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Why Iran Isn’t Rushing to Hezbollah’s Defense

theatlantic.com

At the center of current conflicts in the Middle East is a long-running staring contest between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And Netanyahu seems to have calculated that, even if Israel moves ferociously against Khamenei’s so-called Axis of Resistance—the region-wide network of militias arrayed against Israeli and Western interests—Khamenei won’t do much in response.Yesterday, Israel’s attacks on the southern suburbs of Beirut killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader since 1992. That was only the latest in a dramatic series of strikes this month, including a sci-fi-esque operation using exploding pagers, that have killed high-ranking commanders of the Lebanese militant group and hundreds of Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah has been widely viewed as the most significant non-state threat to Israel. Nasrallah was easily the most powerful operative in Iran’s Axis.[Read: Nasrallah’s folly]Hamas is also part of that Axis. And ever since the July 31 assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, many in the Middle East have been bracing for an Iranian attack on Israel that could plunge the region into a broad war. But the response hasn’t come. Ultimately, Tehran decided against risking a major escalation with Israel. Khamenei has maintained his policy of “strategic patience,” slowly building militias surrounding Israel on all sides without getting into a direct confrontation.Whether Nasrallah’s death will alter Khamenei’s cautious approach seems questionable. A statement yesterday from the Iranian embassy in Beirut claimed that the “rules of the game” had now changed, and threatened Israel with “appropriate punishment and discipline.” Predictably, the hard-liner mouthpiece Kayhan, whose history includes praise for Adolf Hitler and insistent Holocaust denial, declared today, “Israel has dug its own graves; now go ahead and bury its corpse.”But officials in Tehran have been notably more reticent. Several simply pointed out, after yesterday’s strike but before Nasrallah’s death was confirmed, that whenever Hezbollah’s commanders are killed, they’ll be replaced with others. This was the position taken by Ahmad Vahidi, the founding head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, who helped build Hezbollah into the formidable force it is today. Tehran has deep-seated reasons for showing restraint in recent weeks—reasons that still hold no matter how egregious it views the killing of Nasrallah to be.First, Iran’s options for retaliation against Israel are very limited, and it can’t bring about much damage there without risking a destruction of Iranian infrastructure that might take decades to rebuild.Second, Iran has been trying for months to ease tensions and pursue talks with other countries in the region and with the West. This past week in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, a visiting Iranian delegation headed by President Masoud Pezeshkian defended Hezbollah and Hamas but put its main focus on giving out peace vibes. Pezeshkian even told a group of American journalists that Iran would put down its arms if Israel also did so. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later denied that the president had made such a statement, but Iranian hard-liners leaked audio that confirmed it.Araghchi himself is spreading the message that Iran wants the international community to stop Israel from broadening the conflict. Araghchi said on X that he had warned, in a meeting earlier this week with his British counterpart, David Lammy, that “Israeli attacks must cease immediately to avoid unprecedented risk of all-out catastrophe in region.” In Tehran, on Tuesday, Pezeshkian’s spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, likened the recent attacks against Hezbollah to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. She called on the UN Security Council to “intervene to prevent catastrophes like Gaza and Rafah in Lebanon.”Such calls for measured action by the global community sound quite different from the stance taken by Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, who last week warned that the group’s war with Israel had entered “a new phase of limitless settling of accounts.” Tehran isn’t Hezbollah. Although Pezeshkian had claimed on CNN that Hezbollah was unable to defend itself “on its own,” seemingly promising Iran’s entry into the conflict, his foreign minister essentially corrected that statement. Addressing reporters on Wednesday morning, Araghchi promised that Hezbollah “makes its own decisions and is fully capable of defending itself, Lebanon, and the people of Lebanon on its own.”This is another way of saying that Iran doesn’t intend to rush to Hezbollah’s defense. Iran’s Lebanese allies are on their own. Javad Zarif, Tehran’s favorite English-speaking messenger who now serves as a vice president, repeated the same talking points on CNN on Thursday.Iranian hard-liners are incensed at this attitude. Even before Nasrallah’s death, Iran’s political debate was starting to resemble the period from 2013 to 2021, when the centrist President Hassan Rouhani’s negotiations with the United States and other countries in the West led to a backlash in Iran. Earlier this week, one commentator accused Pezeshkian’s government of abandoning Hezbollah and claimed that if Iran didn’t respond to the attacks on Lebanon, Israel would attack Tehran next.[Read: Speak like a president, Madam VP]A centrist outlet responded by criticizing “extremists who always want to drum up tensions.” The anti-retaliation case was put forward most explicitly by Mohammad Khajoee, the head of the Lebanon section at a top Tehran think tank and a former Beirut bureau chief for Iran’s main news agency. In an article on Thursday in a reformist-leaning daily, he argued that “Iran must not enter itself into a military conflict with Israel. It must quickly find a way for Hezbollah to save face and leave this recent war, without suffering more damage.” Iran, Khajoee wrote, “must convince Hezbollah to finish its clashes with Israel and go back to pre–October 7 conditions.” Khajoee even criticized Hamas for getting Iran and the Axis into a war they hadn’t prepared for.What Iran does next is up to Khamenei. The supreme leader has not given up on his decades-long crusade against the West, Israel, and his own people’s insufficient purity. But he has understood that intransigence could prove self-destructive for his regime and is thus putting out feelers for negotiations with the West that could help lift sanctions and stabilize the country. His open support for Pezeshkian limits the gambit of hard-liners, who are also hated by much of the Iranian population and even by many in the establishment.In Tehran, many are cautiously hoping for a new era of talks with the West. A prominent Iranian diplomatic correspondent expressed the hope this week that negotiations with European countries to revive the Barack Obama–era Iranian nuclear deal and lift sanctions will soon resume, perhaps to be followed by discussions with the United States after the November presidential election.But what if Tehran’s reticence tempts Israel into continuing its battering of Hezbollah? Netanyahu might feel that he has called Khamenei’s bluff and can now march on further, thereby keeping his fractious right-wing coalition happy and intact. The Axis might then increase its pressures on Tehran to get into the ring. Already, Yemen’s Houthis and Iraqi militias have fired salvos in Hezbollah’s defense.Still, an uneasy equilibrium has been kept so far, preventing a full-on war between Israel and Iran. Israel would do well to take Nasrallah’s death as a resounding win against the Axis and use the occasion to wind down the wars against Hezbollah and Hamas. If there was ever a time for Israel to pursue peace with its neighbors from a position of strength, this is it.

