The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (private feed for kbockus@gmail.com)

Fiona Hill On Russia, Trump, The American Dream

Fiona Hill was an intel analyst under Bush and Obama and then served under Trump as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Currently a senior fellow at Brookings, her new book is There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century. She also co-authored a book called Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. It was a really pleasant chat — especially talking about our parallel paths from Britain to America. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For two clips of my convo with Fiona — on why a self-reliant country would pick a tyrannical ruler in Trump, and on the pathos of leaving your hometown for more opportunity — head to our YouTube page. Also, heads up: a new Dish transcript just dropped, this time with Cornel West — who believes, unlike Jon Stewart and his panelists, that “we’ve got to fight the notion that whiteness is reducible to white supremacy.” The Christian socialist is a powerful foe of tribalism:Below are many readers over my latest column, “The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia.” First up, the dissenters:You wrote, “But Putin is not without allies. China, Brazil, India, Israel — they’re all hedging their bets, alongside much of the global South.” That was an excessively glib statement on your part. Israel? I think you need to back-up and examine this. In terms of the politics of Middle East conflict, Israel has been successfully Finlandized by Russia, severely circumscribing its freedom of movement in matters military and diplomatic.The tenor of discussion within the Jewish State on this very topic is brisk and contentious. Israel is the ultimate democracy — the acme of public democratic input, sometimes to a fault. I know you are no friend of what I would call the Jewish National Project, and I don’t expect you to be. I’ve taken your measure on this subject long ago. But I do expect you to be better informed and for your critiques to demonstrate greater political acuity.Yes, Israel has been seriously compromised diplomatically re: Ukraine by the godfather role Russia plays in Levantine politics, but it has nothing to do with “ally” status. The Russian hand is inside Israel’s pants and clutching its balls.  There is no alliance.I am absolutely a friend of the Jewish National Project. My issue is with the way Israel treats the United States, and the completely lop-sided nature of that relationship. I think it’s deeply unhealthy for both parties. Another dissenter asks:Why do you keep accusing Israel of supporting the Russians? It was Obama who placed Russia on Israel’s border (the war in Syria) and Israel has to coordinate with Russia to prevent Iranian missiles. Stop your simplistic view.Yep, it was Obama who turned Aleppo into a graveyard and Biden who invaded Ukraine. Please. A much longer dissent on Israel:I believe your characterization of Israel grossly misrepresents the extremely difficult position it has been in since Russia invaded Ukraine. First, 43 countries did not vote in favor of calling on Russia to end the war in Ukraine, but Israel voted for the UNGA resolution demanding an end to the unconscionable violence. Query why you thought to include Israel on your list of Russian “allies” and not Armenia, Cuba, South Africa, Iran, North Korea or Vietnam — to name only a handful of the 43. Second, Israel has provided a significant amount of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, including setting up an Israeli-staffed field hospital in the Lviv region, sending over 100 tons of medical supplies, hospital generators, water purification systems, winter coats, sleeping bags and other items, assisting fleeing Israelis and Ukrainian Jews seeking to move to Israel, and taking in non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees who are not eligible or looking to immigrate to Israel. Thousands of Russian- and Ukrainian-Israelis have also come together in Tel Aviv and other major Israeli cities to protest the war. For a small country of approximately nine million citizens, Israel is punching far above its weight in aid and support provided to Ukraine. This level of humanitarian commitment is obviously not being provided by the other countries you listed as Russian “allies.” Israel is walking a thin tightrope between the two countries. Prime Minister Bennett is at the forefront of global efforts to end the fighting and serve as a mediator, while also in the unenviable position of having to protect large Jewish communities in each country and the interests of his own nation (keep in mind the need to avoid provoking Syrian-based Russian troops on Israel's northern border).I recognize that this is a lengthy response to just one sentence in your column, but I think it’s important. It’s a false moral equivalence to say that Israel is “hedging its bets” with Russia; rather, the more accurate framing is that Israel is doing its best to uphold its Jewish and democratic values as a “light unto the nations” while also taking into account its own interests — which it cannot be faulted for, given that we know what happens to Jews when they don’t have a country committed to protecting the Jewish people.Speaking of threats to the Jewish people, Sam Ramani last week addressed the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine:This next dissenter shifts gears:You are spot on with your latest column — except in this one regard: Russian imperial/nationalistic mysticism. With roots going back hundreds of years, Russian mysticism does NOT always rely on historical Mongolian roots for its exceptionalism. Rather the opposite: it locates exceptionalism where it can find it. You should look up the doctrine of the Third Rome — which dates, as I remember it, to something like the 14th or 15th Century.  Sure. I was talking specifically about Gumilev’s and Dugin’s weird alternative. Another reader looks to Christianism:Your take that the church in Russia is a “Christianist” tool is shared by many Western church leaders. This op-ed explains what’s happening in the non-Russian world of Orthodoxy in reaction to Kirill’s support of Putin and his ideology.Another continues a previous dissent thread:In response your reader comparing Trump to Churchill, you wrote:The second is that comparing Trump to Churchill is obscene. Maybe if Churchill had joined Hitler in the early 1930s to endorse occupying the Sudetenland, we’d have a parallel, or if he’d praised Nazi intelligence over MI5. But I think you ran right past one of the dissenter’s main points. The dissenter listed a number of policies and actions Trump took or advocated that were indisputably hostile to Russian interests: increased US energy production, attempts to export LNG to Europe, pushing for more NATO spending from other members, etc. It’s hard to think of an actual policy Trump enacted or advocated that served Russian interests. Many, including you, point to his statements in Helsinki, but we know years later that he was basically right that US intelligence got the entire Russia story dead-wrong (and that active and former intelligence officials got the Hunter Biden laptop story dead-wrong).Joe Biden, on the other hand, has made North American energy production more difficult, approved pipeline construction into Germany, said that the US would essentially tolerate a “minor incursion” into Ukraine, and taken other actions that the Russians surely could not believe their lucky stars would be taken by an American president. Yes, he’s gotten onboard with heavy sanctions, but recall that his approach was minimalist at first (recall, we needed to wait “around 30 days” to see if the initial sanctions were enough). And Biden only agreed to heavier sanctions after Western Europe began imposing them.So, it’s difficult to reconcile the actual public record with your retort to last week’s dissenter that Churchill could only be compared to Trump if Churchill had “joined Hitler . . . to endorse the Sudetenland.” The record seems, if anything, to point precisely in the opposite direction.My reader’s points about Russian policy under Trump are dead-on. It’s one reason I find the whole collusion narrative unpersuasive. But Churchill? One of the greatest statesmen in history equated with the worst president in history? Nah. And lastly, more on biolabs!The