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"The work was done," a senior Trump administration official confirmed, noting that the plan was rejected by "consensus recommendation" after it had been sent up and discussed by the most senior officials in the Trump administration.

Once Biden was sworn in, new officials appointed to the State Department arrived with "a very similar concept already in mind," a Biden administration official said.

Ultimately, the list of 76 Saudis on the "Khashoggi Ban," whose names the State Department has said it will not publish, had been sent to Congress in February 2020 as part of a classified report of actions the department was considering under then Secretary Mike Pompeo, an official who has seen the lists told CNN.

While it's not unusual for an administration, especially early on, to use an idea that had been considered by past White Houses, it is notable that the Biden team would implement a policy that had been discussed at such high levels under Trump

"It is fairly normal for departments and agencies to float previously considered policies up for review when new administrations come in," said Javed Ali, a longtime national security official who served under both Trump and President Barack Obama

"Any country that would dare engage in these abhorrent acts should know that their officials -- and their immediate family members -- could be subject to this new policy," a senior State Department official said in a statement. "We expect it will have a deterrent effect the world over."

When the intelligence report came out on Feb. 26, the Biden administration announced the "Khashoggi Ban," and the new sanctions aimed at the crown prince's protective team and one former senior Saudi intelligence official, Ahmad al-Asiri. But sanctions were never considered for MBS himself, according to administration officials. It was never a "viable option" and would be "too complicated," multiple administration officials said, with the potential to jeopardize US military interests.

Still unexplained is why on the day the long-awaited report was published, the Office of Director of National Intelligence quietly took it down and replaced it with a second version in which three names were removed.

"It was not some accident the three names were on one version of the report," the official said.

One of the three men whose names were removed, Abdulla Mohammed Alhoeriny, is a senior counterterrorism official whose brother is the head of Saudi Arabia's Presidency of State Security. It's not known whether he or the others are among the 76 who've been banned from traveling to the US.

“This meeting is extremely timely given what is happening along the Ukrainian border with Russia,” Mr. Kuleba said, calling it the “border of the democratic world.”

“In recent weeks, Russia has moved thousands of combat-ready troops to Ukraine’s borders, the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” Mr. Stoltenberg of NATO said

“These forces will strengthen deterrence and defense in Europe,” Mr. Austin said after meeting his German counterpart, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “They will augment our existing abilities to prevent conflict and, if necessary, fight and win.”

The increase in U.S. troops in Germany is a strong indication of the Biden administration’s commitment to NATO and to collective European defense.

One of the two new units will involve field artillery, composite air and missile defense, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare, aviation and a brigade support element.

On Tuesday, Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, said that “two armies and three airborne units were successfully deployed to the western borders of Russia”

Russia is widely seen as testing Mr. Biden and keeping the pressure on Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has moved against some of the Kremlin’s favorite oligarchs.

Ian Bond, a former British diplomat who is head of foreign policy for the Center for European Reform, said that a war was unlikely now but could come this summer.

In any event, Mr. Bond said, the United States and NATO should both reassure Ukraine and “deter Russia by shifting the cost-benefit calculation in favor of de-escalation’’ — in particular by being clear to Moscow about what the consequences of a new military intervention would be.

Polls on the death penalty presented one of the most glaring examples. More than other issues — and far more than on questions about candidate choice, which generally aren’t as deeply impacted by survey mode — capital punishment drew meaningfully different responses.

Last year, participants of Pew’s online panel were 13 points more likely than those surveyed by phone to say they approved of the death penalty. Among Democrats, there was a particularly strong aversion to expressing support via phone

There are a number of issues that make phone polls different from online surveys, including the fact that they tend to yield a slightly different sample of respondents.

“It’s a bit of a touchy subject, it’s kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else — not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger,” Kennedy said, referring to questions about the death penalty.

Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P., 77 percent said in the new poll that they supported the death penalty.

Even among Republicans, however, there was broad acknowledgment that it’s impossible to ensure innocent people won’t be executed. Just 31 percent of Republicans and leaners said there were “adequate safeguards” to that effect. Only 12 percent of Democrats and their leaners said so.

And most Americans — 63 percent — doubted that the death penalty successfully discouraged crime. Even among those who favored its use, just 50 percent said it was a deterrent to serious crimes.

Fully 85 percent of Black people said that whites were less likely to be put to death for similar crimes, but white respondents were evenly divided on the question.

