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The plan includes production of a graphic propaganda video that would show staged explosions and would use corpses and actors depicting grieving mourners, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.The plan, which was revealed in declassified intelligence shared with Ukrainian officials and European allies in recent days, is the latest allegation by the U.S. and Britain that Russia is plotting to use a false pretext to go to war against Ukraine.

He reiterated Turkey’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Putin met with Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez in Moscow and then spoke by phone to Macron, who had a call Wednesday night with U.S. President Joe Biden. Macron then spoke with Zelenskyy.

The NATO chief said Russian forces in Belarus are likely to rise to 30,000, including special forces, supported by fighter jets and missiles.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed Thursday that Paris is sending troop reinforcements to Romania under NATO command, as part of France’s commitment to the alliance and its member states in Eastern Europe.

He did not say how many French soldiers will be deployed. The announcement came a day after the U.S. said it was moving troops stationed in Germany to Romania.

Ukraine’s defense minister is urging calm, saying the likelihood of a Russian invasion was “low.”Oleksii Reznikov said the threat of attack has loomed over the country since 2014, the year Russia seized Crimea, but he added: “There are no grounds for panic, fear, flight or packing of bags.”The minister said there are about 115,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border, including those deployed to Belarus for war games, but he said no battle groups have been detected along Ukraine’s border with Belarus. He also reiterated earlier assurances that Kyiv doesn’t plan to attack rebel-held areas in the war-torn east of Ukraine or Crimea — something the Kremlin has accused Kyiv of plotting.

An ice hockey fan, Putin will also attend Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.His talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday will be their first face-to-face since 2019 and will help cement a strong personal relationship that has been a key factor behind a growing partnership between the two former Communist rivals.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who started his career as a K.G.B. agent in Communist East Germany, took the opposite tack: He made Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, a priority target.

The only hints of potential motives are his apparent far-right sympathies. A search of his home and offices, two people familiar with the investigation said, found fliers from the far-right AfD party. At work, Mr. Linke had openly told colleagues he felt the country was deteriorating, and he was particularly disdainful of its new center-left government, one of those following the inquiry said.

Over the years, far-right groups have grown increasingly sympathetic to Russia, enamored of Mr. Putin’s nationalistic rhetoric. Germany has struggled to root out far-right sympathizers in its security services, including in the military, even dismantling part of its special forces.

A Google account of his, using the alias “Steen von Ottendorf,” first found by Germany’s Der Spiegel newsmagazine, has one YouTube subscription: a channel that collects nationalist tunes. The channel’s icon bears an eagle — and the red, white and black of Germany’s old imperial colors, often used by the far right.

“It’s a kind of conviction, wanting to cooperate with Russia — it’s a romantic belief,” the official said. “I worry there are many others who hold that conviction in our security services.”

Since the days of the Cold War, Germany’s intelligence agency suffered from Russian infiltration, said Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, a historian who has written several books on the agency and keeps a list of all of the B.N.D. agents who were “turned,” exposing hundreds of operatives.

Among them was the 1961 case of Heinz Felfe, a K.G.B. mole who revealed B.N.D. operations across Europe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germany learned that a top director, Gabriele Gast, who worked closely with the chancellery, spied for the Stasi, the East German secret police, for 17 years.

According to Mr. Schmidt-Eenboom, the information available to Mr. Linke was vast: internet espionage, German surveillance stations, mobile listening devices in southern Ukraine, and the German Navy’s reconnaissance ships observing the war from the Baltic Sea.

On top of that, Mr. Linke would have had access to reports from allied American services like the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, as well as from Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.

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.”

In the 20th century, a collection of fascist and communist leaders showed how rapidly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression.

In 2007, as Western intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the liberal international order, Putin warned that he was about to start rolling that order back. In a scorching speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the spread of liberal values and American influence. He declared that Russia would not forever live with a system that constrained its influence and threatened its increasingly illiberal regime.

