The CDC’s new mask guidelines finally got it right

The CDC’s new mask guidelines finally got it right

Leana S. Wen — Read time: 4 minutes

A customer waiting to enter a restaurant in San Francisco on Feb. 15. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News)

February 25, 2022 at 6:57 p.m. EST

The CDC finally got masking right. After months of pleading from governors, local officials, educators and health experts, their new recommendations make clear that masks are no longer required in much of the United States — including in most schools.

Previously, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s sole determining factor for whether a community needed to implement masking was case counts. This made sense in 2020 and early 2021, when surges in infections invariably led to overwhelmed hospitals and deaths. But vaccines have rendered covid-19 far less severe. In areas with high levels of immunity from vaccination or prior infection, cases can be high, but hospitalizations remain low. The risk to society now correlates with severe infection, not positive tests, so it’s reasonable to shift the threshold for government-imposed restrictions.

The CDC’s new metrics are predominantly based on covid-19 hospitalizations as well as hospital capacity. Because severe illness lags infection by one to two weeks, the CDC also takes into account community infection rates. For example, there is a lower threshold of hospitalizations needed to trigger masking if the overall infection rates are more than 200 cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days.

Importantly, the guidelines leave open the possibility that these metrics might need to change in the future should a new variant arise that escapes vaccine immunity. Instead of viewing masking as an on-off switch, the CDC makes the case that mitigation measures are more like a dial. Depending on changing circumstances, restrictions can be turned up or down.

Beyond the rationale for the revision, the CDC deserves recognition for its newfound clarity of messaging. I appreciated the easily understood orange, yellow and green categorizations: When concern for severe illness is very high (orange), everyone should mask; when they are low (green), everyone could unmask; in between (yellow), people can decide whether to mask depending on their medical circumstances and risk tolerance.

I especially applaud the CDC for its bold — albeit overdue — stance on masking in schools. It was poor policy for some states to drop virtually all indoor mask mandates but continue imposing them in schools, when children are at far lower risk from the virus and, unlike adults, could experience harm from prolonged masking. The CDC isn’t going so far as to say that schools should end masking, but is recommending that mask requirements in schools align with the rest of the communities they are in.

At current rates, about 70 percent of Americans live in green or yellow zones. That means about 70 percent of students are in schools that could end mandatory school masking now. This is a dramatic change from the CDC’s prior guidance, which — when based only on case counts — would have required masking in more than 96 percent of the country and virtually all schools.

The revised guidance will surely anger people on both sides. Some will argue that the CDC should have ended mandatory masking altogether and that masks should be a matter of individual choice everywhere. I don’t think this is a responsible stance, because masks — especially high-quality N95, KN95 or KF94 masks — remain an important tool to prevent disease transmission and ensuring that hospitals are not overwhelmed. More dangerous variants might emerge, and federal health officials need to set the expectations that masks might be needed in the future.

Others will be upset that the changes go too far and leave behind the immunocompromised and children under 5. I understand the frustration; it is unfair that many will get to move on to reclaim normalcy while some cannot. But there is a cost to keeping blanket restrictions in place.

Plus, there are other ways to protect vulnerable populations. The Biden administration must commit to doing far more to make antiviral treatments and preventive antibodies available to them. The federal government should make N95s or their equivalent widely accessible and free of charge to all who want to keep masking. Businesses can also do their part, for example, by designating specific hours for shoppers during which everyone must don high-quality masks.

No matter what guidance the CDC released, it would been accused of going too far or not far enough. This time, I think it has it about right. Of course, I wish this guidance arrived a few weeks earlier, before governors took it upon themselves to remove mandates in nearly all states. Still, it’s better late than never, and I’m relieved that the CDC has finally signaled that we need to live with covid-19 and remove restrictions while we can, with the understanding that they might need to return in the future.

The GOP’s real fear about Judge Jackson? That she’s every bit as good as Biden says.

The GOP’s real fear about Judge Jackson? That she’s every bit as good as Biden says.

E.J. Dionne Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

February 26, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EST

After congratulating Jackson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) got right to the politics. “I also understand Judge Jackson was the favored choice of far-left dark money groups,” he said in a statement, “that have spent years attacking the legitimacy and structure of the Court itself.”

Well. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) noted, it was right-wing dark-money groups that “hatched and executed” the strategy that “packed the court under President [Donald] Trump.” Think of McConnell’s argument as a form of transference.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) tweeted that Jackson’s nomination “means the radical Left has won President Biden over yet again.”

Interesting. Does this mean that Graham was part of “the radical Left” when he was one of three Republican senators — the others were Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) — who voted to confirm Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year?

For good measure, Graham added: “The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated.”

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Yes, Jackson was a Harvard undergrad and graduated from Harvard Law School. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has the same academic pedigree. Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch are also Harvard Law grads. And Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Brett M. Kavanaugh got degrees from Yale Law School.

Sure, I get how people might get sick of Ivy Leaguers. But since he joined the Senate in 2003, Graham has voted for every Ivy League Supreme Court nominee put before him. Why might Jackson suddenly be a problem?

Let’s get to the basic issue: Jackson is an excellent choice. She would, as everyone with a passing interest in the news knows, be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s been astonishing (but, alas, not surprising) that many who had no problem with Ronald Reagan promising to appoint a woman to the court professed shock at Biden’s pledge to name a Black woman.

Republicans who swooned over the qualities of Trump nominees would be hard-pressed to explain why Jackson doesn’t more than equal them — not just in her education but also in experience, which includes clerking for the retiring Breyer, who is no one’s idea of a radical. She is, as Biden said on Friday, “worthy of Justice Breyer’s legacy of excellence and decency.”

GOP senators told Democrats to judge Trump’s nominees primarily by their qualifications. Wouldn’t it be lovely if they followed their own advice in weighing Jackson’s readiness?

And, as my colleague Ruth Marcus pointed out, Jackson has one credential that has been missing from the court: She “served in the trenches of the criminal justice system” as a public defender. She has looked at the process from the bottom up.

Alas, Republicans are signaling that they will try to turn a virtue into a nasty partisan talking point. Thus did McConnell’s statement say the issues he hoped to highlight during her confirmation debate included “skyrocketing violent crime and open borders.” Jackson shrewdly met this impending campaign head-on at Friday’s ceremony by speaking with pride about members of her family who have served in law enforcement.

If Republicans wage a full-scale campaign against this daughter of public school teachers, they will run a great risk — and not just because Jackson showed on Friday how appealing she and her personal story are. The more partisan they are, the more they will underscore their own partisanship in stacking the court with conservatives, and how partisan the 6-to-3 majority they created has become. If Republicans choose to play midterm politics with Jackson to ignite their base, they will only make it easier for Democrats to do the same.

It’s unfortunate that the conventions of the confirmation process are likely to get in the way of the debate we need to have over the damage a right-wing Supreme Court is doing to our country. Jackson will be advised, sensibly, to be as careful as possible in her comments, since playing down philosophical matters is the accepted strategy for winning over moderate senators. Her remarks Friday on God, family and country showed how difficult she will make it for the right to paint her as anything but mainstream.

But if philosophical lines are drawn, Jackson has the gifts to make clear that her vision to the law is truer to the Constitution’s promise of equal justice than the right-wing’s crabbed and ideological approach. What Republicans fear most is not that she won’t be a great justice, but that she will be.

Why Ukraine — and Russia’s aggression against it — matters to Americans

Why Ukraine — and Russia’s aggression against it — matters to Americans

Editorial Board — Read time: 4 minutes

February 24, 2022|Updated February 24, 2022 at 5:47 p.m. EST

As has happened so many times before in European history, an aggressor’s bombs, missiles and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor. The toll of killed and wounded is rising; fleeing civilians are clogging highways. This time, the victim is Ukraine, a member state of the United Nations inhabited by more than 43 million people. The perpetrator is Russia, whose repressive ruler, President Vladimir Putin, insists — contrary to black-letter international law — that Ukraine has no sovereign rights he is bound to respect. Once again, civilized life in this strategically vital continent is being overwhelmed by blood and fire. The conflict may be contained — for the moment — in Europe’s eastern reaches. But Russia’s war could all too easily spread, with destabilizing repercussions worldwide. And once again, the United States is called upon to respond.

The United States has no mutual defense treaty with Ukraine and, thus, no legal or prudential obligation to protect it militarily. Many Americans may wish, instinctively and understandably, not to get involved in a European war, even indirectly, by levying sanctions on the aggressor, Russia. Such measures could trigger disruptions in energy and financial markets, creating costs for people in the United States, when we already suffer from problems ranging from a pandemic to inflation to racial injustice. Certainly, this country, its service members — and their families — paid a high price, financial and human, in, and for, Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory. President Biden must keep his promise to limit the pain to his own people.

And yet, as an encouragingly bipartisan range of members of Congress advocated Thursday, Mr. Biden can and must counter Mr. Putin robustly, even at some risk to the United States and allied nations, which are also isolating Russia economically and diplomatically. This country has a stake in the peace and stability of Europe, a continent of nearly 750 million people that is anything but peripheral: Americans share with it a long-standing commitment to democracy, innumerable familial ties and more than $1 trillion in annual commerce, upon which millions of jobs depend.

Preventing this continent from falling under the sway of a hostile hegemon — as it almost did in 1914, 1939 and during the Cold War — has been a vital U.S. interest for decades. This is the vital interest for which the United States invested in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other institutions. And it is precisely the vital interest that unchecked Russian aggression would sooner or later undermine, with, as Mr. Biden declared Thursday, “consequences for America [that] would be much worse.” Indeed, the consequences could be more damaging and more lasting than any turmoil stemming from the economic sanctions, limited troop deployments and other measures Mr. Biden has announced, including a new package Thursday that will freeze Russian bank assets in the United States and curtail Russian access to high-tech imports.