Former President Donald Trump sought to develop a personal relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with a goal of striking a grand bargain to curb the country's nuclear program

This was a dramatically different approach from that of former President Barack Obama, who believed patient diplomacy would prompt change in Pyongyang

North Korea's latest comments indicate its determination to continue its nuclear program.

Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.

The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.

The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.

China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then

many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.

Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.

But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.

Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive

The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.

The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.

this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.

A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”

Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.

He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.

Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.

The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.

China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.

as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.

two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.

As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises

What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?

China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places

China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital

More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.

U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.

What I guess I’m saying is that I think the importance of super-duper pre-K is probably overstated. I suspect that the middle school years are much more important, educationally and developmentally speaking, though they seem to be forgotten territory in terms of educational policy. I also think the main problem that afflicts American education is mediocre teaching and excessive bureaucracy, not insufficient funding.

Gail: Well, our government doesn’t seem to have any plans to require them. I can understand why private businesses might want their work force to have proof of inoculation. Or if I was going on — God protect me — a cruise ship, I’d want to be confident the other passengers had been vaccinated.

But I still find the whole idea pretty creepy. People who have valid ethical or religious or medical reasons for not getting vaccinated should not be barred from any kind of public accommodation for exercising a fundamental right of conscience. Nor should people be penalized when they might not have easy access to a vaccine. Obviously I hope as many people as possible get vaccinated, but we should respect the rights of those who don’t, whatever we feel about their reasoning.

Bret: Well, thankfully the jury reached the right verdict, even if it can never repair the harm that Derek Chauvin did. And I hope it serves as a deterrent against police abuses in the future. But since my conservatism inclines me to be a pessimist about human nature, I somewhat doubt it.

Taiwan is an arena for the rivalry between China and America. Although the United States is not treaty-bound to defend Taiwan, a Chinese assault would be a test of America’s military might and its diplomatic and political resolve. If the Seventh Fleet failed to turn up, China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia.

The government in Beijing insists it has a duty to bring about unification—even, as a last resort, by means of invasion. The Taiwanese, who used to agree that their island was part of China (albeit a non-Communist one), have taken to electing governments that stress its separateness, while stopping short of declaring independence.

Some American analysts conclude that military superiority will sooner or later tempt China into using force against Taiwan, not as a last resort but because it can. China has talked itself into believing that America wants to keep the Taiwan crisis boiling and may even want a war to contain China’s rise.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, has not even begun to prepare his people for a war likely to inflict mass casualties and economic pain on all sides. In its 100th year the Communist Party is building its claim to power on prosperity, stability and China’s status in its region and growing role in the world. All that would be jeopardised by an attack whose result, whatever the US Navy says, comes with lots of uncertainty attached, not least over how to govern a rebellious Taiwan. Why would Mr Xi risk it all now, when China could wait until the odds are even better?

America requires weapons to deter China from launching an amphibious invasion; it must prepare its allies, including Japan and South Korea; and it needs to communicate to China that its battle plans are credible. This will be a tricky balance to strike. Deterrence usually strives to be crystal-clear about retaliation.

In past instances where Iran has faced acts of military aggression, Tehran has sometimes declined to respond; at other times, it has retaliated with incredible violence, weeks later and thousands of miles from its borders.

Washington has not launched an overt military operation in Iran since the 1980s but U.S. military force directed at both Iran’s allies and adversaries has at times prompted Tehran to reassess its activities in the region.

But looking at Iran’s relations with another adversary, Israel, can provide an insight into Tehran’s playbook. Israel, which traditionally maintains a policy of silence over its overseas military operations, is widely believed to have conducted a series of assassinations inside the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s global network of proxies and partners—many cultivated by Soleimani—gives it a variety of options to retaliate around the world. Nevertheless, experts note that the kind of terrorist attacks seen in the 1990s and 2000s have become less frequent since the establishment of effective deterrents between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

At least since President Trump took office in 2016, Iran’s leadership has believed its regional adversaries are seeking to push Tehran into direct confrontation with the U.S. as a means of curbing its influence in the region, says ICG’s Vaez. “The Iranian leadership has tried not to play into the hands of its enemies.

His deeds are beside the point; so is the display of American resolve. The only reason to kill Soleimani is to enter a new war that the United States can win.

What would that war look like? How will Iran fight it? How will the U.S. respond?

What credible allies will we have, after Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal thoroughly alienated Europe?

Who will believe any intelligence about Iran’s actions and intentions from an administration that can’t function without telling lies? How will American officials deliberate when Trump has gotten rid of his experts and turned his government into a tool of personal power

What is our war aim, and how can it be aligned with Trump’s obvious desire to be rid of any entanglement in the region?

