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During the campaign for this week’s elections, the P.P.P. urged voters to support Mr. Yoon’s government so that it could push its agenda at a time when North Korea’s recent weapons tests highlighted the growing nuclear threat on the Korean Peninsula. The Democratic Party appealed for support by billing itself as the only party able to “check and balance” Mr. Yoon’s conservative government.

But Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump both left office without having removed any of North Korea’s nuclear missiles.

During his campaign, Mr. Yoon signaled a shift in South Korea’s policy on North Korea, emphasizing enforcing sanctions and strengthening military deterrence against the North. When he met with President Biden in Seoul last month, the two leaders agreed to discuss expanding joint military exercises.

The elections on Wednesday also filled hundreds of low-level local administrative seats. The P.P.P. won a majority of those races as well, according to the National Election Commission.

Privately, Obama told his aide Ben Rhodes that not even the 1994 Rwandan genocide merited a strong U.S. response. Without announcing a new era of foreign-policy “realism,” Obama brought it into being.

When Chamath Palihapitiya said that Americans should “take care of our own backyard” before pointing fingers at other countries, he was voicing a widespread belief.

When they come up as a policy issue, we look for ways to justify doing nothing. We are all realists now.

the mind stops seeking and absorbing news of them, and so, in a sense, they cease to exist. Their nonexistence stems from and reinforces the profound self-absorption into which Americans have sunk in the past decade.

the demise of these mechanisms has soured Americans on the idea of human rights itself. Because we no longer think we can change the behavior of the world’s oppressors—because the cost of trying will be too high—we no longer think much about human rights at all.

The idea that solidarity with the oppressed here should naturally extend to the oppressed everywhere—an internationalist idea that long ago defined the left—has died,

along with the global system in which the U.S. played an intermittent, usually two-faced, often incompetent, occasionally effective role as the self-proclaimed upholder of human rights as a universal value.

But instincts have a way of outlasting ideas. Within most Americans lies a buried feeling that they should care about the torment of the Uyghurs.

This is Kanter’s style of activism—it’s personal. He gets in a dictator’s face, nose to nose, chest to chest, as if Xi Jinping is a bully throwing cheap shots and committing flagrant fouls and everyone else is afraid to call him out. “Someone had to do it,” Kanter told me.

some players asked him to unfollow them on social media, and not one has spoken out on his behalf. “Maybe they don’t know enough about it,” he told me. “But I feel like the fear of losing money, the fear of losing business, the fear of losing endorsement deals …” He didn’t complete the obvious thought. “And also, sometimes they do not care enough about what’s going on outside America.”

indifference, and not the pervasive influence of Chinese contracts and sneaker endorsements, is the most interesting thing about the league’s unfriendly response to Freedom’s campaign for global human rights. Of course young players want to win lucrative deals while they can, but most people in the league don’t even experience a conflict between money and principle. The latter has disappeared. It’s as if Freedom is putting all that money in jeopardy for a self-indulgent whim—as if he’s taken a tactless interest in matters that don’t concern him.

If Russia's military escalates the crisis, diplomats and foreign policy analysts say diplomacy and action at the United Nations is likely to mirror what happened in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region.

So far, Western diplomacy at the United Nations during the latest military build-up has largely focused on trying to rally support - should they need it - among U.N. members by accusing Russia of undermining the U.N. Charter.

The fiscal response to Covid-19 reinforced this point: Money is a tool of social decision-making, not an objective thing that you get through abstract merit.

the value of cryptocurrency is so clearly socially constructed: A Bitcoin was worth roughly nothing a decade ago, and roughly $41,000 today, solely because people collectively decided to ascribe value to Bitcoin.

money gets its value from people agreeing that it’s valuable.

As of Friday Russia had about $630 billion of foreign currency reserves, a large cushion designed to allow it to withstand economic sanctions and prop up the value of the ruble

But “foreign currency reserves” are not an objective fact; they are mostly a series of entries on lists maintained by foreign-currency issuers and intermediaries (central banks, correspondent banks, sovereign bond issuers, brokerages). 1  If those people cross you off the list, or put an asterisk next to your entry freezing your funds, then you can’t use those funds anymore.

