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The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.

Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.

Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.

Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”

To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump

This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.

A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.

He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.

there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)

In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump

Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:

A feeble truth commission was quickly abandoned by President Boris Yeltsin, and soon even the Soviet archives were closed, although not before researchers like Vladimir Bukovsky revealed some of the KGB's atrocities. The KGB's name was changed to the FSB and its members quietly stayed in touch and intact. The result? A mere nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia elected a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Putin, to the presidency. It was the last meaningful election we ever had. We chose unity and we got dictatorship.

Many Americans were shocked by how many of their compatriots, including nearly all GOP officials, have been willing to go along with Trump's open assault on the pillars of their open society, from the free press to fair elections

As I warned early on, demagogues don't find radicals to lead, they steadily radicalize their followers one outrage at a time. The culmination, so far, was January 6.

Hemingway wrote in "For Whom the Bell Tolls": "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find.

Perhaps the most ominous number is the 24% of Republican voters who don't accept the results of the election, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey last month, leaving the question of whether they will accept the results of any election ever again.

At its core, democracy is an act of faith, a shared belief that the people can fairly act in the common good by choosing their leaders. Destroying the faith in the system will destroy the American experiment.

This is precisely what we are trying to counter at the Renew Democracy Initiative. We are launching a campaign dedicated to the simple phrase, "what democracy means to me," in the hopes of reminding everyone what a luxury it is for every citizen to have a say in the course of their lives and of their nation.

Democracy isn't liberal or conservative, not left or right -- at least it isn't supposed to be. Millions of Americans currently believe that democracy isn't working, or even that it isn't worth saving. The battle to prove them wrong isn't over, it's just begun.

Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.

of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers?

To explain why requires some history

the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power.

Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy.

Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy and political change is dangerous. To keep them from spreading, Russia’s rulers must maintain careful control over the life of the nation. Markets cannot be genuinely open; elections cannot be unpredictable; dissent must be carefully “managed” through legal pressure, public propaganda, and, if necessary, targeted violence.

Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police.

Try to imagine an American president who controlled not only the executive branch—including the FBI, CIA, and NSA—but also Congress and the judiciary; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and all of the other newspapers; and all major businesses, including Exxon, Apple, Google, and General Motors.

He is strong, of course, because he controls so many levers of Russia’s society and economy

And yet at the same time, Putin’s position is extremely precarious. Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader

He knows that this system works very well for a few rich people, but very badly for everyone else. He knows, in other words, that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden might come for him too.

In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine.

Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia.

modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution.

they are all a part of the same story: They are the ideological answer to the trauma that Putin and his generation of KGB officers experienced in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autocracy; instead of unity, they try constantly to create division; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism.

from the Donbas to France or the Netherlands, where far-right politicians hang around the European Parliament and take Russian money to go on “fact-finding missions” to Crimea. It’s a longer way still to the small American towns where, back in 2016, voters eagerly clicked on pro-Trump Facebook posts written in St. Petersburg

The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies.

Faced with these unexplained losses, the CIA in October 1986 set up a small, highly secret mole-hunting unit to uncover the cause of this disaster.

But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames’ account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985—before Ames insists he handed over the documents.

"I remember the first time (Kasparov) was in jail, he didn't eat a thing because he was afraid that they'd poison him. And we all laughed at him! We thought he was paranoid. He is the only person I know who took any security measures."

Navalny's brilliant sting operation won't lead to an arrest and may only increase the chances he'll be targeted again with a less subtle method

Putin, who worked as a KGB officer before his political ascendance, once said himself that "there's no such thing as former KGB man." While he has always prioritized the security services during his two decades in power, the decay within Russia's intelligence agency is obvious as the country stagnates under dictatorship

But you don't have to be a master assassin when you can keep trying with impunity, even after being caught red-handed.

I don't fly with the state-owned airline Aeroflot, and I don't travel to countries where Putin might be able to put pressure on local authorities to do him a favor. But no one is untouchable in a world where criminals go unpunished.

The Kremlin has doubled down on its lies and denials, spreading a flood of contradictory stories by officials and in the state-run media. Putin himself was dismissive as usual, refusing to even mention Navalny by name when asked about the case. He denied the poisoning, saying, "If (FSB agents) wanted to, they would've probably finished it."