explanation for this is easy. I am somewhat familiar with the program, since a close friend was the scientific director of a similar US program in another relevant country. The idea really was to employ biologists and people with the relevant lab experience in the former Soviet Union — while also tracking pandemic threats to livestock. As this friend — an experienced veterinarian (and not a US national, indicating that this was not a secret program) — explained, “a single person with third-semester laboratory skills could do massive amounts of damage to US and Western agriculture.” For that reason, the labs were put into place from Ukraine across the Caucasus to Central Asia as an employment opportunity. And yes, there was a degree of hush-hush about it, because the idea was not to loudly advertise the threat one was worried about.But you don’t have to take my word for it — a respected media outfit with experienced people on the ground has broken down the story, here. I do think it is important to get the story about all of this out there, against the somewhat deranged claims. Happy to help get the word out. As we mentioned on the main Dish, because the main column was so long this week, packed with so many links, we ran out of space on that page — otherwise the emailed version of the Dish would be cut short in readers’ in-trays. So our weekly recommended reading “In the Stacks” and the next window contest is seen below. In The ‘Stacks* Is Putin, in fact, winning? Biden’s mouth has become a minefield.* For Dems in the New York Assembly, it’s pay equity for thee and not for me, and it’s probably a broader trend.* When it comes to “the race game,” Michael DC Bowen wants out. He calls for “personal deracination” — a kind of Benedict Option.* Major props to Filipovic for going to Notre Dame to “debate issues I don’t believe should be up for debate” — abortion — and for “doing the slow work of change.”* What’s worse than banning books? Snuffing them out before they hit the page. * Ever heard of Mercy Otis Warren? A Founding Mother of sorts.* After getting squeezed out of the NYT and going through the censorship of Russia Today in the East and YouTube in the West, Chris Hedges finds a safe haven in Substack. Welcome!The View From Your Window ContestWhere do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a three-month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!The results for last week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Thank you for subscribing. 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Samuel Ramani On Deciphering Russia

Ramani is a tutor in the Department of Political Science at Oxford and a member of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He’s been to Russia and Ukraine many times in the course of getting his DPhil — the Oxford equivalent of a PhD — in International Relations. He has studied Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria, and has two books in the works — one on Russia in Africa and another on the current war in Ukraine.At just 28, Ramani is a bit of a phenom. I wanted a deep dive on the subject of Putin’s Russia, and was not disappointed. I learned a huge amount, and I think you will too.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my convo with Sam — on how sanctions against Putin could actually help him, and on how serious the neo-Nazi presence is in Ukraine — head to our YouTube page.We also just transcribed another popular episode of the Dishcast — with Yossi Klein Halevi, who debated the history and nature of Zionism with me. Judea Pearl described it as “the best discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has ever been aired anywhere.” Here’s a bit of our convo:Meanwhile, a “long-time subscriber, first-time commenter” is really worried:I just read your piece on Putin and the populist Right. I’m an old chippy lefty, so there is no excuse for worshipping Putin, but those people don’t scare me. Right now what scares me the most is the drumbeat for War coming from all sides in the US — Tim Kaine, Tom Cotton, and many others saying we must win this war. The propaganda and War fever coming out of the US truly frightens me. It reminds me of the US after 9/11. It was a wave you could not withstand, Andrew, and it swept many good and reasonable people along with it — to utter catastrophe.What interests does the US have in intervening in a civil war between two corrupt oligarchs in Putin and Zelensky? Ukraine isn’t a democracy, and it’s one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Zelensky is a trained actor — of course he gives a great speech. Why risk nuclear war? Why entertain fantasies that if we don’t stop the Russians here, they'll soon by marching on the Rhine? I beseech you, please don’t fall for the War Party propaganda like in Iraq. This is still early days, this will not end well for us.    I have to say that the memory of 2003 is very much on my mind these days. And I’m a little unnerved that many others who fell, as I did, under the spell of passion and moral certainty at the time, seem to have no memory of that at all right now. They retain a constant ahistorical Munich mindset. Another reader provides a long comprehensive dissent over my piece:In your essay “Putin’s Challenge to the American Right,” I was a little mystified by your discussion of strength, weakness, and genius. If you’ll permit a brief digression to WW2, Hitler played his hand well during his rise to power in Germany. This is, of course, not an endorsement of the man: the world would have been far better off had Hitler died on a WW1 battlefield. But how many other people could have, at low political cost, achieved the rearmament of the German military, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the seizure of the Sudetenland?Now, let’s imagine that it is early 1938, and Churchill goes in for an interview and says:You know, this Hitler guy is playing us like a violin. The other day I was listening to a radio and heard him say that parts of Czechoslovakia are filled with Germans and should belong to Germany, but after that, he won’t desire any further territorial expansion. Oh, they’ll stop there all right! How brilliant is that? He’s going to gain a foothold in the country and bypass their border defenses, and we aren’t going to do a single thing about it. How wonderful. No, it’s very sad. Very sad. Let me tell you, he wouldn’t be able to get away with this if I was in charge.This is, of course, a paraphrasing of the Trump quote you began your article with (the lines “it’s very sad, very sad” and “He wouldn’t be able to get away with this if I was in charge” came a little later in the interview on the same subject). But it is also a quote that I could easily imagine Churchill giving at the time (with a richer vocabulary, of course), and Churchill would have been correct in his analysis. So, if Churchill would have been correct in giving this statement, why does it become problematic when Trump gives it? Your main criticism appear to be the lines about Russia “keeping peace” and about the situation being “wonderful.” But taken in context and with the audio, there doesn’t seem to be any way to interpret those lines other than as a criticism towards the Western leaders for letting Russia get away with this. After all, if Trump literally thought that this invasion was a “wonderful” development, why does he then drop this line: “[Putin] wouldn’t be able to do this if I was still in charge”? And keep in mind, Trump said this when it looked like Putin would only be invading the two breakaway regions, and from where I was sitting, it did look like there would be few sanctions against Russia for that. It wasn’t until two days later, when Russia invaded the rest of the Ukraine and made a bee-line for Kiev, that the West started imposing their hard sanctions. All-in-all, this seems like a very uncharitable interpretation of Trump’s statement on your part.Moving away from Trump specifically, you then attempted to make hay from the finding that 62% of Republicans think that Putin is a stronger leader than Biden. But does believing that Biden is a weak leader make someone any less patriotic than a Brit who thought that Chamberlin was being made a fool by Hitler in Munich? And keep in mind that the same poll found that 42% of independents thought Putin was the stronger leader, with only 15% thinking that Biden was the stronger leader (question 