Quote of the Month
“Move him into the sun —
Gently its touch awoke hi once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
“Think how it wakes the seeds —
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”
- Wilfred Owen, Futility, May 1918
My Recent Writing:
“Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: A quick review of ‘The Batman’”
“Do you really wanna taste it? A review of James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’”
What I’m Reading:
1. How liberalism lost its mojo - and how it can get it back
Why you should read it: In the Financial Times, political theorist and polymath Francis Fukuyama diagnoses the liberalism’s troubles since the end of the Cold War and observes that its benefits are never so apparent than when they are under threat.
“Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow — but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own… Many of those foundations are now under attack. Populist conservatives intensely resent the open and diverse culture that thrives in liberal societies, and they long for a time when everyone professed the same religion and shared the same ethnicity… The liberal values of tolerance and free speech have also been challenged from the left. Many progressives feel that liberal politics, with its debate and consensus-building, is too slow and has grievously failed to address the economic and racial inequalities that have emerged as a result of globalisation. Many progressives have shown themselves willing to limit free speech and due process in the name of social justice… On both the right and the left, foundational liberal ideas were pushed to extremes that then eroded the perceived value of liberalism itself. Economic freedom evolved into an anti-state ideology, and personal autonomy evolved into a ‘woke’ progressive worldview that celebrated diversity over a shared culture. These shifts then produced their own backlash, where the left blamed growing inequality on capitalism itself, and the right saw liberalism as an attack on all traditional values.”
"Liberalism is valued the most when people experience life in an illiberal world. The doctrine itself arose in Europe after the 150 years of unremitting religious warfare that followed the Protestant Reformation. It was reborn in the wake of Europe’s destructive nationalistic wars of the early 20th century… However, more than a generation has passed now since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the virtues of living in a liberal world have been taken for granted by many. The memory of destructive wars and totalitarian dictatorship has faded, especially for younger people in Europe and North America. In this new world, the EU, which succeeded spectacularly in preventing European war, was now seen by many on the right as tyrannical, while conservatives argued that government mandates to wear masks and be vaccinated against Covid-19 were comparable to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. This is something that could only happen in a secure and complacent society that had no experience of real dictatorship… Moreover, liberalism can be uninspiring to many people. A doctrine that deliberately lowers the sights of politics and enjoins tolerance of diverse views often fails to satisfy those who want strong community based on shared religious views, common ethnicity or thick cultural traditions.”
Why it matters: “…the current crisis has demonstrated that we cannot take the existing liberal world order for granted. It is something for which we must constantly struggle, and which will disappear the moment we lower our guard… The travails of liberalism will not end even if Putin loses. China will be waiting in the wings, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and the populists in western countries. But the world will have learnt what the value of a liberal world order is, and that it will not survive unless people struggle for it and show each other mutual support. The Ukrainians, more than any other people, have shown what true bravery is, and that the spirit of 1989 remains alive in their corner of the world. For the rest of us, it has been slumbering and is being reawakened ”
2. Why Ukraine’s war is just
Why you should read it: Political philosopher Michael Walzer outlines why Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia meets the criteria for a just war in the Wall Street Journal.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under international law, and it is unjust according to every version of just war theory. The decision to begin a war and the subsequent conduct of the war have always been subject to moral judgment. In Europe, just war theory dates from the Middle Ages. It was most fully developed by Catholic theologians, but it also appears in Jewish and Muslim versions. (There are Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian versions, too). And for just as long, ‘realists’ have denied the meaningfulness and the efficacy of all such judgments. Realism is the major alternative to both international law and just war theory.”
"The conduct of the war by the Russian army clearly violates the Geneva Conventions, and it fails to meet the just war requirement to fight in ways that avoid or minimize civilian casualties. The Ukrainians chose to fight, but it is the Russians who are putting civilians at risk. They have added to the crime of aggression the crime of total war, in one of its oldest and deadliest forms: the siege… The realist argument these days takes another form, having to do with the war itself and not with the conduct of the war. Realists claim to understand Mr. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, even if they deplore its price. Great powers are entitled to a sphere of influence beyond their borders, they argue, and the eastward expansion of NATO seemed to deny Russia its natural sphere. On this view, the idea that little countries near big and powerful countries are entitled to full independence and sovereignty is naive… But the refusal to allow anything like local self-determination—the creation instead of brutal, authoritarian, subservient regimes—proved disastrous for the people of the satellite states and ultimately for Russia itself. The failed uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed the necessity of an independent state, a state in the hands of its own people, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc decades later vindicated that powerful idea, as true realists should acknowledge.”