What will the American people accept by way of sacrifice, when nothing has prepared them for this?

There’s no sign that anyone in power, least of all the president, has even asked these questions, let alone knows how to answer them.

one prediction I’m willing to make is that events will shortly obliterate these official statements.

The strike had nothing to do with deterrence. Pompeo’s own department is warning Americans in Iraq: “U.S. citizens should depart via airline while possible, and failing that, to other countries via land. Due to Iranian-backed militia attacks at the U.S. Embassy compound, all public consular operations are suspended until further notice. U.S. citizens should not approach the Embassy.”

Killing Soleimani will only lead to more violence, perhaps much more.

Neither Iran nor the United States knows how to read the other’s intentions—each is prone to underestimation—leaving the two countries to lash out in the dark.

A crisis acts like a barium test—it reveals the nature and health of a system. The Soleimani crisis shows a rash and vain president for whom everything is personal; a government that follows no coherent strategy because its leadership can’t provide one; and a Congress and public too irreconcilably divided to rally around a national goal

In this condition, we don’t know how to think about a war with Iran, let alone win one, and it’s not at all clear why we should try. For this reason, killing Soleimani was a blunder—briefly satisfying, possibly catastrophic.

The first question they ask is: what is this like? And, yes, this sudden escalation of Sino-American antagonism is a lot like the early phase of the Cold War.

But the next question the applied historian asks is: what are the differences?

The Thirty Years’ War was as much about power as it was about religion, however. Unlike the Cold War, which was waged by two superpowers, it was a multiplayer game.

today’s strategic rivalry is being played out in a near-borderless world, altogether different from the world of early John le Carré.

Catholics and Lutherans had been given a certain amount of clarity by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which left it to each individual prince to decide the denomination of his realm without fear of outside interference. But that principle seemed under threat by the early 1600s.

it had created an incentive for the proponents of the Counter-Reformation to replace Protestant rulers with Catholic ones. The war of religion had no respect for borders: Jesuits infiltrated Protestant England

2019 isn’t 1949, not least because of the profound economic, social and cultural entanglement of America and China, which is quite unlike the almost total separation of the United States from the Soviet Union 70 years ago.

The Thirty Years’ War was a time of terrorism and gruesome violence, with no clear distinction between soldiers and civilians.

There was no deterrence then, just as there is none now in cyber-warfare. Indeed, states tended to underestimate the costs of getting involved in the conflict. Both Britain and France did so — only to slide into civil war.

The implications of this analogy are not cheering. The sole consolation I can offer is that, thanks to technology, most things nowadays happen roughly 10 times faster than they did 400 years ago. So we may be heading for a Three Years’ War,

we need to learn how to end such a conflict.

What the Westphalian settlement did was to establish power-sharing arrangements between the emperor and the German princes, as well as between the rival religious groups, on the basis of limited and conditional rights. The peace as a whole was underpinned by mutual guarantees, as opposed to the third-party guarantees that had been the norm before.

The democratic and authoritarian powers can fight for three or 30 years; neither side will win a definitive victory. Sooner or later there will have to be a compromise — in particular, a self-restraining commitment not to take full advantage of modern technology to hollow out each other’s sovereignty.

In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.

84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.

The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."

The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.

Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.

"These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"

"Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.

Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'

Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.

"It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.

"I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.

The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.

President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.

"What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."

The great fear in many quarters abroad is that Trump's budding autocracy was not simply a brutal interregnum, and that Biden's administration is but a brief interlude before America plunges again into the deep spiral that has marked the last four years.

In some even quite liberal quarters abroad Trump's acquittal now simply reinforces a fundamental belief that America has strayed off course.

President Biden was dialing up China's Xi Jinping, reading him the riot act as Trump never did -- warning him that America would no longer ignore gross human rights abuses from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, nor its military's threats from the South China Sea to Taiwan.

forge closer ties with non-NATO countries such as Australia

deterrence in space

China is investing massively in new weapons. It is coming closer to us, from the Arctic to Africa. China does not share our values ... and tries to intimidate other countries

NATO should consider including China in NATO’s official master strategy document, its “Strategic Concept”

Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ era comes to an end and Europeans welcome the election of an Atlanticist president-elect in Joe Biden, tensions over NATO’s ability to act remain.

From anger over Turkey’s decision to buy a Russian weapons system to U.S. doubts over Europe’s commitment to its own defence, NATO - founded in 1949 to contain a military threat from the Soviet Union - has also faced calls from Trump to do more in the Middle East.

