America’s democracy is under threat. President Trump smashes alliances, upends norms and tramples the Constitution. So it’s normal to ask: What can one citizen do to help put America on a healthier course?
I have some hard experience with this question. Back in the early part of the first Trump term, I asked myself that question and decided to try to do more. I accepted a 50 percent pay cut from The Times and, among other things, helped start a nonprofit called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Those of us who launched it figured that social distrust is the underlying problem ripping society apart, but that trust is being rebuilt on the local level by people serving their own communities, people we call Weavers. We wanted to support them in every way.
The work was humbling. I learned that my life as a writer did not prepare me to run an organization — I’m not good at management. I made some boneheaded decisions that led to some public humiliation. Eventually The Times sensibly decided that I couldn’t work as a journalist as well as at a nonprofit that was funded by foundations and rich donors.
So I stepped back from the day-to-day at Weave and now serve in a nonpaying role as chair. But these painful experiences did have some upsides. First, under the leadership of Fred Riley and the current team, Weave is thriving. We have plans to be operating in 75 communities within three years. Second, Weave reminded me why I went into journalism. My job there was to travel around the country, interview Weavers in Nebraska, Louisiana, North Carolina and beyond and tell their stories.
I was immersed in the life of every nook and cranny of this country, and I’ve tried to keep that going to this day. I still spend more than half the year in hotel rooms somewhere.
This experience has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation — which at least in schools is actually getting worse — but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.
Editor: I’ve highlighted just one sentence in the above paragraph…
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Editor : In the final paragraphs Mr. Brooks become prescriptive, not to speak of maudlin!
In my view, those of us who oppose Trump have two jobs: to resist and reform — to resist Trump and to reform the systems that cause Trumpism. The reform part is by far the most important mission, and the reforms should have one aim: to disrupt the caste system.
That will require policy reform — directing investments, as Biden began to do, into those job categories that don’t require college degrees. It will require institutional reform. Many of us work in sectors where there is very little room for Trump supporters — in media, nonprofits, the academy, the arts world. That segregation has to end.
Mostly it will require ground-up social reform. The rest of us can do something pretty simple: join more cross-class organizations and engage in more cross-class pastimes. Even something small makes a difference. This summer I’ve been wearing a New York Mets hat. As is their wont, the Mets have been trampling all over my heart for the past few months. But over that time, in places all around America, I’ve had scores of people from all walks of life come up to me to talk about the Mets, which often leads to conversations about other things. My Mets hat has reminded me of a nice reality: We still could be one nation, despite all the ways we’ve segregated it up.
Throughout July secret contacts between Ukraine and Russia had brought the two countries closer to an understanding of how the war could be frozen. But subsequent talks between Mr Putin and Steve Witkoff, a confidant of Mr Trump from his real-estate days, created a series of impossible new territorial demands on Ukraine. At the summit on Friday Mr Putin once again demanded that Ukraine retreat from the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces that it still holds, which together represent the most fortified sections of the front line. This would put Mr Putin in a far stronger position to attack again in the future, should he choose to do so. In return, the Russian president offered to give back tiny chunks of occupied territory in Sumy and Kharkiv provinces, and to freeze the current lines in Zaporizhia and Kherson.
Years of war have strained the Ukrainian people, and Russia continues to press its advantage in metal and men on the front lines. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls show a clear switch to pragmatism on concessions for peace. A majority of those asked are now in favour of acknowledging de facto occupation of the areas Russia already holds in exchange for genuine security guarantees from the West. But there are nonetheless consistent and overwhelming majorities against making any further territorial concessions to Russia. According to Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, less than one in five would be prepared to accept the kind of land swap Mr Trump is said to be favouring.
A Ukrainian intelligence officer says the Americans are being “unbelievably aggressive” in pushing Ukraine to forfeit more land. The Russian interest is clear enough, he says. “They want to maximise the package they will get in return—from sanctions relief, to the return of seized assets, to the re-opening of energy markets.” What, he says, is far less clear is why the Trump administration was pushing so forcefully to promote Russia’s interests.
