How much more can the war in Ukraine escalate?

Perspective | How much more can the war in Ukraine escalate?

Russian S-400 missile air defense systems are seen during a training exercise at a military base in the Kaliningrad region of Russia on Aug. 11, 2020. (Reuters)

By Dan Drezner

As the war in Ukraine continues unabated, one emerging narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has retained escalation dominance. Ukraine matters more to him than to the West. In a worst-case scenario Russia can escalate to the use of chemical, biological or tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and that threat stops NATO cold.

Putin has been unafraid to threaten NATO directly. In the early days of the war, he announced that he had put Russian nuclear forces on high alert. Putin also declared that the sanctions against Russia were tantamount to a declaration of war. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov subsequently warned that anyone transporting weapons to Ukraine would be considered a “legitimate target” by the Russian military. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN International that Russia would go so far as to use nuclear weapons if it faced an “existential threat.”

Many Western commentators believe that Russia’s bellicose threats have effectively cowed the United States into limiting its response. For example, last week my Washington Post colleague David Ignatius, reflecting the opinions of foreign policy observers, concluded: “a nuclear power can engage in vicious regional aggression without paying the most severe price. America and its NATO allies are deterred in this conflict, but Russia isn’t. The paradox of our restraint is that it enables the unrestrained. Somehow, the balance of deterrence must be restored.”

Let me offer a somewhat different take on the current situation.

First, what the United States, its allies and partners are doing right now for Ukraine is not insignificant. The economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Russia have been greater than expected and hit the Russian economy pretty hard. There is additional evidence that the sanctions will, over time, incapacitate Russia’s manufacturing sector, including its military-industrial complex.

Beyond that, NATO is sending significant amounts of weaponry to Ukraine. It seems as though those weapons are being put to good use. Then there is the very near real-time sharing of intelligence and information, which also appears to be making a difference.

Combined, the NATO-led sanctions, military aid and intelligence sharing are all crucial pillars of support for Ukraine’s fight.

At the same time, President Biden has made it clear that he wants to avoid NATO forces in direct engagement with Russian forces. Given the ability of such engagement to escalate quickly into World War III, that seems wise. So escalatory steps like no-fly zones are unwise.

Second, it is becoming less clear to me that Putin’s escalatory threats are anything more than bluffs. Take the so-called nuclear high alert. I have seen neither independent reports nor U.S. intelligence confirming that there has been any change in alert status. This is the kind of announcement that made a lot of waves — but absent action, suggests that Putin was bluffing. The same holds for Russia’s other nuclear threats or Putin’s conflation of sanctions with war. This is hostile rhetoric, to be sure. At the same time, Russian forces have not attacked any NATO installations — probably because such an attack would end badly for the Russian military.

As for the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons — where exactly would they be used? The Russian narrative remains that they have prosecuted this war with concern for minimizing civilian casualties. Whether that is true, such a claim would seem risible after using a nuclear weapon, the fallout of which would affect Russia proper. This feels like yet another bluff.

Third, just because the Biden administration wants to avoid a war with Russia does not mean there is no way to ratchet up additional support for Ukraine — and use the threat of such a ratchet to coercively pressure Russia. For example, the shipment of S-300 and S-400 systems would certainly enhance Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian air attacks. The shipment of more sophisticated fighter aircraft would have a similar effect.

Also, as Russia diverts more of its forces to Ukraine, its ability to intervene elsewhere in its periphery becomes more difficult. This matters because the Russian military has helped ensure frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and elsewhere. One has to wonder about the stability of Alexander Lukashenko’s tenure in Belarus.

If I were advising the Biden administration, I might have Jake Sullivan go on a Sunday morning show and say that the United States is not interested in further escalation but seeing carnage in places like Mariupol tugs at the heartstrings of Americans. Unless the Russian military were to moderate its artillery and aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities, NATO might have no choice but to transfer more sophisticated weaponry to the Zelensky government as a humanitarian gesture.

Maybe in that same interview, Sullivan might sympathize with Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s recent call for Russian forces to leave Transnistria. Or question whether the Belarusian military really wants to get dragged into a war in Ukraine (it doesn’t.).

Are these moves entirely without risk? No, of course not. But they are much less risky than establishing a no-fly zone and put greater pressure on Putin. At a minimum, they are worth exploring.

Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism

Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism

Goodbye globalization?

Keynes’s Londoner, lounging in his bed, had at least this excuse: The end of his age of globalization came with little warning. In our case, globalization has been under sustained attack for two decades, with serious assaults in 2001 (when two planes, hitherto symbols of modernity, slammed into the World Trade Center); 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial system went into cardiac arrest); and 2016 (when the British voted to leave the world’s largest free-trade zone and Americans elected a nativist TV personality as president). The “decoupling” of the global economy into Chinese and Western portions has been gathering pace for some time. And the biggest drama before Ukraine was a virus that froze supply chains and forced the world into hibernation. 

And yet, at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

Now that we have been shaken awake, most of our attention is on the bloodshed in Ukraine, and rightly so. But just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe. The “inevitable” integration of the world economy has slowed, and the various serpents in our paradise — from ethnic rivalries to angry autocracies to a generalized fury with the rich — are slithering where they will. 

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply. Yet liberalism has also dragged more than a billion people out of poverty in the past three decades and, in many cases, promoted political freedom along with economic freedom. The alternatives, historically speaking, have been wretched. Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West. 

From this perspective, the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.

By any economic measure the West is significantly more powerful than the East, using the terms “West” and “East” to mean political alliances rather than just geographical regions. The U.S. and its allies account for 60% of global gross domestic product at current exchange rates; China, Russia and the autocracies amount to barely a third of that. And for the first time in years, the West is coming together rather than falling apart. This week, Joe Biden is traveling to Europe as the leader of the newly united and reinvigorated free world.

Free World

Share of global GDP by country and level of freedom based on political rights and civil liberties

Sources: IMF; Freedom House

Note: GDP figures are the latest available.

