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A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations.
Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Kellogg has been seen as a hawk on Russia, but he also wrote that “the US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia”. Earlier this month, after a disastrous Washington DC meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on 28 February, US aid to Ukraine was paused, as was intelligence sharing.
Kellogg is also surrounded by some key staff who share a rightwing nationalist world view or have links to far-right populist figures.
After spending the Biden years at the rightwing and Trumpist America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Kellogg took at least two young AFPI staffers with him to assist him as Trump’s presidential special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.
One, Gloria McDonald, is a senior policy adviser to Kellogg after co-authoring several of his AFPI publications, according to her LinkedIn profile. McDonald’s résumé contains no foreign policy experience besides her AFPI policy analyst work and two short Trump-era internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, with her second four-month stint coming after Donald Trump fired then ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
Another ex-AFPI staffer, Zach Bauder, is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to a LinkedIn profile reviewed by the Guardian. He was also a field operative for the chaotic 2022 congressional campaign of the far-right Republican Joe Kent, now Trump’s pick for the National Counterterrorism Center chief.
The Guardian sought to confirm their appointments with the state department. In response, a state department spokesperson wrote that they do not comment on personnel. Emails were also sent to Bauder and McDonald’s presumed state department email addresses requesting comment.
Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) documents show that another Kent operative, Matt Braynard, approached Bauder while acting as a lobbyist for the Japanese rightwing populist party Sanseitō, whose leader’s “conspiracist, anti-globalist worldview” has included promoting antisemitic and pro-Russian positions.
Braynard’s Fara declaration says that Bauder shared his “interest in meeting with organization leadership”.
The revelations about the special envoy’s pro-Russia writings and the far-right connections of his staff come at a time when the Trump administration has been accused of seeking to hand Russia victory in its war at the expense of Ukraine and other European allies, and when the employment of young, ideological staffers across government agencies has drawn scrutiny.
However, over the last week Russia has reportedly criticized Kellogg and he was recently excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after Moscow said it didn’t want him involved, NBC News reported. Kellogg was absent from two recent diplomatic summits about the war in Saudi Arabia even though the talks came under his remit.
Kellogg’s op-eds
Kellogg retired from the US army in 2003 as a lieutenant general. He was a prominent figure in the national security hierarchy of the first Trump administration. In 2017 he was the acting national security adviser in the wake of the departure of Michael Flynn. He was chief of staff for the national security council from Trump’s inauguration until April 2018, and then replaced HR McMaster as the national security adviser, a position he held until the inauguration of Joe Biden.
From 2021 until his recall into the second Trump administration, Kellogg became the chair of the Center for a New American Security at AFPI, a rightwing thinktank founded after Trump’s defeat by prominent figures in his first administration including the policy adviser Brooke Rollins and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
Described as a “White House in waiting” for Trump’s second term, AFPI has supplied at least 11 Trump cabinet secretaries and agency heads, reportedly more than any other organization.
Senior Trump appointments with AFPI ties include the FBI director, Kash Patel, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi.
At AFPI, Kellogg articulated what he called an “America first” foreign policy. Since 2022, that took the form of increasingly strident criticism of US efforts to assist in the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.
Before the Russian invasion had even commenced, Kellogg wrote that “Ukraine is primarily a European issue to solve”, and empathized with Russia’s point of view: “To Russia, the issue of Ukraine is deeper and more personal. To Russia, it is about their security.”
Before the invasion, he urged that Ukraine be “armed to the teeth” as a deterrent, but opposed “a no-fly zone and other ways to engage American military forces in the Ukraine conflict”.
After the invasion, Kellogg increasingly reserved his criticisms for the Biden administration, Nato allies and Ukraine, with sympathy withheld from all except Putin and Russia.
In June 2022, in a statement co-written with Fred Fleitz, Kellogg wrote of Biden’s announcement of $1.2bn in aid to Ukraine: “This newest call for additional aid is a nonstarter and is not in the best interest of the American people.”
His turn against the administration and US allies was most evident from late 2023, including in reports and opinion articles Kellogg wrote with McDonald, then a senior policy analyst at AFPI.
McDonald was given the AFPI role with scant previous experience, according to her biography at AFPI’s website, her LinkedIn profile, and information from public records and data brokers.
In 2018 and 2019, McDonald did summer internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, per her LinkedIn page. In 2017, she did another internship with a Republican congressman, Dave Brat. Her time at AFPI is the only full-time work experience she takes into her apparent appointment as Kellogg’s most senior adviser in his efforts to implement Trump’s mooted peace deal.
In one co-written report, the pair argue that the best course of action for the US is to concede any possibility of Ukraine’s membership in Nato in advance of peace negotiations.
“In the case of granting Ukraine NATO membership,” they write, “the US eliminates the very incentive that would bring Russia to the negotiating table. By taking this issue off the table in the near term, however, the US offers an incentive for Russia to join peace talks and agree to an end-state.”
They also specifically criticize the Biden administration’s guarantee that Ukraine would be involved in any negotiations.