Putin’s policies have assailed three core tenets of post-Cold War optimism about the trajectory of global affairs.

The first was a sunny assumption about the inevitability of democracy’s advance.

Putin has also shattered a second tenet of the post-Cold War mindset: the idea that great-power rivalry was over and that violent, major conflict had thus become passe.

He has contributed, through cyberattacks, political influence operations and other subversion to a global “democratic recession” that has now lasted more than 15 years.

To see Putin publicly humiliate his own intelligence chief on television last week was to realize that the world’s vastest country, with one of its two largest nuclear arsenals, is now the fiefdom of a single man.  

Violence, Putin has reminded us, is a terrible but sadly normal feature of world affairs. Its absence reflects effective deterrence, not irreversible moral progress.

This relates to a third shibboleth Putin has challenged — the idea that history runs in a single direction.

During the 1990s, the triumph of democracy, great-power peace and Western influence seemed irreversible. The Clinton administration called countries that bucked these trends “backlash states,” the idea being that they could only offer atavistic, doomed resistance to the progression of history.

But history, as Putin has shown us, doesn’t bend on its own.

Aggression can succeed. Democracies can be destroyed by determined enemies.

“International norms” are really just rules made and enforced by states that combine great power with great determination.

Which means that history is a constant struggle to prevent the world from being thrust back into patterns of predation that it can never permanently escape.

Most important, Putin’s gambit is producing an intellectual paradigm shift — a recognition that this war could be a prelude to more devastating conflicts unless the democratic community severely punishes aggression in this case and more effectively deters it in others.

he may be on the verge of a rude realization of his own: Robbing one’s enemies of their complacency is a big mistake.

There is no dispute now that Mr Putin wants to defend Russia’s sphere of influence. Right at the start of his speech on February 24th, as his forces invaded Ukraine, he criticised the “expansion of the NATO bloc to the east, bringing its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders”

However, for Professor Mearsheimer to reduce the causes of Russia's invasion to the Bucharest declaration is simplistic and wrong.

For a start, there were some obvious frustrations, fears and mistakes.

The continuing American strategic partnership with Ukraine, which Professor Mearsheimer mentions, may indeed have played a part

Ukrainian defiance in response to Russia’s huge military exercise on its border last year would have been hard for Mr Putin to tolerate. A successful and democratic Ukraine undermines the Russian leader’s own authoritarianism at home.

there was a faulty understanding of the situation on the ground: both America in Iraq and Russia in Ukraine have launched wars on terrible “intelligence”.

there are three other factors that help to explain the current crisis in Ukraine.

the break-up of empires is often messy and traumatic. Often foreign military intervention of some kind follows. The end of European colonial empires, and the collapse of the Soviet and Yugoslav empires in the 1990s, forced new or re-constituted states to make fateful decisions. Is citizenship based on ethnicity or simply residence? Should kin living outside the state have a right to citizenship? What frontiers does the state have? What friends and allies? What constitution? What language

Both Georgia and Ukraine faced many if not all of these quandaries in the 1990s—and faced them long before the question of NATO membership arose.

Second, the existence of nuclear weapons outside of Russia necessitated a degree of Western involvement in security matters. An array of nuclear weapons remained in Ukraine

The breakdown of the Budapest Memorandum left Ukraine in an awkward situation. It was unable to trust Russia’s word, but also had reason to doubt Western security guarantees. The idea of full-blooded membership of NATO appeared increasingly attractive but not necessarily more attainable.

The third factor is colour revolutions—the popular revolutions that occurred in many countries in the former Soviet Union in recent decades. They must have reminded Mr Putin of the movements in eastern Europe in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of one communist regime after another.

It suits Mr Putin to treat civil resistance movements as parts of a grand international conspiracy. I have been studying such movements for more than 50 years. In that time all kinds of accusations have been made that such movements are the pawns of outside forces. There is little evidence to support such theories.