So far, for all his talk of uniting democracies, Biden has done little to highlight, let alone advance, the economic dimension of freedom. The question for Biden and the European leaders he will meet this week is simple: What sort of world do they want to build in the future? Ukraine could well mark the end of one great episode in human history. It could also be the time that the free world comes together and creates another, more united, more interconnected and more sustainable one than ever before. Seizing that opportunity will require an understanding of both economics and history.

The Way We Were

The end of the last global age was particularly brutal. Even once the slaughter had begun in Flanders, British shopkeepers, with stoic good humor, displayed signs as the war started that read “Business as usual during alterations to the map of Europe.” But it was not to be. The conflagration quickly halted trade, capital flows and migration. Governments interfered in the economy more deeply than ever before. When the guns finally fell silent in 1918 and peace was forced on Germany at Versailles (in the Carthaginian terms that Keynes decried so eloquently), the Bidens, Johnsons and Macrons of the time tried to restore the old world order of free trade and liberal harmony — and comprehensively failed. 

The new superpower, America, refused to become the defender of the faith that Great Britain had protected with such skill until 1913. A beggar-thy-neighbor policy of tariffs slowed the world economy and eventually produced the Great Depression, with global trade shrinking by more than half in 1928-1933. The serpents continued to slither: Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler exploited defeat and poverty to create aggressively anti-liberal regimes, the Soviet version of which lasted for seven decades. The situation for liberal economics was so dismal that, by the mid-1930s, Keynes himself had abandoned free-market liberalism as a lost cause and was campaigning for national self-sufficiency.  

Only after the Second World War did economic integration resume its advance — and then only on the Western half of the map. What most of us today think of as globalization only began in the 1980s, with the arrival of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reintegration of China into the world economy, and, in 1992, the creation of the European single market.

CHINA-DAILY LIFE-ECONOMY

1992: Beijing experiences its first Big Mac attackPhotographer: Mike Fiala/AFP via Getty Images

Yet once politicians got out of the way, globalization sped up, driven by technology and commerce. Young technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. took off while old technology companies such as Nokia Oyj, a Finnish rubber-boot and electronics maker that by 2010 was the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones, got a new lease on life. McDonald’s Corp. opened restaurants in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in January 1990 and just off Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in April 1992. As the new century dawned and an unknown “pro-Western” bureaucrat called Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the daily volume of foreign-exchange transactions reached $15 trillion. 

More recently, as the attacks on globalization have mounted, economic integration has slowed and in some cases gone into reverse.

Shrinking Share

Trade’s share of global GDP peaked in 2008

Source: World Bank

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks a bigger and more definitive assault than the previous ones. 

That’s partly because the immediate rupture is so savage. The supply of basic commodities, from wheat to nickel to titanium to oil, has been disrupted. The West is doing everything it can to “cancel” Russia from the global economic system — sanctioning oligarchs, expelling Russian banks from the global financial plumbing, and preventing Russia’s central bank from accessing its reserves. There’s talk of throwing Russia out of the World Trade Organization. 

Even when they haven’t been forced to do so by law, Western companies are boycotting Russia and closing down their Russian operations. Russian consumers can no longer use Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The McDonald’s in Pushkin Square is closed — along with 850 other branches. Photos have appeared on social media of Russians standing in interminable queues for sugar and other basic foods or else fighting over remaining scraps, just as they did in the Soviet days. For its part, the Kremlin has hit back by blocking access to Facebook and threatening to imprison or fine anyone suspected of spreading “fake” news, thereby essentially closing down Western news organizations inside the country.

We Didn’t Mean It

The Western policymakers meeting this week will say they have no intention of closing down the global order. All this economic savagery is to punish Putin’s aggression precisely in order to restore the rules-based system that he is bent on destroying — and with it, the free flow of commerce and finance. In an ideal world, Putin would be toppled — the victim of his own delusions and paranoia — and the Russian people would sweep away the kleptocracy in the Kremlin. 

In this optimistic scenario, Putin’s humiliation would do more than bring Russia back to its senses. It would bring the West back as well. The U.S. would abandon its Trumpian isolationism while Europe would start taking its own defense seriously. The culture warriors on both sides of the Atlantic would simmer down, and the woke and unwoke alike would celebrate their collective belief in freedom and democracy. McDonald’s would be open again in Pushkin Square — and Keynes’s various serpents would slither out of the garden.  

There’s a chance this could happen. Putin wouldn’t be the first czar to fall because of a misjudged and mishandled war. Many of Russia’s most powerful people are seeing their mansions, yachts and private planes confiscated, all for an invasion they weren’t consulted about. Younger Russians, particularly in the big cities, are more liberal than their parents. Russian shoppers don’t want to return to the Soviet era.  

Meanwhile in the West, Ukraine has already prompted a great rethink. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proclaimed, we are at a Zeitenwende — a turning point. Under his leadership, pacifist Germany has already proposed a defense budget that’s larger than Russia’s. Meanwhile, Ukrainian immigrants are being welcomed by nations that only a few months ago were shunning foreigners, and, after a decade of slumber in Brussels, the momentum for integration is increasing.

The Power of Alliances

Military expenditure in 2019 U.S. dollars

Source: SIPRI

Note: Figures for China and Russia (1992-2012) are SIPRI estimates.

But this turning point can still lead in several directions. The chances of a regime change in the Kremlin remain slim, given Putin’s popularity and terror machine. Western Europe has heard pious words about integration and immigration before. And look at the West’s leaders! Joe Biden hardly conveys an image of world-changing dynamism; after his initial heroics, Olaf Scholz greeted Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s speech to the German parliament with pudding-like inertia; Emmanuel Macron is bent on winning an election while trying to look like Zelenskiy, in hoodie and stubble; while Boris Johnson has dared to compare the Ukrainian resistance to Brexit.  

As we wait for these giants to act, the facts on the ground are changing in economics as well as politics. In particular, the invasion of Ukraine is accelerating changes in both geopolitics and the capitalist mindset that are deeply inimical to globalization.

The changes in geopolitics come down to one word: China, whose rapid and seemingly inexorable rise is the central geopolitical fact of our time.  