Despite the obvious headwinds, Mr Trump appears committed to his quick-fix peace. The Economist understands a three-way meeting between Mr Trump, Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky could come as early as the end of next week. Before that, on Monday, the Ukrainian leader is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first visit since his humiliation in February. European leaders will join him in a show of support. But some of the ingredients appear ominously similar to his previous visit. Channelling the logic of Mr Putin, Mr Trump is already preparing to blame Ukraine if his plans blow up, Ukrainians fear. “Make a deal,” he advised Mr Zelensky, via Fox News. “Russia is a very big power. [You] are not.” ■
This is where Europe has a key role. After the Alaska summit Mr Trump spoke with European leaders and Mr Zelensky for one hour in a call, during which they emphasised that Ukraine must decide on territory and must get weapons supplies and security guarantees. In a statement the European leaders declared that “We will continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia’s war economy until there is a just and lasting peace. Ukraine can count on our unwavering solidarity as we work towards a peace that safeguards Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests.” There is evidence that Mr Trump listens to Sir Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron and Alexander Stubb, so their interventions over the next few days will carry some weight in steering him away from trying to impose a bad deal on Ukraine. There is little support in Congress or among the American public for a full rehabilitation of Russia.
Europe would carry a lot more weight if it were doing and spending more. Mr Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, both think, with some justification, that supporting Ukraine should be primarily a European responsibility. For a long time that was not the case and only in recent months has Europe’s cumulative military aid through procurement deals finally exceeded that of America, according to the Kiel Institute, a think-tank. Europe can do more by providing funds for buying weapons from America, building up its own munitions and helping Ukraine to complete the build-out of its own military-industrial complex. This is essential in any scenario. It would also signal that if Mr Zelensky and Europe ultimately reject a deal that Mr Trump and Mr Putin agree on, and America then abandons its support entirely, Ukraine is still capable of fighting on.
After Anchorage Mr Trump suggested that he wanted not a transitory ceasefire, but a final peace that would “hold up”. In fact, deal or no deal in the coming days, the conflict will continue. For Mr Putin, the war has become an instrument of political control at home, providing a pretext for the repression that keeps him in power, despite the heavy costs in lives and to Russia’s economy and increasingly rickety financial system. As well as expanding Russian territory, he hopes to divide the Western alliance and weaken Europe. The danger is that Mr Trump is blind to, or even untroubled by, the Kremlin’s agenda. The talks on Monday could produce a breakthrough. But Europe and Ukraine must prepare for the worst and make clear that they are ready for that challenge. ■
The honours for Mr Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr Zelensky during his visit to the White House earlier this year. Since then relations with Ukraine have improved, but Mr Trump has often been quick to blame it for being invaded; and he has proved strangely indulgent with Mr Putin. Mr Trump told Fox you have to “weave and bob” to reach deals, but his constant shuffling in the run-up to the summit suggests indecision and frustration with a Russian leader who will not respond to his entreaties.
The Alaskan venue was rife with symbolism: the proximity of Russia and America across the Bering Strait, the sale of Alaska by Tsarist Russia to the United States in 1867; and the American lend-lease agreements that armed the Soviet Union to help it resist Nazi Germany (an important supply route ran through Alaska). Mr Putin recalled all this and recounted how, on the red carpet, he had greeted Mr Trump with “Good afternoon, dear neighbour.”
It surely makes sense for big nuclear powers, even geopolitical rivals, to talk to each other. Whether they need to roll out the honours at home for no gain is more doubtful. The only sop to Mr Trump came when the Russian leader said he was “sincerely interested in putting an end” to the war, and agreed that it would not have happened had Mr Trump been president in 2022.
Yet Mr Putin insisted that “we need to eliminate all the primary causes of that conflict”. Given that he thinks the primary cause is Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, and its right to join European institutions including NATO, his formula is a recipe for continuing the war. Mr Trump did nothing to disabuse him. The Russian president left with a smile, and even tried a little English in public: “Next time in Moscow”, he told his host. To which Mr Trump replied, “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”
Editor: Here is the final salvos of the Economist, as the perverors of a ‘History Made To Measure’! I offer a condesation, without the maps!
IN JULY 2021 Vladimir Putin published an essay with arguments he would later use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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There is truth in Mr Putin’s claim that Ukraine and Russia are close kin, as the following maps demonstrate.
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For Mr Putin the origin of Russian-Ukrainian identity is Kyivan Rus, a confederation of princedoms that lasted from the late 9th to the mid-13th century (see map 1).
