He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will “very likely” find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran. As a result, he said, the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared with other countries.
In some sense our large contributions to Ukraine earlier in the war could be seen as us fighting Russia via proxy. If I recall correctly our involvement with conflicts in Syria were also seen similarly, as us fighting a Russian proxy state. My understanding is that war between nuclear powers often looks like this because all out war could escalate to nuclear weapons too quickly. All this to say, I think we were already at war with Russia before Trump regained office.