The immediate question with China is how far it will support Putin in Ukraine. On the sidelines of the Winter Olympics in February, Xi and Putin signed a statement rejecting NATO expansion in Europe and American alliance-building in Asia and agreed that the promotion of democracy was a Western plot. China has still notably failed to participate in Western sanctions. But now that Putin’s triumph looks less assured, China’s support for him looks more conditional. A week ago, the mere rumor that Russia had asked for military assistance — a rumor that Beijing immediately denied — sparked the biggest drop in China’s stock market since 2008. On the same day, a Chinese think tanker, Hu Wei, posted a fascinating memorandum warning his country that the invasion of Ukraine is revitalizing the West, and that China needs to dump the burden that is Russia.

Regardless of whether China’s leader decides to ditch Putin, the invasion has surely sped up Xi’s medium-term imperative of “decoupling” — insulating his country from dependence on the West. Xi has spent much of his rule building a Sinocentric economic order through the Belt and Road Initiative. China has joined the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and applied to join the 11-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a free-trade bloc that the U.S. first invented, then foolishly abandoned. 

For the “wolf pack” of young Chinese nationalists around Xi, the reaction to Ukraine is another powerful argument for self-sufficiency. China’s vast holdings of dollar assets now look like a liability given America’s willingness to confiscate Russia’s assets, especially if the regime were to think about invading Taiwan (where its claim that the island is culturally and legally part of China is frighteningly like Russia’s claims about the Ukraine).  

Some Americans are equally keen on decoupling, a sentiment that bridged Republicans and Democrats before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Biden may have dropped Trump’s Sinophobic rhetoric — there’s no more talk of “the China virus” — but he has kept in place most of the tariffs, export controls and investment regulations that he inherited, and added a few of his own. For many Americans, too, Ukraine has been a pre-Taiwan test case: They don’t want to end up relying on Taiwanese components that might suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke.  

So, absent any decisive action by the West, geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs: an Asian one with China at its heart and perhaps Russia as its energy supplier; an American-led bloc; and perhaps a third centered on the European Union, with the Europeans broadly sympathetic to the U.S. but nervous about the possible return of an America-First isolationist to the White House and irked by America’s approach to digital and media regulation. Other powers will vacillate between these two (or three) great blocs, much as they did during the Cold War. India may do what it has done so well over Ukraine and play both sides. Pakistan will lean toward China but not fully commit while India is in play. Saudi Arabia will exploit uncertainty over energy supplies to pursue brutality at home and Islamist policies abroad. And so on.  

The Bonfire of the Certainties 

Just as important as this geopolitical shift is the change in the capitalist mindset. If the current age of globalization was facilitated by politicians, it has been driven by businesspeople. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher didn’t decide that the components of an iPhone should come from 40 countries. Facebook wasn’t created by senior politicians — not even by Al Gore. Uber wasn’t an arm of the Department of Transportation. 

From a CEO’s viewpoint, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done more than unleash Western embargoes and boost inflation. It is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.  

In the great intellectual battle of the 1990s between Francis Fukuyama, who wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), and his Harvard teacher Samuel Huntington, who wrote “The Clash of Civilizations” (1996), CEOs have generally sided with Fukuyama. The view from the boardroom has been straightforward: Democracy won’t always win (China taught capitalists that quickly), but sensible economics usually will. Businesses could rely on a world in which countries would specialize in their comparative advantage. Commerce and free trade would bring people closer, as Fukuyama argued, rather than divide them, as Huntington warned — and businesses that ran themselves globally and wove the most cost-effective supply chains would prosper. 

Commercially speaking, this bet paid off spectacularly. Over the past 50 years multinationals have turned themselves from federations of national companies into truly integrated organizations that could take full advantage of global economies of scale and scope (and, of course, global loopholes in taxes and regulations). World trade in manufactured goods doubled in the 1990s and doubled again in the 2000s. Inflationary pressures have been kept low despite loose monetary policies. Even with a barrage of political disruptions — Trump’s tariffs, Brexit and so on — profits have remained high, as the cost of inputs (such as energy and labor) have been kept low.

Booming Trade

Merchandise exports doubled in the 1990s and again in the 2000s

Source: World Bank

Note: Indexed data. 1990 = 100

Now what might be called the Capitalist Grand Illusion is under assault in Kyiv — just as Norman Angell’s version was machine-gunned on the Western Front. All the dangers that used to appear at the bottom of a CEO’s morning briefing are slithering to the top. Militarism and cultural rivalries keep trumping economic logic. Putin invading Ukraine is merely one in a long list of economically self-harming decisions that vary from dynastic thuggishness (Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen and murdering journalists) to knee-jerk isolationism (Brexit). And these stupidities reinforce each other: Thus, the French are responding to Britain’s act of self-harm in leaving the EU by cutting their companies off from the continent’s main source of cheap capital in the City of London.

Against such persistent irrationalism, CEOs who used to build empires based on just-in-time production are now looking at just-in-case: adding inefficient production closer to home in case their foreign plants are cut off. The head of one of the world’s most powerful investment firms, with shares in almost every significant Western company, talked privately about “a tsunami of recalculations” on the weekend after Putin invaded Ukraine. The CEO of one of America’s most iconic multinationals admits that he is reexamining production across China. Every Western company is now wondering how exposed it is to political risk. Capitalists are all Huntingtonians now.

Nor is just fear changing the capitalist mindset. Greed is also acquiring an anti-global tint. CEOs are rationally asking how they can profit from what Keynes called “monopolies, restrictions and exclusions.” Now that governments are using national security as an excuse for national champions, businesspeople can choose from a plateau de fruits de mer of opportunities for rent-seeking and competition-crushing in industries like energy, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. That erstwhile Thatcherite Narendra Modi now echoes Mahatma Gandhi’s calls for self-sufficiency and imposes tariffs for local industries. Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has created the job of economic-security minister with a mandate to intervene in cybersecurity, chipmaking and much else besides. Macron has declared that “The state will need to take in hand several aspects of the energy sector.” Biden used his State of the Union speech on March 1 to promise that “Everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails is made in America from beginning to end. All of it.” Both sides of Congress applauded.  

So the second age of globalization is fading fast. Unless something is done quickly and decisively, the world will divide into hostile camps, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. And this divided world will not suit the West. Look at the resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most trumpeted figure is that only 40 countries did not vote for this (35 abstained, and five voted against it), compared with 141 countries who voted in favor. But those 40 countries, which include India and China, account for the majority of the world’s population.