The Republican Freak Show

9 h

theatlantic.com

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.” But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an antitransgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. Robinson wrote in response, “and the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!” Politico reports that Mark Robinson’s email address was also registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking affairs. (Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has denied all of the claims.)These allegations aren’t entirely shocking, because Robinson—a self-described “MAGA Republican”—has shown signs in the past of being a deeply troubled person. (My Atlantic colleague David Graham wrote a superb profile of Robinson in May.)[Read: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011, he wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” During the Obama presidency Robinson wrote, “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” He promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi. He is also an election denier, claiming Joe Biden “stole the election.”In 2017 Robinson wrote, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”). And he supported a total ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he admitted he paid for an abortion in the past.Much of this was known before he ran for governor. No matter. Republicans in North Carolina nominated him anyway, and Donald Trump has lavished praise on the man he calls his “friend,” offered Robinson his “full and total endorsement,” and dubbed him “one of the hottest politicians” in the country.SOME REPUBLICANS ARE distancing themselves from Robinson partly because they are worried he’ll be defeated, but also because they’re even more concerned that he will drag down other Republicans, including Donald Trump. But the truth is that Robinson is a perfect addition to the Republican ensemble.The GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has been relentlessly promoting the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has promoted fluoride conspiracy theories and posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden. Yet another Republican member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, was ejected from a family-friendly musical for vaping, being disruptive, and groping her date (and vice versa). She also falsely claimed school authorities “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats.”The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who is under House investigation for having sex with an underaged girl, “used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” according to a source Godfrey spoke to. [Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]This is not normal.The GOP is home to a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who describes in her book shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, as well as killing an unnamed goat. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson, claimed COVID was “pre-planned” by a secret group of “elites” even while he promoted disinformation claiming Ivermectin, which is commonly used to deworm livestock, was an effective treatment for COVID. (Because people were hospitalized for taking the drug, the FDA put out a tweet saying, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.”)Earlier this month Donald Trump attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City. He took as his guest a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who has claimed 9/11 was an inside job, referred to Kamala Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” and said that Democrats should be tried for treason and executed. (Trump has called Loomer a “woman with courage” and a “free spirit.”)Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, floated the idea of having Trump declare martial law so that he could “rerun” the 2020 election. He suggested that the president should seize voting machines. He predicted a governor will soon declare war. He has also warned about the dangers of a “new world order” in which people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab “have an intent to track every single one of us, and they use it under the skin. They use a means by which it’s under the skin.”Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and an unofficial Trump adviser, recently hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. He praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as having been “vindicated on everything” and described Jones as “the most extraordinary person” he has ever met. (Two years ago Sandy Hook families won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress lawsuits against Jones for his repeatedly calling the 2012 school shooting, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to get more gun-control legislation passed. As the New York Times reports, “The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.”)Carlson, one of the most influential figures on the American right, has also peddled the claim that the violence on January 6 was a “false flag” operation involving the FBI and used to discredit Trump supporters, alleged that former Attorney Bill Barr covered up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and promoted testicle tanning.Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat who recently endorsed Trump. The former president has asked Kennedy to go on the transition team should Trump win the election and “help pick the people who will be running the government and I am looking forward to that.” Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes, “I like him, and I respect him. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy.”Sara Dorn of Forbes listed some of the conspiracy theories Kennedy has promoted—vaccines can cause autism; COVID was genetically engineered and is targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people (and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are mostly immune); mass shootings are linked to Prozac; the 2004 presidential election was stolen from John Kerry; the CIA was involved in the death of his uncle John F. Kennedy; and Sirhan Sirhan was wrongly convicted of murdering his father.In addition, Kennedy, who has revealed he had a parasitic brain worm, told the podcaster Joe Rogan that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.” He believes chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender. He claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance. He’s said that Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of NPR, is a CIA agent. Even journals like Smithsonian and National Geographic “appear to be compromised by the CIA,” according to Kennedy.[Read: Why RFK Jr. endorsed Trump]According to Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy, her father chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, bungee-corded it to the roof of their car, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, New York. (The severed head streamed “whale juice” down the side of the family minivan on the trip home. “It was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy told Town & Country magazine in 2012. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”) Kennedy has also recently admitted to leaving the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, as a joke.Donald Trump Jr. has said that he could see Kennedy being given some sort of oversight role in any number of government agencies, if his father is reelected, including the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can see a dozen roles I’d love to see him in.”Like Mark Robinson, RFK Jr. fits right in.THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that make them uniquely dangerous to the Republic. Since 2016 they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.They know.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an essay titled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” warned that no one who “voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood” will be able to justify himself to the living, or posterity, or to his friends, or to his children. Don’t surrender to corruption, the great Russian writer and dissident said; strive for the liberation of our souls from not participating in the lie. Don’t consent to the lies. The challenges facing Solzhenitsyn were quite different, and certainly far more difficult, than anything we face, but his fundamental point still holds.The Trump movement is built on layers of lies. It’s late, but it’s never too late to liberate yourself from lies. One word of truth outweighs the world.