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In the mid-11th century, however, Kyivan Rus began to fragment into semi-autonomous principalities (see map 2). These included Galicia-Volhynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and B.
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When the Mongol empire and its successors began to decline in the 14th century, rival polities rose to fill the vacuum.
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In 1648 the Cossacks, settlers on the steppe who amalgamated into disciplined military units, led an uprising against the commonwealth.
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Early Cossack warriors practised a limited form of democracy, a contrast to Muscovy’s autocratic regime.
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But the Cossack state had a hard time. In 1654, threatened by the Poles as well as the Ottomans to the south, Cossack leaders pledged allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy.
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By the end of the 17th century the Hetmanate’s territory had split into two: Muscovy took control of the east bank of the Dnieper river, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized the west.
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In the late 18th century the Russian empire broke up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with help from Austria and Prussia.
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On the eve of the first world war the Russian empire stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic (see map 4).
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In 1917, weakened by the war, Russia experienced two revolutions. The first overthrew the Romanov dynasty. The second was the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
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Ukraine’s territory expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe.
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But Ukraine also experienced great suffering. In the 1930s Josef Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture led to a famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, which killed millions of people.
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In the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, set out to reform the Soviet Union through openness and reform—glasnost and perestroika.
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Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994 it agreed to denuclearise in exchange for security assurances from America, Britain and the Russian Federation.
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In 2004-05 the “Orange revolution” highlighted Ukraine’s democratic ambitions. Thousands protested against a rigged presidential election that gave victory to a pro-Russian candidate.
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Editor: the final paragraphs of this History Made To Measure , that is about the self -willed forgetting, of the various roles toxic political actors, played in the Political Coup against Viktor Yanukovych: Victoria Nuland, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the toxic political meddler George Soros, and of course the subrosa political actor Barack Obama. Not forgetting Historian Timothy Snyder who benefited from the largess of Robert Silvers of The New York Review Of Books!
His response to the Maidan marked Russia’s first military incursions into independent Ukraine. In 2014 the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine (see map 7). Russia’s separatist proxies—led by the Russian intelligence officers— declared “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. By December 2021, just before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the conflict had killed more than 14,000 people. The war continues.■
Correction (January 30th) The borders in maps 3 and 4 have been updated since this story was published. The chronology of the founding of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917 has also been clarified.
What to make of Mr. Brooks’ assertion in 2019? In the present, America is an Occupying power in Iraq, the white phosphorous attack on Falluja, Abu Ghraib and an American embassy that is 104 acres in size, are historically verifiable facts.
The embassy has extensive housing and infrastructure facilities in addition to the usual diplomatic buildings. The buildings include:[10]
Six apartment buildings for employees Water and waste treatment facilities A power station Two “major diplomatic office buildings” Recreation, including a gym, cinema, several tennis courts and an Olympic-size swimming pool The complex is heavily fortified, even by the standards of the Green Zone. The details are largely secret, but it is likely to include a significant US Marine Security Guard detachment. Fortifications include deep security perimeters, buildings reinforced beyond the usual standard, and five highly guarded entrances.[citation needed]
Not to forget Sec. Powell’s pivotal UN speech, about non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sec. Rice’s looming ‘mushroom cloud’ and Judith Miller’s New York Times propaganda. Brooks makes up his list of heretics, whose collective abode were those ‘dream palaces‘.
There is first the dream palace of the Arabists.
Then there is the dream palace of the Europeans.
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters.
Mr. Brooks’ literary invention of Joey Tabula-Rasa allows him to add a strategic distance between his bellicose sensibility, and that of 20 year old Joey T-B. Who is a manufactured political naif, whose uncritical acceptance of the Wise Political Elders judgement is an inept propaganda device.
Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.
This essay was written for an audience of Weekly Standard readers looking for a set of political rationalizations for the ‘Iraq War’ : an endeavor of the now defunct Project for a New American Century. Its Statement of Principals and its signatories:
June 3, 1997
American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America’s role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.
We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests? We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital — both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements — built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation’s ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.
We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
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Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett , Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky,Steve Forbes Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz
Mr. Brooks’ evolution/de-evolution from Neo-Conservative war monger, to a self-appointed Political/Moral Prophet, with his books , riffing on the themes of an ersatz Sociology made to measure: The Social Animal, The Road to Character and The Second Mountain places this essay, in a past that Mr. Brooks might find inconvenient? Although, like the adroit grifter, he might characterize this essay as a part of his moral/political evolution to his current point of enlightenment.