However, Eastern European allies, fearful of Russia since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, are concerned about shifting too many resources away from NATO’s core task of defending Europe.

“We do not seek conflict,” General McKenzie said, “but we must remain postured and committed to respond to any contingency.”

on Thursday, a senior military official said American intelligence analysts had detected “planning going on” — including preparations for possible rocket strikes or worse — by Iran and Shia militias in Iraq that it supports.

“In short, Iran is using Iraq as its proxy battleground against the United States, with Iran’s ultimate objective being to eject the United States and our forces from Iraq and the broader Middle East,” General McKenzie said

The senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe operations and intelligence assessments, did not cite any specific evidence of a larger, imminent attack against American personnel. But the official said military analysts assessed that the likelihood of Iran or its proxies miscalculating the risks of such a strike were higher than usual.

More recently, a top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed east of Tehran, in a daytime strike widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli operatives

Iran responded this month by enacting a law ordering an immediate ramping up of its enrichment of uranium to levels closer to weapons-grade fuel.

“The Iranians don’t want to go to war with us,” Admiral McRaven continued. “We don’t want to go to war with Iran. So everybody needs to do the best they can to kind of lower the temperature and try not to get this into an escalation mode.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.

Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.”

over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016.

For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative. It’s happened in a couple of ways. The first is that there really is no legitimate defense — even at CPAC, the fetid armpit of the Trump right — of sending troops and tanks into a neighboring country to teach it a lesson in submission to Mother Russia

If you’re Bannon, you can still try and wing it, but the sheer sight of bombed hospitals, murdered children, homeless seniors, and mortar explosions in residential neighborhoods tends to shape public opinion overnight.

Secondly, and perhaps most important, Putin is failing. He looks weak. The visual of a vast, stalled, vulnerable convoy of trucks on its way — or not — to Kyiv is now a metaphor for Putin’s presidency.

Putin has also done something no US president has been able to do in decades: rally Europe around NATO, get NATO countries to re-arm (finally), and give them a new and pointed mission: the deterrence of Russia

Putin’s blunder has revealed, in fact, that the West has a unique new weapon in the history of global warfare that can end wars almost before they begin: an economic kill-switch. The vast and complex set of financial, economic, and travel sanctions that the West unveiled this past fortnight and is imposing on Russia — effectively removing it from international banking and most international trade — is something no country can survive for very long.

if the EU is able to ramp up nuclear power (as France and Britain are), allow more fracking, and keep its investment in renewables surging, Russia’s entire carbon-based economy will have an expiration date attached to it.

None of this was supposed to happen. The West wasn’t supposed to unite this expeditiously; the EU wasn’t expected to find a new and confident voice; Russia’s access to global finance wasn’t supposed to be severed overnight; and a senile American president wasn’t supposed to corral a massive coalition to marginalize and isolate Russia on the global stage.

“Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid

so a president recently celebrated as a mastermind on the world stage has allowed his ancient fantasies of imperial glory to kick-start his own country’s economic and social collapse. Putin emerges from this as neither smart nor strong; he is, in fact, dumb and increasingly weak.

That’s why he’s a useful insight into what reactionism actually is. It’s not really a politics; it’s a mood. It’s not really about the problems of the present; it’s about living in an imagined past, and believing that you alone can restore it by some mystical rhetorical magic.

It’s about “subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.

Trump longs for the 1950s in America — just as Putin longs for the USSR of the same period

Wrapped up in nationalism, provoked by left-extremism, corralled by skillful demagogues, this longing can be a path to power. It can bring tyrants into office. But it cannot work in practice — because the world is different now. We live in 2022. America will never have the cultural and relative demographic homogeneity of the 1950s again. Never.

“White nationalism” in the most ethnically diverse democracy in human history is a kind of insanity — perpetuated by woke leftists and sad rightists. No wall, no president, no new immigration policy, no mass deportations, no book-bannings and no neo-Nazi rallies will bring it back. It’s gone.

globalization as a whole will not be undone. And because it will not be undone, exclusion from it will effectively remove any country from great power status in the foreseeable future. And so Putin has had his bluff called as well. If the sanctions hold, the danger from Russia henceforth will come from desperation, not ambition.

d this is often the risk of reactionary movements. The backlash they provoke can be lethal to their cause.

If Trudeau tried to freeze the bank accounts of political opponents, the West has chosen to cut an entire country off from global finance — to precipitate its collapse. The scale of this organized global cabal and the immensity of its power should alarm anyone. Putin’s hyper-nationalism has actually generated the most potent globalist power grab since the Cold War. And made it look reasonable.