The bulk of Russia’s foreign reserves are held in the form of securities, deposits at other central banks and deposits at foreign commercial banks. A ban on transactions with Russia’s central bank means that it can’t sell those securities or access those deposits.

Now you want something for yourself? OK, but that is going to be subtracted from the running total of how much you’ve done for the rest for us.

There is a lot to dislike, or at least to be uncomfortable with, in this situation.

But the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and to its later European aftershocks, made it clear that something else was going on. Who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by the actions of central banks and national treasuries; banks can be bailed out; costs can be socialized.

it is also arguably bad for global prosperity: Trustworthy rules-based trade works better and produces more value than arbitrary uncertain trade.

But what I want to suggest is that this weekend’s actions are evidence that the basic structure is good. What I want to suggest is that society is good, that it is good for people (and countries) to exist in a web of relationships in which their counterparties can judge their actions and punish bad actions.

If money is socially constructed and property is contingent then money is a continuing, dynamic, ever-at-risk reward for prosocial behavior.

one of the ways I suggest students think about money is as a kind of social scorecard.

You did something good — made something somebody wanted, let somebody else use something you own, went to work and did everything the boss told you? Good for you, you get a cookie. Or more precisely, you get a credit, in both senses, in the personal record kept for you at a bank.

This is arguably bad for the dollar’s long-run dominance: Russia will develop its own ways around SWIFT, China will push other countries to adopt its digital yuan, everyone will use Bitcoin, etc

we have exactly this system already. The number is called a bank account. The difference is simply that we have so naturalized the system that “how much money you have” seems like simply a fact about you, rather than a judgment imposed by society.

Pervasive social credit systems seem dystopian, and you would not really want the U.S. government making day-to-day decisions about who deserves to keep their bank accounts.

But another idea is that money can insulate you from  the obligations of society, and that is also bad.

You get a claim on goods and services by being part of society, and having a big number next to your name on a list does not relieve you of your obligations. If you do something so outrageous that society as a whole decides you are a pariah, then money is a way for society to express that.

Russia’s status in the world has abruptly and obviously changed. Russians cannot escape their isolation as long as they cannot watch Netflix, access TikTok, or see their footballers play in international competitions. Pro-regime oligarchs, who once spent holidays in Europe, bought mansions in Mayfair, and visited their children at English private schools, now face visa restrictions and asset seizures. They have been denied the ability to use the rest of the continent as their gilded playground.

When a Russian spymaster complains about his country’s cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.

For the Russians on the ground in Ukraine, the worst is still ahead. For Putin to subdue Kyiv, a city of nearly four million, he will have to throw a significant level of combat power into the fight

It took the U.S. First Marine Division — the most elite combat troops in the world — nearly two months to conquer Fallujah, an Iraqi city about a tenth the size of Kyiv.

It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the socialist Left that started to revive itself with the antiwar movement and Occupy blossomed into a full-blown generational movement with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign that revived the DSA, spawned a new generation of activist orgs like the Sunrise movement, and created a new (though still modest) socialist medi

So far, despite fierce factionalism, the socialists have not yet succeeded in taking over the Democratic party like Trump took over the GOP. But in highlighting the failures of centrist Dems to curb inequality, revive unions, fix health care, or save the welfare state, they clearly hope to be able to pull off a takeover at some point.

Establishment failures equal insurgent opportunities. That shouldn’t be too controversial.

Both the liberal center-Left and the conservative center-Right are basically committed to upholding the global liberal order. Putin, by invading and attempting to conquer a sovereign state, challenges that order. If Putin succeeds, even modestly, it represents a failure for the U.S. establishment figures who tried to stop him.

If Putin defeats the Ukrainians, the conservatives that are standing against Putin will look ineffectual and weak. The Trumpists will then be able to solidify their control over the GOP.

it also means a victory for raw power and will (perhaps implying that efforts like the January 6th putsch are the preferred method for attaining power).

But if Putin loses, then Trump and his allies who for years praised and defended Putin’s regime will be discredited. Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan.

Even more damningly, if Putin loses, it’ll be a success for the globalist order — sanctions and aid to Ukraine will represent a triumph of international cooperation. Exactly the kind of world order the Trumpists want so badly to smash.

