine’s missiles and drones, where the key takeaway is the Kremlin this year has upgraded its workhorse Geran-2 drone, based on the prop-driven Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition, to the much more advanced and hard to stop Geran-4 and the cruise missile-lite Geran-5, plus the very similar Banderol cheap and power cruise missile against which Ukraine has at best partial protection.

Leaked documents put Russia's projected cost of a localised Geran-2 at about $48,800 in 2023, Militarnyi reported in February 2024. The US LUCAS, a copy of the Shahed, costs about $35,000 a unit, according to US Central Command. But the LUCAS is still on the drawing board and not in serial production. Currently, what drones the US has costs between $20mn and $250mn to make with its best known drone, the MQ-9 Reaper costing 30mn–50mn each - two orders of magnitude more than Russia's drones, which are now state-of-the-art.

In effect the US has next to nothing in its drone arsenal, whereas Russia was producing an estimated 2mn drones and 2,500 missiles a year by 2025, much of it at the Alabuga plant in Tatarstan, and now builds about 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4 drones a month. Europe's combined drone production is estimated to be 300,000 a year by comparison. 

Russia has already moved beyond the original Iranian design following a technology swap in 2015 and since then the two wars in Ukraine and Iran have been driving an expanding CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) technology swap where each partner is helping the others develop better weapons based on hard battlefield data. As a result Russia is currently winning the drone arms race with Ukraine, whereas the US has been reduced to trying to reverse engineer Iran's technology.

The Geran-2 flies at 150-180 km/h. The Geran-3 reaches 300-370 km/h, the Geran-4 about 500 km/h, and the Geran-5 reportedly over 1,000km/h. Ukraine's fastest interceptor drone can manage 450kmh and so can't catch Russia's newest missiles from behind. With  an estimated cost of $170,000-200,000 apiece, according to Defense Express, the Geran-4 is one of the most effective drones on the battlefield.

The Banderol, a cross between a strike drone and a light cruise missile, cruises at 500-560 km/h, and estimates of its cost run from up to $50,000 to $150,000-300,000, Ukrainska Pravda reported in September. The US has no jet-powered one-way attack drone in mass production at all. 

Missiles are harder to compare, because Moscow publishes no prices but a wealth of experience earned from the seven decades of the Cold War. Ukrainian estimates put an Iskander-M ballistic missile at about $3mn and a Kh-101 cruise missile at about $13mn, Forbes Ukraine calculated.

The US Army's budget requests put its comparable Precision Strike Missile at $1.7mn-3.5mn, and trade-press estimates put a Tomahawk at $1.9mn-3.6mn, so on these figures the US pays less per missile. Russia's edge lies in weapons the US does not have at all: the hypersonic Kinzhal, estimated at $10mn-15mn, and the Oreshnik intermediate-range missile, put at $20mn-50mn by Ukrainian sources. China, Russia and now Iran all have hypersonic missiles, while the US version is also still in development. 

Weapon	US	Russia	Note
One-way attack drone	LUCAS: about $35,000	Geran-2: about $48,800 (2023 projected cost)	US cheaper per unit; Russia makes thousands a month
Jet drone / light cruise missile	none in mass production	Geran-4: $170,000-200,000 (est.); Geran-5: not published; Banderol: up to $50,000 to $300,000 (est.)	Speeds 450-600 km/h
Short-range ballistic missile	PrSM: $1.7mn-3.5mn; ATACMS: about $1.5mn	Iskander-M: about $3mn (est.)	No Russian advantage on these estimates
Cruise missile	Tomahawk: $1.9mn-3.6mn (est.)	Kh-101: about $13mn (est.)	Russian prices are Ukrainian estimates
Hypersonic / intermediate-range	none in service	Kinzhal: $10mn-15mn; Oreshnik: $20mn-50mn (est.)	No US equivalent fielded

Sources: US Central Command, US Army budget requests, Militarnyi, Defense Express, Ukrainska Pravda, Forbes Ukraine, ArmyInform

The chip in the machine

Cost and capacity are two of the three limits on Russia's war machine. The third is technology, and it is the one the Kremlin controls least.