Why it matters: “The Ukrainian affirmation of statehood and sovereignty comes at a time when students of international politics have been writing about the end of the Westphalian system and the necessary transcendence of the nation-state. The truth is that we need cooperation across borders, but we also need borders like the ones Ukrainian fighters are now struggling to re-establish… The state remains the critically necessary agent of humanity’s well-being. It is also, too often, the agent of persecution and war. That’s why we still need theories of justice that address the actually existing state system, warn of its dangers and explain its value.”
3. How the cyberwar in Ukraine went unnoticed
Why you should read it: Technology writer Thomas Rid notes in the New York Times that cyber warfare in Ukraine has gone largely unnoticed despite chronic predictions that cyber-operations would prove decisive in future conflicts.
“For decades now, we have heard this refrain from the American defense establishment. We were warned that the next big state-on-state military confrontation could start with a flash-bang cyberattack: power outages in major cities, air traffic control going haywire, fighter jets bricked… Such claims [about the absence of cyberwar in Ukraine], however, are misleading. Cyberwar has come, is happening now and will most likely escalate. But the digital confrontation is playing out in the shadows, as inconspicuous as it is insidious.”
“In fact, often the most damaging cyberoperations are covert and deniable by design. In the heat of war, it’s harder to keep track of who is conducting what attack on whom, especially when it is advantageous to both victim and perpetrator to keep the details concealed… Some of the most consequential computer network breaches may stay covert for years, even decades. Cyberwar is here, but we don’t always know who is launching the shots.”
Why it matters: “Cyberwar has been playing a trick on us for decades — and especially in the past weeks. It keeps arriving for the first time, again and again, and simultaneously slipping away into the future. We’ve been stuck in a loop, doomed to repeat the same hackneyed debate, chasing sci-fi ghosts… The contours of digital conflict are slowly emerging from the shadows, as digitally upgraded intelligence operations at the edge of war: espionage, sabotage, covert action and counterintelligence, full of deception and disinformation.”
4. How Putin’s war in Ukraine bankrupted Russia
Why you should read it: British strategist Lawrence Freedman analyzes the economic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and finds little reason to think Moscow can economically sustain either war or a peace that leaves it in control over impoverished separatist territories over the long haul.
“Up to now the main question has been about whether sanctions and the pressure on the Russian economy will force Putin to abandon his aggression. There is, however, also a post-war issue, which is the cost of reconstruction. Estimates of the impact of the war on Ukraine are already well over $100 billion, and this for an economy that also faces already a contraction of at least 10% in its economy and probably more…The costs of the Russian war effort are not as high as those inflicted on Ukraine, and its infrastructure has not been attacked. Nonetheless war expenditure - lost equipment, fuel, ammo etc. – is still well into the billions of dollars. Looking forward the most worrying issue for the Kremlin is the isolation of the country’s economy… Whatever the impact on Russia’s ability to prosecute the war it is hard to see how Russia is going to have much spare capacity to compensate Ukraine for the damage it has inflicted upon it, even in the unlikely event it was prepared to offer to do so as part of an agreement.”
“Before the war Russians were grumbling about the cost of subsidising the existing enclaves [of Donetsk and Luhansk]. The Ukrainians stopped paying the pensions of those in the enclaves some time ago. Their economies were in decline before 2014 and that process has since accelerated… So the cost of occupying even this limited part of the country will be considerable and that is before even thinking about the expense required to render those horribly damaged towns and cities at all habitable, with effective infrastructure and accommodation. The alternative is to leave them in their devastated state with the bulk of their population departed and with minimal productive economic activity…The strains on the Russian war effort are already evident, from the army’s hesitation about trying to fight their way into cities and the recruitment of mercenaries, to the reported appeal to China for help with supplies of military equipment and Putin’s fury with his intelligence agencies for misleading assessments and wasting roubles on Ukrainian agents who turned out to be useless. He is now having to choose between a range of poor outcomes”
Why it matters: “We are now beyond the point where Putin has much ‘face’ to be saved, even if it were a priority for the other major powers to save it. In launching this disastrous war he has revealed himself to be not only a vicious bully but also a deluded fool… The other implication is that while economic sanctions have not yet given the West much leverage over Putin’s war strategy they do offer it leverage over his peace strategy. While he may have convinced himself that Russia – with Belarus – has a self-sufficient autarchic option this is another self-serving fantasy. The question of the future of sanctions and how they might be unwound is not one to be discussed separately from any peace talks. They are a vital part of the negotiations. As there can be no Western-led peace talks without Ukraine, it should be made clear to Moscow that for now this is a card for Zelensky to play. The future of the Russian economy can then be in his hands. Should a moment come to start to ease sanctions, some leverage will be required to ensure that any agreement is being honoured. There could be a link to reparations for the terrible damage caused.”