18). Even into March, most independents still thought Biden was a weak leader (question 70). Are those plurality/majority of independents who thought Putin was the stronger leader also in the sway of the far right? You then go on to imply that the 62% figure means that those Republicans must approve of or admire Putin. But that same February poll found that 80% of Republicans (and 80% of independents) disapprove of this invasion by Putin, with only 6% agreeing with the invasion (4% of Democrats agreed with the invasion) (question 15) and 73% of Republicans had a unfavorable view of Putin (question 13). So, according to the polling data, thinking that Putin is a strong leader is not a synonym for admiring Putin.Now, the quotes you bring up from Bannon, Cawthorn, and Zemmour are more troubling. Had you just used their quotes to make your point, I probably wouldn’t be writing this dissent. But when surrounded by all the other more problematic analysis, I find it difficult to take your concern seriously.And this raises the question: Is Putin a smart and strong leader compared to our leaders? Matthew Schmidt appears to have thought so back in 2017 when he wrote that article you linked. Half of its focus was on Russia’s clever use of maskirovka — military deception — in Ukraine and its accomplishments in Syria, and how Western leaders had yet to figure out the correct response to those strategies. Had Schmidt’s vocabulary been greatly simplified, he would have sounded downright Trumpian.Now, you could respond to these points by saying, “But look at the current mess in Ukraine. Putin is facing an unwinnable war, crippling sanctions, and a united West. Clearly he wasn’t that smart after all.” And this appears to be the main point of the second half of your article.This brings us back to the WW2 analogy. By 1941, the Germans had won the war. The British had been expelled from the continent, the French had been vassalized, and the Balkans had been subjugated. And with the communist threat rising to the East, the Germans would have had a good chance of convincing the British to end the hostilities to help fight the Soviets had they just waited long enough. But instead, the Germans decided to immediately invade Russia, and then later decided to also declare war on the United States. These two moves sealed Germany’s fate and eventually led to the liberation of the western half of Europe. So, what happened? The Germans had fought brilliantly up to 1941, and then they made some of the most idiotic decisions of the 20th century. Did they suddenly become complete morons in the space of six months? Or did these two decisions prove that Hitler and his generals had been idiots all along? Neither answer is really satisfactory. The best guess is that their early victories were indeed clever. But they let their success go to their heads, and in their arrogance, they lost their judgement. Had they kept their head about them and not started making rash decisions, who knows what the world would look like today. (Then again, if they were capable of not making rash decisions, maybe they wouldn’t have been Nazis in the first place.)The same dynamic plays out today with Putin’s Russia. Putin has been playing smart for a long time. There is the maskirovka in Ukraine that Schmidt discussed: Russia was able to gain influence in the Middle East through Syria on the cheap, sold missile defense to Turkey, seized parts of Georgia for no real cost, seized the Crimea for only a small cost, built a decent relationship with President Xi, allowed the hacking of US pipeline infrastructure, have influenced elections throughout the West, donated heavily to Western environmental movements to keep oil prices high and prevent the growth of nuclear power, and had used cheap natural gas to buy silence from the Germans. Had Putin only annexed the disputed portions of Ukraine, the pushback would have likely been similarly minimal. And the fact that Putin got overconfident and (very) dumb with his last push in Ukraine doesn’t mean that we should ignore all his cleverness up until now. Likewise, the fact that the West has finally grown a backbone in the face of a total invasion of another European nation doesn’t negate the fact that their response up until this point had been fairly anemic.You quote David Frum as saying: “Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid.” But the point was never that Russia was stronger than the West, for liberal democracies are always stronger than kleptocracies in the long run. The point was that Western leaders were choosing to not use our strength to confront Russia’s weakness, thereby making us appear weak and inviting further aggression. Sure, dictators will always eventually push too far and invite a fierce blowback (Germany after the Lusitania, Japan after Pearl Harbor, Hitler after Barbarossa, Afghanistan after the Twin Towers), but that is hardly an argument for letting our enemies grow big enough to deserve the blowback. Imagine how many lives could have been saved had we maintained a more active military presence in the Pacific before Japan had managed to capture half of the ocean. Just because totalitarian regimes always stumble in the end doesn’t mean that we should meekly hide in the corner until they do so. Waiting always lets them grow stronger, making their downfall all the more bloody for both sides. And besides, what happens if they forget to stumble?Wow, that was a long response. Hopefully these dissents aren’t word capped. Like I said, I usually enjoy your writing, so keep up the good work.P.S. I didn’t know where to fit this in the main body, but I have absolutely no idea where ground truth is about the “bioweapons” propaganda. However, given Under Secretary of State Nuland’s bizarre testimony/admission and how many times Americans have been lied to over the past two decades by neocons like Nuland and your neocon friend Frum, Americans deserves a better explanation than the one that the Biden administration has provided thus far.P.P.S. OK, one more thing about political strength and weakness. You made some claims that A) Trump brings up “strength” as a dodge, and that B) Biden has proven himself to be strong against Russia. And while I agree that Biden has done decent for himself during this crisis (though we can’t give him too much credit — the Europeans have mostly taken the lead on this one), doesn’t Trump come out on top when we compare his Russia policy to Biden’s? After all, Trump withdrew from the INF treaty, built up good relations with Saudi Arabia, incentivized US energy production, sought to increase LNG exports to Europe, approved sanctions on the Nordstream pipeline, pushed for more military spending in NATO countries, gave lethal weapons to Ukraine, and authorized the killing of Russian combatants in Syria. Compare that to the actions that Biden has taken, such as blocking the sale of oil and gas leases on federal land, ending sanctions for Nordstream, killing the Israeli/Greek oil pipeline to Europe, alienating the Saudis so that they now refuse to help us lower oil prices, letting the Russians run the nuclear negotiations with Iran, cozying up with Putin’s ally Venezuela, and running a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that humiliated the US on the world stage. Trump’s actions made Russia weaker and the US stronger, while Biden’s made Russia stronger and the US weaker. And waving that all away as “just bluster” from Trump and “well Biden is at least doing well now” does a grave disservice to this conversation. Even if Russia ends up imploding on their own.I address many of these points in my post today. I’ll offer two observations here. The first is that if every international crisis is always 1936, then we’re always going to be going to war, or provoking one. This is brain-dead. The second is that comparing Trump to Churchill is obscene. Maybe if Churchill had joined Hitler in the early 1930s to endorse occupying the Sudetenland, we’d have a parallel, or if he’d praised Nazi intelligence over MI5. And maybe if Putin’s military were able to occupy Kyiv, and he didn’t have nukes, he could be compared with the the war machine that swept through Europe in a few months in 1939 - 1940.Another reader looks back at my earlier piece, “Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?”Long time, first time (though Chris knows me from VFYW). I very much admire your writing, and you’ve made me rethink many of my positions over the years, but — you knew it was coming — I think you’ve gotten it somewhat wrong on Ukraine. Your latest posts and interviews have all pointed to a common theme: NATO should have known not to poke the Russian bear by expanding into Eastern Europe. You even quote Churchill to prove your point, citing his famous “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” statement about Russia — who could disagree with that?But let’s examine the context of his speech. It was given on October 1, 1939, a month into World War II and a fortnight after the Soviet Union had launched an unprovoked invasion of Poland. As Churchill notes earlier in that same speech: “First Poland has been again overrun by two of the great Powers which held it in bondage for the last 150 years, but were unable to conquer the spirit of the Polish nation.” Over the next year, the Soviets would invade the Baltic states and Finland, all of which (like Poland) had been independent since the end of World War I.  