Russia's drones and missiles are cheap and they are plentiful, but unlike the artillery shells they are not Russian all the way through. Strip the casing off a Geran or an Iskander and what is inside is a smorgasbord of components, much of it Western.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the audit public on June 2: five Kalibr cruise missiles fired at Ukraine contained 145 foreign components between them, 33 Iskanders contained 1,122, and 650 strike drones of various types contained more than 17,000. Russian drones and missiles, he said, “cannot be produced at all without components imported from other countries”.

As Kyiv finds itself under a 24/7 bombardment of missiles and drones as Putin escalates the increasingly brutal tit-for-tat missile war, Bankova’s pleas for the West to crank up its technology sanctions have become increasingly shrill. Russia can out-produce the West on shells because it can find everything it needs at home, but it cannot out-produce the West on signal processors, programmable logic and radiation-hardened memory, because it does not make them. But Russia does have friends who do and they are getting increasingly good at it.

Ukraine's Defence Intelligence now publishes the evidence component by component on its War&Sanctions portal, and the catalogue is countable. IntelliNews tallied every card on the portal for four weapons – 464 in all. The pattern is not the simple one. Substitution is happening, but it runs in two directions at once.

On drones, Russia is going Chinese:

Geran-2: In a sample whose newest identified part dates from June 2023, 70 of 75 catalogued components came from firms headquartered in the US and its allies and just three from China.

Geran-4: with parts made as late as March 2026, the Western share is down to 56 of 74 and China's is up to 12. The Iranian Mado engine that powered the original has gone, replaced by Chinese Telefly turbojets. Colonel Oleksandr Zaruba of Ukraine's weapons testing institute said in June that around 50 parts in each Shahed are now made in China or Taiwan.

On missiles, Russia is substituting for itself:

Kh-101 cruise missile: in a sample whose newest part dates from November 2022, carried 138 catalogued components of which four were Russian.

Iskander-M: in a sample with parts made as recently as April 2025 carried 177, of which 38 were Russian – Mikron, Morion, Proton, Kremnii El – and a further eight came from Integral, the Belarusian state chipmaker. Even so, two-thirds of that missile is still Western by origin.

Integral is a lesson in itself. It shipped more than 6mn microchips worth $130mn into Russia between March 2022 and June 2024, 80% of all Belarusian chip exports to the country, and Ukraine's SBU has confirmed its parts inside Iskander, Kh-101, Kh-59M2A and S-300 missiles. Its own production lines run on German microscopes, Swiss vacuum valves, British vacuum systems, Japanese wafer slicers and American test rigs, fed by 99.999% pure hydrochloric acid routed out of Germany through Poland, Turkey and Kazakhstan. The substitute for Western technology is manufactured with Western technology.

The deepest layer has not moved at all. The Kometa is Russia's own anti-jamming navigation module, the thing it built to replace Iran's Nasir receiver and the reason Geran drones still fly through Ukrainian electronic warfare; its antenna has gone from four elements in mid-2023 to sixteen. It is Russian-designed and Russian-assembled – and of its 37 foreign components, 34 come from Western firms and 28 from American ones. Russia has substituted the module. It has not substituted the silicon inside it.

That is the ceiling. Russia's three mass-scale chip plants – Mikron, Angstrem and Milandr, all in Zelenograd – produce at 90 nanometres. The industry ministry's roadmap targets 28nm by 2028 and 14nm by 2030, which IntelliNews has reported as unrealistic; China is already below 10nm and the US is heading for 2nm.

Up to 82% of Russia's electronic components were imported before 2022, and the state is putting about RUB175bn ($2.2bn) a year into microelectronics against an estimated RUB1.5-2.5 trillion for a single modern fab and RUB3-5 trillion for the equipment to fill it. Russia cannot buy the lithography machines and it cannot build them.

Which is why Kyiv keeps pressing. Tighten the export controls hard enough and the lines at Alabuga and Izhevsk slow, because the parts cannot be made at home and the workarounds – distributors in Hong Kong, shell companies, the long daisy-chain through Central Asia and the Gulf – are expensive and traceable. The Kyiv School of Economics found $7.3bn of critical battlefield components reaching Russia from coalition-based firms in a single year, almost all through third-country intermediaries.