Even in the face of one of the worst cyberattacks in US history, Trump has refused to call out Russia as the culprit, even when his own secretary of state said, "We can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity."

Putin's henchmen are sloppy because they can afford to be. Just like their boss, they don't fear any repercussions

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is sending a clear message to all despots as it considers granting legal immunity for Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the gruesome killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to the CIA

Yet, there is always talk about the need for more international engagement with these despots and thugs, not less. The dubious theory that globalization and closer economic ties will inevitably liberalize dictatorships has been refuted many times over. We see this with China's Xi Jinping, who has become more authoritarian and aggressive since the US welcomed China into the World Trade Organization. Instead, engagement -- or appeasement by another name -- reinforces their sense of impunity

Russia and some of Putin's oligarchs have already been under piecemeal sanctions since the 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. But these sanctions are merely a slap on the wrist, and it's clear they do not go far or high enough.

Between 1928 and 1940, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.

Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.

The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.

At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.

On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.

Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago”) and the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB wouldn’t fully dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.

The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.

A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.

All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.

1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?

At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.

On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.

Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications

Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.

What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.

But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.

2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?

I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree

recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War

We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient

Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy

It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.

no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.

China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.

Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.

even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.

3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?

I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.

The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.

6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?

If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.

Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?

he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.

5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?

My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.

4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 

Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.

The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.

7. What is the collateral damage?

History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.

The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies

these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.

A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.

Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.

This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).

I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.

If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.

Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.

The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.

Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.

Their average age is 68 years old and they have a lot in common. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which Mr Putin famously described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, was the defining episode of their adult lives

Four out of five have a KGB background, with three, including the president himself, coming from the ranks of counterintelligence. It is these hardened men, not polished diplomats like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who run the country’s foreign policy.

In recent years members of this group have become very vocal. Messrs Patrushev and Naryshkin frequently give lengthy interviews articulating their views on global developments and Russia’s international role.

According to them, the American-led order is in deep crisis thanks to the failure of Western democracy and internal conflicts spurred by the promotion of tolerance, multiculturalism and respect for the rights of minorities. A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values.

Given the state of affairs in Western countries, the pair contend, it's only natural that they seek to contain Russia and to install pro-Western regimes in former Soviet republics. The West’s ultimate goal of a colour revolution in Russia itself would lead to the country’s conclusive collapse.

Washington sees unfinished business in Russia’s persistence and success, according to Mr Putin’s entourage. As America’s power wanes, its methods are becoming more aggressive. This is why the West cannot be trusted

Import substitution efforts have generated large flows of budget funds that are controlled by the coterie and their proxies, including through Rostec. The massive state conglomerate is run by a friend of Mr Putin’s from his KGB days in East Germany, Sergey Chemezov

Seen this way, Ukraine is the central battleground of the struggle. The stakes could not be higher. Should Moscow allow that country to be fully absorbed into a western sphere of influence, Russia’s endurance as a great power will itself be under threat

The fact that the new elite in Kyiv glorifies the Ukrainian nationalists of the 20th century and thumb their noses at Moscow is a huge personal affront.

Messrs Patrushev, Bortnikov and Naryshkin all find themselves on the US Treasury’s blacklist already, along with many other members of Mr Putin’s inner circle. There is no way back for them to the West’s creature comforts. They are destined to end their lives in Fortress Russia, with their assets and their relatives alongside them.

As for sanctions by sector, including those that President Joe Biden’s team plans to impose should Russia invade Ukraine, these may end up largely strengthening the hard men’s grip on the national economy

The best way to ensure the safety of Russia’s existing political regime and to advance its national interests is to keep America off balance.

In a similar vein, a ban on food imports from countries that have sanctioned Russia has led to spectacular growth in Russian agribusiness. The sector is overseen by Mr Patrushev’s elder son Dmitry, who is Mr Putin’s agriculture minister.

further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members' place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky.

The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime. That further cements the hard men’s grip on the country

Russia’s interests are increasingly becoming conflated with the personal interests of the people at the very top of the system.