This context shows an inconvenient truth: Russia may have a history of foreign invasions, but it also has a history of launching its own invasions. Russia isn’t simply some long-aggrieved actor finally lashing out when pushed too far. The history of its empire is one of conquest, often ruthless, against smaller peoples on their borders, groups who often posed no “security threat” to their government or people.  Shouldn’t we take that into account, too, in any assessment of Russian “national identity”? Is Putin really concerned about his security now, or is that just a convenient pretext to allow him to join a long list of Russian conquerors? It could certainly be a bit of both, but that underscores the need for nuance over simplicity in assigning blame in the current crisis.I further find it problematic to dismiss the will of the Ukrainian people in all of this — or the will of the peoples of the Baltic republics, for that matter. We act as if NATO forced these countries to join, when in fact strong majorities in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia supported both NATO and EU membership in the early 2000s when they joined. Can one blame them given the history of Russian aggression towards them?  Moreover, a major cause of both the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan protests was the popular anger at Ukrainian politicians' subservience to Russia. And recent opinion polling in Ukraine has shown strong majorities in favor of NATO membership, majorities that emerged only after Putin annexed Crimea and began backing the insurgency in the Donbas region. I mean, I get it.  Just because these countries wanted to join NATO didn’t mean NATO was obliged to take them. And the Ukrainian government perhaps could have played up its commitment to neutrality more convincingly. But even if we acknowledge (as we should) the West’s partial culpability, it seems that this war is, on balance, Putin's doing.To me, it comes down to this: the idea that these smaller states are mere playthings in the hands of the Great Powers without any say of their own is deeply troubling.  Maybe 'twas ever thus, but the idea that we are consigned to that in perpetuity seems to remove the basic element of human agency and undermines the hope of popular sovereignty.  Hell, if even the Swiss can get on board against Putin now, maybe it shows NATO was right about the threat he posed all along.Maybe it’s worth repeating that faulting the West for mistakes in the past in no way justifies Putin’s war, which is 100 percent his responsibility. And, as I insisted, it is important that he lose, and be seen to lose. I pray he does. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Maia Szalavitz On Drugs And Harm Reduction

Maia is the author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, and her latest book, Undoing Drugs, which we cover in this episode. Much of her reporting and research on harm reduction is informed by her own history of drug addiction, including heroin, which we discuss in detail. She makes a strong case.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of our convo — on how much to blame Big Pharma for opioid addiction, and to what extent harm reduction enables addicts — pop over to our YouTube page.The episode with Maia Szalavitz is a good complement to our popular episode with Michael Shellenberger, which we just transcribed — read the whole conversation here. From one reader who enjoyed it:Thank you for your continued attention to the issues of drug addiction and homelessness. These problems receive far too little reality-based coverage. The podcast with Shellenberger was excellent and I hope his message gains traction.You asked why homeless men so often attack elderly Asian women, and Shellenberger said it was because they carry a lot of cash. That may be the motive of burglars, but does not explain the behavior of homeless men who attack passersby without stealing anything. Instead, I think there is a simpler explanation: These men target those who are unlikely to be able to fight back. And that means most victims are women and/or the elderly.In many cities, homeless men have been allowed to dominate public spaces: sidewalks, parks, public transportation, and libraries. This makes these places unwelcoming and unsafe for the elderly, women, and children. If progressives want cities to be family friendly, they need to address this problem.I think you and Shellenberger were too circumspect in describing the violent behavior of these men. He stated explicitly that he left out details because they were too horrible. I don’t think these details are distracting. I think they are clarifying. It is better to be matter of fact about exactly what is happening. Euphemistic discussion obscures the severity of these men’s sickness and the full toll their actions take on the community.So let’s not pussyfoot around. For example, we can look at your hometown of DC. In December, a woman walking home from the gym with her 5-year-old daughter was attacked by a schizophrenic man. Her teeth were knocked out. A few weeks later, a homeless man in Capitol Hill threw a brick at an 11-month-old girl in a stroller, fracturing her eye socket and requiring 19 stitches. In 2019, a man with a history of homelessness and mental illness stabbed a 27-year-old woman to death while she was walking her dog. The previous year, a homeless man stabbed a 35-year-old woman to death while she was out for an evening jog.Similar violent attacks are taking place in cities across the country. Below is just another small sampling. (I am making a particular effort not to use any sensationalist or dehumanizing language — that’s the most productive approach, in my opinion.) In New York City:* A panhandler on the subway repeatedly punched in the face a 2-year-old child sleeping in his mother’s arms. The boy is likely to suffer seizures as a result.* A homeless man used a belt to beat a 21-year-old woman taking a morning break outside the bagel shop where she works.* A 56-year-old woman walking to the store was punched in the face and then stabbed in the back with a broken bottle by a homeless man. The victim required stitches.In San Francisco:* A homeless man repeatedly stabbed a 94-year-old woman out for a morning walk. The victim required surgery and was no longer able to live independently following the attack. The attacker was wearing an ankle monitor as a consequence of recent burglary charges.* A 94-year-old man walking his dog was attacked by a homeless man with a stick. The victim fell and died from head injuries.In Chicago:* A homeless man punched a 66-year-old woman at a train station, causing her to fall into the tracks. The victim suffered a broken eye socket, a concussion, and a dislocated wrist. This attack took place just one day after the same man was released for punching a 60-year-old woman in the face. The victim in that incident fell, hit her head, and was knocked unconscious.