These deeper changes in capitalism and geopolitics increase the stakes this week. Joe Biden and his European interlocutors have a lot on their plate with Putin’s escalating terror and nuclear-tinged threats, but they also need to address the wider economic ramifications of the war sooner rather than later. Do nothing and the drift toward protectionism will inevitably accelerate. The Chinese, for one, seem pretty sure that the West lacks the collective character to keep up its current stance as energy prices soar and compassion fatigue sets in. But we still have time to shape a very different future: one in which global wealth is increased and the Western alliance bolstered.

Despite his less-than-stellar presidency thus far, Biden comes to Europe with several big advantages. The first is that the West is more united and determined than it has been for decades. The sense of unity behind liberal values is no longer confined to the metropolitan elite. One of the great problems with modern liberalism for the past few decades has been its lack of a gripping narrative and a compelling cast of heroes and villains. Globalists have talked a bloodless language of “comparative advantage” and “non-tariff barriers,” while populists have talked about sneering elites and hidden conspiracies. Now Putin has inadvertently reversed all that. Freedom is the creed of heroes such as Zelenskiy; anti-liberalism is the creed of monsters who drop bombs on children.

The second is Biden’s long experience. George H. W. Bush, another long-serving vice president who stumbled into the big job, was much mocked for his lack of “the vision thing.” Yet his handling of the last days of the Soviet Empire in 1989 was exemplary: He provided Mikhail Gorbachev with gentle encouragement, resisted premature triumphalism, and worked with allies to lay the foundations of a new global order. So far, Biden’s handling of the Ukraine invasion has been similarly nuanced. He has drawn a line between supplying the resistance and becoming involved in the war (or giving others an excuse to claim the U.S. is involved). And he has put firm pressure on China to stay out of the conflict. 

Biden needs to go further in the coming weeks. He needs to reinforce the Western alliance so that it can withstand the potential storms to come. The American president has spent his first year in office talking about reengaging America with the world after Trump’s isolationism, and forming an alliance of democracies, but so far he has failed to give his allies the economic cement to bind together these alliances — especially free-trade pacts. His commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was dispatched to Asia last year to talk about inviting countries like Singapore and Malaysia into vague things like “frameworks,” when all America’s Asian allies really want is a solid trade deal — in fact, one like the CPTPP deal that Trump jettisoned. 

Biden needs to recognize that expanding economic interdependence among his allies is a geostrategic imperative. He should offer Europe a comprehensive free-trade deal to bind the West together; it could be a slightly remolded version of the rejected Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, based on regulatory convergence (under which a product safe to sell in the EU is safe to sell in the U.S., and vice versa). He should also join CPTPP.

It is not difficult to imagine Europe or democratic Asia signing up for these sorts of pacts, given the shock of Putin’s aggression and their fear of China. Biden’s problem is at home. Why should the Democratic left accept this? Because, Biden should say, Ukraine, China and America’s security matter more than union votes. The U.S. president’s first job is to protect his country. Biden is old enough to remember that the United States won the last Cold War peacefully because it united the free world behind it. This is the way to win the next one peacefully as well. Put together the free world’s economic potential — the EU, North America, Latin America’s biggest economies and the democracies of Asia — and it can do more than see off the autocracies; it can pull them toward freedom. 

Biden should pursue a two-stage strategy: First, deepen economic integration among like-minded nations; but leave the door open to autocracies if they become more flexible. China could be wooed toward freedom. But nothing will improve unless Biden first glues together the free world. That means freer trade — and the sooner he tells his party that, the better. 

Biden can soften that message at home by adding a political dimension to his trade agenda. “Build back better” applies to globalization, too. A global new deal should certainly include a focus on making multinational companies pay their taxes, and the environment should be to the fore. But Biden should also talk about the true cost of protectionism in terms of higher prices, worse products and less innovation. Spreading economic freedom remains the best guarantor of both global and American prosperity: global prosperity because, for all its travails, the last 50 years of globalization have enriched most of the world; and American prosperity because his country’s prosperity depends on his country’s security.

Constructing such a “new world order” will be laborious work. But the alternative is a division of the world into hostile economic and political blocs that comes straight out of the 1930s. Biden, Johnson, Scholz and Macron should think hard about how history will judge them. Do they want to be compared to the policymakers in the aftermath of World War I, who stood by impassively as the world fragmented and monsters seized the reins of power? Or would they rather be compared to their peers after World War II, policymakers who built a much more stable and interconnected world?

Nobody would understand the significance of that choice better than Keynes. He first came to prominence as a decrier of the Treaty of Versailles — and the know-nothing statesmen of the time. But at the end of World War II he participated in something that was much more constructive. 

In 1944, with the defeat of Hitler seemingly inevitable, President Franklin Roosevelt invited the Allied powers to a conference to design the postwar order — under the aegis of Keynes and, on the American side, the economist Harry Dexter White.

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The elderly Keynes had heart problems and a strong dislike for American summers — “one sweats all day and the dirt sticks to one’s face” — so he was delighted that the conference was held in New Hampshire rather than the infernal federal capital. The Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains was selected partly for the climate, but also because it had all the amenities of civilized life — its own power plant, post office, golf course, church, beauty parlor, barber shop, bowling alley and cinema.

Keynes In USA

Keynes at Bretton Woods, July 1944Photographer: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This was the setting for the most consequential conference since the disastrous Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Keynes, no longer a protectionist, played a leading role in designing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the infrastructure of the postwar Western order of stable exchange rates. He helped persuade the U.S. to lead the world rather than retreating into itself. He helped create the America of the Marshall Plan. This Bretton Woods settlement created the regime that eventually won the Cold War and laid the foundations for the second age of globalization.

At the closing banquet on July 22, the great man was greeted with a standing ovation. Within two years he was dead — but the world that he did so much to create lived on. That world does not need to die in the streets of Kyiv. But it is on course to do so, unless the leaders meeting this week seize the moment to create something better. 