Deterrence, to be sure, has failed; the roar of explosives across Ukraine proves that. Raising the costs to Mr. Putin of this adventure may still have an impact, but not unless those costs are truly punishing to Russia’s economy and to the business oligarchs who dominate it in corrupt collaboration with the Russian president. The immediate and long-term impact of the sanctions Mr. Biden added Thursday could be substantial; the mere threat of them caused Russia’s currency, the ruble, to plunge in value. Russia’s crucial revenue source, the oil and gas industry, retained access to the Brussels-based SWIFT interbank payment facilitation system. Key European allies, without whom there could be no SWIFT ban, objected to expelling Russia from the system, a move that would have potential blowback against Western economies themselves. Mr. Biden says the bank asset freezes will offset this omission, and there is a plausible case that he’s right. Meanwhile, SWIFT cancellation should remain an option and he should buttress the message of resolve sent by troop deployments to NATO’s eastern flank with a request for a supplemental defense appropriation from Congress.

“Security,” “territorial integrity” and “international law” are buzzwords — abstractions. In practical human terms, however, they connote something precious: time and space for people and nations to develop freely. That includes the people of Russia, whose legitimate security concerns the United States does not threaten and has offered to discuss. Thousands of them courageously took to the streets to protest Mr. Putin’s war, an astonishing sign that his propaganda has not conquered all Russian hearts and minds. In the three decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transatlantic community may have taken peace and freedom for granted. Now comes Mr. Putin, a former mid-level intelligence official of that vanished empire, who still bitterly laments its passing, to explode Western complacency. In his characteristic manner, he claims, grotesquely, that Russia must make war on Ukraine because it threatens Russia, when his real ambition is imperial restoration and his real fear is that a neighbor’s exemplary democratic success would undermine his own kleptocratic rule.

He must not get away with it. If the United States — firmly, calmly and in concert with like-minded nations — stands with Ukraine, there is a chance he won’t.

Russia is about to plunge into financial crisis. How will citizens react?

Russia is about to plunge into financial crisis. How will citizens react?

Tom Pepinsky — Read time: 5 minutes

If Putin wants to stop a bank run, he doesn’t have good options

People stand in line to use an ATM in St. Petersburg on Feb. 27. (Anton Vaganov/Reuters)

Earlier today, Russia’s central bank announced that the country’s currency, the ruble, was fully liquid. Normally, central banks do not need to reassure currency holders this way. We take it for granted that we can access our savings in the bank, use our credit cards and get cash from the ATM.

But these are not normal times in Russia. Having launched an invasion of Ukraine just a few days ago, Russia faces some of the strongest financial sanctions that any country has faced in modern history.

Russia is about to plunge into financial turmoil

Many of Russia’s central bank assets are currently unusable because of E.U. and U.S. actions. Additionally, many of Russia’s major banks will soon no longer be able to use SWIFT to settle payments. Meanwhile, the ruble’s value is collapsing in local markets. Although markets are not open at the moment, reports indicate that its value has declined from roughly 70 to the dollar to 150 to the dollar in after-hours trading.

All of this is making the financial system look shaky to Russian citizens. They responded today by withdrawing hard currency from ATMs across the country. Because it is Sunday, banks aren’t even open for regular service, so we won’t know until Monday exactly how seriously Russians will react to the financial turmoil.

Indonesia offers some lessons about what might happen

What happens when a regime like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia faces bank runs and currency collapse?

Political scientists have studied the political consequences of financial crises. In my 2009 book on the Asian financial crisis, I wrote about what happened to Indonesian dictator Suharto when it became clear that Indonesia’s banks were insolvent and the currency was in free-fall. Suharto’s struggles in 1998 suggest that Putin may face real economic difficulties in the coming days.

Like Putin, Suharto bolstered his dictatorial regime through close ties to an elite group of wealthy elites (known in Indonesian as “konglomerat”). Like Putin’s oligarchs, these superwealthy elites oversaw highly diversified business empires that blurred the lines between public and private authority. And they, too, owed their wealth to Suharto’s patronage and favoritism.

Also like Putin in 2022, Suharto in 1998 was viewed by many Indonesians and foreign observers as erratic. He was prone to quick decisions and quick reversals, and seemingly blind to the consequences of his actions, such as reneging on an IMF bailout to protect his youngest son’s monopoly on cloves.

Of course, Indonesia had not invaded any neighboring countries in recent years, so the specific drivers of Indonesia’s crisis in 1998 were different from Russia’s emerging crisis in 2022. But the financial fallout may be quite similar.

Putin’s big financial challenge is to convince people that there is no reason to worry about their money — they will be able to access it when they need it. That confidence will forestall the risk of runs on Russian banks. But just talking about financial stability can make people nervous. If everyone wants access to their savings by withdrawing money from ATMs, banks may not be able to cope. People’s individual strategies to keep themselves safe can bring about a banking crisis in which everyone suffers.

Putin doesn’t have many options

Putin’s options for how to address this problem are limited, as were Suharto’s. His choices boil down to the following: print lots of money on demand to cover all withdrawals; raise interest rates really high; or implement currency controls of some sort.

The first option generates inflation. It also does not really help to address the core problem: High inflation will give people with rubles an incentive to convert those rubles into dollars, gold or something else with a more stable value. That would push the value of the ruble even lower.

The second option seeks to keep money in banks (and rubles in Russia) by offering much more attractive returns for people holding ruble savings. But this is unattractive for many other reasons. With luck, it may eliminate inflation, but it may also put a sharp halt on spending and investment within Russia. It may avoid financial crisis, at the cost of a full-blown recession.

The third option would seem to be the most attractive. Indeed, this is an option that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad followed during Malaysia’s economic crisis in 1998. But it was very unpopular among Malaysia’s most wealthy elites, who were no longer able to move their savings and investments across borders. Moreover, in Russia today, such controls would have to be paired with controls on bank withdrawals to shore up the domestic financial system itself. Russia’s central bank is proclaiming that its financial system is liquid precisely to avoid having to do this.

I argue in my 2009 book that Indonesia’s oligarchs stymied Suharto when he attempted to implement the same solution in early 1998. They only supported Suharto as long as they could move their money abroad if needed — a powerful check on Suharto’s power to behave in ways they didn’t like. When the political situation turned sour in Indonesia, the oligarchs left with their money almost overnight.

Foreign sanctions may mean that Putin doesn’t have to worry as much about oligarchs fleeing abroad with their cash. Tough sanctions on his closest oligarch supporters mean that they can’t spend their money abroad anyway. Even so, currency controls and withdrawal bans would probably cause a full-blown financial crisis overnight.

It is hard to see how Russia’s domestic financial turmoil will end. The next 24 hours will be some of the most grimly interesting financial politics that Russia has seen since its two most recent financial crises, one of which (in 1998) ultimately paved the way for Putin’s rise to power.

In the meantime, however, Ukraine’s supporters in the international community may be thinking about how to leverage the threat of Russia’s financial collapse to their benefit. Giving oligarchs an exit option might provide the leverage they want to restrain Putin’s aggressive and destructive international behavior, by showing him its domestic consequences.

Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy and director of the Southeast Asia program at Cornell University, and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

There’s a reason Putin can be so aggressive: Oil.

There’s a reason Putin can be so aggressive: Oil.

Jessica L.P. Weeks, Jeff D. Colgan — Read time: 4 minutes

Putin’s personalist rule leaves few domestic checks on his power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 4. (Sue Ogrocki/AP)

Putin’s Russia is no democracy, but autocracies come in many flavors. Our research has found that when it comes to decisions about military conflict, a key question is how much power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader.

Some non-democracies feature a form of collective rule in which elites share power. Examples include the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, China in the decades between Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, and some military juntas. In this scenario, the leader is surrounded by other powerful elites who can mete out political punishment for unsuccessful or overly risky foreign policy decisions.

In contrast, in “personalist” regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union or North Korea under the Kim dynasty, individuals hold enormous power. These leaders exert personal control over internal and external security forces. When it comes to using force, there are few — if any — inside the regime who can hold the leader accountable.

Personalism and aggression

Why do personalist regimes engage in conflict? First, personalist rulers face relatively low domestic costs for taking military risks. They can usually hang on to power even in the aftermath of military defeat, unless they are forcibly removed by a victorious foreign nation — a fate that seems unlikely for Putin. On average, therefore, personalist leaders initiate military conflict more frequently than autocrats facing greater domestic constraints.

Second, the kinds of individuals who become personalist dictators tend to believe that force is highly effective — after all, it is often their willingness to use violence that helped them to rise to power, and stay there. As Putin declared as he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, “it is our strength and our readiness to fight that are the bedrock of independence and sovereignty and provide the necessary foundation for building a reliable future for your home, your family, and your Motherland.” Personalist leaders often have similarly bold international aspirations: They don’t just want to run their country; they want to rule the entire neighborhood.

Personalists are also more likely to have a troubling tendency to cut themselves off from high-quality information. They’re likely to surround themselves with sycophants who have incentives to tell them what they want to hear, rather than deliver criticism or bad news. Hussein, for example, famously overestimated his weapons of mass destruction program because subordinates were frightened to share information about setbacks. It’s therefore not surprising that Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, concluded in 2014 that Putin is living “in another world.”

This cocoon can contribute to foreign policy mistakes. Historically, personalists have been less likely to win the conflicts they get involved in than other kinds of governments, though their decision-making bureaucracies can help shield them from such mistakes. While Putin has made some shrewd strategic moves in the past, it could be that rising domestic repression has made it even less likely that he is receiving the information or advice he needs to make well-informed decisions.

How does Russian oil fit into Putin’s calculations?

Russia’s oil wealth intensifies the problem of personalist rule and aggressive foreign policy. One of us coined the term “petro-aggression,” indicating the link between oil and war. It turns out that major oil-exporting countries like Russia, known as petrostates, are about 50 percent more conflict prone than non-petrostates, on average, and oil has played a role in 25 to 50 percent of recent wars.

Other petrostates with aggressive pasts include Iraq, Libya and Iran. Not every petrostate is conflict-prone, of course. Much depends on the leader’s preferences. When a leader is not interested in revising the status quo, there is nothing about oil that inherently leads to conflict.

