Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton White House chief of staff and most recently the U.S. ambassador to Japan, divides opinion. Liberals particularly dislike him because of some of his policies and actions during his time as mayor of Chicago. He may have his flaws, but I’ve always greatly admired him because he is one of the clearest thinkers in America in my view.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump frequently criticized the billions of dollars in aid that the U.S. had provided Ukraine to defend itself against Russia’s 2022 invasion. After he won the election, Mr. Trump set out to make Ukraine pay not only for future U.S. military assistance, but also for some of what it had received previously. In connection with that, in the early days of his second term, President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a minerals deal under which Ukraine would supply strategically important minerals to the U.S.

In his March 10, 2025 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Rahm Emanuel argued that a minerals deal is not what America needs from Ukraine. He wrote this: “Ukraine could offer us something immediately more worthwhile. [T]he United States should be looking to acquire not what’s underground in Ukraine, but rather what’s 100 feet in the air. We need Kyiv’s drone technology.”

According to Emanuel, prior to the current war with Russia, Ukraine had no drone manufacturing industry to speak of. They effectively had one unreliable military supplier. But in the last three years, the country has developed a domestic production base comprising some 500 entrepreneurial firms “that are now the world’s envy.”

Emanuel provided data showing that in 2024, Ukraine produced 1.2 million drones, many with ranges well in excess of 180 miles. This year, Ukraine is expected to produce 4 million. He wrote that “their defense industrial base is accomplishing in weeks what the Pentagon’s procurement system has failed to do for decades — that is, to quickly produce new, battle-tested weapons systems that warfighters can deploy reliably on the battlefield.” His recommendation: “The United States should license the battle-tested drone technology Ukrainian companies are developing and producing at scale and in real-time, obviating overnight our greatest strategic weakness.”

What is impressive about that opinion piece is that it was written nearly three months before Ukraine’s audacious drone attack on five strategic air bases inside Russia last week. The operation, code-named “Spiderweb,” involved the smuggling of drones deep into Russian territory, as far as Siberia. The drones, which were armed with explosives, were transported to sites near the target airfields. They were concealed inside trucks and beneath the roofs of houses. On the day of the attack, the containers were remotely opened, releasing the drones to fly up and attack their targets. According to reports, about a third of Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers, including nuclear-capable types, were destroyed.

The attack is said to have dealt a major blow to Russia’s aerial cruise missile strike capability and revealed “the vulnerability of major military assets thousands of miles from the front lines.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the operation, describing it as “brilliant” and “perfectly prepared.” He added: “These are Ukrainian actions that will definitely be in history textbooks.” The New York Times quoted the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office as saying that her country’s security services had “set a new bar of skill in conducting large-scale combat operations on enemy territory.”

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Ukrainian attack, the Washington Post’s Max Boot said that “Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war.” He likened operation Spiderweb to the Dec. 7, 1941 Imperial Japanese Navy attack that destroyed or damaged 328 U.S. aircraft and 19 U.S. Navy ships. Boot is sure that the Russian high command must have been as shocked by the Ukrainian assault on their bases as the Americans were in 1941. He goes on to say that “swarms of Ukrainian drones that probably cost tens of thousands of dollars to build in total might have inflicted $2 billion of damage on Russia’s most sophisticated aircraft,” and that this “revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights.” He concedes that “the Ukrainians are proving far more resilient and adaptable fighters than anyone had anticipated before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago.”

I am not one of those people who have been unexpectedly awed by the ingenuity and bravery of the Ukrainians during this war. That is because I was already quite familiar with the country and its people. For six years, I sat next to Ukrainians in classrooms, and lived with them in university dormitories. I also spent thousands of hours in conversations with them in various venues. They are some of the most brilliant people on the planet.

A week before Emanuel’s opinion piece was published, I wrote that it would be shocking if the Ukrainians were not quietly building nuclear weapons behind the scenes. My argument was that Russia would not have attacked their country if they still had their nuclear arsenal that the U.S. pressured them to relinquish. Given the apparent unwillingness of the U.S. to sufficiently help in their defense as promised in the Budapest Memorandum, I thought it would be quite logical for Ukraine to reacquire nuclear weapons for future deterrence. I mentioned one of my Ukrainian classmates, a complete genius who exemplifies the caliber of scientists and engineers that the country boasts of, as the reason for my belief that Ukraine can quickly reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.

We have all been guilty of underestimating and sometimes disrespecting people who we don’t know well. Even then, it was a stunning display of arrogance for President Trump to wag his finger at President Zelensky in the Oval Office in February and lecture him that he “didn’t have the cards” and should therefore keep his mouth shut. With operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian president and his compatriots have amply demonstrated that they actually have a strong hand, and that it would be foolish for anyone to be so dismissive of them as our president was.

I don’t know what President Trump finds so admirable about Putin for him to show so much deference toward him. The vile dictator has a vast landmass that spans eleven time zones and is filled with every natural resource one can think of. But he has absolutely no idea what to do with all those endowments. He spends all of his time either trying to steal other people’s lands to add to what he already has, or building bombs in preparation for senseless wars. Putin should be quite embarrassed that with its barely $2 trillion of GDP, Russia is not even on the top-ten list of countries by GDP. Relatively tiny nations like France and Italy, with far fewer natural resources, have much higher GDPs. No wonder the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona derisively described Russia as a “gas station masquerading as a country.” Clearly, size doesn’t always matter.

Our sitting president has chosen to prioritize his personal friendship with a tyrant over our national interest. Thankfully, we have visionaries like Rahm Emanuel who keep a close eye on what is happening in the world and critically think about some of the things we should be doing to keep America and our indispensable allies strong and safe. It is up to the rest of us to pay careful attention to what these sages tell us.