Speak Like a President, Madam VP

Kamala Harris has campaigned as the tough-on-dictators candidate for president. The Democrat scores points off Donald Trump for his truckling and cringing to Vladimir Putin, for swapping love letters with Kim Jong Un.Today—this very day—the vice president has her best opportunity to prove her toughness and assert her national-security credibility.

9 h

theatlantic.com

The Ghosts of Wannsee

10 h

theatlantic.com

In Berlin, the winter sky is screwed on so tight that all the world beneath becomes dark and gray and grim. On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly. Around some bends, I’d come across naked old men, bright red with the cold of their swim, vigorously toweling off their withered loins. When I’d come to the ferry launch to Pfaueninsel, the peacocks across the spit of water would cry out so loudly in their winter rutting, I could easily imagine that the island was entirely made of peacocks, in layers four thick upon the ground, that the castle there was wrapped in a hissing sheet of iridescent blue, the million eyes of Argos on their tail feathers staring up, affronted by the low gray clouds.Then, in mid-April, just as despair crept in and I began to think that we would be stuck in chill darkness for good, the lid of the sky blew off, and the sun poured down, and the earth leaped up in joy to meet it. A green fur grew on all the bereft trees and dirt, and the tulips stood up and unfurled themselves, the brave avant-garde of more color to come. Even the German people who’d so dourly walked their dogs along the lake paths all winter began to smile and nod in greeting. But the ghosts still wrestled mutely in the middle of the lake; even the sun couldn’t burn those off.It was a week or so into this astonishing reversal of winter that my first love, my first friend, Leslie, called me for the last time. My heart seized; nowadays, he only ever called to relate tragedy—our high-school heartthrob who had died in a motorboat accident, my roommate from college who’d overdosed. Leslie wasn’t an oracle; he was just still on social media. There had been a time, long ago, when we didn’t need to call, when we could talk without talking in our separate beds across the little town where we were raised, chatting away in our minds until one of us fell asleep or was interrupted, and then we’d pick up the conversation mid-sentence at school the next day.I’d discovered him in first grade. He’d been there all along, since nursery school, but we’d somehow never connected until I turned around fast in the lunch line with a fork in my hand and accidentally stabbed him in the stomach. The injury wasn’t serious, he was fine, no blood even, but it hurt. He was always brave, though, and when he cried, he cried silently so as not to get me in trouble. I was impressed. I asked him what his name was, and he said, Leslie, but in a whisper, holding his gap teeth behind his hand, because already he’d been relentlessly teased for the gap and for having a girl’s name. From that lunch on, he was mine, and nobody ever dared tease him again, because back then I was a biter.Leslie wasn’t calling with tragedy this time; he was coming to Berlin for a couple of nights. He had to fly over to set up the house on his husband’s Greek island for the summer and could get away early to come see me. Why wouldn’t I want to see my oldest friend? he said. And I mean that literally. God, honey, I’ve been looking at your husband’s pictures of you on the ’gram, when did you decide to let yourself go? We both laughed, I a little sourly. It was true, the Berlin winter had seeped into my soul, and I had let myself go gray, let myself have my fill of beer and pommes rot-weiss. The way I looked must have been shocking to him, married as he was to an haute couture designer and now living in a world without fat or blemish, only expensive fabric on expensive bone.I had yet to meet Leslie’s husband, had not even been invited to the wedding, which rankled some. When I’d asked him about it, he had let out a puff of exasperated air and said, We only had four people there, they are all Damien’s friends, they’re so famous they’re not even real human beings. Bringing a normie into that mess would have been cruel to you, believe you me. When I’d said, But still, I’m me, you’re you, he’d said, Oh, honey, if it’s any consolation, not even my parents were invited. This was no consolation at all; I knew the parental history.Later, after my stung ego had eased up a bit, I felt sad for my friend, not allowed his own friends at his wedding; he had fought for so long, transforming himself from a street kid into a wildly successful interior designer without even a college degree, and as soon as he’d married Damien, he’d been forced to give up his career to become something like his husband’s majordomo. It wasn’t right; none of it was right. But Leslie’s allegiances had shifted, and he was happy, deliriously happy, and I found I couldn’t say this to him anymore. In revenge, I wore while bleaching the bathroom floor the one piece of Damien’s I owned. True, it was a skirt from his collaboration with a big-box store, but I’d felt sexy in it.In any event, the prospect of soon seeing my oldest friend was a light radiating out into the rest of my life. I ran faster; I ate fewer potatoes; I yelled at my kids less. Then, the next week, he texted to tell me that the few days in Berlin had to be curtailed to only one night, alas. And the day of, when I was already waiting at the restaurant where his assistant had booked lunch, he texted to say that, oops, Damien needed the plane, he could spare only the afternoon. Could I come to Mitte in, like, four hours? He needed to take pictures of something in the Altes Museum, and we’d have time to do dinner before he had to go back to the airport. I was upset, of course, but there was nothing I could do. I had to see him. Despite recent changes, Leslie would always share the private throne room inside me with my husband and my sons.For a long time, he’d been a separate piece of me, preferring to spend most of his time in my loud and messy house, full of pets and the friends of my brother and sister, chaotic with music and life and games, which Leslie, with his long-limbed, goofy sweetness, had joined with almost fervent zeal, his high-pitched laughter making everyone else laugh.