I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.
Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.
Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.
Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.
Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.
In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.
Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.
Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.
Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.
I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:
After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.
Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response amid economic crisis and war weariness says something profound about America’s DNA.
Editor: Mr. Brooks demonstartes his Neo-Conservative politics, in this sucessoer to the utterly purile ‘The Collapse’ !
For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.
Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.
The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6 percent were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent.
But America, disillusioned with itself, is now withdrawing. And there’s a strong possibility that this withdrawal will produce a strategic setback and a humanitarian disaster. The Taliban are rapidly seizing territory. It may not be too long before Afghan girls get shot in the head for trying to go to school. Intelligence agencies see the arming of ethnic militias and worry about an even more violent civil war. The agencies worry about a flood of refugees, and terrorist groups free to operate unmolested once again.
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Over the past decades America and its allies have betrayed our values and compromised with tyrants innumerable times. But at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice. These things are all intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.
If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people, foreign and domestic, don’t like that package and feel existentially threatened by it. China’s leaders are not just autocrats, they think they are leading a civilization state and are willing to slaughter ethnic minorities. Vladimir Putin is not just a thug, he’s a cultural reactionary. The Taliban champion a fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
These people are not leading 20th-century liberation movements against colonialism and “American hegemony.” They are leading a 21st-century Kulturkampf against women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, individual dignity — the whole progressive package.
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I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
Editor : The purile feeds on the purile !
What does David Brooks see when he looks in the mirror?
The War on Terror-era neocon is at it again, scolding America for withdrawing from Afghanistan and advocating we stay in the game.
Marcus Stanley of Responsable Statecraft of July 21, 2021 provides The Reader with actual political and moral thought, not the chatter of a well paid Technocrats who follow the NYT Party Line!
If you were politically aware during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, David Brooks’s recent column calling for America to stay in Afghanistan and take a more aggressive role overseas might feel uncomfortably familiar.
Once again, as he did when promoting the Iraq invasion, he calls for America to be the “indispensable nation” and “democracy’s champion.” Once again, there is the obliviousness to the human costs of a supposedly humanitarian U.S. intervention. That was already strange in 2003, but it’s now grotesque after the death of more than 1.3 million human beings in just the first ten years of the War on Terror that Brooks had championed.
The studied turning away from the costs of our wars to those who live in the places where they are fought turns almost surreal in the part of his column devoted to Afghanistan. Brooks cheerfully informs us that “in 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school…and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent,” all at the cost of “relatively few” American casualties. The cost of a quarter of a million Afghan dead, over 70,000 of them civilians, in a country with a smaller population than California gets zero mention in his column. Neither does the widespread human rights violations associated with the foreign military presence, ranging from torture and detentions to ignoring the return of institutionalized child rape by U.S.-aligned Afghan security forces, something that even the Taliban never tolerated.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, Brooks observes, America “lost faith in itself and its global role, like a pitcher who has been shelled and lost confidence in his own stuff.” Apparently the U.S. is losing its mojo in the democracy-championing business. With the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 the champions of the War on Terror seem to think we are reaching some kind of statute of limitations for the relevance of our past actions. One might have more confidence in this assertion if there had been real accountability and reckoning in Washington for the individuals and ideology that drove the catastrophic decisions made after 9/11.
But this article underscores that there has been no such reckoning. What it instead illustrates is the through-line that links the ideology of global dominance that drove our decisions then, and the way we still look at the world today. The invasion of Iraq was justified by commentators like Bill Kristol using a Manichean distinction between “a world order conducive to our liberal democratic principles and our safety, or… one where brutal, well-armed tyrants are allowed to hold democracy and international security hostage.” Twenty years later, Brooks, a champion of that invasion, still depicts the world as “enmeshed in a vast contest between democracy and different forms of autocracy…a struggle between the forces of progressive modernity and reaction.” And it’s true, as Brooks claims, that this view is close to that espoused by some in the Biden administration.