“The Biden Administration’s policy of ‘nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine’ and arming Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ has, therefore, only served to remove the urgency of reaching a negotiated end-state to the war.”
They further recommend withholding arms from Ukraine in order to force it to the negotiating table: “The US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia to negotiate an end state to this conflict.”
In a co-written opinion article for the rightwing Washington Times website in December 2023, the pair focused on a recent Zelenskyy visit to the US that included meetings with defense contractors.
The pair claimed that this was evidence “our national security policy is being unduly influenced by the interests of the military-industrial complex.”
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In the piece, they elaborate on this conspiracy narrative about Ukraine and the military-industrial complex: “The US withdrawal from Afghanistan significantly reduced defense contractors’ profits,” they write, adding that “the proxy war in Ukraine, however, not only reignited these defense contracting revenue but also spurred global military spending, which was raised to a historic $2.24 trillion after Russia invaded.”
In an April 2024 AFPI report written with Fleitz, Kellogg placed the blame for the war largely on Biden, suggesting that his attitude towards Russia was provocative.
“Biden’s hostile policy toward Russia not only needlessly made it an enemy of the United States,” they wrote, “but it also drove Russia into the arms of China and led to the development of a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis.”
They wrote: “It was in America’s best interests to maintain peace with Putin and not provoke and alienate him with aggressive globalist human rights and pro-democracy campaigns or an effort to promote Ukrainian membership in NATO.”
They also wrote that Putin’s sabre-rattling at the beginning of 2022 should have induced the US to make a deal, writing: “It was in America’s interest to make a deal with Putin on Ukraine joining NATO, especially by January 2022 when there were signs that a Russian invasion was imminent.”
They describe ongoing support of the Ukraine war effort as “expensive virtue signaling and not a constructive policy to promote peace and global stability”.
Kellogg and Fleitz appear to recommend that Russia be allowed to keep any territorial gains, arguing that the US should “continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement”.
Again, Kellogg signs off on excluding Ukraine from EU membership, writing: “President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal”.
Zach Bauder’s role
Along with Kellogg and McDonald, the policy adviser, another staffer, Bauder, has come via the AFPI pipeline.
And although Bauder has less apparent experience in foreign affairs than even McDonald, he does have international connections that appear related to his 2022 field work for a far-right candidate’s congressional campaign.
Bauder – who only graduated from rightwing Hillsdale College last year – is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to his LinkedIn page.
Besides internships at AFPI and the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Bauder’s only work experience besides working as an operations coordinator at AFPI in 2023 was field organizing for the failed 2022 congressional campaign of Kent.
The Guardian has previously reported on Kent’s far-right political positions and unanswered questions about his campaign finances and employment.
Daily Beast reporting in January 2024 implicated Braynard, a “former top aide” of Kent’s who had “white nationalist ties” in campaign finance issues. A significant proportion of 2022 campaign disbursements went to a company belonging to Braynard’s wife.
After being connected with Bauder on Kent’s campaign, Braynard apparently tapped the relationship in his lobbying work for Sanseitō, the far-right populist party in Japan.
Fara rules require lobbyists for foreign entities to lodge declarations that specify not only who they are working for, and how much they are paying, but who they make contact with in the course of pursuing their client’s aims.
A September 2024 Fara filing from Braynard indicates that he had worked as a paid lobbyist for Sanseitō.
Rob Fahey is an assistant professor in the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Shinjuku, Japan, who has written some of the scarce English language research on the far-right party.
In a telephone conversation, he said the party had grown out of “the anti-vaccine, anti-masking social movement” touched off in Japan by the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that party members were “terminally online, and they are very, very deeply involved in the conspiracy framework that is a core part of the Maga movement as well”.
Fahey said Sanseitō was part of the “new conspiratorial hard right in Japan” whose “media diet comes from the American conspiratorial ecosystem”.
Fahey added that Sanseitō largely “see the war in Ukraine as through the same lens as American conspiracy theorists: it’s Nato’s fault, and Nato is part of the new world order”.
Braynard’s filing says that the aim of his lobbying for the group is for them to “win Japanese elections”.
On Braynard’s account in the Fara declaration, “the principal, party leader Sohei Kamiya, had planned a trip to the US”.
He continues: “The principal was interested in appearing on Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson’s podcast, so I texted the producers of those shows. I also contacted Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Foundation, and America First Policy Center to ask if they would be interested in meeting with the principal to discuss common, populist conservative policies.”
In his list of the people he contacted, along with producers for Carlson and Bannon and a Heritage Foundation staffer, Braynard lists Bauder.
The filing said he texted Bauder, described as “formerly and then again more recently staff of America First Policy Institute, but not employed by them at the time I contacted him”.
Following the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy, it has seemed that Trump himself has been calling the shots on a cooling relationship with Ukraine and the other western allies. But he apparently still has the support of his special envoy.
This week, the Guardian reported that Kellogg told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting of the suspension of intelligence sharing that “they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians,” and that it was a punishment akin to “hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose”.
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