Vladimir Putin can’t restore the old superpower parity with the US, but he can make European democrats fear Moscow again. He can proselytise for a vicious strain of authoritarian nationalism that suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions wherever it takes hold

That malevolent spirit has usurped orthodox conservatism as the driving force of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic

If it works, Trump’s inauguration will be remembered as the setting of a sun that rose over Berlin 35 years ago. The ideas that won the cold war will no longer prevail in Washington. The Trumpian right still sometimes identifies itself with something called “the west”, but in its mouth it is a crusade to protect white Christendom from mass migration, not liberal pluralism or the rule of law.

Trump will enter the Oval Office with a more systematic programme of constitutional subversion than he had the first time around. He has tech oligarchs onside. He can nobble referees in the information arena.

The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption, held together by favours, a personality cult and paranoia. It will be a dogmatic kleptocracy where people who know how to spout the right beliefs to the right people will get lucrative jobs and contracts. Such regimes normalise the hypocrisy of plundering a nation while claiming to make it stronger. There are no contradictions or shame when submitting to the will of the leader is synonymous with doctrinal correctness.

American democracy won’t suddenly perish. The system that put Trump in power can remove him, as it has before. Resistance to tyranny is enshrined in law and embedded in US culture, but fastidious political vandalism can dismantle those protections.

The abrasive reality of a post-west America will take some getting used to. It represents an acute crisis for Britain, which counts the US as its paramount defence and security partner, while relying on European trade for its prosperity.

Once upon a time, that was a geopolitical balance with huge benefits. The UK was Washington’s best friend in Brussels and Europe’s hotline to the White House. Surrendering that status made Brexit a terrible idea in 2016. It hasn’t aged well.

It leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start. He will also make Europe less secure. The variables are quite how little he cares for Nato, how much he will appease Putin, how spiteful he will be to EU leaders and how contagious his politics will be in continental elections.

This puts Keir Starmer in an invidious position. Powerful currents of realpolitik demand intimacy with any US administration, regardless of how repulsive the incumbent president might be. Righteous decoupling is not a serious option when national security interests are densely interwoven. But as the price of keeping that relationship sweet, Trump will demand vassalage, which will complicate Starmer’s ambition for closer European ties.

Britain could carry on pursuing a new security deal with the EU, while grovelling for special exemption from US tariffs. Maybe Starmer has steady enough hands to thread that needle. But just the hint of alignment with Trump will sour any conversation about easing UK access to the single market.

there is a cost to pretending that not much has really changed. No one buys it. Labour’s foreign policy blew up on 5 November. Plan A was a version of the old mid-Atlantic bridge role that wasn’t wholly convincing to begin with. It relied on the pretence that Brexit was something that happened once in the past, a page that has been turned. In truth, it is a nagging, self-aggravating injury to the country’s strategic position. Without some acknowledgment of that reality, it is impossible to give a meaningful or honest account of the choices that lie ahead.

Trump’s victory reinfects the wound. It leaves Britain looking friendless in the post-western world. The shortage of good options isn’t a reason to pretend there isn’t an emergency. Squirming and cavilling around Britain’s biggest strategic blunder in a hundred years is not a sustainable path.

Now, says Stengel, social media give everyone the opportunity to construct their own narrative of reality

, the problems of today’s information-saturated society would have been unimaginable for Marshall, who lived at a time when information was scarce and precious and when openness brought change.

Stengel argues that the U.S. government should sometimes protect citizens by exposing “weaponized information, false information” that is polluting the ecosystem. But ultimately, the defense of truth must be independent of a government that many people mistrust. “There are inherent dangers in having the government be the verifier of last resort,”

“They’re not trying to say that their version of events is the true one. They’re saying: ‘Everybody’s lying! Nobody’s telling you the truth!’ ”

For a Russian leadership schooled on KGB tactics, Pomerantsev argues, “It’s not an information war. It’s a war on information.”

“The central insight was that we’re not the best messenger for our message,” Stengel explains, “because in the post-truth world, the people we’re trying to reach automatically question anything from the U.S. government.