The problem here is not the belief that American values differ from those held by rulers of other countries, or that we can and should advocate for those values on the global stage. It’s the black- and-white, all-or-nothing vision that divides the world into two hostile camps and abstracts from historical complexity. That complexity includes both the complex origins of cultural and values diversity between sovereign nations and the difficult history of America’s own repeated and systemic violations of the values we claim to uphold. By raising moral condemnation of our rivals to a fever pitch and blurring the distinction between nations as diverse as a Communist dictatorship like China and an Islamic theocracy like the Taliban, it turns difficult and situation-specific challenges around the world into a single global crusade that only America can lead.
But the lesson of the last 20 years is the way in which trying to impose American dominance in the name of our own moral superiority can betray the democratic and humanitarian goals it claims to pursue. Saddam Hussein was a more brutal and arbitrary dictator than the leaders of China and Russia today, and one might have thought that no intervention would have made the situation in Iraq worse. Yet American intervention did just that, and dramatically so. Likewise, Brooks’s call to remain in Afghanistan relies purely on condemnation of the Taliban as evil, without tallying the costs of continued American intervention in sustaining a bloody and stalemated civil war.
Of course, many things have changed since 2001, and Brooks’ article does reflect those changes. He now appeals not to center-right values of democratic capitalism, but to the left values of “feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.” He tries to tap domestic partisan energies by claiming that foreign rivals are united with Donald Trump domestically in leading a reactionary “21st century kulturkampf” against these progressive values. It takes a certain chutzpah to appeal to the dream of racial justice to support continued bombing of brown villagers in Afghanistan, or the values of multiculturalism to claim America’s cultural and moral authority to impose its values on the rest of the world. But Brooks has never lacked for chutzpah.
The more subtle difference, acknowledged by Brooks in a brief statement that “we’re never going back to the Bush doctrine,” is a belief we can avoid the overreach of boots-on-the-ground invasions of foreign countries while still pursuing claims to unilateral U.S. global leadership. This recasts the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as driven not by ideological overreach but by a short-sighted failure to anticipate the practical difficulties of invasion and occupation. Calls for new hot wars are out; a sweeping, ill-defined global cold war with the forces of reaction domestically and abroad is in. But cold wars carry their own dangers — including igniting a hot war in any of the numerous simmering low-level conflicts with our ideological enemies around the world, from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait.
Brooks closes by saying that without aggressively fighting this new global conflict between authoritarianism and progressive values we won’t be able to “look at ourselves in the mirror without a twinge of shame.” It’s an odd moral calculus that tries to ignore shameful acts facilitated by the United States itself and instead calls on us to be ashamed of the actions of foreign governments based on the vague hypothetical claim that U.S. intervention could prevent them. But it’s at the heart of the humanitarian interventionism Brooks sold 20 years ago and is still selling today. We should hope that this time there won’t be buyers in Washington.
PUCK is the want-to-be Version of Gradon Carters Vanity Fair, that morphed into ‘Air Mail’ , bathed in reductive nostalgia, held afloat by garish ADVERTISEMENTS! No more Dominick Dunne: But nerver fear, Neo-Con gouhl Julia Ioffie, offers the parched reader of the inefable? Reader don’t miss Jonathan Greenblatt’s interview in The Times! Fellow Travelers!
The reader quickly realizes the ‘why’ of the Jerusalem Post hiring, of the 28 year old Bret Stephens, to be its editor. This newspaper is the propaganda arm of the Zionist State. And Stephens regurgitates the ever evolving rationales for this European Settler State, he knows it by wrote, but is also able to extemporize, at will, on its themes. Mr. Stephens is given to impugning his opponents, like the anguished Liberal Zionist Beinart. Reminding this reader of Paul, in the commentary by Karl Barth, of ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ or of Luther’s ‘1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology’ and his ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’. Stephens is a zealot, that shares that commonality with the Protestant Reformation and its Biblical precursor..
The last two paragraphs of his essay is about the waning power of Jewish Identity, where such a concept appears as ineluctable, as conceived by Stephens, being the sine qua non of the Zionist State’s survival.
It used to be that Israelis depended on a secure and thriving American Jewry to help stand up their fragile state. Today it is American Jewry that is fragile, threatened by dwindling cultural influence, stagnant demographic trends, increasing alienation from the Democratic Party and abiding discomfort with the G.O.P., and rising anti-Semitism — sometimes masked as anti-Zionism — from across the political spectrum.