5. How war in Ukraine transformed German politics and policy
Why you should read it: ProPublica writer Alec MacGillis writes on how Putin’s war against Ukraine finally upended the assumptions that had driven German politics and policy since the end of the Cold War.
“President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed civilian and military carnage, ravaged cities and sent some two million people fleeing the country. As its effects have rippled across Europe and the world, one consequence has gone underexamined: The invasion has upended the political and economic policies of Germany, where the government has reconsidered its long-planned energy transition; undone a congenial political stance toward Russia that lasted for half a century; and reversed a policy of military minimalism that dates to the end of the Second World War. In many ways, Germany has rethought its place in the world — all in two weeks."
"At the heart of the shift is Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels, which until recently was not seen as problematic by German leaders. Quite the opposite: It was part of a deliberate, decades-long effort by Germany to maintain comity with the huge, nuclear-armed neighbor with whom it fought in two bloody 20th century wars. Germany chose its dependence on Russia because it saw the economic links created by fuel imports — physical links, in the form of pipelines through Eastern Europe and under the Baltic Sea — as integral to keeping peace and integrating Russia into the rest of Europe… After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germany kept up with Ostpolitik, and the country’s military spending slipped below 1.5% of GDP, even as signs mounted that Russia was on an alarming trajectory under Putin, who, in the 1990s, levelled Grozny, in Chechnya, and presided over a regime that saw disturbing numbers of dissidents persecuted and journalists murdered. Germany further expanded its energy ties with Russia… Looming above all, of course, was the boundless shame of the Third Reich, which left many Germans intent on moral repentance. Within the country, there has long been a divide over what this repentance should entail, roughly aligned in two camps: those who believe Germany should never permit itself to return to totalitarianism (‘never again dictatorship’ or ‘never again Auschwitz’), and those who believe Germany should never engage in any war, full stop. With a few exceptions, such as Germany’s limited participation in NATO’s operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the ‘never again war’ camp has held sway.”
Why it matters: “Scholz’s military shift calls for an immediate expenditure of a hundred billion euros on the armed forces and, in years ahead, a return to spending more than 2% of GDP on defense. Reaching the 2% threshold would meet Germany’s commitment to NATO… Notably unresolved, though, is how Germany plans to survive with much less of the Russian fossil fuels it has sought all these years. According to Bloomberg , the country now relies on Russia for two-thirds of its natural gas, half its coal and nearly a third of its oil. Extending reliance on nuclear energy won’t be an easy stopgap. Last fall, energy experts told me that prolonging the life of Germany’s three remaining nuclear plants wasn’t feasible; once the process of closing starts, it’s difficult to reverse… The country could delay its exit from coal, but that would imperil its goals for sharply reducing carbon emissions. And electricity production is far from the only concern: Natural gas is used to make fertilizer and, crucially, for home heating in the winter. So assured had Germany been in its Russian pipelines that it is only now building two terminals on the North Sea to receive liquefied natural gas from other countries. The terminals will take at least two years to complete, and the gas itself will likely be far costlier.”
6. How Putin’s invasion could rejuvenate American-led alliances
Why you should read it: International relations scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands argue in Foreign Affairs that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine represents a moment parallel to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when anemic efforts to build alliances like NATO to confront Soviet power were supercharged by the Berlin blockade and Korean War.
“…Russian President Vladimir Putin has now inadvertently done the United States and its allies a tremendous favor. In shocking them out of their complacency, he has given them a historic opportunity to regroup and reload for an era of intense competition—not just with Russia but also with China—and, ultimately, to rebuild an international order that just recently looked to be headed for collapse… Putin’s aggression has created a window of strategic opportunity for Washington and its allies. The democracies must now undertake a major multilateral rearmament program and erect firmer defenses—military and otherwise—against the coming wave of autocratic aggression. They must exploit the current crisis to weaken the autocrats’ capacity for coercion and subversion and deepen the economic and diplomatic cooperation among liberal states around the globe. The invasion of Ukraine signals a new phase in an intensifying struggle to shape the international order. The democratic world won’t have a better chance to position itself for success.”