“They don’t have a candidate, per se. But they want to undermine faith in democracy, faith in the West.” In the cyber-propagandists’ atomized, construct-your-own-narrative world, agreement on a common framework of factual evidence can become almost impossible.

How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth? Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting and empower truth-tellers, but he’s right that this isn’t really a job for Uncle Sam

The best hope may be the global companies that have created the social-media platforms. “They see this information war as an existential threat,” says Stengel. The tech companies have made a start: He says Twitter has removed more than 400,000 accounts, and YouTube daily deletes extremist videos.

The real challenge for global tech giants is to restore the currency of truth.

Perhaps “machine learning” can identify falsehoods and expose every argument that uses them. Perhaps someday, a human-machine process will create what Stengel describes as a “global ombudsman for information.”

right now, the truth is losing.

Which side will America’s next president take in the war on information?

But Mr. Putin understands that his people will suffer quietly amid cutbacks in social services. In Russia, suffering is an art form. What he cannot afford is to be seen as weak in the eyes of the voters or to fall victim again to global currency speculators. That failure will not be forgiven by a population eager to see Russia restored to greatness again.

Today, Mr. Putin is once again showing his financial savvy by talking up the price of crude oil on global markets while maintaining a high level of production. Russia cannot afford to cut its output of oil and natural gas and risk losing foreign customers.

Yes, Mr. Putin has played a financially weak hand very well.

Washington publicly accused the Kremlin of cyberattacks on election systems and the democracy itself last Friday.

US officials suggested Russia be investigated for war crimes in the besieged city of Aleppo.

The whole hysteria is aimed at making the American forget about the manipulation of public opinion,"

We have not seen a single fact, a single proof,"

Hillary Clinton has pointed to the hacks as evidence that Russia favors her GOP opponent,

Putin dismissed that charge

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was a baseless accusation.

very real possibility of a building tit-for-tat dynamic

openly raised the possible use of nuclear weapons

"I think the world has reached a dangerous point,"

"It's a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation."

Putin wants to limit America's world leadership role, curb what he sees as an American inclination for "regime change," and show that Russia too can use military force to achieve foreign policy goals.

Moscow abruptly left a nuclear security pact, citing US aggression, and moved nuclear-capable Iskandar missiles to the edge of NATO territory in Europe

"you have the impression they are escalating by themselves and going to the extreme."

Recent incidents include harassment of US diplomats in Moscow and Russian claims that its foreign service officers are badgered in the US, several occasions

quality of relations between us is certainly at the lowest point since the Cold War,

aggressive anti-Russia tendencies at the basis of the US policy on Russia."

"the unacceptability of interference with democracy in the United States of America,"

Gorbachev urged a "return to the main priorities" between Russia and the US.

"These are nuclear disarmament, the fight against terrorism, the prevention of an environmental disaster,

Russian president is a former KGB agent and that means "by definition he doesn't have a soul."

Lavrov called it "ridiculous" to suggest that "Russia is interfering in the United States' domestic matters."

but there's clearly concern on some level

Putin "really believes the US is responsible" for the December 2011 demonstrations against him

ollowed a typical pattern of a slow escalation and a mutual understanding on both sides when it was time to stop. 

'if we are not getting what we want on one front, we will escalate on other fronts.' "

Russians "have signaled in a couple of ways that they are willing" to use nuclear weapons.

Russia understands they have another couple of months until January where nothing much is going to happen, and why not take advantage of that

The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.

Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:

The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.

Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.

You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.

The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.

Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”

Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.

This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?

Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.

You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.

This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.

Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.

The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.

The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.

Sviatlana Tikhanouvskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader and a 2020 presidential candidate, said in a tweet that Protasevich faced the death penalty.

Protasevich's detention came soon after the May 18 raid and shutdown of another major online media outlet, Tut.by. and detentions of at least 10 of its staff, including three journalists

Belarusian authorities raided the studios of another prominent media outlet -- Belsat, a Poland-based satellite broadcaster, which has also been reporting on anti-Lukashenko protests.

Now, Pratasevich's life could be in danger and the survival of independent media as a whole is at stake. Many journalists who are not in jail fled Belarus and are trying to find ways and funding to continue journalism from abroad.