— With assistance by Lara Williams

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the authors of this story:

John Micklethwait at micklethwait@bloomberg.net

Adrian Wooldridge at awooldridge5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

GOP grandstanders aren’t the only reason Jackson’s confirmation hearings were so disgraceful

GOP grandstanders aren’t the only reason Jackson’s confirmation hearings were so disgraceful

Jennifer Rubin — Read time: 4 minutes

The only thing more stunning than the off-the-rails Republican badgering and constant interrupting of Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Wednesday was the utterly inaccurate and inapt media coverage. “Tense.” “Heated.” “Confrontational.” “Tough.” Was that really the proper way to describe the hearings?

From much of the mealy-mouthed coverage of the circus, one would have a hard time guessing that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) angrily interrupted Jackson over and over again and shouted over hapless Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) as he lamely pleaded, “at some point you have to follow the rules.” (Was he not responsible for enforcing those rules?)

Similarly, from the media descriptions, one might not have understood the extent of the nonstop bullying from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and his disgusting accusation that Jackson, a mother of two and circuit court judge, did not think child pornography was a “bad thing.” And one might have never imagined that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) plowed over the same debunked allegations about her being “soft” on child pornography defendants. Jackson, after hearing the same disingenuous questions repeatedly, eventually resorted to saying that she stood by her prior answers.

How is it that the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court was treated so shabbily? Let’s first dispense with the typical whataboutisms from Republicans. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh, during their confirmation hearings, were given the chance to answer questions without persistent interruptions. (And it was Kavanaugh who lost his cool, not the Democrats questioning him.)

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Let’s also acknowledge the obvious: Cruz, Hawley and other Republicans operate as content providers for right-wing media, generating clips designed to upset and anger the MAGA base. They are competing to be the most aggressive in anticipation of possible presidential runs.

The rage machine exists because “normal” Republicans do not put an end to it. What if, for example, more than a couple Republicans denounced the mockery their colleagues made of a serious process? What if they acknowledged that Jackson is eminently qualified and voted for her?

It is not the fault of Republicans alone. Durbin failed to enforce the Senate Judiciary Committee’s rules, allowing members to constantly badger Jackson. While tough questioning is entirely appropriate, the obnoxious manner and utter irrelevance of topics (Cruz harped on a schoolbook on racism in an attempt to pull Jackson into an utterly inappropriate debate on critical race theory) suggested the judge was not entitled to the same level of courtesy and respect shown to other nominees.

Rather than intervene, Democrats on the committee went on with their prepared list of questions. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) made a strong objection, but outside the hearing room where most Americans would not hear it. “You had a Republican member who went way over the time allotted to him, ignored the rules of the committee, badgered the nominee, would not even let her answer the questions,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve been here 48 years.”

Not until Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the only African American on the committee, spoke did Republicans get their deserved pushback. He excoriated Hawley for his misleading line of questioning, reading from a National Review column that deemed his allegations “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” To Jackson, he said, “You have sat with grit and grace" and stressed that her “joy” would not be taken away from her. “God has got you!” His sermon-like tribute brought tears to her eyes, a rare show of emotion on her part.

The media might be able to curtail such haranguing if they accurately described what had happened. For reasons that confound me, reporters often play down the extraordinarily obnoxious behavior of Republicans, instead casting it as the normal back-and-forth nominees encounter. The refusal to call out Republicans for departing the bounds of civilized conduct allows the MAGA crowd pleasers to escape the judgment of average people who might be offended by their conduct.

The media in particular fails to convey the visual image of angry White men screaming and interrupting a Black woman, who dares not show anger for fear of being labeled unprofessional or lacking the correct temperament. Combined with the insinuations about her “softness” on child pornography and the hysterics on critical race theory, the aggression barely masked the Republican outpouring of White grievance.

It behooves Republicans who do not approve of this travesty to speak up. Meanwhile, Democrats should use their majority position to put an end to such conduct (cut off Republicans’ microphones or conclude the hearing until they act appropriately), and the media should not provide camouflage for it. The refusal to afford a historic nominee with respect she deserves and to denounce baseless accusations speaks volumes about our collective failure, still, to reckon with the original sin of racism.

Biden should defend U.S. democracy as aggressively as he is defending Ukraine

Biden should defend U.S. democracy as aggressively as he is defending Ukraine

Perry Bacon Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

Yesterday at 9:00 a.m. EDT

President Biden has been forcefully defending the Ukrainian people from an unjust invasion and repudiating the radical, anti-democratic behavior of Russian leaders. That’s the right policy. I just wish the administration were fighting anywhere near as hard for democracy at home.

The contrast in the Biden administration’s handling of the two situations is easy to spot. Before Russia invaded, it took the unusual step of announcing U.S. intelligence findings that undercut Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims and worked to lay the groundwork for the unified Western response that we have seen. Since Russian forces entered Ukraine, Biden and his team have focused intently on this issue.

But as red-state Republicans have passed numerous laws over the past year that both undermine our core democratic values, particularly the right to vote in fair elections, and specifically target Black and LGBTQ Americans, the administration’s response has been lackluster.

Where was the effort to get ahead of what state-level Republicans were doing? The administration and Democratic Party were caught flat-footed by a wave of GOP laws restricting voting and teaching about racism, along with other radical measures. And where is the forceful response now that it is clear the GOP has reacted to the 2020 elections by moving even further right? The president gave a few aggressive speeches blasting the new voting laws, but his message was contradicted by his emphasis on bipartisanship.

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Biden allies frequently blamed the filibuster and more conservative Democratic senators for the lack of action on democracy issues. But as we’ve seen with Ukraine, new laws aren’t the only way a president can have influence. The administration’s broadcasting of its unequivocal condemnation of Russia helped make defending Ukraine a top priority of both Americans and people around the world.

Biden can’t stop state-level Republicans from passing radical laws, nor can he prevent Russia from ultimately winning this war. But he’s at least trying really hard to prevent the latter.

The situations are obviously different. The conflict in Ukraine is simpler to understand than what’s happening in the United States — a large nation is invading a smaller one without justification. Many Republican officials share Biden’s position on Ukraine. Most important, a full-blown war is clearly, viscerally dangerous. No one is dying in Florida because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s moves to make the state less democratic.