“The United States has been talking tough about great-power competition for years. But to counter authoritarian rivals, a country needs more than self-righteous rhetoric. It also requires massive investments in military forces geared for high-intensity combat, sustained diplomacy to enlist and retain allies, and a willingness to confront adversaries and even risk war. Such commitments do not come naturally, especially to democracies that believe that peace is the norm. That is why ambitious competitive strategies usually sit on the shelf until a shocking event compels collective sacrifice… Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered these comfortable myths. Suddenly, great-power war looks not only possible but perhaps probable. Western policymakers have rediscovered the value of hard power and have started taking Putin’s and Xi’s imperial aspirations literally. The idea that the United States can focus on China while pursuing “stable and predictable” ties with Russia has become laughable: the Chinese-Russian entente could violently challenge the balance of power at both ends of Eurasia simultaneously. As a result, moves previously thought impossible—accelerated German and Japanese rearmament, EU arms transfers to Ukraine, the near-total economic isolation of a major power—are well underway.”
Why it matters: “Even an economically devastated, militarily constrained Russia will retain the ability to make geopolitical trouble. China will be a formidable rival for decades, even if it is prevented from overturning the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The free-world offensive during the Korean War was an emergency program, but it created enduring strategic advantages that largely determined the Cold War’s outcome. The Ukraine crisis can have a similar effect in another long twilight struggle if it motivates the United States and its allies to get serious about defending the world order that has served them so well."
7. How “cost-disease environmentalism” stymies the fight against climate change
Why you should read it: The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath contends in City Journal that regulatory bottlenecks threaten to undo much of the investment in low-carbon energy sources and technologies by making it hard to build any of it.
“…subsidizing demand for low-carbon technology comes with serious risks if policymakers don’t attend to the supply side by dismantling the regulatory bottlenecks that make it hard to build anything in this country. For decades, clean-energy deployment has been undergirded by federal tax credits, state-level renewable-portfolio standards, and other subsidies. Democrats’ climate agenda broadly extends and expands this subsidy regime. Yet the projects these subsidies support encounter regulatory hurdles imposed by the same governments that provide the subsidies… This twentieth-century environmental policy may have been appropriate in an era of widespread air and terrestrial pollution, but it’s counterproductive nowadays. From land-use regulation and zoning in cities to overly burdensome regulatory standards for emerging technologies, supply restrictions obstruct the deployment of cleaner and lower-carbon alternatives to existing fossil-fueled infrastructure. This presents problems not just for the pace of clean infrastructure deployment but also for its cost, and, as a result, its economic and political sustainability.”
“While both the broader clean-energy industry and most of the environmental-advocacy community support increased clean-energy spending, only the industry supports regulatory reform, while the advocates oppose it. Indeed, opposition to specific clean-energy projects often comes from the contemporary environmental movement. Environmentalists have become a powerful interest group blocking the technology and infrastructure deployment necessary to reduce emissions substantially… The same problems show up in the regulation and deployment of novel technologies, such as advanced nuclear reactors, genetically modified organisms, alternative proteins, carbon removal, and seaweed farming. Environmentalists make various arguments against these innovations, citing the alleged moral hazard of relying on technologies not yet widely available and empirically debatable public-health risks, or demonizing the coalitions supporting the technologies. The result: a heavier regulatory burden for improving and deploying innovative technologies.”
Why it matters: “The culprit is a partially reconstructed environmentalism, one that has embraced the virtues of certain technological investments without jettisoning the deep-seated technophobia that powered the emergence of the postwar environmentalist movement. Absent a comprehensive philosophical reckoning within this large, influential, and well-endowed movement, solving environmental problems is likely to get more expensive and difficult even as clean-energy innovations get cheaper…Politics aside, though, Americans would be better served by a climate politics that saw the two parties competing to address cost-disease environmentalism, instead of pointing fingers at one another over the nation’s inability to build anything.”
8. How the left opened up new frontiers in literary censorship
Why you should read it: In Persuasion, author Kat Rosenfield observes that censorship of books comes as much from the progressive left as the conservative right - and in many ways left-wing censoriousness proves more insidious than the right’s obvious and transparent legislative follies.
“…where the quest to suppress objectionable reading material in America used to be more or less the exclusive purview of political conservatives and the religious right, today's censorship flaps are more diverse in both origin and execution. Those freedom-to-read liberals are also, increasingly, enthusiastic censors themselves—ones whose cultural influence is both greater and more insidious than their right-wing counterparts. Conservatives continue to flail about, trying to pull individual books from individual reading lists; but the left has increasingly captured the culture, the means of production, even the creative process… Unlike traditional book banning, which targets already-published work, this is a literary McCarthyism that flies largely under the radar; for every author who writes candidly about the deleterious effect of identitarian politics on their work, there are dozens who bristle at the interference but stay silent for the sake of their livelihoods. Ultimately, it's more chilling than anything the right could cook up. Left-wing censorship stifles creativity at the source, intimidates writers with the threat of social and professional death if they refuse to toe the line, and, crucially, obviates the entire notion of suppressing books post-publishing. After all, one need not bother banning what never existed in the first place.”