In the hands of an aggressive or revisionist leader like Putin, however, oil can further reduce domestic political constraints. Oil money allows an autocrat to buy off domestic opposition, build a military machine and create a war chest to ward off sanctions. In that sense, Putin is following in the footsteps of other petrostate dictators like Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi. Oil and energy also helped set the 2014 political context for Putin’s invasion of Crimea.

The U.S. and its European allies have announced sanctions involving the SWIFT banking system — and some sanctions against Putin himself. It remains to be seen whether even these relatively strong sanctions will work on a personalist, petrostate regime.

In general, these kinds of leaders are unlikely to abandon the fight unless the costs of using force become personal. For example, research suggests sanctions work best against personalist regimes when they affect the leader’s welfare directly.

In the long run, potential sanctions that hurt Russia’s oil and gas sector could prove effective, for two reasons. First, such sanctions would undercut Putin’s ability to buy off opposition and fund his war machine, though declining oil revenue brings its own political risks. Second, this approach would gradually increase Europe’s energy security, as would much-needed investments in Europe’s energy infrastructure. Reducing harm to the global climate would be a side benefit of acting against Russia’s petroleum sector.

Of course, sanctions that are strong enough to change the mind of a leader like Putin are likely to hurt pocketbooks in the U.S. and Europe, as well — as President Biden warned the American public last week. Time will tell whether the West thinks that stopping a personalistic, oil-rich dictator from destabilizing Europe is worth those costs.

Jessica L.P. Weeks is professor of political science and H. Douglas Weaver chair in diplomacy and international relations at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She tweets at @jessicalpweeks.

Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke associate professor of political science at Brown University. He tweets at @JeffDColgan.

Volunteer troops can be a curse, not a blessing. But Ukraine may be figuring it out.

Volunteer troops can be a curse, not a blessing. But Ukraine may be figuring it out.

Polina Beliakova — Read time: 4 minutes

Kyiv also called on volunteers in 2014 to defend the country.

Ukrainian friends embrace as they stand in line to join the Territorial Defense Forces in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Feb. 26, 2022. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

After Russia attacked Ukraine, Zelensky announced mass mobilization. About 37,000 volunteers joined the territorial defense forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).

Volunteer fighters were seen as national heroes in 2014, when the Russian-backed separatist war began in Donbas and the military was unprepared for the challenges it faced in eastern Ukraine. However, some analysts worried that those volunteer forces posed a threat to domestic governance and security.

In the expanded war with Russia now unfolding, will the government’s call for volunteers pose similar risks? My research finds that extensive changes have helped boost the military’s expertise, improved the government’s ability to control its forces, and limit opportunities for volunteer formations to defy Kyiv’s political authority — all of which suggest Ukraine’s volunteers in 2022 pose less of a risk.

Volunteer battalions didn’t always fall in line

In March 2014, the Ukrainian government called on volunteers to defend the country. Legally, volunteer formations were supposed to operate under the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MoIA). In reality, many independently funded formations had extensive operational and political autonomy, and their own political goals. High levels of motivation and relative independence made these volunteers capable defenders of Ukraine — but also enabled them to challenge the government.

Here are some examples. In February 2015, representatives of 17 battalions initiated the creation of an alternative General Staff, separate from the UAF, to coordinate the actions of the volunteers. In December 2016, the leaders of the “Donbas” and “Aidar” battalions announced an economic blockade of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” something Kyiv had not ordered. Ukraine’s government then had no choice but to adopt the blockade as its official policy.

And in the fall of 2019, the former commander of the “Azov” battalion brought about 100 veteran fighters to Zolote, in Luhansk oblast, to block the president’s decision to begin disengaging troops, in compliance with the Minsk Protocol.

Moves like this raised concerns about the power and intention of Ukraine’s volunteer forces. However, my research indicates that the factors that enabled the battalions to intervene in politics after 2014 are not present today, making the emergence of new challengers unlikely. Here’s what has changed.

Ukraine’s military is ready to tackle the threat

In April 2014, Kyiv identified the threat in eastern Ukraine as “separatism and the use of weapons against your own […] state.” Since dealing with internal threats was beyond the UAF’s expertise, the military was unprepared for the challenge. On April 17, 2014, in Kramatorsk, Donetsk oblast, the 25th Airborne Brigade surrendered to a crowd of local people. The officers and soldiers explained that no one trained them to deal with civilians or fight within the cities. A series of similar events set the stage for volunteer battalions eager to fight the nonuniformed separatists, rather than the military taking the lead.

By contrast, in 2022, a more professionalized UAF has been trained to address a broad range of contingencies related to Russian aggression. The first few days of fighting in Ukraine showed the UAF’s ability to reverse the advancement of Russia’s superior forces, take down aircraft and resist diversionary groups in Ukrainian cities. This closer alignment between the nature of the threat and the redefined UAF’s expertise means that in 2022, the volunteers will assist the military and not replace it.

Kyiv now controls the use of force

Kyiv’s attempts to mobilize troops in the spring of 2014 exposed the government’s inability to control a military that was both highly bureaucratized and not combat-ready. Before 2014, the UAF resembled an extensive bureaucracy more than a capable military. Experts I interviewed in Kyiv noted that the UAF’s expertise was not fighting but managing paperwork, which earned it a pejorative nickname — the Ukrainian Paper Army.

At the time, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that about 30 percent of the UAF conscripts abandoned their positions as the war in Donbas broke out. Many who remained tried to avoid fighting by reporting their equipment lost in combat — and secretly providing it to the volunteer battalions, against the government’s direct orders. At the outset of the fighting, the lack of civilian control over the military allowed some volunteer battalions to maintain significant autonomy and build a heroic image, in contrast to what many Ukrainians saw as incompetent political elites and an impotent military.

Professionalization of the UAF since 2014 has made it subordinate to Kyiv’s policies. In fall 2019, when battalion veterans tried to prevent the planned disengagement, the UAF worked with law enforcement to overcome volunteers’ opposition. Military experts I interviewed in Kyiv in December 2019 noted that since the start of the Donbas conflict, conscripts and politically motivated volunteers alike had largely been replaced by professional contract soldiers. Having a reliable military allowed President Volodymyr Zelensky to confront the renegade battalions and proceed with his preferred policy option.

Kyiv has also managed to bring most volunteers under civilian control within the MoD and MoIA structures. Most recently, a new law in January declared the president of Ukraine the supreme commander in chief over the volunteers through the MoD and UAF structures in a top-down manner.

So far, the early days of war suggest that this mechanism is working. This improved civilian control over the use of force decreases the chances that volunteers will challenge Ukraine’s democracy and security in the future.

Under the current conditions, Kyiv’s control over a professional and capable military is essential for defending Ukraine from the Russian aggression. It is also essential for mitigating any risks that armed volunteers would become a challenge to Ukraine’s security and democracy in the future.

Polina Beliakova (@Beliakova_P) is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University focusing on civil-military relations, international security and post-Soviet politics.

To understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict, look to colonialism

To understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict, look to colonialism

Linda Kinstler — Read time: 6 minutes

Ukrainians have been fighting Russian imperialism for hundreds of years

Linda Kinstler has covered Ukrainian politics and culture since 2014. Her first book, "Come to This Court and Cry," will be published in August.

February 24, 2022 at 8:46 p.m. EST

“I come today with an appeal to all citizens of Russia,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a televised address, just hours before Russian forces launched a full-scale assault on his nation’s major cities. He said he wished to talk to the Russian people not as the leader of a nation but as a citizen of Ukraine. He wanted to tell them, in their shared language, that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s excuses for invading his country were mere fantasies. He wanted to remind the Russian people of all that they share with their Ukrainian neighbors, and to underscore that it was up to them to speak out to stop war.

“You are being told that we are Nazis,” Zelensky said. But 8 million Ukrainians died fighting with the Soviet army in World War II. Zelensky’s grandfather served in the Soviet infantry; my grandfather, born and raised outside Kyiv, spent the war running radio cables between the front line and Moscow.

“You are told that we hate Russian culture,” Zelensky said. “But how can you hate culture? Any culture? Neighbors always enrich each other’s cultures, but that does not make them one entity,” he said. “We are different, but that does not make us enemies. We want to build our own history, peaceful, calm and fair.”

Zelensky’s address was both an appeal and a prayer, a clearheaded response to Russian justifications for war. His voice was calm and forceful, but you could hear the anger behind his words. He underscored that though Russians and Ukrainians may share kin and culture, that does not mean their relationship can forever be that of colonizer and colonized. He addressed his remarks to the Russian people, but he was also speaking to their president, who had claimed only a few days earlier that “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” Putin prefers to think of Ukraine as a southern province of Russia, a territory that was mistakenly “gifted” lands by his predecessors. It is these supposed mistakes that this invasion aims to correct.

It is no accident that one of the most authoritative responses to the Kremlin’s rhetoric has come not from the United States or European powers, but from Martin Kimani, the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations, who explicitly linked the colonial history of his own country to that of Ukraine in a speech to the Security Council on Monday. Kimani’s countrymen, he said, “share deep historical, cultural and linguistic bonds” with people across their borders — borders that they had no role in drawing. The same is true of Ukrainians. Many families, including my own, have been split across the Russia-Ukraine border. These separations are largely accidents of history, one of the lasting effects of the collapse the Soviet Union. But this sense of kinship, Kimani said, cannot justify invasion: “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

On Wednesday evening in Kyiv, Zelensky echoed this sentiment as he warned that at any moment the embers of the former Soviet empire could burst into a catastrophic flame. Shortly after he addressed the nation, that is precisely what occurred: Russian missiles began targeting Ukrainian military sites, not just in the occupied territories in the east but also in the metropolises of Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv. Smoke rose over cityscapes. Civilians descended into bomb shelters.