A senior European official said that “the one lesson we take away from a Russian aggression that many thought could not be possible, is that here is a country that is ready to do something that no security guarantee or even plausible expectation [can ensure] that it can’t happen again.”

“We thought interdependence, connectiveness, would be conducive to stability because we had correlating interests. Now, we’ve seen this is not the case. Russia was highly connected with Europe, a globalized country.” the official said. “Interdependence, we’ve now seen, can entail severe risks, if a country is ruthless enough. … We have to adapt to a situation that is absolutely new.”

Several European policymakers said their current calculations are shaped by two major factors. The first is the expectation that any truce in Ukraine is likely to be temporary. Even if Putin agrees to lay down arms for the moment, many Europeans believe he will seek to regroup, rebuild the Russian military and attack again once he feels ready.

The second is a deep horror at the Russian military’s atrocities against civilians that have come to light since its forces pulled back toward eastern Ukraine in the past two weeks. Many believe Putin himself may need to face war crimes charges in front of international tribunals.

The combination means many Europeans feel their continent will be unstable and insecure so long as Putin is in the Kremlin. And if they are not yet willing to embrace an active effort to oust his regime, support is growing there, as well as in the United States, to permanently cut off his country.

“There is growing realization that this is a long-term situation and that a strategy of containment, a strategy of defense, is forming,”

“Support Ukraine as much as you can, sanction Russia as much as you can, do as much as you can do to reduce dependence on Russia however you can and finally, yes, put more emphasis on military defense.”

“The feeling after Bucha,” the Kyiv suburb where withdrawing Russian troops left scores of dead civilians in the streets, some apparently tortured and executed, “is that it will be very difficult to speak with Putin or anyone in the Russian government without remembering what happened.”

Apparently strong backing for the war among Russians has also caused a recalculation among allied policymakers about a long-standing effort to draw a distinction between the country’s population and its leadership, said Lithuanian Vice Defense Minister Margiris Abukevicius. Russians appear to have the leaders they want, he said — another reason to dig in and prepare for a long standoff.

“There is collective responsibility,” Abukevicius said. “At the beginning, we were saying ‘Putin’s war.’ Now, we are more and more saying ‘Russia’s war.’”

Is this fair?

That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s an unanswerable question. Because nothing is fair.It’s not fair that one kid is born in a mansion in Bel-Air, another kid is born in row house in Northeast Philly, and another kid is born in a slum in Mumbai.

Because in some ways we all are. Life is not fair.

It’s not fair that Bill Lumberg is an idiot, but he makes so much money that he drives a Porsche. It’s also not fair when people in Porsches get hit by drunk drivers.

There’s only one measure by which fairness exists in our world: That we’re all God’s children, with dignity and worth simply because we were loved into being.

And that is, ultimately, what I wanted to say about this college admissions story. Are you, personally, getting the short end of the stick? Look, I don’t know you. But yes. In some way you are. Even if you’re in that top 0.1 percent.

It’s not fair that some kids can get 1510 on their SATs and some kids struggle to break 900. It’s not fair that some kids are born with genetic disorders that cut their lives short long before they even know what the SATs are.

It’s okay to notice unfairness and it’s wise to try to remedy it where possible. But we shouldn’t dwell on it or let it define our worldview.

Maybe your kid got 1510 on her SATs but didn’t get into Brown. Or maybe your kid struggled to graduate high school. Or maybe you were never able to have kids, even though you desperately wanted them.

I don’t know if they teach gratitude and compassion at the Ivy Plus schools, but those are the two most important lessons for all of us.

This is the same question as “Should we notice and object to Jason Aldean’s not-really-veiled incitement—or should we let it slide so that we don’t give him a bigger audience?”

I can see both sides of the coin. But my tentative answer is that it’s better to push back against agitators (and law breakers), even if doing so elevates them.

The logic of the provocateur is the logic of the bully. They act because they believe they will get away with it. Some of them (like Aldean) will. But also, some of them won’t be able to ride the wave to greater prominence. Deterrence is real.

There may be obvious short-term benefits to not elevating bad actors, but there may also be non-obvious long-term costs. For instance: When the rule of law is set aside in one instance, it weakens the rule of law in all instances. Maybe this weakness has no practical consequences. But also, maybe it does.

Most bad actors can be safely ignored, because they will never become dangerous at scale. Only a handful of them have the potential to metastasize and build subterranean movements. But it’s hard to reliably tell these two groups apart.