But the window is closing, and not because enforcement is improving. Every Chinese part that replaces an American one is a part the West can no longer switch off, and Chinese quality is rising fast – the CRINK technology swap means Beijing is now a developer of these systems, not merely a supplier of parts for them. Conflict Armament Research has recorded a “discernible increase” in Chinese content in Shahed-type drones.

Sanctions on Western technology would bite today. On present trends they will not bite for much longer.

 

Foreign components catalogued by Ukraine's Defence Intelligence in two Russian drones and two Russian missiles, by the manufacturer's home country. Source: War&Sanctions portal, 464 component cards tallied by bne IntelliNews on November 2; Militarnyi; Kyiv School of Economics; CSIS

The like-for-like index

Set side by side, the categories show where Russia's money goes furthest. In shells, the ammunition this war burns through fastest, Russia's ruble buys three to four times as much as a Pentagon dollar. In tanks and jets the multiplier is about 2.5. In drones Russia pays roughly the same per unit as the US but unlike the US, already has large-scale, fully developed production, churning them out in the millions a year. In hypersonic missiles, Russia has no American rival to price against and America has no effective air defence to protect against them.

Measure	Cost ratio (US:Russia)	Russia's $211bn in US-equivalent terms	Share of US $962bn
Market exchange rate	1:1	$211bn	22%
Drones (Geran-2 vs LUCAS)	0.7:1	$151bn	16%
Fifth-generation fighters	2.4:1	$502bn	52%
Main battle tanks	2.5:1	$521bn	54%
Economy-wide PPP	2.7:1	$574bn	60%
Shells (2025 contract price)	3.1:1	$654bn	68%
Shells (Bain & Company)	4:1	$844bn	88%

Ratios apply one weapon class to the whole budget for illustration only. Source: IntelliNews calculations from the sources above

Preparing for the wrong war

"Generals always prepare to fight the last war," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill quipped. The US is still buying what it has always built: stealth fighters, heavy tanks and expensive precision missiles. Russia's biggest advantage is that it is fighting a war now and buying for it.

Ukraine has turned war into an asymmetric contest where the cost-to-kill ratio decides who wins, not who has the biggest or smartest bombs. A Patriot PAC-3 interceptor costs about $4mn, while the drones fired at it cost $20,000-30,000. An attacker can make 150-200 drones for every interceptor. The new paradigm is a man with a flywatter trying to fend off an attack by a swarm of hornets. 

The doctrine has shifted the “Command of the Commons” doctrine the US has been following for decades - the deployment of powerful weapons in bases scattered around the world so it can respond to any crisis quickly with overwhelming force - to the Command of the Reload, in which the side that can build more cheap, "good-enough" weapons wins. 

Ukraine is praised for its pioneering drone innovations, but Russia is innovating too and currently has the edge in drones over Ukraine. The CRINK technology swap and informal alliance is proving to be decisive. The only answer the US has to the CRINK hypersonic missiles is the Army's Dark Eagle that has flown a few flight tests and its first battery of eight missiles is assigned to a unit in Washington state. Its first operational fielding was expected in July, according to the Congressional Research Service brief on the programme. The Air Force revived its own ARRW hypersonic missile with a $694mn production contract earlier this year.

The pace of change on the Russian side is fast. The Geran family has gone from 150-180 km/h for the Geran-2 to 450-600 km/h for the Geran-5 in under two years and Russia is keeping its foot on the pedal. US weapons development has no war driving it at that speed.

Washington had a chance to learn from the experts but fluffed it. Zelenskiy offered Trump a mega-deal in July 2025, Ukrainian drones in exchange for American missiles, and a $50bn drone deal was rejected. "We don't need any help," Trump said in March, as the US rolled out the LUCAS instead.

The US war on Iran that began in February has shown what that costs. Iran's asymmetric tactics have blunted American air power, and eight months on Tehran is still setting preconditions for ending the war. The US and Israel armed themselves for the wrong war, and Russia's military is far more powerful than Iran's. Even if the US outspends Russia by about 10% in like-for-like terms, it is spending more of that money on the wrong weapons, and risks the same experience in any war with Russia's far more powerful and experienced army. 

This article was produced with the help of IntelliNews Lambda analytical tool