* A 31-year-old woman was stabbed to death by a homeless man while walking in the Loop neighborhood. The same man had recently attacked a 50-year-old woman and a 25-year-old woman. The first victim had a broken nose and required stitches on her head, and the second victim’s head injuries were so severe that first responders thought she had been shot.You were right to point out that homeless men and their family and friends are the grievous victims of addiction and untreated mental illness. However, we should also prioritize the victims of these attacks and their families, some of whom face lifelong consequences from their wounds. Other residents who no longer feel safe in their neighborhoods are also important victims.Thank you again for shining a light on this. You’ve now covered the topic from a variety of angles, and I think the only thing missing is hearing from a clinician or researcher who can speak to the potential for treatment and recovery. Try our latest pod with Maia! If anyone else has a recommendation along those lines, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Another reader provides a “quick update from Seattle regarding a shift in the voting public’s priorities”:Our new mayor, Bruce Harrell, is a pro-police, anti-crime Democrat who defeated his leftist rival by historic margins. Even more surprising to me is the city attorney race, where a Republican, Ann Davison, defeated the pro-police abolition candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. It should send a pretty clear message about the growing backlash when any Republican can win a political race in Seattle.Another reader turns to Austin:I enjoyed listening to your conversation with Shellenberger — both for the discussion of his new book and his views on nuclear energy. You could have added Austin to the conversation, as we were heading in the same direction as San Francisco and Seattle … but the people of Austin spoke last spring and approved a referendum reinstating a ban on public camping which had previously been eliminated by our city council. While enforcement of the ban has been half-hearted at best, it’s nonetheless progress. The argument by our progressives and the homeless industrial complex has been the same as on the West Coast: the problem is lack of housing. And the solution is to build free housing on the most expensive ground in Texas … or California … or Washington. And, of course, you cannot expect homeless people who have suffered trauma to live in a communal shelter (even though large numbers live unsheltered in sweltering or freezing weather in what are effectively communal encampments). In the meantime, one Austin leader, Allan Graham, is quietly demonstrating a solution. Community First Village, a planned community on the outskirts of the city, currently houses 200 formerly homeless people in tiny homes and RVs. It’s about to double in size. His book Welcome Homeless is an interesting read, and I’m sure you’d find a conversation with him fascinating.Here’s Shellenberger on why San Francisco hasn’t built more shelters in the face of soaring homelessness:Lastly, a reader zooms out to national politics:Thank you for a great interview with Shellenberger. The segments on policing and homelessness, in particular, served to illustrate in stark terms the emerging problem with the Democratic Party (full disclosure: I am to the right of Attila the Hun and generally vote Republican): the Dems are increasingly becoming a party that caters only to the wealthy, educated, coastal elite. That cohort is almost completely shielded from the consequences of the policies it advocates for. It is easy to call for the abolition of the police when you live in a gated community; for lockdowns when you can work remotely and lose no income; and for a massive influx of low-skilled immigrants when they won’t attend your children’s private schools or threaten the wages of your executive job. The harmful consequences are always borne by others, most often among the Party’s most loyal demographic groups.If the Party continued to care primarily about its traditional hard-hat-and-lunchpail base, many people like me could vote for its candidate in national elections when the Republican opponent is a grossly unfit madman (as in the last two elections) or an ideologically blinded warmongering buffoon (as in 2000 and 2004). Far more importantly than the relatively small number who feel as I do, though, the Party seems to be going out of its way to drive away Latinos — who have always been more at home with the Democrats — by ignoring their legitimate concerns on issues related to education and immigration (as we recently saw in Virginia). I expect this to continue until Democrats remember who they always used to fight for.The latest polling on the Latino vote and the Republicans is pretty remarkable, I have to say: By 9 percentage points, Hispanic voters in the new poll said they would back a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat. The two parties had been tied among Hispanic voters in the Journal’s survey in November.Uh-oh. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Jim Holt On Philosophy, Humor, Hitchens

Jim is the author of Why Does the World Exist?, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, and his latest, When Einstein Walked with Gödel. Andrew tees up the episode:I’ve known Jim forever, and he’s rather hard to introduce, but he’s one of the liveliest and rudest conversationalists I’ve ever known, so I thought he’d be a great podcast guest. It’s a bit of a break from the deadly seriousness of the past few weeks. Jim goes at me over “The Bell Curve,” performs a rant desanctifying Hitchens, and discusses quantum mechanics and its current travails. A bit philosophical at first, the whole chat was a trip. You can listen to it right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of Andrew and Jim’s convo — reflecting on their early days of being gay in the big city, and how their mutual friend Hitch got some big things wrong — pop over to our YouTube page.A decade ago on the Dish blog, Jim joined our Ask Anything series — and since then, the following clip has racked up nearly 50,000 views:Keeping things in the philosophical realm, a reader just got around to listening to our episode with Steven Pinker on rationality:I’m a 40-year-old German living in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro, and I have been a great admirer of Andrew for the last five years. I do not always agree with him, but by and large I find that he’s able to put into words what I can only feel abstractly. I especially enjoyed his conversation with Steven Pinker and his defense of rationality. Pinker is a wonderful thinker and responds to most of Andrew’s questions with not one, but three or four well-argued points. Quite amazing.However, I found that Andrew could have pushed Pinker harder on some points that I think he would not entirely agree with, especially the two moments when Pinker talked about the tension between “truth” (in a dry, empirical sense) and “tact,” which I found rather unconvincing. This is exactly where a purely “rational” worldview hits a wall. I’m reminded of a 2004 debate between philosopher Jürgen Habermas and future pope Joseph Ratzinger, in which they pretty much agreed that the liberal-democratic order is built upon a fundament of values that antedate it: the traditional Judeo-Christian values of love, compassion, solidarity, and the fundamental dignity of every person. These values, in my opinion, cannot be truly acquired by just being “rational.”Here’s Pinker on what he thinks is the most damaging delusion among Americans today — “the Myside Bias”:Another reader delves into natural law — and sodomy:I am Catholic-raised university student, currently struggling to understand the physiological, psychological, social, and religious aspects of outercourse (oral and anal sex). Some studies in the past two decades have found a correlation between oral sex and fewer complications during pregnancy and fewer miscarriages. The authors suggest immunological factors at play. The probability of an embryo implanting in the uterus is largely determined by immune-compatibility. Thus, by oral ingestion of paternal antigens in seminal fluid, gradual tolerance might be achieved in the mother. Similarly, since rectal absorption is also possible, anal sex might be relevant too in this regard.If this were indeed true, this might undermine the Church’s stance on sodomy — that it can’t be derived from the natural law and has no teleology. This would mean that these acts serve to prepare a woman’s body to successfully carry the child of their long-term partner. Now given the high rate of miscarriages (estimated to be 50% of pregnancies), this would reduce the large number of spontaneous abortions that arise naturally in traditional, procreative marriages.This