Should American Jews start looking for the exits — just as every other Diaspora community in history has done, and continues to do — they will be grateful to find a Jewish state that resisted the siren song of “one state.”
Editor: Bret Stephens is the natural inheritor of mantle of Fred Schwarz nototious for Christian Anti-Communism Crusade! How do I know this? In 1961 Schwartz came to my Highschool, in Lynwood California, to give his presentation. Mr. Sculnick a teacher of mine, hated Schwartz. Mr. Sculnick had a ‘talk’ with me about my Levi’s jeans, my first and only pair: Lynwood Highschool wanted to improve it’s standing, by having students appear more polished, in sum to appear more Middle Class. Mr. Sculnick and Fred Schwarz were on on my ‘LIST’! It was the early 1960’s and ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’, book and Movie, with the aid of ‘The Organization Man’ made conformity, in its myriad expressions, a valuable political commodity! This paragraph is introductery!
Donald Trump, the world’s greatest negotiator according to himself, may not think he needs much advice before his summit meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin on Friday. But the president should give Robert Kraft a call.
Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, knows what it’s like to be fleeced by the Russian president. On a visit to Russia in 2005 with U.S. business leaders, Kraft, at the urging of Citigroup’s then-chairman, Sandy Weill, showed Putin one of his $25,000 Super Bowl rings.
“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft recounted in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three K.G.B. guys got around him and walked out.” Kraft said he was urged by the Bush administration to pretend the ring had been a gift, while Putin later mocked Kraft’s complaint and suggested that the ring was embarrassingly cheap.
Editor: The Reader might wonder the source of this tale? Kraft himself , carefully embroidered? Or just apocryphal? Putin is by nature untrustworthy or just a thief : in sum a man without scruple: it comfortably dovetailes with the remainder Stephens diatribe?
Editor: These paragraps provide more ballist for Stephen’s :
Petty crooks sometimes become big-time ones, and Putin’s career is a case in point — from reports of pilfering high-tech secrets from the West as a K.G.B. agent in East Germany to suspicions about corrupt contracts while a mayoral deputy in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, orchestrating electoral theft in Russia and electoral meddlingabroad, plundering the Russian economy and seizing territory from Georgia and now Ukraine.
This is not grand strategy at work. It’s grand larceny. It’s the essence of what Putin is about — and surely helps explain Trump’s long-held admiration for him.
Editor: Here is a selection from Stephens essay:
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He may also be conscious that some of his predecessors made fools of themselves in past Russia summits, including George W. Bush (“I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”) and Barack Obama (“After my election I have more flexibility,” he said to Putin’s front-office man Dmitri Medvedev).
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There are many ways this summit could go wrong, including vague talk of “land swapping” between Russia and Ukraine. But there’s also a way Trump can do something useful.
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Editor: Mr. Stephens offers this maladroit sumation… The Russina’s are relentlessly advancing day my day!
The most positive thing that can be said about this summit is that it can be cast as a final good-faith effort by the administration to give Russia a face-saving way to cut its losses: an estimated million casualties, the loss of much of its stock of tanks and bombers, NATO’s expansion, the slow strangulation of the Russian economy, a war without end.
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Stephens: A few items to lay on the table: (Editor: consonent with the Neo-Con Wet Dream)
Working with Europe to seize the estimated $300 billion of frozen Russian government assets to serve as a funding pool for Ukrainian purchases of Western arms. The president has the legal authority to do this under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and George H.W. Bush already set a precedent by freezing and transferring Iraq’s frozen assets to a compensation fund following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Signing the bipartisan Senate sanctions bill on Russia, which includes a 500 percent tariff “on all goods and services imported into the United States from countries that knowingly engage in the exchange of Russian-origin uranium and petroleum products.”
Removing all technical or targeting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons.
Pursuing a defense and technology cooperation pact with Kyiv on the model of U.S. military ties to Israel. Today especially, America has a lot to learn from Ukraine about the rapid development and fielding of drones on the battlefield.
Supplying Kyiv with additional squadrons of F-16s and other weaponry that can defend Ukraine’s skies and hold Russian military targets at risk.
Editor: Mr. Stephens still can’t let go of his self-serving version of a ‘History’, that is collapsing before his eyes!
The choice between these two sets of options — the off-ramp versus the road to hell — should be Putin’s to make. Though public opinion counts for almost nothing in Putin’s Russia, Russians should still know that their president was offered an honorable peace and refused it.