Outside the halls of academia, the former Soviet states are rarely referred to as “post-colonial.” Instead, they are usually called “post-Soviet,” a term which suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union passively gave birth to liberated nations, each with their own unique language, history, literature and traditions. In reality, the former Soviet countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus among them — nurtured national movements for hundreds of years before finally getting to experience independence. The very idea of the modern nation, and the concept of nationalism, emerged in the Baltic countryside in the 18th century, when the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder rode his horse between Latvian villages collecting peasant folk songs. The songs — poems, really — seemed to Herder to bind the people to the land and to each other. Reading through them, he began to develop his romantic theory of what makes a nation. He determined that it is not history or even blood that does it, but rather the lilt of a shared language, the verses of common songs and stories.

Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian. (A statue of him stands near Washington’s diplomatic corridor.) In one of his most-cited poems, “The Caucasus,” written in 1845, he ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. “We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen / While drunken justice sodden sleeps,” he writes. He describes, with a telltale twinge of irony, how Russian assimilation swallowed up the voices of the empire’s dominated lands: “From the Moldovian to the Finn, / all are silent in their languages, / because they’re blessed!” His poetry salutes the warriors who battle colonial forces, urging them on: “Keep fighting — you are sure to win! / God helps you in your fight / For fame and freedom march with you, / And right is on your side!” These words were emblazoned on banners in Kyiv’s Independence Square in 2014, when protesters took to the streets in the Revolution of Dignity. On Thursday morning, I woke up to read them on the Instagram feeds of my friends in Ukraine. They quoted Shevchenko to declare their support for their country and its soldiers as the first casualty counts came in.

On Russian state television, a map showing territorial “gifts” to Ukraine from Russian and Soviet rulers aired this past week. It showed Ukraine divided into pieces, and claimed that the eastern region had been “given” to Ukraine by Vladimir Lenin in 1922; that Crimea was “given” to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954; that a large swath of the nation’s northern territory had been a “gift” from Russian czars. What this map really shows is different periods of subjugation, moments when, as Kimani described, Ukraine’s borders were redrawn by outside forces. In a beautiful piece in the online news outlet Meduza, the historian Victoria Smolkin argues that this imagination of Ukraine is a fantasy of a fallen empire, a fever dream of imperial restoration. In his remarks Tuesday, Zelensky took pains to emphasize the similarities between Russians and Ukrainians because that is what the moment called for. But Ukraine is not Russia. Its people have been fighting Russian imperialism and colonial domination for hundreds of years.

In the chamber of the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday night, Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya invoked Soviet colonial history in an effort to challenge Russia’s status on the council. He repeated an outstanding request to the secretariat to produce the reasoning for why the Russian Federation had been allowed to inherit the Soviet Union’s permanent seat, which had previously represented all of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics. He also asked the Russian ambassador to confirm that Ukrainian cities would not be targeted, a request that was rendered obsolete minutes after it was issued. “It’s too late, my dear colleagues, to speak of de-escalation,” Kyslytsya said. “It is the responsibility of this body to stop the war.” The Russian ambassador corrected him: It was not a war, he claimed, but a “special military operation.”

On their way into the chamber, they and their fellow ambassadors would have walked by the newly restored and reinstalled tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” that has adorned the U.N. halls since 1984, a warning of the grotesque horror of war. Perhaps the Russian ambassador glanced at it, or maybe he just stared straight ahead.

The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone

The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone

Daniel W. Drezner — Read time: 4 minutes

The lose-lose outcome persists

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

A week ago, just after a bizarre day at the Kremlin where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions toward Ukraine were made clear, I wrote, “everyone will lose in the coming weeks.”

More than 100 hours into Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in the past 10 years, there remains so much that we do not know. The fog of war is real, and social media only amplifies it. All parties to the conflict have an incentive to slant the truth in their favor. No doubt, readers have seen some video that perfectly encapsulates their feelings about the conflict. Consider the possibility that a longer clip of that same scene might lead to a different interpretation.

So there is a lot of uncertainty. But one thing I am quite certain about is that this remains a lose-lose situation.

Let’s start with the actor that most readers are probably rooting against: Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has lost and lost badly. For 15 years he has coasted on an inflated reputation as a tactical genius and strategic opportunist. He had won quick victories in Georgia and Crimea, and his other adventures in Syria and the Donbass had not gone too horribly. It seemed that he had prepared for this moment of confrontation by stockpiling financial reserves, shoring up strategic partnerships, and attempting to foment discord within NATO members.

Oops. In the air, Russia has yet to establish air supremacy over Ukraine. On the ground, Russian forces have gained some territory but nothing has come fast or easy. Russia’s expectation of rapid decapitation via special forces and paratroopers has come to naught. Every day Kyiv does not fall and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posts something on social media is a day when Putin’s reputation for tactical mastery (and the Russian military’s reputation for competence) gets dented.

If Putin’s war in Ukraine is going rougher than expected, that is nothing compared to Russia’s strategic situation. Sure, Belarus has firmly backed Russia. There are some important countries — China, India, Israel, and the UAE — that have tried to appease Putin. Mostly, however, Russia has found itself diplomatically isolated, economically sanctioned, and on its back foot in the propaganda battle.

Actually, it is worse than that. Putin’s primary strategic aim has been to divide and disorient the west, and to fracture NATO and the European Union with an array of energy carrots and covert sticks. One can debate how well this strategy had worked, but Putin had definitely pocketed some gains.

No longer. For all of Putin’s tenure, Germany’s approach to Russia has been economic engagement and a reluctance to bolster its military. After Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Bundestag speech, that policy is now in the dustbin. Russia faces a Germany newly determined to bolster its military and wean itself from Russian energy. Sweden and Finland now seem super-keen to at least cooperate with NATO if not join it. Japan has joined other Group of Seven allies in knocking Russian banks off the SWIFT financial messaging system. Even pro-Russian leaders in Brazil and Hungary have denounced Putin’s actions in Ukraine.

A week in, Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine has gone badly for Putin. But it is worth pointing out that it has gone badly for everyone. Each day this war continues is another day in which Ukraine is pulverized. The tempo of destruction could increase, as Russia gives up on a quick victory and starts to apply more brutal tactics. According to the United Nations, more than 350,000 Ukrainians have fled the country and entered Europe. So far they are being welcomed with open arms, but if the war drags on that might change.

For many analysts, Putin’s endgame in Ukraine was always fuzzy. But NATO’s endgame is only a little bit clearer. Clearly you will see a buildup of military forces in Eastern Europe. You will also see the Russian economy become even more autarkic and/or more reliant on China — in other words, a Russia that has even less incentive to care about not roiling the West.

Here is a more concise way of putting it: After the past week, can anyone envision an outcome in which Russian planes will be able to fly in European airspace, in which Russian firms will be relied on for global supply chains, in which a normal Group of 20 meeting will take place?

We have entered a new Cold War, which is not something I say lightly. I am old enough to remember that the first iteration of that conflict involved a lot of white knuckles. Putin’s response to failure will probably be to attempt further escalation. The risks of accidental (or intentional) escalation are only going to get worse.

Right now, Americans are cheering on Ukrainian resistance and hoping that protests will lead to an ouster of Putin. That could happen, but anyone familiar with how this century has gone so far should be pessimistic. It is far more likely that Putin clamps down further at home and orders a more savage form of warfare in Ukraine.

No one will win this conflict. There are only losers in geopolitics this week.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s resentful leader, takes the world to war

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s resentful leader, takes the world to war

Joe Cummings illustration of Person in the News Vladimir Putin

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Growing up in a communal apartment in Leningrad, a young Vladimir Putin liked to chase rats across the stairwell with sticks. One day, he spotted a particularly huge rat and drove it into a corner. Suddenly, it threw itself at him, trying to leap onto Putin’s head in its bid to escape.

The incident taught Russia’s president a lesson he carried for decades. “Everyone should keep this in mind. You should never drive anyone into a corner,” he said.

On Thursday, Putin ordered his army to attack Ukraine from the north, south and east in what could be the largest military operation in Europe since the end of the second world war.

Despite months of western warnings about his plans for a brazen assault, Putin framed the invasion as a defensive operation — even going so far as to cite the relevant UN charter article — and claimed that Russia had “been left no chance to act otherwise”.

His war in Ukraine marks the culmination of a slide into a paranoid autocracy that earns comparison with Russia’s most brutal rulers.

Already a distant figure before the pandemic, the lengths the former KGB officer takes to avoid coronavirus have limited his human contact. Western visitors are forced to sit around a comically huge table. Allies toast champagne from opposite ends of a massive carpet. Even Putin’s closest advisers are rarely allowed to come within 10 feet without weeks of quarantine and testing.

People who have known him for decades say this has deepened a pent-up resentment of the west and a fixation on Russia’s shared history with Ukraine — making him more aggressive and unpredictable than ever.

“He’s even more isolated than Stalin,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser. “In the last years of his life, Stalin didn’t come to the Kremlin and lived in his dacha, but the politburo came to see him and they talked and drank. Putin doesn’t have that. He’s as isolated as he can be. And in that situation rational issues become irrational.”

A romanticised ideal of serving his country drew Putin, 69, to join KGB counter-intelligence in the late 1970s. Before long, however, he was confronted with the Soviet Union’s long, dreary slide into collapse. Deployed to Dresden in East Germany, he watched helplessly as communist regimes in eastern Europe fell while nationalist movements at home pushed Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the country.

One night shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Putin emerged from KGB headquarters to face an angry mob, then asked a nearby Soviet unit for support. The answer haunted him for years. “‘We can do nothing without an order from Moscow. And Moscow is silent’,” he recalled. “I had the feeling the country was no more. It was clear the Union was sick with a deathly, incurable disease called the paralysis of power.”

Back in Russia, Putin left the KGB and quickly rose up the ranks as a trusted aide to Russia’s two most important democratic leaders — St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin, its first president.

Once Yeltsin unexpectedly named Putin his successor on New Year’s Eve in 1999, Putin strove to restore the power Russia had lost. At home, he launched a brutal campaign to subdue separatists in Chechnya, brought the media to heel and defanged the country’s oligarchs. But abroad, he initially sought to ally with the US, asking Bill Clinton if Russia could ever join Nato and offering his support for George W Bush’s war on terror after the 9/11 attacks.