[Read: Lauren Groff has written a new gospel]Leslie was an only child, and the rare times I’d spent the night at his house, I’d felt tentative in the cathedral hush. His was a large and supermodern home, on a hill above the lake, two miles outside town. There, you could stand on the flagstone veranda and look down on Main Street with binoculars to track the ant-size people who were so huge in our daily lives. The floors were dark, shining slate; the ceilings were 25 feet tall; the furniture was precious and uncomfortable and looked to my child’s eye like the carapaces of huge insects frozen in place. His mother was extraordinarily beautiful—Leslie got his glow from her—but almost entirely silent, floating pale-haired through the house with a chuckling glass of ice water that she replaced at exactly five in the afternoon with vodka from the freezer. His father was a froggish man, red-faced, also with long limbs, whose torso seemed somehow inflated, like a rubber hot-water bottle. Poor Leslie had inherited his face, with its huge, thin-lipped mouth and bulging eyes. My friend has never been beautiful, even during his years as a twink, though, of course, he overbrims with charm. His father was also the kind of man who sucked the oxygen out of every room and left you gasping. He loved gossip, jokes, pointed observations. Only at night did he go silent, though even the night hours in Leslie’s house were startling, marked by a clock that cuckooed the hour, then sang what in adulthood I would understand to be a Wagner lied.I hated being in that house. They kept it too cold, and Leslie was not allowed to hang the undeniably excellent drawings he did on the wall of his own room. I once woke to see the shadowy shape of his father in the doorway, his silken robe parted. Whenever Leslie’s father saw me, he had a savage impulse to needle me with dumb-blonde jokes over and over until I broke down and cried. That this adult man absolutely needed to make sure I knew how small and powerless and stupid I, a little girl, was compared with him has, I’m afraid, been the subject of hours and hours of therapy.The last day I’d see Leslie, I came, very slowly, on the S-Bahn to Museum Island. The weather was gray again, drizzling and cold, but the purple peonies at the flower shops in the station gave me courage. I wandered around the Neues Museum and had a coffee there, then sat on the steps of the Altes Museum, watching the tourists huddle and dart off, mesmerized by how they behaved like fish near coral, their colors the same brightness, their noise the same noise as the chewing one heard under the water. At last, when I had begun to shiver with cold, I smelled Leslie before I saw him, an expensive custom perfume of bergamot and orange and musk, and his hands were over my eyes, and I took them down and kissed his palms. He was laughing his high, delighted Leslie laugh.You looked so forlorn sitting there, he said. A lost little puppy.Oh, I thought, how strange to see people whom you’ve loved for so long. You don’t really see their current face; instead, you see the faces of your greatest intensity of love. I could see my 7-year-old friend, my 11-year-old friend, my 18-year-old friend, not really the middle-aged one. Still, I sensed something different about him now. Let’s go get you warmed up, he said, and he linked my arm in his, and we went inside the old columned building. At the desk, though, he stood aside for me to buy the tickets, behavior that felt a little strange for a man with a Greek island and a private jet. We walked slowly through the ancient torsos—You must change your life, I intoned gravely, which he blinked at, puzzled—the Etruscan jewelry, the Roman busts. He seemed to know where he was going, and we arrived at a little room on the second floor called the Garden of Delights.Inside was a circus of priapism. Ancient penises with wings, Leda being reamed by the swan, lamps in the shape of little satyrs, their members so huge and painfully engorged that they touched the ground. I said, I suppose that one set fire to the little hole in the urethra, what is it called? Leslie said, The glans? No, I said, I got it, the meatus. Leslie giggled, then set to work with his cellphone, taking picture after picture, in close-up. I thought about when we were 12, in the little Methodist graveyard where we’d liked to gossip and talk about death. One day, we’d decided out of curiosity to French-kiss. Leslie’s mouth had been cold and wet, and tasted like corn chips, which he’d just been eating. I’d fled immediately. All night, I’d turned in bed, unable to even try to talk to Leslie in my mind, growing ever more certain that now I was going to die of AIDS, that I was probably pregnant now, that I was doomed to have to marry Leslie and have his baby at 12 years old and spend the rest of my life kissing cold, wet corn-chip kisses. But in the morning, when I saw him at school, he’d looked at me, startled, and then his mouth had spread and spread in his froggy smile, and then I’d started laughing too, and we’d set the kiss event aside and never attempted another one again.I stared so long at one hyper-endowed lamp that it turned its head, stuck out its cracked terra-cotta tongue, and licked all the way around its mouth, lascivious, shimmying. Leslie said, suddenly, He’s thinking of a collection inspired by this room, and put his phone away. Who, Damien? I said, stupidly. Yes, Leslie said. Damien remembered this place from, like, a decade ago, and he wanted me to take photos of every single thing in the room. How’s he doing, I asked, this husband of yours whom I’ve never met, if he’s actually real. Leslie said, He’s real. He’s amazing. Just absolutely amazing. You have no idea what it’s like living with a genius. Oh? What is it like, I said, and he shrugged and smiled and said, Amazing. I was stung; he was protecting someone with his vagueness, but I wasn’t clear who.We came back down through the dim antiquities, the nine carved Muses on a sarcophagus gesturing above our shoulders. Now that his task was done, he could focus on me, and he asked me rapid-fire questions that I answered as honestly as I could: Yes, the boys were furious with us for dragging them to Berlin, no, they don’t like their school at all, yes, they were the most gorgeous humans ever to set foot on the planet, funny and loving and smart and good, yes, I do in fact wonder how they came out of me, haha, it’s true, yes, my husband wanted to see Leslie too, he says he’s sorry he had work to do today, no, I’m not getting any work done myself, this place is too exciting, I can’t focus. Ugh, Leslie said, nobody wants to work anymore, it’s a cultural disease. Then we went out into the darkening afternoon.Hey, Leslie said, I’m working on my bikini body—let’s say we skip dinner and just go have a drink? You already have a bikini body, I said, everybody has a bikini body, besides, I am starving, you had me skip lunch, if you remember. But he either didn’t hear me or affected not to, and said he knew an amazing bar, they always went there when they were in Berlin, I’d love it, and if I was really hungry, he thought they had food there, and swept me along.He led me by the hand down the damp and windy street, where idling for him was a gleaming black car of such absurd luxury that I laughed. Oh, he said, it’s the airport’s, not ours, we don’t keep a car in Berlin. I slid onto leather that both looked and felt like actual butter. For all my socialism, I luxuriated in the reflected heat upon my face, this dazzle, this excess, the champagne chilling in an ice bucket, which Leslie fell upon with relief, popping the bottle, pouring out coupes of perfect honeyed chill. We slid through Berlin surreally in this purring car, bubbles striking our tongues. Until then, I had mostly seen the center of the city as excitingly gritty—piss in stairwells, graffiti atop graffiti.Seeing my friend so comfortable in comfort, my old guttersnipe buddy who’d