But I think something deeper — and older — is at play, too. Long before Biden entered the Oval Office, the U.S. government fought democratic abuses abroad while ignoring them at home. Even as Jim Crow policies severely restricted the rights of Black Americans in the South for the better part of a century, the United States cast itself as a beacon of freedom, most notably in taking on Germany in World War II and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

More than that, America’s nongovernmental institutions are united behind Biden on Ukraine, but not on the democracy conflict at home.

The way the Ukraine conflict has played out in the United States reminds me of the summer of 2020, after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The media, business community, churches and other generally nonpartisan institutions interjected themselves into an issue with a single message — in this case, Russia is bad and the Ukrainians must be defended. On paper, Biden is America’s leader, but in reality, he often follows the lead of the broader U.S. society. Other institutions are pushing Biden toward aggressive action to help Ukraine, reinforcing the administration’s own posture.

Compare that to Republican Party radicalism. While the political press is increasingly covering the GOP’s worsening anti-democratic tendencies, the media still often employs its both-sides approach when covering the Democrat-Republican conflict over voting rights. There is no vocal nongovernmental consensus to steer the president.

Finally, the contrasting approaches to these issues unfortunately reflect some of this president’s personal shortcomings. Biden often appears to be a politician trapped in the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s. In that era, it was broad conventional wisdom that Russian leaders were anti-democratic, while few people saw the Republican Party that way. I worry that Biden’s experiences make it easy for him to grasp Putin’s destructiveness but slow to accept the radicalism of Republican officials.

Biden’s long tenure in politics might also have left him with an outdated view of the presidency itself. Biden appears eager to play the role of an American president leading an international coalition against a rogue dictator. That was what presidents did in his youth, after all — think, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But in 2022 an American president, only 15 months from an attempt by his predecessor to overturn an election, should feel called to build a domestic coalition to fight for democracy at home. Biden hasn’t picked up that obvious mantle.

I’m really glad that Biden is trying to stop the 44 million people in Ukraine from having their country taken over by a regime that they didn’t vote for and that threatens their rights and freedoms. But more than 28 million of the people who voted for Biden, including me, live in America’s red states, where a more gradual, less visible effort to take away our rights is well underway. A majority of the nation’s Black voters, nearly all of whom voted for Biden, live in the GOP-dominated South. The Biden administration should bring the same kind of passion to its defense of these Americans as it is bringing to aiding the Ukrainians.

Playing to win against the attacks on LGBTQ progress

Playing to win against the attacks on LGBTQ progress

Democrats should make smart decisions about when to fight and when to make a tactical retreat.

The LGBTQ rights movement has been the signature political success story of my lifetime.

When I was a kid, overt homophobia was routinely expressed even in a liberal, relatively gay-friendly place like New York City, and the idea that it would be intensely embarrassing and shameful to be mistaken for gay was a staple of 1990s sitcoms. Bill Clinton not only signed the incredibly homophobic Defense of Marriage Act, but he was also (by far!) the most pro-LGBTQ president we’d ever had. His appointment of an openly gay man to serve as ambassador to Luxembourg counted as a record of strong pro-LGBTQ advocacy at the time (his nomination was blocked for years by Senate Republicans, culminating in a recess appointment). In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama ran on the position that it should be illegal for gay and lesbian couples to get married but that they should be allowed to volunteer for military service; John McCain’s position was that volunteering for military service was unacceptable.

But the acceptability of same-sex relationships has increased so rapidly over the course of my life that Obama’s first-term stance now seems unbearably reactionary. The entire terms of the debate have shifted.

We had a roughly 10-year period of political routs (starting with the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell,” continuing to the Obergefell decision, through to Bostock) in which the left was constantly on the march. And a new PRRI poll confirms that both marriage equality and LGBTQ non-discrimination law are not only popular but increasingly so in a population that continues to secularize and grow more tolerant.

But after taking a lot of Ls, conservatives have regrouped around a new set of issues, including an effort to ban gender-affirming medical care in Texas that will be repeated if it holds up in court and key provisions of Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education Act that seem aimed at making K-12 classrooms more hostile to LGBTQ people.

At the same time, I think progressives have grown somewhat overconfident about the broad popularity of some of these issues and are not paying enough attention to the potential electoral ramifications of supporting trans participation on women’s sports teams. The Transgender Law Center itself says that in their message testing that “our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side.”

It is not smart for elected officials to take up a political cause whose own advocates say it’s currently a losing position. And I think it’s important not to die on that hill because there are other important political fights that are winnable.

“Don’t say gay” in Florida

Opponents of the new Florida law have characterized it as a “don’t say gay” bill and seem to feel that it is obviously outrageous. I think this bill is pretty bad, but I want to warn that the polling on it is decent for conservatives given favorable wording of the question, so progressives really are going to need to make the case here.

The key provision is this sentence:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

Now what the poll finds is that using that exact statutory language:

51 percent of Americans support “banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade,” with 35 percent opposed.

And 52 percent support the “age-appropriate” provision for grades four and up.

If you step back and think about it, obviously everyone thinks that pedagogy should be age-appropriate. So the fact that this only got 52 percent is an indication that people are not totally naive about what this means in practice. And in fact, the whole issue with this law is that it is deliberately ambiguous as to what is being banned.

Right now my kid’s school teaches reading, math, and science every day and also has classes they call “specials” (music, art, PE) that are taught more sporadically. If you were to ask me whether they should cut back on some of that in order to make room in the curriculum to teach about sexual orientation and gender identity, I would say no. But if you were to ask me whether some of the books available in the classroom should feature characters who have same-sex parents, I would say yes. And if I were to hear that a teacher who is married to a woman got in trouble with the authorities for telling a kid who asked about her husband that actually she has a wife, I’d be horrified.

Conservatives insist that’s not what this law is about:

Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute says the meaning of this is that “teachers in Florida will not be permitted to talk about sex-stuff until kids are in the fourth grade.”

Ben Shapiro says the point of the bill is “protecting small children from the predations of adults.”

Ron DeSantis’ press secretary says it’s an “anti-grooming bill.”

But obviously if you read the statutory language, it is not narrowly tailored to prevent the discussion of explicit sexual material with young kids. It’s been drafted with deliberately broad, deliberately vague language.