Belarus has strong political, economic and security ties with Russia, and some observers believe Russia's FSB helped Belarus' KGB in the operation to arrest Pratasevich.

Providing support to in-country and exiled media outlets, journalists, press freedom and human rights organizations is the only way to guarantee we can continue to receive objective information about media crackdowns and human rights violations in Belarus.

In Donetsk, these included not just the Red Flag of the defunct Soviet Union and the black-yellow-white tricolor of the long-gone Tsarist empire, but at times also the emblem of an even more distant, failed venture, the Confederate States of America.

But what was most familiar about the insurrectionists in Washington on Wednesday was their certitude, an unbending conviction that, no matter what anyone else or the law might say, right was on their side.

“Victory is ours. All we need is courage,” shouted a self-declared commander of the “army of patriots” who, in the fall of 1993, helped take control of the White House that at the time housed the Russian legislature on the banks of the Moscow River.

When insurrections began in Moscow in 1993, and then in eastern Ukraine in 2014, failure looked inevitable. The leaders, along with their followers, seemed deranged, intoxicated by nostalgia, wild conspiracy theories and fantasies about the depth of their public support.

A barrage of propaganda on Russian television, the main source of news for much of the population, spread fear and anger, embedding a conviction that anti-Russian protesters in the distant Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would soon descend on Donetsk with guns and knives to wreak havoc.

The war that followed has now dragged on for six years, killing more than 13,000 people, nearly all civilians. People who wanted nothing to do with the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” who, according to opinion polls carried out shortly before its declaration, constituted a large majority, have mostly left the “republic” that no other country, including even Russia, recognizes.

But the winners squandered the victory, unleashing a wave of crooked privatizations and staging a deeply flawed presidential election in 1996 that kept an infirm and increasingly erratic Mr. Yeltsin in the Kremlin for a second term. When that was nearly done, he handed over power to Vladimir V. Putin.

A former KGB officer who believed in order above all else, Mr. Putin had no time for insurrection but he embraced the revanchist cause, reviving Russia’s ambitions as a global power, the reach of the security services, the music of the Soviet national anthem, Soviet-era emblems for the military and patriotism as a cudgel against his critics.

Commenting on the tumult in Washington, Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia’s upper house and a Putin loyalist, scoffed at American democracy as “limping on both feet.”

In March 1940 two more exiled German scientists working at Birmingham University, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, outlined the first practical exposition of how to build a nuclear weapon, a device “capable of unleashing an explosion at a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun”. Peierls recruited Fuchs to join him in the top-secret project to develop a bomb, codenamed “Tube Alloys”.

Fuchs arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1933 and, like many scientists escaping Nazism, he was warmly welcomed by the academic community. At Edinburgh University he studied under the great physicist Max Born, another German exile.

Fuchs was extremely clever and very odd: chain-smoking, obsessively punctual, myopic, gangling and solitary, the “perfect specimen of an abstracted professor”, in the words of one colleague. He kept his political beliefs entirely concealed.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs came of age in the economic chaos and violent political conflict of Weimar Germany. Like many young Germans, he embraced communism, the creed from which he never wavered. He was studying physics at Kiel University when his father was arrested for speaking out against Hitler. His mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid. Returning from an anti-Nazi rally, he was beaten up and thrown into a river by fascist brownshirts. The German Communist Party told him to flee.

When Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to collaborate on building the bomb (while excluding the Soviet Union), “Tube Alloys” was absorbed into the far more ambitious Manhattan Project. Fuchs was one of 17 British-based scientists to join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

“I never saw myself as a spy,” Fuchs later insisted. “I just couldn’t understand why the West was not prepared to share the atom bomb with Moscow. I was of the opinion that something with that immense destructive potential should be made available to the big powers equally.”

In June 1945 Gold was waiting on a bench in Santa Fe when Fuchs drove up in his dilapidated car and handed over what his latest biographer calls “a virtual blueprint for the Trinity device”, the codename for the first test of a nuclear bomb a month later. When the Soviet Union carried out its own test in Kazakhstan in 1949, the CIA was astonished, believing Moscow’s atomic weapons programme was years behind the West. America’s nuclear superiority evaporated; the atomic arms race was on.