once lived for years in actual squalor, felt odd. Of course, he had started off in smoothness and sleekness up in that sad house of his on the hill, but the Thanksgiving of his freshman year in college, all hyped up by his campus LGBTQ alliance and against my counsel, he’d decided to come out to his parents. That same night, as my own family was passing around appetizers, he showed up at my house, unable to speak for weeping, his skin reddening into what would later be a hideous black eye. We had lost some of our ability to speak without speaking by then; enough life had streamed through us without the other person there to witness it. But while everyone else was eating stuffing and pumpkin pie downstairs, he lay on the foldout bed next to mine, and I held him, big spoon to his little, and I came to understand what had happened as vividly as if I had been in the room.His mother had bought a turkey dinner from a local caterer and put it on her own mother’s sleek porcelain platter. His father had been drinking bourbon, glass after glass, ever since the food had arrived hours earlier. Leslie had been quivering with anxiety, a big mistake, because when his father saw weakness, he leaped on it, he couldn’t help it, the man was a hunter, a predator, a kind of jungle cat. When at last my friend had broken the tension and announced that he was gay, his father had stood up and taken a fistful of turkey and thrown it in Leslie’s face, then leaned over and punched him in the eye. Before he’d left the room, he’d said, with his back turned, That’s it. You’re no child of mine.Leslie’s mother had picked turkey off her son’s shirt, whispering, Hush now, hush now, stop crying, he’ll hear, and then she’d kissed him, and whispered, I always knew, of course I did. A mother knows. But you’d better go down to your friend’s house, just get out of his sight. After his devastated week with us, my parents drove him back to college, and he finished out the term and spent winter break at my house, but when he went back to school, he was barred from the dorm; his father had withdrawn his payment for the semester, they were sorry, he was no longer officially matriculated in that institution.He’d hitchhiked to my school and spent a few weeks on my common-room couch, until my roommates had revolted. They loved Leslie, he was so funny and kind and smart, but he wasn’t a student there, and his feet at the time reeked like dead things, they were sorry, they sympathized with his plight, they were allies! But they’d have to tell the dean if he wasn’t gone by Friday. That day, I withdrew every penny from my savings account, all my earnings from lifeguarding during high-school summers, all my graduation and birthday money, and gave it to my friend. He sat for a long while with his face in his hands, saying, I should just kill myself, nobody would care. I said fiercely that if he killed himself, I would kill him again, and at last he smiled wanly and packed up. Whatever he needed, he just had to call, I said, I’d figure it out for him.He’d hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on my money for about two months, after which he’d declined rapidly. I took a dining-hall job washing dishes so that I could send him a check faithfully every week—my hands can still hold searing-hot plates without pain. But some months, I couldn’t send one, because he had no address to send things to. Other months, he managed to call but couldn’t speak, only sobbed into the receiver.Along with the jobs he told me about—the go-go dancing, the house painting, the bartending, the dog walking—there were darker jobs he hinted at. I think he sold what he had, which was his youth. For a time, he was addicted to something, but he wouldn’t tell me why his speech was slurred. When he finally washed up in a steadier place, he was so proud that he bought a disposable camera and took pictures of his room and sent the camera to me to develop. But when I got the prints back, the room was so little and sparse—four walls with a giant poster of David Bowie on one, a bed scrupulously made with a cheap wool blanket—that I ached at the difference between my hopes for him and his reality.When I saved up enough to go visit him over spring break during my junior year, he was house-sitting for a pair of kind elderly lesbians in the Marina. He’d met them when he’d shown up with a crew to paint their house, and they’d worried about him and semi-adopted him. He seemed sober but looked pale and haunted when he picked me up at the airport, and I felt a strangeness between us during that trip, which couldn’t end fast enough. He had no money for restaurants or tickets, of course, so I bought us groceries, and we cooked and went for long walks and talked and talked, awkwardly, with hours-long pauses between bursts of conversation. At the end, he promised he’d pay me back for all the money I’d sent, which by that point was something close to $10,000. Not that I’m a person who keeps accounts like this, but even with all his private jets and Greek islands, he has yet to repay me. I don’t think it is intentional; I think he was so ashamed to have taken from me that he cast the debt from his mind. If he were to write me a check today, I don’t know if I would take it, though perhaps he could pay for his own museum ticket.We slid to a stop before a bar with a neon sign above a green door. It didn’t look like a haven for the cognoscenti, but one had to ring the bell to be let in, and the person who opened it was about 10 feet tall, with a shaved head and the sharp-boned face of an angel, and so many piercings, she looked like she’d been bedazzled by a bored child. Les! she cried out, wrapping him in her spidery arms. She looked behind him for Damien and seemed piqued when she saw me. God, Anya, you look incredible, let me take a picture for Damien, he might be able to use you, Leslie said, and once inside the dark bar, he took about 50 flash photos of Anya, her hand on her hip, looking very tough.She led us to a table, and Leslie said, My usual, thank you, and she said, Got it, then frowned down at me. Out of panic, I picked the first thing I saw on the menu, the Voltaire, a drink with cognac and quince. Leslie said, wisely, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize, and raised an eyebrow. What? I said. Voltaire said that, Leslie said. And you call yourself a college graduate? He still had his phone in his hand and got distracted, poking and prodding it, so I was left alone to look around. The bar was full of Berliners, gorgeous girls with ratty mullets and 1970s eyeglasses, skinny boys slouching in all black. The bar was illumined by candles and an uplit line of mostly esoteric liquors along the full-length mirror against the back wall. Only when Anya delivered our drinks did my old friend remember I was there with him and put the phone away.He gulped down half of his drink in one go, then leaned forward and filled me in on all the gossip from our town, his face lighting up the way it used to. The divorces, the affairs, the tragedies in the lives of our classmates, people I didn’t think about more than once a decade. Nothing about himself. I watched Leslie speak, until I suddenly understood what had become so strange about his face. It wasn’t Botox or any kind of plastic surgery, subtle or not; he’d had his teeth fixed, and that glorious gap in them that I’d loved so much had disappeared.