Throughout his analysis Professor Mearsheimer pays remarkably little attention to the ideals and political desires of people in countries that have experienced “people power” revolutions.

These factors suggest that the 2008 proposal to expand NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine is just one among many developments that have made the current crisis so acute

It is arguable, indeed likely, that the NATO expansion proposal made matters worse, as may some other Western actions, but to assert that “the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis” goes too far.

This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)

Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.

We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.

we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.

Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.

China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility

China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.

A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.

China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050

By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.

The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands

growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.

by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.

who will look after these unfortunates?

Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.

Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.

the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.

China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.

Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.

If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.

by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.

Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.

Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.

Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations

When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.

Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations

But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level.

instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.

Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.

China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proven the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.

Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.

Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 

Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 

often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern

in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 

The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 

Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.

who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 

then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.

inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 

here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 

That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable

When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 

The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.

The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 

I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown

remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 

since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end

The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai

If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.

the opposite message seems to be true

Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.

It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good

It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 

Could the West have done more to avert the disaster of the last decade? Its financial leverage over Russia weakened in the early 2000s when rocketing gas and oil prices raised the Russian economy off its knees. Economic sanctions, at least those introduced before 2022, served mainly to foster Russia’s determination to become self-sufficient in every sector of production

Western political diplomatic levers were stronger, but the western powers missed many crucial chances. London should not have become the laundromat for Russian dirty money.

The United States’ leadership has been just as woeful. President Donald Trump liked to schmooze with Putin as if on a boys’ night out rather than pinning him down on points of disagreement.

In his own way, president Joe Biden did just as badly in 2021 by encouraging Ukraine to seek membership of Nato without taking proper precautions – and helping Zelensky take them in time too – against the possible negative Russian reaction

A coarsening of relations between the West and a resurgent Russia was always likely, but western politicians could have moderated the process

In all this, it is neither Trump nor Biden who have shown the least prudence but Putin.

Now, after years of vacillation, the West has something like a systematic policy towards Russia and is supplying Ukraine with some of the military defence equipment it sorely needs and deserves. Better late than never.

With consumers buying so little, at least relative to the Chinese economy’s productive capacity, how can the nation generate enough demand to keep that capacity in use? The main answer, as Michael Pettis points out, has been to promote extremely high rates of investment, more than 40 percent of G.D.P. The trouble is that it’s hard to invest that much money without running into severely diminishing returns.

financial repression — paying low interest on savings and making cheap loans to favored borrowers — that holds down household income and diverts it to government-controlled investment, a weak social safety net that causes families to accumulate savings to deal with possible emergencies, and more.

Part of the answer is bad leadership. President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

But China’s working-age population peaked around 2010 and has been declining ever since. While China has shown impressive technological capacity in some areas, its overall productivity also appears to be stagnating.

very high rates of investment may be sustainable if, like China in the early 2000s, you have a rapidly growing work force and high productivity growth as you catch up with Western economies

This, in short, isn’t a nation that can productively invest 40 percent of G.D.P. Something has to give.

the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.

what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash. And as it does this it can ramp down its unsustainable investment spending.

But there are powerful players, especially state-owned enterprises, that benefit from financial repression

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Japan ended up managing its downshifting well. It avoided mass unemployment, it never lost social and political cohesion, and real G.D.P. per working-age adult actually rose 50 percent over the next three decades, not far short of growth in the United States.

My great concern is that China may not respond nearly as well. How cohesive will China be in the face of economic trouble? Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies? Scariest of all, will it try to distract from domestic difficulties by engaging in military adventurism?

In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.

Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style

Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer.

they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.

argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.

also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician

during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters

Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. I didn’t encounter a single outright supporter of what happened, but many people explained the events away. Increasingly separate information environments and our fractured media ecology shape the way people view that day.

they think Biden is too weak and too old to be president. They talk about him with attack lines frequently used by Trump, saying that he’s senile, falling down stairs, losing his train of thought while talking and so on

What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars.

Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary

Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen.

Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world

In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”

from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.

That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.

Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.

Polls also show that voters believe that Trump would do a better job than Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration. It was Trump’s perceived strength, in contrast with Biden’s perceived weakness, that was the common theme that tied it all together for his supporters.

“I’m not concerned with Jan. 6,” Finch said. “I don’t trust our government. I don’t trust anything they’re saying. They’ve been doing this to Black people for so long, railroading them, so they have zero credibility. So I don’t even care about it, and I don’t want to hear about Jan. 6.”

For her, biased mainstream media is misrepresenting him. “He was making the point that he’d use executive orders on Day 1, like the others do — executive orders bypass Congress, but that’s how it’s done these days,” she said. “He was being sarcastic, not saying he’d be a real dictator.”

What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?

Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.

“China is clearly alarmed by these developments,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the China and Asia Security Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “Chinese interpretations would be that the U.S. and its allies have clearly decided that China needs to be contained.”

aside from pointed words and the perfunctory maritime patrol, Beijing’s options to push back against U.S. pressure appear limited, analysts said, especially as China contends with slowing economic growth and mounting trade frictions.

Whether Mr. Biden’s strategy succeeds in deterring China in the long run remains to be seen. Nationalists in China view American alliances as fragile and subject to the whims of each U.S. presidential election. Then there’s Mr. Xi, who perceives the West to be in structural decline, and China’s ascendance as Asia’s dominant power to be inevitable.

“The Americans should not think so highly of themselves. They could not solve Afghanistan or Ukraine,” said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus in Shenzhen. He said that China still hoped to resolve its disputes peacefully. “The reason we are not touching the Philippines is not that we are afraid of the United States.”

Beijing’s room to maneuver against Washington is limited by its struggling economy, which has been hit by a property crisis and a cratering of foreign investment. China has been increasing exports, but that has already caused friction with countries concerned about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.

The broader American pressure campaign may also be nudging China to avoid escalating tensions further. Despite its differences with the United States, China is engaging in talks between the countries’ leaders and senior officials. Relations with some neighbors, such as Australia, are slowly thawing. Analysts have noted that Beijing has also avoided escalating its military presence around Taiwan in recent months, despite the island’s election of a leader the Communist Party loathes.

“They are definitely being more cautious and demonstrating a willingness to engage,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said of Beijing. “They are realizing there are actual risks to letting frictions escalate. We just haven’t seen any substantive compromises yet.”

Even as India has expanded defense ties with the United States and doubled bilateral trade over the past decade, to about $130 billion in goods alone, it has resisted American pressure to reconsider its strong relations with Russia. India has deepened connections with Europe and the Middle East, too; trade with the United Arab Emirates alone has reached $85 billion.

While India remains wary of becoming a pawn in the West’s fight with Beijing, and has not forgotten its frosty history with the United States, China has become an unavoidable focus after being a secondary threat for much of modern Indian history.

India’s socialist founding prime minister was accommodating of Communist China, but the bonhomie was shattered by a monthlong war in 1962 that left thousands dead. The relationship began to normalize in the 1980s even as incursions continued, and open channels of communication kept tensions down and elevated trade.

The situation changed in the years before Mr. Modi took office, she said. As its economy soared, China began flexing its muscles — investing heavily in its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which India saw as threatening its security and spheres of influence, and moving more aggressively on its borders and in the Indian Ocean.

As prime minister, he did not allow the embarrassment of the Chinese incursion in 2014 to dampen his red-carpet welcome to Mr. Xi. His subtle message — a warning that “a little toothache can paralyze the entire body” — carried the hope that Mr. Xi would come around.

That hope ended with the deadly 2020 clash in Eastern Ladakh. Now, it is clear that New Delhi is resigned to a long-term threat from China, a shift evident in Mr. Modi’s push for road and tunnel construction in border areas to support a large troop presence.