Dubliner Tom Wright was an adviser to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan during the Biden administration, advising on security and strategic threats to the US, spending “about half my time on Ukraine”.

He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at the Atlantic.

Wright may no longer be the most influential Irish person you’ve never heard of, but he has inside knowledge of how power works in Washington and a ringside seat to observe the way the Trump administration is changing the world.

This week in Washington, I asked him about war in Iran, the prospects for Ukraine and the future for Donald Trump.

Welcome to the new Global Briefing newsletter

In a Beirut hotel, families brace for war with no clear end

‘A perfect storm is coming to Jersey’ he warned, but all I could see were blue skies

Is it time for the EU to start talking to Russia after four years of silence?

In Iran, Wright says, Trump is in “a real bind”. The Iranians have been more resilient than expected – expectations that the regime would just crumble were unfounded – and have targeted world energy prices by hitting facilities in the Gulf states and closing the Strait of Hormuz. These were developments that proper planning would have anticipated.

“They are good reasons not to have started the war in the first place,” he said.

I think there’s a chance the war just goes on. It could still be going on when Trump leaves office

I think there’s a chance the war just goes on. It could still be going on when Trump leaves office

He cites reports that the chairman of the joint chiefs, the highest-ranking military officer, warned that the Iran operation would be much more difficult than Venezuela – only for Trump to dismiss them.

“I think he’s in a hubristic phase ... He thinks he has the Midas touch, like everything he touches, just turns to gold,” says Wright.

And when “people warn of disaster, it never really happens ... not for Donald Trump, not for America. And so I can ride all of that out, and if it goes bad, then I can just leave, and just say I won, right? And he believes that’s worked for him before. But it hasn’t worked here.”

“So I think he’s really stuck and I think he’s looking for options to try to break out of the mould a little bit. That could be a big escalation, like using ground troops to take Kharg Island, or a raid into Iran, but those are hugely risky, and if they don’t work, they could make things much worse.”

Since we spoke a year ago about the situation in Ukraine, Russia has only made slow progress on the ground.

The Russian advance in eastern Ukraine, Wright says, has been “slow, sort of piecemeal. If the progress were to continue at the pace of the last year ... it would still take them two years or more to take the Donbas alone.”

He points to the “massive” casualty rate being sustained by the Russians, with estimates suggesting that they have lost over 1.2 million men killed, injured or missing. By contrast, total Russian fatalities in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 were about 15,000. “So this is just gargantuan.”

Wright says that Ukraine has compensated for the comparative shortage of troops by “going all in on drone technology, and the drones have sort of taken over in a lot of ways”.

Russia has “had to adjust. Sometimes they’ll take territory when the weather’s really bad, and the drones can’t operate as well. Or they will try to infiltrate in small groups, undetected ... but it means that the front line itself has become a little bit more stable. And the Ukrainians are now out of winter. I think they were hurt a lot on the electricity grid and everything, strikes on energy [infrastructure] – but they didn’t collapse. They haven’t collapsed as a country.”

Have we passed the point at which Trump is at the peak of his powers?

Have we passed the point at which Trump is at the peak of his powers?

The conflict in Ukraine, and specifically the way that drones have become central to combat operations, has changed the way wars are fought on the battlefield. For this reason, Wright says that Ukraine’s role in future European defence will be “enormous”. He cites reports of recent Nato war game training exercises in which “a handful of Ukrainian [drone] operators defeated the entire Nato forces quite quickly.”

The prospects for the immediate future are uncertain, though. The Russian demands – occasionally amplified by Trump – amount basically to a “negotiated surrender”, where Ukraine gives up territory that Russia has been unable to conquer and downgrades its military forces, leaving itself open to future attack. No Ukrainian leader will agree to that.

“And so I think where we are is that ... I think there’s a chance the war just goes on. It could still be going on when he [Trump] leaves office.”

A more optimistic possibility is that “it ends in 2027 ... If Putin thinks a Democrat might come back, and if he isn’t making many gains in the war, he may just decide, ‘I should just take a good deal from Trump and lock that in’.”

Wright emphasises the centrality of Trump to all decision making in the administration.

“They don’t prepare options or plans because the general ethos is the president is in charge. His administration believes he will instinctively know what to do, and he will tell them. So they are constantly unprepared.”

When Wright was in the White House, “normally we would have done a lot of contingency planning, prepared options, done tabletop exercises, to try to game them out a bit, and you try to socialise senior decision makers on what they might need to do ... you know, if Iran did close the Strait of Hormuz, what would that look like? What would your options be? They haven’t really done any of that. And that’s by design. And ... it’s quite eccentric and dangerous.”

This week in Washington Trump seemed to me to be diminished, politically and personally. Have we passed the point at which he is at the peak of his powers?

“I’d love that to be true. Sometimes I try to make myself feel better by thinking it’s not one and a quarter years into four – it’s like five and a quarter into eight. But it’s still a long time and the president has a lot of power, especially on international issues ... So, right until the end, I think there’s still capacity for him to do things.”

© The Irish Times