The covert action toolkit under fire after revelations of extra-constitutional actions during the Church committee hearings and reports of 1975-76, have been expanded to include economic instruments that are viewed as "soft" power, but cause much more widespread damage. The substitution thesis posits that regime change objectives never faded after the revelations, rather the foreign policy establishment just exchanged paramilitary activity with primary and secondary sanctions

This contemporary application episode examines the Russo-Ukrainian peace negotiations from the perspective of how the Iran war, launched on February twenty-eighth, 2026, materially altered the negotiating landscape in Russia’s favor.

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”—George F. Kennan, The New York Times, Februa

This contemporary application episode connects the alliance dynamics traced in Episode 4 to current events in Ukraine and Iran. As peace talks continue in the UAE and the USS Abraham Lincoln positions off Iran’s coast, we examine how alliance commitments—NATO’s Article 5, the Russia-Iran strategic partnership, the Russia-North Korea mutual defense pact—create the same escalation dynamics that produced World War I. With 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers AWOL and President Trump threa