fact would theologically not necessarily reconcile homosexuality and Catholic doctrine. However, it would shed new light on the issue of sexuality and the Church. It might open up discourse about the theology of homosexuality as well. It would be an existential blow to the Magisterium, because this correlation between oral sex and miscarriages could not have been discovered before the 20th century, where pregnancy tests were available. So it would largely be a fruit of science.If you missed our announcement on the main Dish this week, here’s the first full transcript of the Dishcast — Andrew’s long conversation with John Mearsheimer. We will be doing a lot more of those soon. Below is a new clip from the popular episode (our third-most downloaded thus far) on how Russia and the West have been playing by two different playbooks over the past few decades, leading to the current crisis:On the Dish’s continued coverage of the war in Ukraine, a reader writes:I read Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on NATO expansion after the fall of the USSR, and I now read Andrew’s piece that references Friedman’s work. It was more educational to read Andrew’s broader view, but I came away from both with one big thought — namely, I don’t believe that any of the Eastern European countries that joined NATO were forced to do so. Could it be that decades of domination by the Soviets gave them experiential reason to seek the protection of NATO, as opposed to there being some kind of naked expansion by NATO, as Friedman suggests? And isn’t it equally plausible that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is proof of their reason for fear, as opposed to a reaction by Russia to NATO expansion?Another reader responds to a tweet from Andrew linking to Mearsheimer’s new interview with Isaac Chotiner:My former teacher, Mearsheimer, is wrong. The evidence is overwhelming that Putin’s foreign policy got hyper-aggressive after the Arab Spring in 2011, not after the NATO conference in 2008. As you might recall, Putin responded to Obama’s “abandonment” of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 by doubling down his support of the minority Alawite regime in Syria — and the rest in history: the flattening of Allepo; the Garisimov doctrine that codified electoral interference in Italy, France, the UK, and the US; interference in Ukraine’s 2014 Maiden revolution; and overturning an election loss of an ally in Belarus in 2020.Very few of these acts of political warfare had anything to do with what NATO did in 2008. They had everything to do with a Bonapartist whose military, political, and business elites helped execute a blueprint of expanded warfare that enabled a second-rate economic power to punch well above its weight in the pursuit of its imperial and superpower nostalgia. Professor Mearsheimer’s reductionist theories of Great Power politics do not fit the facts of Vladimir Putin’s Napoleonic ambition that were not properly deterred.While the war is going relatively well for Ukraine so far, this next reader is paradoxically worried that the early success will breed disaster: The sanctions appear to be just, but the mood right now is one of moral euphoria, which scares me. The idea of a no-fly zone — which is basically war with Russia — has become more mainstream at an alarming pace. I see intelligent friends who have never had an iota of interest in international relations or Eastern Europe posting extremely strong opinions based on their seven days of reading news reports about Ukraine. It feels like the mood after George Floyd’s shooting or during Covid — the sense that people are so desperate for meaning that they will latch on to any large, socially deep (or seemingly socially deep) morally charged cause. (You have made the Weimar comparison before, and it continues to seem apt.) That this particular cause is mostly righteous makes the fervor more alarming, not less. It is genuinely a mob mentality, with people seemingly savoring the impoverishment of Russia’s people or the killing of its troops with the moral frisson of a witch-burning.The most alarming possibility, to me, is that the war will escalate in brutality, and thus Americans — and Westerners more generally — will not be able to sit by and let it happen. Large-scale Russian war crimes, Western outrage and horror, the euphemistic fallacy that an no-fly zone is something short of war …. that is how this situation would continue to escalate, and it has already done so remarkably quickly.The last few populist, moralist moments — BLM, Covid — were checked by the fact that half the country was against them. If we take a more aggressive turn in Russia, I doubt as many as half of Americans would oppose it, and by the time we realized a more aggressive policy was a disaster, catastrophic damage might have already occurred. Should the US offer assurances that Ukraine will not join NATO? Has that ship already sailed? Is there an off-ramp strategically? Or is Putin such a peculiar sort of menace, and his breach of the post-WW2 order sufficiently egregious, that we should celebrate the moral fervor, lean into the extremely punitive sanctions and “lethal aid,” but hope our elite will keep us out of a war? It seems we need a credible voice that can see the moral nuance in these issues, firmly insist that Putin is still in the wrong, yet temper the American mob. I don’t know who that voice would be.But I agree with your observation on Twitter that Mearsheimer’s voice — most recently expressed to Isaac Chotiner — offers “clarity.” His insistence on describing what IS in great-power politics, rather than what OUGHT to be, is immensely refreshing. I also enjoyed reading the essay by Jack Matlock, former US Ambassador to the USSR, which continued to help me understand why Putin sees NATO expansion — and NATO militarism in general — as an existential threat.At the same time, I genuinely believe Russia is breaking an extraordinary norm that we have maintained for 80 year, that countries do not conduct land grabs. For all the US’s mistakes, no NATO country has attempted to permanently annex the territory of an occupied country, as Russia did with Crimea. Ukraine and Iraq seem to more similar than the American hawks would admit, but more dissimilar than the biggest detractors of the hawks (Glenn Greenwald being the most persuasive) would admit. This next reader, a native-born Ukrainian, believes the war could have been prevented if the West had been serious about protecting and arming Ukraine:Thank you for covering this topic over the last few weeks. You and your guests — Mearsheimer, Applebaum, Luttwak — have approached this terrible crisis from various angles, which was very interesting to hear. This topic is close to my heart. I was born in Donetsk, Ukraine but haven’t been there since the coup in 2014. My friends from back home fight on both sides of the barricade — which is truly heartbreaking. I appreciate that I may sound like an armchair general here, and I cannot claim to know more about this conflict than some of your speakers. But I want to expand on an observation that you briefly touched on in your latest column.Specifically, it really frustrates me that across most of Western media, the narrative is all about Putin’s war crimes and no real coverage or debate of the fact that the “Western alliance” hugely overpromised and massively underdelivered for the Ukrainian people. It was in 2008 that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO was first discussed and made public. We are in 2022 now. 14 years! NATO had 14 years to integrate Ukraine into the alliance, if it was serious. It did not. It wasn’t for the lack of enthusiasm from Ukraine, I can tell you that. I can only conclude that it wasn’t a serious commitment to begin with. This dishonest and — as we can now see — harmful act is truly unforgivable. A lie.Just over the past few weeks, the US and Britain publicly doubled down on their commitment to protecting Ukraine and made as much clear in their response to Putin’s written demands. And? What did Ukraine get, other than being in Biden’s prayers when the invasion happened? A couple of anti-tank missiles? In contrast, the US left $80 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan.American intelligence knew that this invasion was coming way ahead of time. Why not proactively protect Ukraine? Send a couple of warships to Odessa’s ports ahead