Fuchs was a naive narcissist and a traitor to the country that gave him shelter. He was entirely obedient to his KGB masters, who justified his actions with hindsight. But without him, there might have been only one superpower. Some in the Truman administration argued that the bomb should be used on the Soviet Union before it developed its own. Fuchs and the other atomic spies enabled Moscow to keep nuclear pace with the West, maintaining a fragile peace.

As the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer made the world markedly less secure. Fuchs, paradoxically, made it safer.

The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it’ll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.

Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it’s always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov… Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years.

The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: “you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you.”

Judging by recent events, the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin.

Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn’t destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn’t bury their Soviet past either – unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s

Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption. Launching his time machine into the past, it was as if he were returning to his Soviet youth, during which he’d been so comfortable. He gradually forced all of his subjects to return there as well.

After the war with Georgia and the seizure of its territories, the “peacemaker” Obama offered Putin … a reset of their relations! Which is to say, c’mon, Vladimir, let’s forget all of that and start from scratch. The result of that “reset” was the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The ideology of Putinism is quite eclectic; in it, respect for the Soviet lies side by side with feudal ethics, Lenin sharing a bed with Tsarist Russian and Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Putin’s favorite philosopher is Ivan Ilyin – a monarchist, Russian nationalist, anti-Semite, and ideologist of the White movement, who was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia in 1922 and ended his life in exile

In his articles, Ilyin hoped that, after the fall of Bolshevism, Russia would have its own great führer, who would bring the country up from its knees. Indeed, “Russia rising from its knees” is the preferred slogan of Putin and of his Putinists.

“Under Putin, Russia has gotten up from its knees!” his supporters often chant. Someone once joked: the country got up from its knees, but quickly got down onto all fours: corruption, authoritarianism, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and poverty. Now we might add another: war.

A lot has happened in the last 20 years. The president of the Russian Federation’s face has turned into an impenetrable mask, radiating cruelty, anger, and discontent

Merkel admitted that, in her opinion, Putin lives in his own fantasy land. If that’s so, what’s the point of seriously engaging with such a ruler?

For 16 years, Merkel, who grew up in the GDR and should therefore understand Putin’s true nature, “has established a dialogue”. The results of that dialogue: the seizure of certain territories in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the capture of the DPR and LPR, and now: a full-scale war with Ukraine.

Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries.

It was also cultivated by the approval of irresponsible western politicians, cynical businessmen, and corrupt journalists and political scientists.

I met many admirers of Putin in Germany, from taxi drivers to businessmen and professors. One aged participant in the student revolution of ’68 confessed:

“I really like your Putin!”“And why exactly is that?”“He’s strong. Tells the truth. And he’s against America. Not like the slugs we’ve got here.”“And it doesn’t bother you that, in Russia, there’s monstrous corruption, there are practically no elections or independent courts, the opposition is being destroyed, the provinces are impoverished, Nemtsov was murdered, and TV’s become propaganda?”

“No. Those are your internal affairs. If Russians accept all of that and don’t protest, that must mean they like Putin.”Ironclad logic. The experience of Germany in the ’30s didn’t seem to have taught such Europeans anything.

Now, one thing has become clear: with this war, Putin has crossed a line – a red line. The mask is off, the armor of the “enlightened autocrat” has cracked. Now, all westerners who sympathize with the “strong Russian tsar” have to shut up and realize that a full-scale war is being unleashed in 21st-century Europe.

The aggressor is Putin’s Russia. It will bring nothing but death and destruction to Europe. This war was unleashed by a man corrupted by absolute power, who, in his madness, has decided to redraw the map of our world.

If you listen to Putin’s speech announcing a “special operation”, America and Nato are mentioned more than Ukraine. Let us also recall his recent “ultimatum” to Nato. As such, his goal isn’t Ukraine, but western civilization, the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat.

Who’s to blame? Us. Russians. And we’ll now have to bear this guilt until Putin’s regime collapses

People have finally understood this today. He attacked a free and democratic country precisely because it is a free and democratic country. But he’s the one who’s doomed because the world of freedom and democracy is far bigger than his dark and gloomy lair.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding that the West rewrite the post-Cold War security arrangements for Europe and demonstrated that Russia has the military capability to impose its will despite Western objections and economic sanctions.