“It's also a feature of these practices that those who engage in them will categorically deny that what they're doing is censorship. When they say a book shouldn't exist, that's just criticism; when a terrified author capitulates to their demands, she just did the right thing. We are often reminded in these conversations that a book deal is a privilege, not a right—and that these problematic authors are taking up space that might have gone to someone more deserving.”
Why it matters: “Indeed, it's easy to take a cynical view of all this. The right and left appear to be engaged in a frantic race to the bottom when it comes to freedom of expression, slouching toward a bleak future awash in sanitized, upstanding, ultra-woke literature that nobody wants to read… But there's also reason to be optimistic: the fiercer the pressure to conform, the more powerful the creative eruption when artists finally decide to break free. Suppression breeds rebellion. Censorship breeds transgression. Puritanism gives way, inevitably, to punk—and the vibe shift is coming. Gird your loins.”
9. Why Stalin continues to cast a long shadow over Russia
Why you should read it: Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore examines the dark legacy Soviet dictator Josef Stalin still has on modern Russia and Vladimir Putin’s own foreign policy in particular for the New Statesman.
“Across the world today, people are asking if Putin is a new Stalin. Karl Marx joked that ‘history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy then as farce’. It doesn’t, but any ruler of the Russian state faces some of the same issues as earlier Romanov tsars and Communist general secretaries. Most Russian leaders have aspired to emulate the achievements of the two pre-eminent modern rulers, Peter the Great and Stalin, both revolutionary tsars, both brutal killers. One day, hopefully, Russia will be governed by someone who admires neither. Yet Putin is not Stalin. Stalin was a Marxist; Putin is a 21st-century tyrant, who, while co-opting elements of Romanov and Soviet imperialism, is a populist and nationalist, a practitioner of 21st-century identity politics… Yet Stalin could not be more relevant. Stalin’s influence is imprinted everywhere in the state structure of Russia; he remains omnipresent. Putin’s repression at home increasingly resembles Stalinist tyranny – in its cult of fear, rallying of patriotic displays, crushing of protests, brazen lies and total control of media – although without the mass deportations and mass shootings. So far.”
“Along with the KGB, the Stalinist institution that formed Putin’s world was the Soviet Union. Many Bolsheviks were Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Letts, Ukrainians and Poles because Romanov tsars had embraced Russian nationalism and excluded the minorities who made up more than half their own population: Lenin called Russia “the prison of nations”. The overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917 was followed by civil war, and after 1918, Ukraine was the battlefield, enjoying a short, chaotic and blood-spattered independence. Lenin lost Poland, Finland and the Baltics but reconquered the most essential territory: Ukraine… Unlike Stalin – an expert in nationhood who recognised the existence of the Ukrainian nation but was determined to repress it – Putin claims Ukrainians are part of the Russian world and Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’. But both dictators would agree that Ukraine is essential to Russian statehood. In the tradition of Peter the Great, both Stalin and Putin consider military victory the mark of a great tsar. Putin made his presidency by an ever steeper gradient of gambles – crushing Chechens, striking Georgians, bombing Syrians. In 2014, when Ukraine leaned towards Nato and the EU, Putin annexed Crimea and launched a war in its Russian-speaking eastern provinces that consolidated the very Ukrainian nation he feared.”
Why it matters: “Putin is now set on hegemony over the Soviet and Romanov empires… As this atrocious war and Western sanctions corrode Russian society, Stalinist terror will become essential to Putin’s hold on power. If Putin loses he may be deposed by his own courtiers – tsars and general secretaries are usually destroyed by palace coups not protests – but he could also survive, as Saddam Hussein did after two defeats. If Putin wins, he joins Peter the Great and Stalin in the histories. ‘Victors,’ said Stalin, ‘are never tried.’”
Odds and Ends
An oral history of Prince’s Batman soundtrack album…
What the rise of an all-female Lebanese death metal band tells us about the country today…
Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant’s desert island discs…
How explorers found the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea…
Inside former astronaut Scott Kelly’s troll campaign against the head of Russia’s space program…
What I’m Listening To
Three selections from the final three posthumous albums in Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series:
“If You Could Read My Mind,” a Gordon Lightfoot cover included on 2006’s American V: A Hundred Highways.
“Hung My Head” from 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around.
“Redemption Day,” a Sheryl Crow number on 2010’s American VI: Ain’t No Grave.
Image of the Month