of the invasion. Send a couple of NATO battalions to Lviv and Kiev. That could have been enough to deter Putin. Enough to change the calculus. It would have shown real intent.Another reader worries not about Biden’s age, but Putin’s:Putin is a Cold War revanchist. His life-force is bent on overturning the verdict of 1989. He’s patient, but he’s getting old, and it’s all moving too slowly — grabbing bits of Georgia, grabbing Crimea — and he hears time at his heels. A free and easy Ukraine is the biggest thorn in the bear’s paw.Putin’s worldview is rooted in the Soviet Union’s collapse as the great calamity of modern times. He is from the class of Soviet military and espionage leaders who saw the world going their way (they owned us in espionage) and who believed the USSR would win a nuclear war — simply by surviving it when America didn’t.And now here’s Putin, an old uncertain man, but Russia’s savior, suddenly staring down Afghanistan II, looking at 1989 over again, losing to the same America — the recurrence of his nightmare. At which point he becomes the dead-hand switch of the Soviets.Cheery. This next reader is less apocalyptic, ending his note with “Know hope”:It seems clear that Putin is delusional. Attempting to manage an immiserated Ukraine over the next several years and the blowback from the West in reaction to his invasion will not end well for him and Russia. Modern warfare has a really, really bad impact on modern societies — a fact we have been learning and relearning for more than a century. You have wondered whether the invasion of Ukraine will affect China’s designs on Taiwan. Yet, I suspect this overreach is the beginning of the end for Putin. It may take a while, but the world is watching — much more closely than was ever before possible. China will not be encouraged by the devastation that Putin is bringing to Ukraine. Neither will the Russian people, who will also suffer.Lastly, a reader reminds us of other suffering in the region:While I feel for the people of Ukraine, last year Turkey and Azerbaijan launched an unprovoked war against Armenians living in their ancestral homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh, where war crimes and atrocities were committed. In many ways, it was a continuation of the Armenian Genocide. Time and again, we have failed to learn from history.Strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan all share a disrespect for the rule of law. Had the world done more for Armenians and not stayed silent last year (or for that matter during the Armenian Genocide in 1915), then maybe that would have sent a stronger message to autocrats like Putin who feel that they can get away with anything and prevent the situation the world finds itself in. What’s happening to Ukrainians is very similar to what’s happening to Armenians. These are not mutually exclusive events.But for some reason, there’s more attention being paid to Ukraine than what was given to Armenians. Is a Ukrainian life more valuable than an Armenian one?   Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Edward Luttwak On Putin, China, Brexit

I first came across Ed Luttwak when I edited him at The New Republic in its glory days. He is a military strategist, historian, and consultant in the “grand strategy” school of geopolitics who has advised many world leaders — and is basically sui generis. He’s the author of almost two dozen books, including Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook and, most recently, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy. He’s a trip — and his personality and brilliance come through in this chat. We discussed Russia’s reassertion after the Cold War, the rise of China as a superpower, and the impact of Brexit. You always learn something from Luttwak, and from this conversation, I learned a lot about Xi Jinping, a dictator unlike anyone in China since Mao, and internationally far stronger. Did you know Xi is obsessed with Goethe?You can listen to the whole episode in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. Ed and I recorded the convo a few weeks ago, so the situation in Ukraine has changed dramatically since then, and he thought Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine. The reason he gave is simply Putin’s lack of sufficient manpower to hold down a country as vast as Ukraine. We’ll see if that is borne out in due course.The next Russia expert we have scheduled for the Dishcast is Fiona Hill, a former official at the National Security Council, so stay tuned. We’re doing our best to give you the broadest variety of perspectives to understand where we are. My job, as I see it, is not to win an argument, as if I were a fellow guest, but to push and goad and coax my guests to make the best case they can. On that note, many listeners have responded to last week’s episode with Anne Applebaum — which included spirited exchanges like this one:A listener writes:Thanks for this edition of the Dishcast. I know that Applebaum is truly an expert in Russian and Eastern European history, so I was excited to listen to her develop her arguments in long-form. I expected you to “push back,” and it’s important that you do — but only after listening to your guests develop their position, rather than pick at something in every sentence they utter. I understand your passion — it’s what makes your podcast compelling — but a bit more discipline, please.All I can say is that, from my perspective, Anne dominated the conversation, which was fine. But it’s all highly subjective! Another listener was also a bit critical of the back-and-forth:Holy camoly, that conversation with Anne Applebaum was rough! It became so contentious that eventually I lost track of the broader points you two were disagreeing about. I’ve coined the phrase “micro-corrections” to describe what Anne was doing. It is hard to have a productive conversation with someone who’s that fussy and pedantic. It seems like you two are old friends, however, so that’s good.See what I mean? This next listener praises Anne and chides me:Anne Applebaum, David Frum, and Timothy Snyder are some of the only voices I listen to these days for a good dose of intelligence, experience, and sanity — and in Anne and Tim’s case, firsthand knowledge of eastern European and Russian history and politics. It was fairly maddening that you didn’t seem to really grasp what Anne was trying to say about Putin’s motives. You couldn’t seem to separate national pride/patriotism — i.e., the story a country tells about itself — from the paranoid self-interest of a tyrannical leader, who on some level knows what would happen to him if the Russian people really did revolt and usher in a form of democracy. This seems as plain as the nose on your face and mine, but you kept referring to the Kremlin’s propaganda about NATO and indulging in some really counterproductive whataboutism that seems beneath you. It’s clear that you need to spend more time grappling with Anne’s knowledge and perspective, since the romance of realpolitik that John Mearsheimer offers, and which you seem to admire, doesn’t take into account the practical motives of dictators today and how they are enabled and financed by each other (something Anne briefly touched on and wrote extensively about in her “Autocracy, Inc.” article). Nevertheless, I appreciate that you had her on the podcast, so at least you’re trying. And speaking of Timothy Snyder, here’s one of his latest newsletters about thinking through the “simple solution” of giving Putin what he wants and why it’s not actually that simple. I found it immensely helpful.One of the things I’ve learned over three decades of getting things right and wrong on foreign policy is that the neconservative/liberal internationalist rubric of autocracy vs democracy can profoundly blind you to reality in the minds and souls of the people you are dealing with. The writers you follow seem to me to remain, at heart, unreconstructed neocons and liberal internationalists. I’m in recovery from those delusions. That doesn’t mean they do not have a point. But it’s a point that in recent years led to disaster. We will add Timothy Snyder to the list of Substacks we follow, thanks for the recommendation. Though to my mind, he’s not exactly a font of wisdom. This next listener is critical of Anne’s position:I like her writing, but listening to her made me think of the hubris that can accompany expertise. She flippantly