[Read: ‘Birdie,’ a short story by Lauren Groff]Oh, I interrupted him, Leslie. Your teeth. He put his hand up in alarm, then, remembering that I knew him best with his old set, grimaced to show off the new. He looked like a chimp demonstrating aggression. Aren’t they wonderful? he said. I feel like a new man. Damien was against it, he said the gap gave my face a certain rakishness, but I’ve hated it ever since I first looked in a mirror. You know, when I was a kid, if I forgot at dinner and accidentally smiled with my teeth and my dad saw the gap, he’d make me stand up and show my teeth while he threw toothpicks at me like darts, trying to get one through the space, Leslie said, smiling. I could tell that this was a story he’d told many times at parties, and that it had made people laugh.Oh, Leslie, I thought, sick. Don’t break bread with the kind of person who’d laugh at that. Aloud, I said, bitterly, Your goddamned father. At this, Leslie flinched, saying, Jesus, have some respect. My dad is totally demented right now, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, he’s in a nursing home down in Sarasota crying all the time because he has no idea where he is or who he is or what’s happening to him, all day he’s just wandering around so confused, it’s like watching someone tormented, like someone in hell. My poor mom is just devastated, she visits him every day, it’s wringing her out, she’s never been strong anyway, you know that. It’s just breaking her to bits. So yeah, okay, fine, he wasn’t the best father, but he’s still a human being, damn. He deserves our pity.I suppose I still have a biter in me, because I said, Right, right, and does his dementia automatically absolve him for everything he did? Are you actually kidding me right now, Leslie?What are you talking about, he said, in a very low voice, because mine had made the Berliners around us stop in their conversations and look at us. You mean that time when I came out? Yeah, those were some shitty years, but I got through them, look at me, I’m absolutely fucking thriving, they made me what I am, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, I didn’t make any excuses, I worked. I’m the fucking American dream, baby. Anyways, not that you care, my father apologized, I forgave him. Why the fuck would you still be angry when I’m not? What the fuck is wrong with you?This is when it all came boiling up out of my molten core, the mystery that all these decades I’d felt deep down, this terrible thing sensed, those sudden interruptions when we were talking in our separate beds across the village at night, that vision or dream I’d had of his father in a parted robe in the doorway, my revulsion for the man, the way my friend had made himself small in the world, apologetic, hiding himself, the way his father had watched with a gleam in his eye when he made dumb-blonde jokes at me until I cried, that fascist soul of that fascist man spreading its tarry blackness all over everything he touched. I couldn’t know, I didn’t know for sure what he had done to my friend. But I did know. I did. Somehow. Perhaps.Maybe the knowledge was written on my face—maybe, for a brief moment, Leslie could hear inside my mind again the way we’d spoken when we were little. He pushed back from the table so violently that my Voltaire splashed all over the table and onto my lap. In the shock of cold, I thought he was angry that I was witness to his deepest shame, but he hissed through his new, perfect teeth, Fuck you. You knew. All along.And then he was gone through the door. I was alone with my wet lap, my confusion, my rage, Anya glaring down at me, the angel of punks.I paid, I escaped. Out in the street, rain had begun for real, a rain that would turn overnight into ice and raze back all the tender new green that had emerged, leave the tulip blossoms withered brown twists on the stem. I dialed Leslie again and again, walking through the rain to the S-Bahn station, but he did not pick up, and at last my phone informed me regretfully that I was blocked. On the train, shivering, I tried an email, but he had preemptively emailed to say, You’re dead to me. Don’t contact me again. And when I tried to respond, my email bounced back.Now June is here, the lengthening days so rich with sunshine that light spills out everywhere like coins and bars of gold, spilling upon the vigorous green leaves fully and lushly emerged, upon the real cuckoos marking crazy time and the swans in their elegant glissades across the water, upon the crowds of naked youths sunbathing on the hillsides around Schlachtensee and Krumme Lanke, upon me in my endless all-day walks around Wannsee and Potsdam. I can only walk now, because I injured myself trying to run out my grief in the weeks after I saw Leslie—and I have to walk so much, often from the moment I wake up until the moment the boys come home from school and I can hold their animal bodies against my animal body and feel the batteries of their hot hearts recharge me again.Leslie is a person who holds fast to his actions; we have been severed, I know, I can feel it inside me, it is permanent. Voltaire did not in fact say, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. That’s the wisdom of an actual neo-Nazi. When I cry on my walks, the ghosts laugh at me from their heaving white masses at the center of the lake, where the sailboats slice over them; the ghosts of Wannsee mock me.They, by existing, remind me of what a new friend said once during the winter, a friend who is both German and American. She said that being German has a sense of heaviness to it—that the Germans are at least wrestling with their guilt and that we Americans have been trained to pretend that the wounds don’t exist, which only means they fester inside.A few days ago, I took the ferry across to Pfaueninsel, thick now with roses and wisteria. The castle at the center of the island was wrapped in renovation plastic, not in peacock feathers; peacocks did not seethe four thick upon the ground. I saw only a few dozen at most, shouting out in their strange, catlike cries. One approached me as I sat on a bench in my desolation, a male trailing his feathers behind him like the long train of a ball gown. I gave him the pretzel I’d bought but didn’t want, and he pecked at it for a long while, then rewarded me by lifting the strong muscles that carried his tail, unfurling his great glorious fan only a few feet from me so that I could be intimidated by his beauty, his shine, the shocking colors, the eyes on his feathers all at once winking at me, as if to say, Don’t worry, this will pass, we will survive. This is the way of things, we carry our gorgeous burdens, we go through life losing. By autumn, all his tail feathers will have fallen out; he will go into the long, dark winter bare of his glory. But this is the nature of the greatest gifts, the eyes of Argos say; they are never meant to last forever.