The choice will also have to involve Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, who run the risk of being treated in this summit much as the government of Czechoslovakia was treated by the powers who met in Munich in 1938. Neville Chamberlain is yet another leader to whom Trump won’t want to see himself compared. Friday is Trump’s chance to show he’s better.
While he’s at it, he can also ask Putin to return Kraft’s ring.
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a Neo-Con, and is trapped in its toxic mythology, as presented by Leo Strauss failed attempt to Re-Write the History of Philosophy!
Editor: Here is the bedinning of ‘call to account’ offered by this news magaine : featuring the Soviet Union as the untimate, indeed the toxic political actor of the 20th Century. How fleeting is the political memory of this newspaper and it’s minions, about the Crime’s perpitated by America in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
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Other estimates made in the immediate postwar, for which the methodology is not available, include the following, which were cited in some of the aforementioned reports:
Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital estimated 70,000 dead, and another 50,000-60,000 dead within the next two months, for a total of around 125,000 dead;
The British estimated, based on their own population estimates, that some 70,000-90,000 people died at Hiroshima, and an additional 100,000 were injured; at Nagasaki, they initially estimated 39,500 killed, but later reduced this to 34,000; they also estimated that at least 60,000 were injured at Nagasaki;
The Navy technical mission to Japan estimated 80,000 dead at Hiroshima and 45,000 at Nagasaki;
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s Civilian Defense Division estimated that 25,761 had died in Nagasaki, with 30,460 injured and 1,927 missing;
The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers headquarters put the dead at Hiroshima at 78,000 in early 1946;
In July 1946, Lt. Col. George V. LeRoy, a physician assigned to the Joint Commission and a member of the Manhattan Project’s health physics division at the University of Rochester, gave an address that claimed that at Hiroshima 80,000 had died and 40,000 had been injured, and at Nagasaki 40,000 had died and 25,000 had been injured.
Again, the fact that most of these numbers hover around similar orders of magnitude (66,000-90,000 dead at Hiroshima, 25,000-45,000 at Nagasaki) should probably be understood as being essentially based on the same types of data for the populations of the cities, and they may not be totally independent estimates.
Various Japanese estimates were also made during this time. As we have seen, the American forces viewed Japanese accounts with some skepticism, rightly or wrongly. At the end of August 1945, officials in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures estimated that there were 63,614 dead and missing at Hiroshima, and 25,672 dead and missing at Nagasaki. The Joint Commission concluded that an investigation into the data behind these estimates “reveals several errors in calculation and judgment.”
The police at Hiroshima prefecture estimated that there were 92,133 dead and missing from the city at the end of November 1945. In March 1946, the city of Hiroshima put the same number at 64,610. In August 1946, the city put the number of dead and missing at one year after the bombing at 122,338. In 1949, a Nagasaki City committee estimated that 73,884 people had died. Both of these latter estimates are obviously considerably higher (nearly double) the other estimates, and it is not clear what the methodologies used to compile them were. (They are cited in Table 10.11 on page 364 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings.)
Recommended Reading
The physical and medical effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs
A team of scientists appraises Japanese studies of the after-effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Most of the deaths occurred on the first days of the attacks, and most of those that did not happen immediately happened within several months.
The only other estimate of note that I have come across from the 1940s is from Shinzo Hamai, the mayor of Hiroshima in 1949, who asserted that 210,000-240,000 had died from the bombing. He claimed to base this on his own personal experience in working with the rice rationing cards, and also on his belief that the military dead were removed from the official statistics. (The United States Strategic Bombing Survey had previously estimated that only 6,789 soldiers, out of 24,158 in Hiroshima, were killed or missing because of the bombing.) The only reportage I have on this estimate is from American newspaper sources (and so may be inadequately communicated or poorly translated), but it is of interest not only because of its significant variance with the other numbers given, but also because it was reported on quite widely in 1949 specifically because of that variance.