Some conservatives want a broad rollback

One interesting thing about the conservative movement is how effective they’ve been at getting everyone to shut up about the marriage issue now that their position is unpopular. The Supreme Court has gotten a lot more conservative since it handed down a 5-4 decision in favor of marriage equality, but nobody in the U.S. Senate or the conservative legal movement talked about using the Kavanaugh or Barrett nominations to reverse that.

And yet even though marriage equality is very popular, it’s still quite divisive among rank-and-file Republicans. In theory this could be a troublesome wedge issue where safe seat Republicans are constantly talking about rolling it back, and more moderate or vulnerable Republicans need to argue with them. But instead, the movement has largely acted with message discipline and savvy to just stop talking about it.

During the debate over the Florida bill, some state legislators did let their more expansive aspirations out of the bag:

Such a law would directly impact how teachers could provide instruction. At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Republican Sen. Travis Hutson gave the example of a math problem that includes the details that “Sally has two moms or Johnny has two dads.” Republican State Sen. Dennis Baxley, who sponsors the bill in the Senate, says that is “exactly” what the bill aims to prevent.

This is all just to say that not only is the Florida bill vague, but it is deliberately vague. State party leaders were aware of progressive concerns about the bill and could have amended it to address those concerns if they had wanted to.

But they didn’t want to. For political purposes, they like the current dynamic where the left denounces the bill and then Republicans claim it’s actually very modest.

HB 1557 in practice

And my guess is that in practice, the impact of this legislation probably will be pretty modest.

Suppose a student with two moms mentions that fact about himself in a first-grade classroom, some other kid says that’s not possible, and then a teacher explains that some families have two moms or two dads. I think it is pretty unlikely, in practice, that this teacher will get in trouble with anyone. If anyone does try to get the teacher in trouble, then the teacher’s lawyer is going to want to cite all these Republicans saying it’s really just a modest bill about “sex stuff.” And my guess is that in practice, groups that opposed the bill as extreme and overly broad are going to flip around and will also defend the teacher by citing the “it’s only about ‘sex stuff’” argument.

And if school administrators and Florida judges do try to implement a broad clampdown on any mention of LGBTQ families, they are going to be courting an obvious backlash.

But I also don’t find the vagueness and likely lax enforcement to be totally benign. Sodomy prosecutions were extremely rare even when the laws were on the books, but they still operated as a tool that police and prosecutors could wield against people and still served to keep gay people closeted and fearful. Leaving random legislative tools around for bigots and maniacs to use to hassle teachers seems like a bad idea.

The “age-appropriate” provision for grades four and up is even worse in this regard. Obviously school material should be age-appropriate! The whole question is which material is the age-appropriate material and who is empowered to decide. Just tossing a fatuously vague provision like that out there and linking it textually to “sexual orientation or gender identity” seems designed to make schools generally more hostile to LGBTQ people. And that’s bad. But absent a specific case of overreach in implementation, it’s probably not so bad that it will produce an obvious backlash.

It’s worth trying to win these battles, but that means being smart.

Playing to win

If Ron DeSantis were running on a platform that explicitly restricted LGBTQ teaching in classrooms and also banned same-sex marriage, he would have a losing position. But he isn’t saying that explicitly. The Supreme Court took the marriage topic out of the legislative arena, and conservatives have mustered the discipline to instead fight on more ambiguous winning terrain. In contrast, Democrats seem to have pretty uniformly lined up behind an explicit and unpopular position and are largely engaging with arguments against it by denying the consequence of their position — often by butchering facts and science about athletic performance in a way that makes the left look silly even to people who aren’t invested in the particulars of the issue.

It is not obvious to me that there is a strong philosophical or conceptual basis for gender-segregated sports leagues, and someday we might come to a consensus that divisions by weight or size or some other factor make more sense for some sports. But that day has not yet arrived, and I don’t think it’s productive for activists to push Democratic candidates or elected officials to walk this plank before voters are convinced that it’s a good idea.

One prominent feminist told me that she hesitates to raise any doubts about the sports questions while trans people are under attack, but I don’t think politics really works that way. If progressives insist on hewing to a high-salience, unpopular position that trans advocacy groups concede they don’t have broadly persuasive arguments for, then school boards are going to end up dominated by bigots like Dennis Baxley and Ileana Garcia who try to craft legislation and policy that harasses and undermines LGBTQ students and teachers.

That would be a really bad outcome, and it’s worth fighting against it in a smart way — by arguing against morally indefensible policies without taking up electorally indefensible positions of our own.

Republicans make Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearing all about their own victimhood

Republicans make Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearing all about their own victimhood

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Republicans know they can’t stop Ketanji Brown Jackson from being confirmed to the Supreme Court. Since they don’t hold a majority in the Senate, they cannot simply refuse to allow her nomination to be considered. Given her sterling record and lack of disqualifying misconduct, they won’t be able to turn any Democrats against her.

What they can do is use her confirmation hearings for other political purposes, as both parties always do in these situations. Some Republicans have chosen to do so with bad-faith attacks on Jackson; Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), in an apparent attempt to secure the QAnon vote when he runs for president, tore a few sentences in previous rulings and writings out of context to make the repulsive accusation that she is “soft” on child porn.

But so far, their clearest focus has been on their own victimization. You may be under the hot lights and being cross-examined, they are telling Jackson, but we are the real victims here.

You can see it in the multiple times senators have brought up prior judicial nominees who were either deprived of their supposedly deserved place on the high court or mistreated by cruel Democrats before taking their seats. The average voter may not recognize all the names in the GOP’s parade of decades-old judicial martyrs (Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown), but the activist base knows them, if only as victims of some long-ago Democratic treachery.

It all culminates with Brett Kavanaugh, the victim to beat all victims, his name invoked again and again. How can the poor Supreme Court justice even bear to get out of bed in the morning, knowing only that he’s a hero to his party and will be making the country’s laws for the next 30 years or so? What a nightmare it must be for him.