“He basically wanted to be like a vice-chairman of the board,” says Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation. “You don’t have to . . . change your fisheries code to match what Brussels tell you — you get a seat at the big boys’ table.”

Putin’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, leaving him embittered at what he saw as the west’s refusal to take him seriously, according to a former senior Russian official. “It’s their fault. They should have supported us and integrated us into the world, but they worked against us.”

Key turning points came in 2003 and 2004. Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, while growing increasingly resentful of the US for the Iraq war, Nato’s expansion into eastern Europe and its support for “colour revolutions” in former Soviet states. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where protests overturned a Moscow-backed candidate’s fraudulent election victory, was a particularly sore point.

“The fear of losing the post-Soviet space to Nato expansion became tied up with the fear of losing his own power,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Gradually, a revanchist side began to emerge. Former aides to Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of the “colour revolution” in Georgia, suspected something was wrong when Putin complained about Tbilisi’s “museum of Russian occupation” at a meeting in 2007 and reminded him of fellow Georgians like Stalin and Beria who had sat at the heights of Soviet power.

Saakashvili joked: “Why don’t you open a museum of Georgian occupation in the Kremlin?” His aides gasped in horror at Putin’s stony reaction.

Putin’s resentment of the US and Nato came to the fore when Ukraine and Georgia applied to join the alliance in 2008. He warned Bush that Ukraine was “not even a real state”, according to a Russian account. Though Nato offered only a vague assurance the countries would eventually join the alliance, it was enough to prompt the then prime minister to launch a devastating five-day war against Georgia and send troops to occupy two breakaway border regions.

But the muted western reaction, followed by a US attempt to reset ties with Russia, meant Putin’s use of force “was not addressed decisively enough”, says Kadri Liik, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “And that created a situation where things got worse and worse and worse.”

Fears of western encroachment and domestic uprising became intertwined in Putin’s mind. In December 2011 he accused the US of “giving the signal” for protests preceding his return to the presidency, then described the 2014 revolution in Ukraine as an “armed coup”, prompting him to seize the Crimean peninsula.

This severely damaged Russia’s global standing but Putin’s approval ratings at home soared above 80 per cent. With little meaningful opposition, his appetite for adventurism grew — culminating in a 2015 military intervention that turned the tide of the Syrian civil war.

“Putin’s used to being lucky. That’s very dangerous for a gambler, because he starts believing fate is on his side,” Pavlovsky says. “When you play Russian roulette, you feel that God is on your side until the shot rings out.”

As Putin’s circle became more limited, the picture of the world he received became more distorted. He and his confidants would increasingly spout bizarre conspiracy theories that the west was bent on destroying Russia through everything from gay marriage to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.

“You eventually end up in a trap, because your inner circle tries to only tell you good news and what fits your views. Imagine Putin discussing the war in Ukraine with his generals — they’ll rapturously cry, ‘Yes, we can!’ Nobody will resist,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik analysis firm, says.

Western countries found negotiating with an overconfident, isolated Putin impossible. Talks over the Donbas conflict, brokered by France and Germany, stalled.

Ukraine then elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who took a bolder stance against Putin: the former comedian demanded Nato admit Kyiv and had Putin’s closest ally there arrested.

“Russia’s political regime is this mafia-type state where letting insults drop means the leader loses his authority,” says Nikolai Petrov, a fellow at Chatham House. “There’s no way you can wipe that clean.”

As the peace process deteriorated, Putin’s resentments of Ukraine and Nato spilled into the open. Last summer, he published 5,000 words casting aspersion on Ukraine’s right to exist in its current form and claiming the US was using it to threaten Moscow.

Then, as Russia began massing troops on the border, Putin told diplomats to maintain “a certain tension” with the west. His demands that Nato pledge never to admit Ukraine and roll back the alliance’s eastern expansion would have rewritten the post-cold war security order.

The west mounted last-minute diplomatic efforts. But when France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz met Putin around the huge Kremlin table, they were subjected to historical rants by a man who struck them as almost totally at odds with the outside world, according to aides.

Their missions were doomed to fail. A day after agreeing to a Macron-brokered summit with the US, Putin recognised the Donbas separatists’ independence in a rambling tirade in which he threatened to hold Ukraine responsible for any “ensuing bloodshed”. It was a clear attempt to prepare Russia’s population for war against the “brotherly nation” of Ukraine — whose very existence in its current form, he claimed, was an existential threat.

“At some point he didn’t think he had been driven into a corner so much as that he could get out of the corner. What did he have to be afraid of?” Stanovaya says. “He realised an aggressive, frightening Russia is an effective way to make the world start taking you seriously.”

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The continuing war against Liz Cheney

The continuing war against Liz Cheney

By Matthew Green

Safe incumbents aren't usually featured on bulletin boards like this.

As a rule, leaders in Congress don’t endorse challengers against incumbents in their own party. It violates one of their core duties, to help their colleagues get reelected. And it can easily backfire: if the incumbent gets reelected anyway, she can make life difficult for those leaders and make their endorsements look worthless.

Yet last week, two leaders of the House Republican Party did exactly that. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told The Federalist that he stood behind Harriet Hageman, one of several Republicans challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) for the GOP nomination. Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) soon followed, endorsing Hageman in a remarkable statement that called Cheney a “Far-Left Pelosi puppet.”

If McCarthy and Stefanik were going to target anyone in their party, Cheney was the safest bet, politically speaking. When Cheney was chair of the Conference, her repeated criticisms of Trump put House Republicans in a tough spot with their pro-Trump constituents, and they voted to replace her with Stefanik. Four months later, Pelosi appointed Cheney to the select committee investigating the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol, a move that angered many conservatives who saw it as an act of treachery. In addition, Cheney herself had once supported a primary challenger to an incumbent (though the incumbent, Tom Massie (R-KY), isn’t exactly the most loyal Republican himself).

Still, endorsing Hageman was highly unorthodox and potentially risky. So why did McCarthy and Stefanik do it?

If they hoped to persuade Wyoming voters, they are likely to be disappointed. Political science research has found that endorsements by parties and party leaders can affect vote share in elections, but the effect is modest and contingent on many factors, such as the quality of the candidates. By themselves, these two endorsements probably won’t sway many primary voters. McCarthy is unknown to much of the public, and those who do recognize his name tend to view him unfavorably.

Another possibility is that McCarthy and Stefanik intended to scare would-be Cheney donors who want to stay McCarthy’s good graces. This could be why their endorsements came now, just a few weeks after Cheney reported raising record sums and boasted nearly $5 million in her campaign coffers, twelve times what Hageman has. But with so much money in the bank, Cheney won’t be hurt if donations to her campaign slow down.

A third possibility is that the endorsements were directed not at voters or donors but at other Republicans running against Cheney. As long as those candidates stay in the race, there’s a real danger that they split the anti-Cheney vote. Seeing that powerful GOP leaders are against them, perhaps they will withdraw, leaving Hageman as the sole candidate representing Republicans who want to remove Cheney.

But the most likely reason that Stefanik and McCarthy have stuck their neck out for Hageman is to placate Donald Trump. As Seth Masket predicted over a year ago, GOP leaders have been assiduously courting Trump, believing that only he can decide whether his strongest supporters -- working class whites -- turn out to vote. This gives the former president outsized leverage over what those leaders do. And Trump has it out for Cheney, who voted to impeach him and who has repeatedly attacked Trump for falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump also has a small cadre of aggressive followers in Congress, consisting mostly of the House Freedom Caucus, who have been pushing McCarthy for months to kick Cheney out of the Republican Conference. McCarthy and Stefanik may be listening them, too, especially since they consider themselves kingmakers in their party. Stefanik felt she had to placate the Freedom Caucus to be elected Conference Chair, for example, and Freedom Caucus members have periodically threatened to kick McCarthy out of leadership.

These unusual endorsements of Cheney’s opponent, then, tell us two bigger things about the state of the GOP today. First, the Republican Party remains deeply divided, not over policy differences (as is usually the case for intraparty divisions) but over the Party’s very identity. Is the GOP about a shared set of policy goals and ideological commitments, or is it about one man and his personal grievances?

Second, the endorsements can be seen as a sign not of Trump’s strength but of his weakness. He dominates the Republican Party – certainly enough to scare two House leaders into making a risky and possibly pointless endorsement. But why pressure two House minority party leaders to support Hageman if she weren’t already likely to beat Cheney?

Those endorsements were only the latest effort by Trump and his acolytes to punish the Wyoming congresswoman. The tremendous amount of effort being deployed against her – the RNC’s censure motion, the state party refusing to acknowledge that Cheney is a Republican, Trump trying to get Wyoming to change its balloting law so Democrats can’t vote for Cheney in the primary – hints at desperation.

Importantly, Cheney is hardly alone among Republicans who are pushing back against a Trump-centered GOP. She is joined by Senate Republicans (including the highest ranked Republican in national office, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)) and dozens of former White House staffers and members of Congress. Members of this wing of the Party threatened to leave the GOP last year and sharply criticized the Republican National Committee’s badly-worded censure motion against Cheney (and against Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another GOP congressman who joined the January 6 committee). Anti-Trump Republicans have also organized a conference in DC this weekend.

To be sure, Cheney could easily lose her primary. Her opposition to Trump is unpopular with Republican voters, who still largely support the president (though that support has started to weaken somewhat). But even if Cheney leaves Congress, others in the anti-Trump wing of the GOP will remain, and McCarthy and Stefanik will continue to be pressured by Trump to combat them. Expect the internecine conflict to continue.

GOP humoring of Trump’s praise of Putin sinks to absurd new lows

GOP humoring of Trump’s praise of Putin sinks to absurd new lows

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

The invasion of Ukraine has presented Republicans with a vexing conundrum. How can they express horror and condemnation — which no doubt are sincerely felt — over Vladimir Putin’s actions while avoiding taking a position on Donald Trump’s praise of the Russian leader, let alone on Trump’s long history of kowtowing to him?