The Low Comedy of Eric Adams’s Indictment

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theatlantic.com

Credit is due to indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. His recent predecessors took multiple terms to become enmeshed in scandal. Adams was elected in November 2021; less than three years later, federal prosecutors have hit him with five felony counts.In a document that was unsealed Thursday, the government accuses Adams of ripping off the city’s campaign-finance system in a not particularly ingenious fashion and of cadging free luxury-hotel rooms overseas and airline upgrades from people who may have been agents of the Turkish government. This is a sad step down from the classical municipal scandal, entailing mayors conspiring or looking the other way as contracts are fixed or commissioners bribed or political parties corrupted in clever and devious ways. No such criminal arts are entailed here.[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]Instead, the pages of Adams’s indictment are full of low comedy. In November, FBI agents waved aside the mayor’s security team, stepped with Adams into his SUV, and took away his cellphones and a laptop. But the mayor’s personal cellphone was missing. As this was the phone that Adams used to communicate with aides about his travel and fundraising, FBI agents demanded to see it.The mayor produced the phone for the FBI the next day, but, according to the indictment, there was a problem: It was locked. Adams told the agents that he had recently changed its password and, alas, had forgotten the new code.Years ago, a friend of mine reported on former Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Sharpe James, a powerful machine boss who was convicted of fraud. After the Adams indictment became public, my friend sniffed that the ham-handed derelictions attributed to the New York mayor made James look like Enrico Fermi, the nuclear physicist.In November, federal prosecutors and investigators also sat down with an Adams staffer who acted as the mayor’s liaison to Turkish Airlines. The agents made clear that they knew the mayor and the aide—who is unnamed in the indictment but has been identified in news reports as Rana Abbasova—used an encrypted messaging app to communicate with Turkish officials about travel and fundraising. The aide, the indictment stated, excused herself to use the bathroom, where she deleted the messaging app. [Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]The most damning accusations against Adams center on his supposedly taking money from foreign businesspeople, which is illegal, and using that money to obtain matching funds from the city’s campaign-finance system, which is also illegal. Far more amusing is what the government portrays as a nearly decade-long insistence on obtaining tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines—most of which Adams failed to report. It comes off like a frequent-flier-club obsession run mad.The indictment indicates that no matter where in the world Adams flew—Ghana, France, China, Oman—he instructed aides to route flights through Istanbul, the better to get perks from Turkish Airlines and luxury-hotel stays subsidized by Turkish interests. So in 2016, Adams and his girlfriend flew to India, purchasing economy tickets for $2,286. Turkish Airlines promptly upgraded them to business class, where two tickets would have cost about $15,000.On one trip, Adams’s girlfriend texted him and was surprised to discover that he was in Istanbul, because their planned vacation was in France. According to the government, he texted back: “Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul.”This pattern reached an apogee when Adams’s girlfriend asked him if the two of them could visit Easter Island, in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Adams was game, the government asserts, but only if they could fly on Turkish Airlines. Disappointment loomed. As the indictment noted, he asked her to check with the airline “to confirm they did not have routes between New York and Chile.”Adams apparently was not oblivious to the risks he was running, and he seems to have resorted to a sleight of hand that in the reading sounds half-hearted. He took trips on Turkish Airlines in the summer of 2017, according to prosecutors, and three months later sent an email to his scheduler telling her that he had left the cash for those flights in an envelope in her desk. “He did not do that,” the indictment asserts.Such inept subterfuge appeared to offend the crime-hunting sensibilities of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “That’s just a clumsy cover-up,” Williams—who has prosecuted corrupt financiers and the music mogul Sean Combs, not to mention the occasional mafioso—told reporters.For all its absurdity, Adams’s alleged behavior, which prosecutors say began after he became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, was no small matter. The indictment noted that Adams’s Turkish contacts were working with the Turkish government, and all were intent on buying influence with an up-and-coming politician. He might, one of the Turks speculated, even become president.As Adams neared the mayoralty, the Turks began to call in their chits, the indictment suggests. In September 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic mayoral primary, a Turkish official said it was Adams’s “turn” to repay Turkey. When an aide relayed the message, Adams replied: “I know.” A Turkish consulate was due to open in a new 36-story office tower in Manhattan, and city fire inspectors had found many problems and would not sign off. Embarrassment loomed for Turkish officials.[Read: An era of shamelessness in American politics]Adams, the indictment stated, put pressure on the fire department. The chief of the department in turn told his subordinates that their jobs were at stake; if they hoped to keep their positions in Adams’s upcoming administration, the office tower must open.Not long after, prosecutors say, a Turkish Airlines manager sought a prime seat on one of Adams’s mayoral transition committees. He warned that if this did not happen, the mayor might find himself sleeping in economy class on his next trip. “Seat number 52 is empty,” the airline official noted. He was promptly appointed to a transition committee.The ridiculous mixed with the pernicious. What’s remarkable was the lack of discretion among people in Adams’s circle, even as they realized that investigators were rummaging about. In June 2021, an aide—apparently Abbasova—was recorded talking with Adams’s contact at Turkish Airlines.“How much does he owe?” the aide asked.“It is very expensive,” the airline manager replied. “I am working on a discount.” A short time later, the airline manager said he would charge the mayor $50. That answer, apparently too low, annoyed the mayoral aide: “$50? What? Quote a proper price.”“His every step is being watched right now,” the Adams aide warned the airline manager. The aide suggested “$1,000 or so,” adding, “Let it be somewhat real.” In the end, Adams paid $2,200 for two round-trip tickets to Istanbul—which, according to prosecutors, were upgraded to business-class tickets worth $15,000.Long before the FBI took his phones, Adams was struggling to gain any traction as mayor. Recent months have been particularly unkind. FBI agents have raided the homes of his police commissioner and schools chancellor and a deputy mayor. Yesterday, his chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, returned from vacation in Japan to find two law-enforcement agencies waiting for her at the airport. New resignations come every week, and this mayor’s power seems more and more like an hourglass nearly run out of sand. For the Adams administration, “Let it be somewhat real” would make a fitting epitaph.