Almost all of these estimates are the dead within several months of the bombing. The question of time is an important one: Are we talking about how many people died on the day of the bombing, within a month, within several months, until the present? The estimates on this are, of course, as sketchy as they are for anything else. An American doctor, Verne R. Mason, from 1947 reported that the last of those who died of acute radiation exposure at Hiroshima had expired by late September 1945; a Japanese study of mortality rates from 1951 found that about 70% of those who had died by November 1945 had died on August 6. (See Table 7.8 on page 112 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings.) The Joint Commission had itself estimated that around 40,000-50,000 (about 70% of their 64,000 total) died at Hiroshima on the first day. They similarly estimated that maybe 10,000 had died immediately at Nagasaki, as well.
These kinds of estimates are even looser than the estimates of total dead. But the basic conclusion is an important one, because it is perhaps surprising to people approaching this topic for the first time that most of the deaths occurred on the first days of the attacks, and that most of those that did not happen immediately happened within several months. The question of long-term radiation-related deaths (e.g., from cancer) will be discussed in a moment.
Editor: The opening paragraphs of this ‘History Made to Measure’ and The Soviet Union, that appeals to The Economist’s reactinary readership! Not to speak of this maudlin pastiche: From the beginning, the world has struggled to live up to the high ideals of 1948.
ON MAY 14TH 1948, in its Declaration of Independence, Israel embraced universal human rights “irrespective of religion, race or sex”. This belief in individual human dignity is also enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, submitted to governments that same month. Today the founding vision of Israel and the laws of war are under attack in Gaza. In its bombed and barren landscape the fate of both lies in the balance.
From the beginning, the world has struggled to live up to the high ideals of 1948. Israel was born in violence and ever since it has wrestled with the tension between upholding universal rights and being the home of a people in a contested land. The cold war was a stand-off between two systems that too often treated humanitarian law as inconvenient. Even so, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union gave rise to aspirations that law-breaking leaders could be held to account.
Editor: The toxic, indeed murderious action of the Zionist Faschist State has been continious since 1948! This political fact eludes the Economist’s ladder of political checks and balances, that ends in its final political product !
Gaza shows how this vision is failing. The laws of war are being broken and the system for upholding them is not working. However, that failure does not exonerate Israel from having to answer for its actions in Gaza, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indeed, its foundations as a liberal democracy demand that it must.
Something has gone very wrong in Gaza. Israel’s just war against the terrorists who massacred its people on October 7th 2023 has turned into death and destruction on a biblical scale. Most of Gaza lies in ruins, millions of civilians are displaced and tens of thousands have been killed. And still, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, cannot stop himself. This week it emerged that he wants to occupy all of Gaza. But Hamas is no longer a military threat, so the war no longer has a strategy and fighting on is no longer just.
Worse, Israel’s government, despite its duties as an occupying power, has used the distribution of food to civilians as a weapon against Hamas. It continued even when, as predicted, that led to starvation and the death of desperate people queuing for survival rations. By corralling civilians in pockets as it systematically bulldozes their homes, Israel is also practising ethnic cleansing.
Editor: The above pagraphs are followed by this collection of Bad Political Actors that widens the scope, and offers a brief respite, of a self-serving kind, in sum a self-serving apologetic of a kind?
Gaza is not alone. Civilians are being slaughtered and driven from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and pretty much every other warzone today. Hamas, don’t forget, started the current Gaza conflict 22 months ago with an orgy of hostage-taking and crimes against humanity. Instead of seeking peace, it has gorged on the misery of its own people. It recently described the recognition of a Palestinian state promised by Britain, Canada and France as the “fruits” of October 7th.
Editor: This political indictment, of a kind?, rambles on and and on! Reader here are the final paragraphs of this Economist Chatter, that in it’s meadering way, seeks the the ‘Redemption’ of The Zionist Faschist State!
Those officials understand that Israel has an interest in the law, too. Some Israelis calculate that they can do what they like now and patch up relations with the West later. But views of Israel are bleak in Europe and are changing in America among Democrats and the MAGA right. If Israel becomes an ethno-nationalist state that annexes the West Bank and crushes its people, the violence will not cease.
You might argue that, after suffering the worst attack in its history, Israel will have no appetite for prosecuting its own leaders. However, the penetrating insight which emerges from the Geneva Conventions is that countries which break the laws of war without shame or recourse do not just harm their victims: they also harm themselves.
Israel has an existential interest in seeing justice done. If instead it glorifies those who orchestrate famine and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, its politics and society will lurch towards demagoguery and authoritarianism. The young, idealistic country that was born in May 1948 will have been eclipsed. ■