The solutions Republicans have hatched to this problem usefully illuminate the range of acceptable opinion in the party, and the constraints on it, at a moment when many Republicans still see Trump as essential to the party’s future.

The Post has a remarkable new overview of quotes from Republicans about the situation. The story is essentially that Trump’s praise of Putin has left him isolated, now that many Republicans are condemning the invasion, even as Republicans avoid faulting Trump directly for this.

What’s also notable, however, is how Republicans are finding new sweet spots that allow them to condemn Putin while also vaguely retaining fidelity to the underlying worldview that Trump’s praise of Putin reflects.

On Feb. 22, White House press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed former president Donald Trump’s comments after he called Russia’s move on Ukraine “smart.” (The Washington Post)

Trump has publicly praised Putin’s moves as “smart” and “savvy” and as “genius,” and he has reportedly also lavished private praise on Putin. Before this, of course, Trump accepted Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and wielded U.S. military aid as corrupt leverage against Ukraine even as it pleaded for help against Russian aggression.

Now that this aggression has become a horrifying reality, very few Republicans have condemned Trump for any of this. But even more notable is that, while they are condemning Putin, they’re also finding ways to cast this as somehow the Trumpist position.

Criticizing Putin while blaming Biden

One way Republicans are accomplishing this is to condemn Putin’s invasion while blaming Biden for it. Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a member of the House GOP leadership, issued a statement ripping Putin as an “authoritarian dictator” but spent far more time attacking Biden’s “weakness.”

This is absurd. We can legitimately debate how sanctions should have been imposed, but given all we’ve seen, no one can seriously pretend earlier sanctions would have likely dissuaded the invasion. And as Damon Linker notes, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine before almost surely because Trump was also committed to Putin’s goal of weakening NATO.

But here’s the key point: Blaming Biden’s weakness also obscures Trump’s alignment with Putin on the bigger question of whether Ukrainian sovereignty and the international order should be defended in the face of Putin’s threats to it. Republicans are erasing what Trump got spectacularly wrong and replacing it with an account in which Trump was and remains eternally strong, which is faithful to Trumpism at its most base level.

Criticizing Putin with Trumpist tropes

Meanwhile, other Republicans are condemning Putin while obscuring the situation with a fog of Trumpist tropes.

Take J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and GOP Senate candidate in Ohio. After claiming not to care about Ukraine’s fate, he abruptly issued a new statement admitting the invasion is a tragedy but blaming “elites” and “globalists” for the problem, insisting those taking action to defend Ukraine secretly want to drag the United States into armed conflict.

Here again, there’s a legitimate historical debate over whether NATO expanded too far in a way that aggrieved Russia. But Vance deep-sixes nuance: NATO’s successes in maintaining decades of relative peace and security for hundreds of millions of people are entirely erased.

Vance now dismisses the worth of sanctions against Putin. And he bizarrely claims the only “solution” to “tyranny abroad” is a strongly nationalist America — but how this would have stopped Putin is unexplained.

You see, internationalist commitments cannot simply be admittedly insufficient in a situation where armed aggression by a nuke-possessing madman leaves no good options. These commitments must have no value whatsoever and can reflect only corrupt elite plotting, and the only answer can be maximal withdraw from them. What that withdrawal is supposed to be an answer to remains unstated.

But Vance manages to condemn Putin while remaining faithful to Trumpist nationalist tropes, without admitting how aligned they — and Trump himself — are with Putin’s own worldview and goals.

Meanwhile, one of Vance’s primary opponents, former Ohio state GOP chair Jane Timken, condemns Putin’s aggression. But she also insists the true version of “America First” entails taking aggressive non-military steps against Putin, because this will “protect American security interests at home and abroad.”

It is in our interests, and in the interests of the West and liberal democracy, to defend Ukraine through sanctions and other measures. But in the real world, this has nothing in common with Trump’s vision of “America First,” which has long been all about weakening the Atlantic alliance. Magically, the alignment of “America First” Trumpism with Putin’s interests is simply erased.

Here’s the bottom line. Many Republicans are legitimately horrified by Putin’s invasion and do support action against it. What they cannot do is hold this position while also admitting that Trump consistently sided with Putin against Ukraine; that Trump’s efforts to weaken our international commitments are largely aligned with Putin and against the interests of the West; and that we’re now witnessing the awful truth about the threat that Trump consistently downplayed.

Putin is breaking 70 years of norms by invading Ukraine. What comes next?

Putin is breaking 70 years of norms by invading Ukraine. What comes next?

Tanisha M. Fazal — Read time: 5 minutes

Up until now, Russia tried to look like it was playing by the rules.

Members of a Ukrainian territorial defense battalion set up a machine gun on Feb. 25, in Kyiv. (Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shocking because it is so unusual for one country to so brazenly attack another’s political independence and territorial sovereignty today. A norm against territorial conquest — especially, against the wholesale erasure of countries from the world map — has conditioned international relations since the end of World War II.

Russia’s behavior raises the question: Are we witnessing the demise of that norm?

Not necessarily — but maybe.

Countries used to conquer other countries frequently

Conquest of land, including of entire countries, used to be relatively common. As I show in my book, “State Death,” buffer countries — traditionally, countries that lie between two countries that are rivals — were especially vulnerable to conquest. Often, great powers on either side of buffer states did not trust each other not to take over the buffers between them.

Poland, carved up multiple times by more-powerful neighbors, provides a clear illustration of this dynamic. But buffer states around the globe — from Korea (in 1905) to Estonia (in 1940) — died by conquest. Ukraine lies in a similarly vulnerable position, sandwiched between NATO member countries and Russia.

Beginning in the early 20th century and, certainly, after World War II, however, a norm against such territorial conquest emerged. Promoted especially by the United States, but with support around the world, this principle is most clearly enshrined in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

After 1945, the violent death rate of states declined so dramatically that it virtually ceased. The norm against conquering another country is one of many factors, including the advent of nuclear weapons and increased global trade, that contributed to “the long peace” after World War II.

Countries turned to different ways to control other governments

One consequence of the emergence of the norm against conquest was a shift in the way countries exercised political control over other countries.

The norm did not magically reverse the incentives of countries that might have taken over buffer states in previous eras. But it did change how they tried to control buffer territory. Such countries sought to achieve the same political aims via different means. Thus, we saw a rise in foreign-imposed regime and leader changes of buffer countries after 1945, such as when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956.

What does this broader history tell us about Ukraine today? If Putin’s aim is limited to overthrowing and replacing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a pro-Russian leader, the consequences for the survivability of the norm against conquest also would be limited. As scholars such as Kimberly Howe, Roxani Krystalli and co-authors have shown in the context of Syria, however, the consequences for Ukrainians would be severe. What is more, the costs to Russia are likely to be extremely high; invaders rarely accurately assess the costs of occupation.

Until now, Russia tried to appear to be playing by the rules

International relations scholars know more about the rise than the decline of norms. But chipping away at the norm by swallowing up pieces of Ukrainian territory one chunk at a time may prove an especially effective strategy to undermine the norm.

Even as the Kremlin flouts norms and breaks international law, until now even Russia seems to have acknowledged the need to at least look as if it respected international law. In 2014, Russia tried to obscure its role in the annexation of Crimea by using “little green men” rather than sending in clearly marked Russian troops, as it has done in 2022. Similarly, there was the pretext of the Crimean “declaration of independence” and subsequent deployment of a self-determination justification for Crimea’s becoming part of Russia. Likewise, by recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia is setting itself up to use a (sham) vote to justify irredentism — claiming these territories based on historical and ethnic ties.

In other words, Russia could have taken Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk without giving any justification. While the justifications are flimsy and unconvincing, there’s a reason Russia took pains to provide them, as Villanova political science professor Jennifer Dixon shows. Putin is trying to manipulate existing norms for his own ends. His search for a pretext for invasion in the last week — and the efforts of the United States, its allies and Ukraine itself to deny him one — only reinforce this point.

This time may be different

In the end, however, Putin launched the current war by rewriting history and accusing Ukraine of aggression it didn’t commit. As bombs fall on Ukrainian cities, is his end goal the Russian annexation of all of Ukraine? Putin’s Feb. 21 speech suggests regret and nostalgia for the territorial boundaries of the Soviet empire. The response to a Russian effort to change the map of Europe in this way leads to at least two possible outcomes for the norm against conquest.

A strong global response to such an annexation attempt would be a signal of the norm’s strength. The strength of norms that proscribe behavior is most visibly gauged when those norms come under a direct challenge. For example, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 (using a similar justification to the one that Putin seems to be proposing), the large military coalition that responded reinforced the norm against conquest.

If, however, the world accepts a wholesale annexation of Ukraine, with little effective response — if Ukraine were to be erased from Europe’s map — the norm against conquest would be severely, perhaps even fatally, damaged.

Historically, most wars between countries have been fought over territory. The norm against territorial conquest was meant to decrease the incidence of this type of war. The risk of overturning the norm is a return to a world of conquest and violent state death.

Tanisha M. Fazal is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Find her on Twitter at @tanishafazal.

In words and deeds, Putin shows he’s rejecting even Soviet-era borders

In words and deeds, Putin shows he’s rejecting even Soviet-era borders

Daniel Treisman — Read time: 5 minutes

His speech this week makes it clear he’s out to restore “historic Russia”

President Vladimir Putin’s emotional speech on Monday justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was eye-opening in many ways. Among other things, it cast new light on the Russian president’s complicated and evolving relationship with the Soviet past.

Even before this week’s attack, Putin’s use of troops abroad — in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine — has been taken by some as evidence of a desire to rebuild the Soviet Union. U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among others, have suggested this interpretation. So did President Biden in his Thursday comments announcing further sanctions.

And Putin’s own words have at times supported this interpretation — in 2005, for instance, he called the collapse of the USSR “a major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.”

