Jacob Kaarsbo, fifteen years in Danish intelligence, told Narativ Live what was inside it — and why he thinks the South Korea withdrawal is not a pivot to Asia at all.
Two advanced drones flew into Leipzig, the airport NATO uses to move weapons into Ukraine. One of them carried between 600 and 800 grams of Semtex in an airtight container, and it sat close to a Ukrainian transport plane. It did not go off.
“I know for a fact,” Jacob Kaarsbo said on Narativ Live on Tuesday, and then gave the numbers. He spent fifteen years in Danish intelligence. On the failure to detonate he was blunt: “it was only due to pure luck that it didn’t go off.” German investigators have since established that the ammunition had been taken off the Ukrainian freight plane before the drones arrived. Kaarsbo does not find that reassuring — there was still jet fuel.
Leipzig has been hit before. In 2024 someone put a firebomb aboard a DHL plane there, timed to explode in the air. The flight was delayed, so it burned on the ground and nobody died. German counter-intelligence later uncovered a Chinese operation working the same airport, collecting flight schedules for weapons shipments to Ukraine; a member of the far-right AfD is under investigation as part of it. Whether the schedules reached Moscow, Kaarsbo would not say. He does not assert what he cannot show.
In the past fortnight, ammunition factories have exploded in Bulgaria and in Italy, and there has been an attack in the Netherlands. Europe, he said, is “too slow to react and cannot create the deterrence against Russia at this point in time, simply not decisive enough.”
That is the war nobody is calling a war. The other half of the hour was about the one America is walking away from.
For a year the administration justified its treatment of NATO as a necessary pivot — resources conserved in Europe, moved to the Pacific. Kaarsbo’s verdict on that: “The curtain is falling and he’s doing the exact opposite. There are no more aircraft carriers left in the Pacific theater.” Months ago the Secretary of Defense called South Korea a model ally. This week Trump cut the exercises with it.
Then the line the show turned on. “This whole ordeal about South Korea is not a pivot to China or a pivot to Asia. It’s a pivot to Pyongyang.”
What Trump wants from allies, Kaarsbo argued, is not burden-sharing but obedience: he is “using these alliances now for political submission,” turning allies into “vessels, just like the Warsaw Pact back in the day.” He pointed at reporting from Friday that the administration had sent European governments a report card — grading them on whether they had publicly supported its foreign policy, whether they buy American weapons systems, and whether they are working to obstruct Europe’s push to build its own.
He took it personally, and said so. “Donald Trump has threatened to take over Greenland by force. And it’s a blatant violation of the NATO Treaty, Article 1.” Greenland is Danish.
The show played Trump’s own account of the South Korea call, which needs no gloss. He asked Seoul for help against Iran and was refused. “We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” On NATO he was working the same arithmetic: “they don’t want to get involved with guarding the straight where they get most of their oil.”
Nobody in that account is defending anything. It is an invoice.
There is a cost to the arithmetic that Trump left out. North Korean ballistic missiles hit Ukraine most weeks. North Korean troops have fought for Russia. In the same breath, the president called the North Koreans unthreatening and respectful. Kaarsbo, who has spent his career watching Moscow and Pyongyang, put the reaction plainly: if you support Ukraine and think international law is worth something, “you’d sit there and say, what?”
Seventy-seven days out from the midterms, the conversation ended where it had to. Trump is already staffing an election he expects to contest, with a thousand Justice Department monitors and no list of where they go. Kaarsbo has heard Europeans say the midterms will sort it out. He does not believe them. “If you followed what happened on January 6th and the prelude to that, then he’s doing the exact same. And it shows you how far he will go.”
He offered one piece of evidence for optimism: Hungarians voted Viktor Orban out despite everything done to stop them.
Michael Cohen once said his former boss would start a world war to keep power. The hour did not prove he is doing that. It showed the doors being left open, one theatre at a time, by a man who has told everyone what a war does to an election.
Thank you Cheech Previti, Shulamit Elson, D Egger, An Mcgreevy, Chardonai, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jacob Kaarsbo! Join me for my next live video in the app.