“We all thought we were looking at a Europe whole, free and at peace indefinitely,” said Michele Flournoy, who served as the Pentagon’s top policy official during the Obama administration. “We knew that Russia would conduct gray zone operations and that Putin would use his KGB playbook to create instability on his periphery. But a wholesale invasion of a sovereign country to reorient its government is a different moment.”

“And we’re seeing that while Beijing doesn’t really like Putin’s tactics, they’re willing to band together as authoritarian states against the Western democracies,” Ms. Flournoy added. “We are going to see more and more of that in the future.”

China’s Communist Party leadership also saw pro-democracy protest movements in former Soviet republics as U.S.-engineered plots that could ultimately be used against Beijing.

For much of the past decade, the U.S. security establishment began taking note of what the Pentagon in 2015 called the “re-emergence of great power competition” and shifted from its emphasis of counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has repeatedly cast China as the “pacing challenge” while Russia was seen as the lesser longer-term danger.

Even with annual defense budgets that soared over $700 billion, coping with an urgent Russian-generated crisis while preparing for a Chinese threat whose peak is still years away presents an enormous challenge for the Pentagon.

”The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously,” said a Congressionally mandated study of the Pentagon’s strategy that was issued in 2018

The era of nuclear reductions may come to an end as the U.S. military establishment argues for a large enough nuclear arsenal to deter both Russia’s formidable nuclear weaponry and China’s rapidly growing nuclear forces, which aren’t limited by any arms-control agreement.

“The United States is going to have to get used again to operating in multiple theaters simultaneously—not just militarily, but in terms of psychology and foreign-policy making,”

Already, debates are emerging among U.S. defense experts on whether the Pentagon should give equal weight to the twin challenges from Beijing and Moscow or focus more on the Pacific.

Should the West impose crippling sanctions on Russian banks and major companies, Moscow is likely to become more reliant on Beijing, which has issued a digital currency and is building a payments system separate from the West’s.

“It is already ending the amnesia about the importance of energy security,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of research firm IHS Markit. “It means a new emphasis on diversification of energy sources for Europe and a new look at U.S. domestic and international energy policies.”

Advocates of using energy as a geopolitical tool say Washington should promote investment in U.S. oil and natural gas and approve new LNG export terminals and pipelines in the United States.

The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act precludes the alliance from permanently stationing additional substantial combat forces on the territory of its new Eastern and Central European members, but could now be repealed.

A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted most Europeans see the Ukraine crisis as a broader threat to Europe. Some current and former officials, however, worry that the alliance’s solidarity could fray in the years ahead as it debates the need for greater military spending and wrestles whether its military ties with Georgia might stir new confrontations with Moscow.

the Alphen Group by former officials and other experts urges that European members of the alliance and Canada provide for 50% of NATO’s minimum military requirements by 2030 so the U.S. can focus more on deterring China.

“Everybody’s unified right now and outraged about what the Russians are doing,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who also served as the alliance’s deputy secretary-general from 2012 to 2016. “But when we get down to making longer-term commitments to strengthen NATO’s defense posture and potentially revisit nuclear issues, it could become very divisive.”

What we now know is that, by not taking them seriously — by laughing at their vulgarity and what we thought was a pitiable desperation to be part of our national life — we allowed them to appropriate our politics and business and judiciary, taking what they wanted. Far from being the ridiculous basement-diggers we thought they were, many of them knew exactly what they were doing, like KGB agents. Was it co-ordinated? The aim, we now know, wasn’t to be friends with us.

For a certain type of impoverished British toff the arrival of the oligarchs was a five-star orgasm. There is no way of overstating the sheer bristling excitement that greeted them as they brought over their cash. This is as much a story of British greed as it is of Russian: having been dismissed by people with bigger titles, or sneered at for not having serious money, minor toffs like Elliot, George Osborne, even Prince Andrew and Boris Johnson, could not believe they would finally be getting unlimited access to where they thought they belonged: private jets and luxury yachts.