In fact, what Monday’s speech reveals isn’t nostalgia for the Soviet state but Putin’s fury at the incompetence of early communist leaders who built it on such rickety foundations. In his current view, Vladimir Lenin and associates tore apart what Putin thinks of as “historic Russia” — and he is not about to forgive or forget.

Putin blames Russia’s Bolsheviks

In his hour-long tirade, Putin seemed at times more angry at the Bolsheviks who created the Soviet Union than at modern-day Western leaders.

Lenin, in his telling, pandered to nationalists, split up historically Russian territories and planted a land mine in the Soviet constitution by giving each Soviet republic the right to secede. Lenin, he continued, built “odious and utopian fantasies” that were “absolutely destructive” into the architecture of the state.

The Bolsheviks’ approach was “not just a mistake but much worse than a mistake.” According to Putin, their “injustices, lies and outright pillage” led directly to the 1991 Soviet collapse that scattered enclaves of ethnic Russians across now-independent countries.

Offering to help “decommunize” Ukraine, Putin made clear that the restructuring he had in mind would leave little of the country intact.

Of course, Putin’s logic here is flawed. Ukraine’s secession had nothing to do with Lenin’s secession clause. The Ukrainian independence declaration in 1991 made no mention of the Soviet constitution, which by that point had been discredited. Instead, Ukraine cited the right to self-determination in the U.N. Charter.

But that’s not the point. The real surprise in Monday’s speech is the abuse Putin heaps on communist icons and the Soviet historical record. Even the extended essay he published last summer, which in many ways prefigured this week’s speech, did not achieve the same intensity of anti-Bolshevik vitriol.

What made Putin so anti-communist?

Putin has been falling out of love with Soviet communism for a long time. The story of this disenchantment is important for what it says about the Russian president’s current motives.

As a spy in Dresden in the 1980s, Putin already saw himself as a technocratic specialist for whom too much ideology got in the way. “For us professionals,” he once told his political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, “it hindered our work.”

As the Berlin Wall collapsed, Putin was shocked by the Soviet superpower’s inability to defend itself. Angry crowds surrounded the KGB outpost in Dresden and Putin requested reinforcements. But, as he later recalled, “Moscow was silent.” To Putin, this was a stunning betrayal of the Soviet state by its communist leaders.

Still, he remained at least ambivalent. As president, 10 years later, he was solicitous of the many communists who were nostalgic for Soviet greatness. To the horror of liberals then supporting him, he restored the rousing Soviet-era music of the national anthem. New in power, he even drank a toast to Stalin with Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

In part, this was electoral calculation — Putin still needed the backing of left-leaning older Russians. But in 2003, the Kremlin’s political operatives crushed the Communist Party as a political force and stole many of its voters by denouncing the party’s financial ties to billionaire oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin prosecuted him for tax fraud, and the Kremlin co-opted the party.

Still, Putin rarely spoke negatively about communism. In 2016, he confessed, “I really liked and still like communist and socialist ideas,” and claimed to have kept his old party card.

That Putin has complicated feelings about Russia’s past is hardly accidental. His father, a war veteran, was a loyal communist. His mother, a devout Russian Orthodox believer, secretly had the future president baptized. He grew up between two ideals.

At heart, Putin has always been a conservative, with a horror of revolutions — who was unlucky enough to grow up in a society that was forged by one. But by the Brezhnev era, when Putin came of age, the Bolshevik Revolution had crystallized into a tradition. Rather than images of anarchic street fighting, the 1917 revolution evoked ritualistic parades and collective celebrations. Paradoxically, Putin seems to have accepted the communist coloration of the Soviet past — out of conservatism.

At least, so it seemed. But a competing idea has been building for some time. Already at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, which Putin attended as a guest of NATO, he called Ukraine a “very complicated state” that had been patched together, in part, from territories taken from Russia. At that point, he seemed to recognize Ukraine’s borders as a fait accompli.

But in subsequent years, this grievance came back in ever more elaborate forms. And now a new identity has burst through. Putin no longer accepts the compromises of the Soviet past. His recent words and actions suggest he has become a radical nationalist, out to reshape borders and forge a single people out of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, despite the human costs of war.

Pre-1917 “historic Russia” included a range of territories beyond just Ukraine, some of which — like Kazakhstan, the Baltic states and Moldova — have ethnic Russian minorities. If Putin stays true to the convictions he embraced in his speech on Monday, the door he has opened may prove hard for the world to close.

vacation mailbag

Vacation mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias

I’ve been enjoying vacation, but you can’t keep me away from the laptop so here’s some mailbag for you all.

Back with regularly scheduled commentary on Monday!

Ollie Sayeed: Who was the best person of the 20th century in raw utilitarian terms? Deng Xiaoping, Norman Borlaug...?

There’s an interesting big picture question lurking behind this about the causal role of scientific innovators in the world. We have famous cases of very clear-cut joint or overlapping discovery. While calculus is obviously very important, it’s also pretty unambiguous that if you went back in time and assassinated Isaac Newton, Leibniz was waiting right behind him to basically do the same work.

And in a world with no Albert Einstein, someone else probably would have come up with general relativity. At the end of the day, the beauty of a scientific insight like that is it really does solve the problem, so if enough people think about the problem for long enough, someone is going to come up with it.

Politics feels much more contingency ridden to me than science. Vladimir Putin could absolutely have handled the Ukraine situation differently and Barack Obama could have intervened more forcefully in Syria or less forcefully in Libya. Borlaug’s work is a lot more applied than Newton’s or Einstein’s so I’m inclined to see it as in more of a middle ground of contingency. That said, I feel like the rhetorical function of invoking Borlaug is generally to try to raise the status of science relative to politics, making the point that developing higher-yielding varieties of wheat has saved innumerable more lives than any activist anywhere can claim credit for.

But we should also consider the possibility that Mexican President Ávila Camacho’s decision to establish the program where Borlaug did his pioneering work on wheat was kind of non-obvious. Only a small minority of the benefits of this flowed to Mexico and very few at all flowed to Camacho personally. I am not that well-versed in Mexican history, but all-in-all he seems like a pretty solid leader.

I guess what I’m saying is Deng Xiaoping is probably the right answer here.

Normie Osborn: What is the best getting to know you question to ask on dates?

Which Substacks do you subscribe to?

Andrew B: Which would do more to improve health outcomes in the US – a single payer healthcare system or a dramatic expansion in the supply of medical service providers (through some combination of increased immigration, med school admissions, and paraprofessional licensing)?

I hate to duck a question, but I genuinely think this is a kind of a false binary.

If you listen to Bernie Sanders talk about why he wants a Medicare-for-All system, he very clearly articulates the view that there is under-consumption of health care services in the United States. He says he’s fighting not just for the uninsured but also for the under-insured who presumably are not getting into the doctor enough because of copays or deductibles or what have you. And then he juxtaposes this with the money made by insurance company CEOs:

Twitter avatar for @SenSanders

But this is a fallacy that comes from thinking like an accountant. The United States does not have a large stock of unemployed doctors who could be treating the underinsured if we redistributed fiscal resources away from insurance company CEOs. And the insurance company executives are not themselves medical professionals who could be treating patients. If we want to accomplish the goals of the single-payer movement, we clearly need to expand the supply of healthcare providers. The question then is how much of the good of Medicare For All could be achieved purely through the supply-side reforms that would be necessary to make it work.

George Porter: What is your favorite Star Trek series? Original? Next gen? Voyager? DS9? Enterprise? ...

There are stretches of DS9 that probably represent the peak of Trek, but taken as a whole, TNG is the best series and I don’t really think that’s debatable if you’re a Trek fan.

Rustbeltjacobin: Matt you mention that american media coverage is weirdly dismissive of our hemispheric neighbors, in favor of heavily covering europe, the middle east & asia. So. Got any takes on mexican policy or politics for us?

Just for context, I said that as a monolingual American reader of the news, I feel much better informed about the political developments in European countries compared to those in Latin America — even a country like Mexico that is both larger than Germany and also literally adjacent to the United States.

This is odd on many levels, not least of which is the fact that many Latin American events directly impinge on American politics through migration.

But by the same token, I really don’t have many takes on Mexican politics or policy for you; I’m just really staggeringly ignorant. I just think this should be a bigger deal — promoting an atmosphere of public safety and industrialization in Mexico and Central America would be a big win for the United States and deserves to be a high-profile issue that it’s considered prestigious to work on.

Nate: What movies are you most looking forward to coming out in 2022?

My former number one most anticipated movie was “The Worst Person In The World,” which I’d heard great things about from people who saw it in 2021. And it really is good. It’s only February 23, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if no better movie comes out this year.

Beyond that, I always enjoy a “Mission Impossible” movie so I’m looking forward to the new one. I’m not sure I have a great picture in my head of what a movie version of “Killers of the Flower Moon” would look like, but I believe in betting on talent and Martin Scorcese plus Leonardo DiCaprio doing an Eric Roth adaptation of a David Grann book is a lot of talent. The preview for “The Northman” has been incredibly hyped up. “Thor: Ragnarok” is the best of the MCU movies, so I’m eager to see “Thor: Love and Thunder. “

Last but not least, all of Rian Johnson’s movies are at least interesting, so I’m curious to see what happens in “Knives Out 2.”

Sukrit: Does Matt have any thoughts on (Ben + Justin) Smith's new global news venture? The premise is there are 200 million college-educated English-language readers globally not being served by the current news offering. Bullish/bearish on the idea of a single global news source?

Ben and Justin are both very smart, so I’m sure that whatever they do will be good. In terms of its actual business prospects, it’s very hard to say. The only media business idea I’ve ever heard about where I thought “that sounds like a good idea, they’re going to make a lot of money” was Punchbowl, and they are in fact making a lot of money. But that just goes to show I am biased toward pessimism — I underrated Slow Boring’s potential for example.

I will say that as a hot takes guy, I have grown to be more and more appreciative of the virtues of old-fashioned, bland “just the facts” reporting at a time when a lot of high-profile media outlets have started putting more and more spin on the ball with their headlines, topic choice, and framing. The basic issue is that both reporting and analysis/punditry are tasks with a reasonably high degree of difficulty, and trying to do them both simultaneously at a mass scale is, I think, creating problems. There may be an opportunity for a global back to basics brand.