Having your actions governed by fixed mores is not infallible. But relying exclusively on judgment calls is more fallible. In the long run, we’re probably better off just calling things as we see them, using objective standards, rather than trying to play bank-shots in order to jump to better outcomes. If someone in a prominent position is making noises about shooting people from groups he doesn’t like, for instance, we should say that this is irresponsible and dangerous. If someone is breaking the law, we should want the legal system to operate with due process rather than turning a blind eye to criminality.

Putin may be possessed by neo-imperial dreams of Russia’s place in Europe, but he is presiding over a state of affairs that has steadily given Beijing more leverage over Moscow. Far removed from the days of the Cold War when the Kremlin viewed communist China as its “poorer cousin,” Russia — isolated and enfeebled — is sliding inexorably into the role of “junior partner” to the Asian giant.

The war in Ukraine has rendered Russia increasingly dependent on China: Sanctions have curtailed the global market for its exports and thinned out possible suppliers for its exports. Enter China, whose imports from Russia have surged, jumping 80 percent in May compared with last year, largely in the form of oil and other natural resources. The Russian market, left bereft of many European products, may get all the more flooded by Chinese goods and technology in the months and even years ahead.

Gabuev suggested that current trendlines could see China’s renminbi, which has already outperformed the euro on Moscow’s stock exchange, becoming “the de facto reserve currency for Russia even without being fully convertible,” and thereby “increasing Moscow’s dependence on Beijing.”

Imbalances that already existed between both countries are only amplifying. China is edging closer to Russia as a leading arms supplier to developing countries. Russia was compelled to significantly discount oil sales to China, while Chinese car manufacturers — recognizing the paucity of options now facing Russian consumers — have in some instances raised prices for their vehicles in Russia by 50 percent

Gabuev unpacked the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s supplication to China. “To keep China happy, Russian leaders will have little choice but to accept unfavorable terms in commercial negotiations, to support Chinese positions in international forums such as the United Nations, and even to curtail Moscow’s relations with other countries, such as India and Vietnam,”

Even in the remote scenario where Putin himself falls, it’s hard to imagine the broader tectonic realignments taking place would shift all that much. “Russia is turning into a giant Eurasian Iran: fairly isolated, with a smaller and more technologically backward economy thanks to its hostilities to the West but still too big and too important to be considered irrelevant,

With China as Russia’s biggest external partner and major diplomatic ally, Gabuev concluded, “the aging ruling elite in the Kremlin, myopically fixated on Washington, will be even more eager to serve as China’s handmaidens as it rises to become the archrival of the United States.”

“The best way for the West to deal with the China-Russia alignment is to acknowledge that these bonds are strong and to improve its own resilience and deterrence capacities,” wrote Justyna Szczudlik, a China analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

Hamas is making up a strategy as it goes. I disagree with Hussein Ibish’s claims that the massacres were “​​intended as a trap,” and that “the intended effect is precisely the ground assault Israel is now preparing.”

I do not see evidence that Hamas planned for the magnitude of the response it is getting. Is there evidence that Hamas was stockpiling weapons, preparing cells for hostages, and digging even more tunnels in preparation for October 7? So far I have not seen it.

Public statements by Hamas’s leaders, moreover, have been garbled and pathetic, by turns taking enthusiastic responsibility for the atrocities and suggesting that they either did not happen or were not intended.

The most unsettling aspect of the current moment is how deeply all parties have gone into strategically uncharted territory.

I have little doubt that the delay in starting the invasion was in part because no plans existed for the bizarre scenario—Shalit, times 240—that Israel currently faces.

Hamas might not be beyond deterrence. The decision to eliminate Hamas was made in a righteous fury after October 7. Israel could not abide the existence of a neighboring terrorist group with no apparent limitation on what it was willing to do.

To have a neighbor who breaks your windows now and then is one thing; to have a neighbor who steals your children and dismembers your husband is another

So is Israel. The job of military planners is to prepare for the worst. In Israel’s case that worst-case scenario is a multifront war, with Iran fully committed. But preparing for the worst is much easier than preparing for the weird. And it is decidedly weird when one’s enemy undertakes a sophisticated, disciplined, tactically brilliant operation—and then so bungles things that it exceeds its objectives and begins to defeat its own strategic goals.

The deaths in Israel and Gaza could cascade politically, affecting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan—in ways that Hamas might welcome, or might not. Hamas may have stumbled much further into this darkness than it intended. Now Israel is stumbling in the same darkness, and the whole region is right behind.