dismissed all of your hypotheticals that tried to inhabit a Russian point of view. I believe she said at one point “NATO isn’t the Nazis” — indeed not, but the point of the comparison was not “NATO = Nazis”; it was to imagine someone who could be viewed as an aggressor on your doorstep. She had no response to your comparisons to the US’s stated dominion in the Western hemisphere and how Russia might feel similarly.Perhaps worst, she refused to concede that there can be such a thing as a national character or national mood (even if it’s not set in stone), but she was completely ready to ascribe all Russian actions entirely to Putin’s psychology. That seems a strange error, as if a national mood (including hostility to the West) can’t both shape Putin’s interests, and that getting some sort of buy-in from the Russian people is certainly going to help him. Not that he needs it, but if it’s there and he can exploit it, it matters.Overall, Applebaum seemed to insist that any view of NATO that wasn’t precisely the West’s view of NATO was somehow illegitimate.It seems relevant to me also that Anne’s view is Poland’s, which is where she lives and where her husband was once a government minister and is now a European MEP. I think her refusal to concede even a millimeter on the question of Russia’s influence in Europe must surely come from this perspective — understandably! — but the rigidity of her position, and its absolute moral certainty, is something I’m not going to repeat in my own life. Continuing the theme of psychology, another listener points to “what appears to be an inconsistency in your expression of the realist position you’ve recently adopted”:Realism in international relations (as Mearsheimer explained in your previous podcast, which was a great listen) argues that states act not according to abstract ideologies (democracy, communism, etc.) but according to hard, unemotional, calculations of national interest viewed in terms of power and security. But what struck me in your objections to Applebaum was how often, instead of talking about Russia’s national interest, you spoke of its “psychology,” “feelings of national humiliation,” and so forth. Now feelings of national humiliation in post-Soviet Russia may or may not be influencing Putin’s policies, but if they are, then he is not acting as a Realist, because feelings and real self-interest are not the same thing, and there would be no reason to lend any more validity to Russia’s (or rather Putin’s) feelings about Ukraine than to Western liberal “feelings" about the integrity of sovereign states (let alone Ukrainian feelings about being invaded). You can be a Realist, or you can be sensitive to Russia’s putative feelings, but I really don’t see how you have be both at the same time. Another listener makes that point more concisely:Mearsheimer even said, “Realism doesn’t care about individuals when it tries to understand a situation.” It’s therefore impossible for realism to understand Putin’s mission and therewith Russia’s — as Applebaum explains it, compellingly. Instead you consistently refer to a “Russian psyche” — ghosts and spirits instead of flesh and blood individuals. How “realist” is that?I see realism as one vital way to understand international relations, but other factors are also always involved. I’m not a pure realist because I think it’s too reductionist to explain everything, but insightful enough to explain a lot. “I don’t think this is about the Russian psyche at all,” according to this listener:If Russia were a well-functioning democracy, we wouldn’t be faced with the crisis in Ukraine. To think that the US and its allies can restructure European security by making concessions to a Russia led by Putin, or someone like Putin, assumes good faith on the part of those in the Kremlin. Why would we expect good faith in the future from a state whose past includes the use of radioactive materials and of nerve-agents on UK soil, the use of gangsters to assassinate opponents in Berlin, the murder of its opponents at home, and the invasion of — and theft of territory from — its neighbours?Such a regime will simply bank any gains and then watch for the next moment of what it imagines — quite possibly correctly — to be weakness in its opponents. The more concessions we make, the worse our position will become with each succeeding crisis.Then we better be clear what our red lines rally are. Here’s a reminder of what Anne thinks the US approach should be to Russia’s aggression toward — and now invasion of — Ukraine:Next, a listener who “appreciates your podcast, especially when I disagree”:George Kennan opposed NATO expansion, but back then, Eastern Europe was isolated from Western European economies. The European Community has since expanded its economy into the east: banks, high tech, pharma, agricultural companies, infrastructure — big investments in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Baltic states, etc. This was not the case in Kennan’s time.NATO is the defense umbrella for North America and Europe and Ukraine is not part of NATO. It is threatened with destruction and occupation, something unheard of in recent times. People should be able to determine their own future. Don’t you agree?Sure. If you want a nuclear conflict with Russia, go ahead. Yet another listener writes:First, thanks for getting the Applebaum interview out early. Apropos to the moment, it reflects one of the strengths of Web “publishing” — turning on a dime. It also reminded me of the days of the Daily Dish. And she is a lot of fun. I appreciated her more than Mearsheimer, who to my mal-tuned sense of communications seemed to be out to win academic points and advancing a particular horse, rather than engaging in disinterested evaluation of competing strategies. Or don’t FP academics do that sort of thing?Back to Applebaum, something you said caught my attention, something along the lines of “we can pick which national adversary we prioritize first” — Applebaum objected, but the conversation veered off. Briefly, it seems to me that, disregarding consequential reasoning, sure, you can exercise free will — but there are always consequences. Pick the wrong opponent to put at the top of the adversary board and you’ll pay for it down the road. In the end, the priority order is selected for us by the ambitions and actions of those national entities, whether they are China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia, and I think your statement is terribly wrong.And, for the record, I think Russia has a long history of territorial ambition and national pride that can be only satisfied through pursuit of traditional goals of nationalism. Give them Ukraine today and they’ll take Poland tomorrow. They’ve done it before. Thus, Russia has to be at the top of the priority list at the moment. I think it’d be great if China would suddenly start massing an army on the Sino-Russo border, but it seems unlikely — more likely they make a grab for Taiwan.Speaking of Mearsheimer “advancing a particular horse,” he sure placed an accurate bet here:You can listen to the entire 2015 lecture from Professor Mearsheimer here. (It’s not often you see a foreign policy lecture get nearly 8.5 million views on YouTube.)Lastly, a listener notes that “the war in Ukraine is in some ways a climate issue”:Russia’s economy is powered by our collective dependence on fossil fuels. Indeed, one of the things which has empowered Putin is the denuclearization of the European (and, in particular, the German) energy sector. If we really want to punish him, we should build hundreds of new nuclear plants, rendering his economy obsolete. Leading such an effort could be good politics for Biden, as both red meat for the hawks and as something with which to engage the climate left. This could be a transformative moment in our engagement with the climate crisis if we were to embrace as a war aim what we have hitherto, and with not much success, framed as an issue of social justice. (The imperfect analogy would be Lincoln framing his initial push for emancipation as a measure to undercut the South’s capacity to fight, rather than as the moral issue it truly was). Hopefully, someone in the policy space will make this case, as we navigate this crisis.I couldn’t agree more.As always, please keep the dissents and other commentary coming — this war, sadly, is just beginning: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.