Jonathan Cox: In view of your post on “human history in the long run,” what books or other reading can you recommend on that subject, including human evolution and the development of civilization? I’ve read Scott’s Against the Grain and would love more reading in that same spirit.

“Sapiens” is the book that is really “about” the pairing of evolution and macro-history and a lot of people love it. I thought it was just okay, but I think people who are interested in this should check it out.

Beyond that, I’m sure there are aspects of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and William H. McNeil’s “Plagues and Peoples” that don’t hold up, but they’re both classics of big picture history for a reason. Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order” is a newer entrant into this genre that’s excellent.

Phillip R: Why do you delete your tweets regularly? You normally have a lot of good commentary and links to interesting articles on the site, but every couple weeks you delete them all which makes it hard to reference them later on. Have you ever explained why you choose to delete them so often (which is something that most public figures don’t do)?

I work hard on my columns, my books, and other published writing and am happy to be held accountable for them across the fullness of time. Obviously I don’t always get things right, and I’m happy to take my lumps when I get things wrong.

But while Twitter as a platform has a lot of virtues, I think those virtues are inherently tied to spontaneity. I want to be able to shoot the breeze with people in a casual, conversational manner without having it held over my head for decades if something I say off the cuff isn’t quite right. Obviously there is no way to stop people from archiving screenshots of old Yglesias tweets (and in fact people do this) but routinely mass-deleting signals in a good-faith way that I object to that kind of use of people’s Twitter track record. And while it’s true that most public figures don’t mass delete their tweets, I wish they would. I suspect they don’t in part because Twitter doesn’t make it easy to do it. If they had a checkbox where you could automatically delete tweets after 30 days, I think a lot of people would use it.

Lenzy T Jones: Observing the arguments of someone like Adolph Reed, what kind of arguments would you make to further support his arguments and dispel the idea of his thesis being “class reductionists” and push back against the “race is the basis” of everything argument at the core of woke-culture?

I like and respect Reed’s work, and I think his own piece on “The Myth of Class Reductionism” is a better refutation of that particular idea than anything that I can write.

That being said, Reed was also very critical of Barack Obama’s politics in a way that I’m not because Reed is a socialist, which I’m not. I oftentimes feel like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary season gambit of trying to outflank Bernie on the left with identity politics appeals opened up a wormhole we’ve been stuck in ever since. It sometimes seems as if the only alternative people can think of to Democrats talking like a university DEI coordinator (Hillary) is Democrats talking like an aging Marxist (Bernie) or achieving the higher synthesis of talking like a really smart humanities grad student (AOC). But the real trick is to just be 25 percent more normal across the board.

Doug Orleans: Can you respond to Nathan Robinson's interview with anti-YIMBY Dean Preston on the Current Affairs podcast?

One of the joys of podcasting as a medium is that hate-listening to podcasts is extremely tedious so nobody does it. Then as a podcaster, you can just talk in a relaxed way without being defensive all the time. The flip side of that is there is no way in hell that I am going to spend my time listening to a Nathan Robinson interview with Dean Preston.

James: Should we have more formal debates in various areas of society? Sure, we have presidential debates and various political debates, but those are middling at best. Housing? Debate! Public health? Debate! Schools? Debate! I’d love to see some people who aren’t politicians break down issues and address disagreements head-on. Or are debates not worthwhile?

I am very debate-skeptical and almost never agree to participate in a debate. To me, a big problem in intellectual life is people getting too invested in trying to win arguments rather than inform the audience. What’s more useful is dialogue and negotiation where people try to forge consensus on an idea that can advance everyone’s goals even without achieving perfect agreement.

David Mosley: You’ve written on how you think the future of remote work etc may be detrimental to Seattle, are there any other US cities about which you have a strong take about their future prospects?

My basic take is that we should look at tourism. For example, New York City is going to face substantial dislocations as the value of midtown office space plummets and as many people leave town in favor of cheaper housing elsewhere. But New York is also a place that attracts lots of inbound tourists. Plenty of rich celebrities who could live anywhere live in New York. Weird billionaires buy pieds-à-terre there. So the newly vacant space will be occupied by someone.

Seattle, I think, is a place that was really pretty small until recently and that not a lot of people visit as tourists. It’s not without its charms and natural beauty, to be clear, but it shares those charms with a lot of other northwestern places that are much cheaper than Seattle. There’s going to be leveling-down there.

By contrast, places like Miami or Portland, Maine or Charleston, South Carolina are spots where lots of people go and enjoy spending time and then lament that there aren’t necessarily great career opportunities there. But if you can make it in the big time while working remotely, lots of people will choose to locate in spots like that. I think the main reason this matters is that I think the cities that won’t benefit are the ones that most need help: the cold industrial cities of the Midwest and interior northeast. I think people are always searching for reasons to be optimistic about St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and I just don’t see it. Cities like Nashville and Austin and Denver that already had momentum will pick up speed and be joined by a wider set of leisure destinations.

Craig W: I'm curious about economies of scale with respect to local government. It seems like it should be more efficient to deliver services to a larger number of residents. And It seems to be true in at least some cases. But it also seems that larger cities seem to be high tax environments relative to their suburbs or smaller cities. So what's going on here? Is it actually more efficient so people respond by demanding more services? Do large cities at the center of metros get stuck providing services that suburbs then free-ride on? Or is it more of a Mancur Olson thing where cities are good at generating and concentrating wealth and then interests arise to claim some of that wealth?

I think it’s basically the Olson-style point. Suburban jurisdictions tend to be fairly interchangeable, so if the governing class of one particular suburban town starts using tax dollars on useless stuff that people don’t value, it will lose out sharply to other nearby jurisdictions. This offers an imperfect but real check on misgovernment that’s called Tiebout Competition.

But Tiebout Competition is undermined by a place that has unique geographical assets like beautiful beaches or oil wells. And historically, central cities have had unique geographical assets in the form of valuable commercial real estate (this is why remote work is going to be a tough transition), which traditionally gave central cities more running room to be poorly governed.

Separately, though, there are economies of scale issues. It’s very inefficient for Bangor, Maine and Brewer, Maine to maintain separate fire and police departments to serve what’s really just one not-particular-large community. The extreme fragmentation of municipalities that you see in New England (and New Jersey) isn’t great. I’m in general a fan of city-county consolidations like you see in Jacksonville and Indianapolis as a way of addressing some of these trade-offs.

M Hamill: I'm curious if you have thoughts about "end user" solutions to inflation. That is, there has been talk about the recent inflation being at least in part, driven by stimulus and people spending their extra money on goods when there was a lack of services to be had. So then, let's say you have some money lying around and aren't sure what to do with it: In purely inflation management terms, whats the most helpful thing you could do? Buy stock? Put it in savings? Spend it on services like dining or a lavish vacation? Give it to charity? Spend it on maintenance for your old car so you dont need a new one?

There are a few different margins at work here. At the most basic level you want to shift consumption out of areas that we know are constrained (buying durable goods, burning gasoline) and into areas where there’s spare capacity. So go to the movies. Go on vacation. But ideally don’t go to the beach — go stay at a hotel in downtown Chicago or Dallas that’s hurting due to loss of business travelers. Then go see a movie there and eat at downtown restaurants.

A more advanced play is just to consume less and buy stock; increasing the national savings rate helps.

But what we really want are not savings, but investment (and yes I know that S=I by definition in the National Income and Product Accounts, but the ordinary language sense of these terms is different), so the truly optimal thing to do would be to lend your money to someone who wants to drill some oil wells.

Ivan: What did you think about Ezra Klein's interview with Jon Favreau's Offline Podcast and the discussion of popularism. Ezra talked about balancing the popular with the viral to get reach of your message. Want to know how you think about balancing those things?

It’s a fair point. But this is why I emphasize that posting is praxis. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about Rick Scott’s plan to raise taxes on working-class retirees, then you are making those posts viral. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about how we need to abolish ICE, then you are making those posts viral. We, as a collective, have the power to influence what is and isn’t viral.

Josh Morrison: What do you think of the "long-termism" trend in effective altruism that prioritizes reducing the risk of human extinction over near-term goals like improving global health in the present day?

People write much longer takes about this than I’m going to attempt here. But for now, I will say that I think most people (most politicians, most journalists, most bureaucratic institutions) would benefit from discounting less and caring about existential risk more. So I am always happy to recommend Toby Ord’s book and cheerlead for longtermism.

That being said, I don’t really think there’s all that much the typical person could or should do with the fact that Ord estimates there’s a 1/30 risk of existential catastrophe from an engineered pandemic versus a 1/1,000 risk from climate change or a 1/10,000 risk from a supervolcano. The estimates are obviously very imprecise and it’s also extremely hard to know ex-ante what is and isn’t going to be helpful in addressing these things.

Part of the appeal of public health work is that we have known interventions with high confidence that marginal investments of money will lead to marginal lives saved and improved. And then beyond that, we have a lot of other ideas that sound promising and a pretty good sense of how to do assessments of those ideas. And there’s a much wider set of people who are in a position to meaningfully contribute to these causes, if for no other reason than this is an area where small infusions of money really do help.

Dmo: Do you play video games at all? If so, which games? What is your history with this medium and do you have any thoughts on it?

We're nearly the same age, but I don't think I ever remember you talking about them.

People keep asking me about video games! I don’t have a lot to say about this. I owned an NES, an SNES, a Gameboy, and a Sega Genesis at different times when I was a kid but never got a more modern system. I used to play TIE Fighter at my friend Jeff’s house when we were in elementary school but I was never really into PC gaming.

The game genre that I have a deep affection for is turn-based strategy games. I was a big Civ II guy in my day. I also liked Koei’s games, especially L’Empereur. More recently my kid and I have been playing European War IV and European War VI. But I’m not a big gamer is what it comes down to — for recreation, I like to tweet.