If Putin defeats Ukraine, it’ll be a debacle for Biden and the establishment, and perhaps a socialist candidate will be a little closer to winning the next primary.

So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss.

What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization.

many people all over the ideological spectrum allowed themselves to see the chaos of the last decade as a high and beautiful wave that would carry them to power…and now, if Putin is ejected from Ukraine by a triumphant international liberal West, the various Chaos Climbers may see their waves break and roll back.

In effect, Turkey’s enforcement of Montreux blocks Russia from reinforcing its Black Sea fleet from outside, or from moving warships now in the Black Sea back into the Mediterranean.

“These provisions don’t change much of the balance of power in the Black Sea,” Sinan Ulgen told CNBC. The former Turkish diplomat is now a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

Turkey is attempting to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine and hasn’t imposed sanctions on Russia.

But Turkey is a member of NATO.

“We could witness a scenario,” he said, “where Russia claims that the war is over, but the international community and Turkey not recognize that.”

Ultimately, a reassessment will be in order, not just of where the Russian armed forces are, but where they are going.

Another area where Russia fell flat was its inability to scale up operations. What its army could do on a lesser scale in 2014 and 2015, it could not replicate across Ukraine. From communications to logistics, combined arms and beyond, Russia’s armed forces lacked experience in large-scale operations prior to the invasion, and it showed.

The Russian armed forces will take years to recover from this blunder but, at the same time, failure is often a better teacher than success.

this shift in perceptions should not mislead NATO members into the belief that, in a different context, Russia would be easily defeated.

The conflict serves as a fresh reminder that sustained conventional war hinges on the availability of manpower, materiel, ammunition and defence industrial capacity to sustain it.

It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia, or become complacent. Despite significant losses, the Russian army will rebuild sooner or later. Sanctions will affect Russia’s defence industry, but writing Russia off as a military power would be the wrong lesson to learn from this war.

“The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène

The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”

More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.

For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.

In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that some members of OPEC were exploring the idea of suspending the OPEC+ supply agreement to allow countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to step in and ease a supply crunch that pushed global oil prices above $120 a barrel this week.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted Western powers to ban imports of Russian crude and refined products. The European Union earlier this week agreed to ban 90% of Russian oil by the end of this year.

At the same time, Russia has started to choke off exports of natural gas to some EU countries — adding to the energy supply crunch that has helped send US and European inflation to its highest level in decades and prices for gasoline and diesel to all-time highs.

It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.

“Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”

In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.

In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.

“If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”

The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet

Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”

A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace

“The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,

“In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”

“Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”

Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.

“Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,

“But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”

“boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.

“If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine

“The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”

“There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”

In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.

Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.

Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”

At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran

Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”

Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”

two uncomfortable facts

First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain.

Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.

North Korea conducted seven missile tests in January, more than in all of 2021. ​It refrained from weapons tests ​for most of February, possibly out of deference to China, its neighbor and only major ally, which was hosting the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

​The resumption of North Korean weapon tests comes as the Biden administration is focused on the crisis in Ukraine, and as South Korea is in the midst of a presidential campaign. South Korea goes to the polls on Wednesday to elect the replacement for President Moon Jae-in, whose single five-year term ends in May.

North Korea has often been accused of attempting military provocations to influence elections in the South. Prof. Lee recalled that in December 2012, just a week before the South Korean presidential election, North Korea launched a rocket under the pretext of putting a satellite into orbit.

Since the North does not want a hawkish right-wing leader to take power in the South, it will refrain from attempting a major military provocation before the election, said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.

But once the election is over, it will likely step up weapons tests to celebrate the 110th birthday of Kim Il-sung, the North Korean founder and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Cheong said. The senior Kim’s birthday is April 15.