So GOP senators repeated again and again that they would never abuse Jackson the way Kavanaugh was treated. “You’re the beneficiary of Republican nominees having their lives turned upside down,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told her, adding that “Most of us couldn’t go back to our offices during Kavanaugh without getting spit on.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) agreed, telling Jackson that “No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits,” though “dating habits” is an interesting way to refer to what Kavanaugh was accused of. “We won’t get down in the gutter like Democrats did during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

To all this umbrage, one might respond, “Let us know when Jackson is credibly accused of sexual assault.” But this has nothing to do with her. The point is that Republicans know the sense of victimhood ties their entire movement together, and the more it is nurtured, the greater their chances of keeping that movement mobilized in November’s midterm elections, the 2024 presidential campaign, and everything that happens between and beyond.

So of course this has become yet another forum for Republicans to claim victim status, given the absolutely central place this occupies in their political project.

As conservatives have learned well in recent years, in the right circumstances, adopting the stance of victimhood can be thrilling, particularly if you don’t have to suffer any actual victimization along the way. You can take the normal unpleasantness that comes with politics — having people disagree with you, or watching as a figure you admire gets criticized in ways you consider unfair — and turn it into something noble, profound, even epic.

Are people calling me a jerk for something repugnant I said? I’m not a jerk, I’m a victim of cancel culture, persecuted for my devotion to free expression! Are people opposing my legislation to ban books and target the families of transgender kids? I’m a victim of the woke mob! Proclaim yourself a victim and not only do you become the hero of the story, you can claim moral absolution for your own grimy choices.

And of course, no one claims to be a victim more than the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, who seems to whine endlessly about everyone who has done him wrong, whether it’s the media that doesn’t give him sufficient adulation, the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, the prosecutors who investigate him for possible crimes, or the electorate that denied him a second term.

In his 2016 campaign, Trump taught all Republicans the power of the victimization narrative. He told voters they were the victims of a “rigged” system, of immigrants, of outsiders, of racial minorities, of “elites.” Your hate and resentment is not ugly and shameful, he said; you’ve earned it by the injustices visited upon you. Be proud of it, wield it like a weapon, and know that you’re in the right.

So Jackson will have to suffer through a few more sessions of Republicans beating their breasts about the terrible trials they have endured, with the gripping tale of Kavanaugh, that modern-day Job, told again and again.

Throughout, Republicans will congratulate themselves for how graciously they are conducting themselves. Even though the most gracious person in the room is the nominee sitting in front of them, patiently listening to all their nonsense.

‘Putin owns Biden’: Absurd GOP attacks require a strong Democratic response

‘Putin owns Biden’: Absurd GOP attacks require a strong Democratic response

Paul Waldman, Greg Sargent — Read time: 3 minutes

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is many things: a crime against humanity, a disaster for the Ukrainian population, and a complex policy challenge for the United States and its allies.

But to hear Republicans tell it, everything is simple, and all the United States needs to do is be tougher and more belligerent, at which point the conflict will come to a pleasing end. The fact that it hasn’t is proof that President Biden is, in the word they use ad nauseam, “weak.”

Consider the moment on Monday when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity why Biden did not approve a proposal by Poland to deliver MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.

“Putin owns Biden,” Graham said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Biden is afraid of escalation. He’s afraid of making Putin mad.”

Wait, does this mean Graham is not afraid of escalation? Or that he doesn’t believe such an escalation would take place?

Graham’s opinion on the MiGs is shared by many other Republicans. What you don’t hear them discuss is why Biden rejected the transfer of the planes.

There are two essential reasons Biden did this. First, the administration believes the planes won’t make the Ukrainian air force significantly more effective. Second U.S. intelligence has concluded that Russia could read such a move as provocation, which “might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO.”

In a world where Republicans were held to account for their positions, we could have a real debate over this question. Republicans could tell us why they think this intelligence assessment is wrong — that is, why they think approving the MiGs wouldn’t prompt such an escalation. Or maybe they’d say it’s a risk worth taking.

Could they be right about that? Possibly — but they don’t tend to make this case. Instead, they simply characterize the decision as evidence of Biden’s generic weakness. As Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) put it, Biden must make Putin “fear what we might do.”

But what will Putin do if he fears what we might do?

The same flaws mar the debate over creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine, something President Volodymyr Zelensky has also requested. Many Republicans have rejected this for a simple reason: It would mean shooting down Russian planes, and likely targeting Russian ground positions that support their air assets. That would simply mean a war between NATO and Russia, full stop.

Again, perhaps those Republicans believe a no-fly zone wouldn’t provoke a massive conflagration, or alternately, that risking a NATO-Russia war is worth the trade-off. But have they addressed this one way or the other? Not really. Instead, they know they can enter into friendly propaganda spaces such as Hannity’s show, where they don’t have to characterize the administration’s position fairly or offer much justification for their own position.

Instead, they are permitted to dumb the debate down to the point at which Putin’s invasion is continuing only because of Biden’s “weakness,” without having to explain why the downside risks of showing more “strength” are acceptable ones to take.

Why Fox News hosts don’t want to make Republicans explain this is fairly obvious. But if they aren’t going to, then perhaps Democrats should.

As an example, one senior Senate Democratic aide pointed out that, last week, Republicans fanned out to attack Biden as weak on Ukraine, while saying the president should do more. This came right after numerous Senate Republicans voted against humanitarian aid to Ukraine because of concerns with a broader omnibus spending package that aid came with.

“Why are we letting Republicans get away with talking tough on Ukraine, while not helping Democrats pass legislation that actually supports Ukraine?” the aide wondered to us.

Meanwhile, characterizing this conflict not as a complex policy challenge but as a personal battle of wills between Biden and Putin leads to yet another absurdity. Former president Donald Trump regularly paints himself as personally tougher than Biden, to the point of declaring that, were he in still office, he’d threaten Russia with nuclear annihilation.

This sort of nonsense is also allowed to skate by unchallenged on Fox News. But here again, the casualty is a real debate: The actual difference between Trump and Biden on Russia and Ukraine is a profound policy difference, not something that reflects their contrasting temperaments.

The result has been a robust, coordinated response from the West that has defied everyone’s expectations and has unmasked Trump’s vision as bankrupt to its core. Why aren’t Democrats more forcefully pointing this out?