Upon his arrival at Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, Biden will be greeted by Polish President Andrzej Duda and receive a briefing on the humanitarian response to the war. He'll meet with service members from the 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszów before traveling to Warsaw in the evening.On Saturday, the White House says Biden will hold a bilateral meeting with Duda to discuss how the US and allies are responding to the refugee crisis that has ensued as a result of the war. He'll also deliver remarks before returning to Washington.Biden's travel to Poland comes after meetings on Thursday in Brussels, where he attended a slate of emergency summits, announced new actions -- such as sanctions against hundreds of members of Russia's parliament and a commitment to admit 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine -- and conferred with global leaders on how the world will respond if Russia deploys a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

Poland, which borders Ukraine to the west, has registered more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees crossing into the country. However, the number of refugees staying in Poland is lower, with many continuing on in their journey to other countries.Earlier this month during Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Poland, Duda personally asked the vice president to speed up and simplify the procedures allowing Ukrainians with family in the US to come to the country. He also warned Harris that his country's resources were being badly strained by the influx of refugees, even as Poland welcomes them with open arms.The White House says that since February 24, the US has provided more than $123 million to assist countries neighboring Ukraine and the European Union to address the refugee influx, including $48 million in Poland.

Biden brought up that he has visited war zones, saying he understood the plight of refugees."I've been in refugee camps. I've been in war zones for the last 15 years. And it's -- it's devastating," he said.Biden also said the refugee influx is "not something that Poland or Romania or Germany should carry on their own."

The Poland trip also comes two weeks after the US rejected Poland's proposals to facilitate the transfer its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. The US rejected Poland's proposals over fears that the US and NATO could be perceived as taking an escalatory step, further fomenting conflict between the alliance and Russia -- which adamantly opposes Ukraine's ambitions to join the NATO alliance.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly requested more aircraft for the invasion, making another appeal to NATO leaders on Thursday.

President Joe Biden has dramatically increased the flow of arms to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft systems, drones, rifles and other weapons. Importantly, it was Trump who first sent lethal aid, in a major reversal from the Obama administration, which refused to send offensive weapons to Ukraine during the early stages of fighting in the eastern Donbas region.But Trump has a checkered past on this topic. As a candidate, his position was unclear at best. Trump campaign aides intervened during the 2016 Republican National Convention to block language from the GOP party platform that called on the US to send lethal arms to Ukraine.

One of his 2016 campaign aides falsely claimed that "Russia did not seize Crimea." "Trump said that Crimea is Russian, because people speak Russian," said Elena Petukhova of Molfar, a Kyiv-based business intelligence firm, who called it an "absolutely pro-Kremlin" view. "According to this logic, the entire territory of the United States should belong to Great Britain."

Trump's biggest lie was about the 2016 election. He rejected the reality that Russia interfered to help him win. Instead, he falsely claimed it was Ukraine who meddled, and that he was the victim. These lies, which he repeated dozens of times, were a double boon to the Kremlin: they downplayed Russia's brazen attack on US democracy, while simultaneously smearing Ukraine.

This was a break from decades of warm US policy toward Ukraine, especially when dealing with leaders like Zelensky who tried to reorient the country toward the West. Former President George W. Bush praised the Ukrainian people in 2004 for protesting a rigged election, and Obama celebrated the 2014 revolution that ousted a Kremlin-friendly government in Kyiv. "When Trump muddies the water by praising Putin, or undermines Zelensky and spreads falsehoods about Ukraine, this has real implications for how this crisis plays out," said Jordan Gans-Morse, a Northwestern University professor who was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine. "It shapes public opinion in ways that tie Biden's hands when he's a de facto wartime president."

This strong-arming by Team Trump forced Zelensky, in his first months in office, to navigate a surprisingly hostile relationship with the US, a supposed top ally in his fight against Russia. "Zelensky had more than enough on his plate when he came to power," Gans-Morse said. "The country was already at war with Russia. He's a political novice. And then, on top of that, the most powerful person in the world essentially extorted him, and he had to devote time and energy to deal with that. It's unclear what the full impact was, but it definitely tested Zelensky."

“I understand he’s between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Collins told the pollsters, speaking of Mr. Biden’s dilemma. “It just feels like Putin’s not going to stop at Ukraine.”

And that, she said, made her believe that a direct confrontation with Russia was “inevitable

But there was one area of agreement across party lines. Strong majorities in both parties approved of Mr. Biden’s efforts to marshal international support for crippling economic sanctions against Mr. Putin and his allies, with 70 percent of Americans backing a total U.S. ban on oil imports from Russia.