America’s Relentless Hurricane Future

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theatlantic.com

From high above, Hurricane Helene’s swirling clouds seem to have taken a piece of the United States and swallowed it whole. Helene, which made landfall last night as a Category 4 storm, has drenched the Southeast from the tip of Florida all the way up to North Carolina. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm this morning, streets have transformed into rivers, dams are threatening to fail, and more flooding is still to come. At least 22 people have died in the Southeast. Millions are without power. Florida’s Big Bend region, where Helene came ashore, had never faced such a strong hurricane in recorded history.Helene arrived during an Atlantic hurricane season that forecasters had predicted would be unprecedented, thanks to record-warm ocean temperatures proffering extra fuel for storms. Since Hurricane Beryl swept over the Gulf Coast in July, the season has been quieter so far than the most dire expectations—but still unusually intense for Americans living in hurricane country. On average, one or two hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. per season. Helene is the fourth to come ashore on the Gulf Coast this year, which has occurred only a handful of times in the same year since the mid-1800s. Only six storms have ever made landfall on the U.S. mainland in a single season. This season isn’t over yet, so topping that record isn’t out of the realm of possibility.“I wouldn’t make too much of that other than bad luck,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, told me of the season’s landfall count so far. Helene and most other storms this season have emerged in the western part of the Atlantic basin, which has always been more favorable for storm growth and increases the likelihood of landfall, McNoldy said. Climate change isn’t to blame for where a hurricane touches down, or if it does at all. But Helene’s strength is a different kind of bad luck—a variety that we humans inadvertently engineered. Many of the hurricanes that do reach land these days are more intense because of oceans warmed by climate change. Decades ago, Helene might have become a medium-size storm—still destructive, but not a beast. This hurricane is a sign of America’s relentless hurricane seasons to come.For months now, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been abnormally hot, spiking several degrees over the past decade’s average temperatures. “It is simply not within or even close to the range of natural variability to have water temperatures this far above normal in the Gulf, over this wide of an area, to that deep of a depth,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. “When the other ingredients you need to form a hurricane are present, the results are explosive.” In Helene’s case, those other ingredients included the state of hurricane-slowing winds (low) and hurricane-bolstering moisture in the air (plenty), Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, told me. Its massive size was also due to happenstance—a low-pressure system that spun over the Caribbean and Central America a few days before Helene reached the Gulf Coast. Such vortexes are quite common around this time of year, Klotzbach said.These and other factors can make or break a hurricane. If the atmosphere is too dry, or if the wind shear is too intense, storms may never spin their way into Category 1. The problem is that, when atmospheric conditions allow a storm to form, our warming, moistening world is poised to grow them into major threats. “Even 100 years ago, the Gulf would have been plenty warm to support a hurricane of Helene’s strength,” Klotzbach said. But in this century, the chances of this particular outcome are simply higher. Gulf waters may certainly be cooler than average in some years, and perhaps that will be the case next year, which is forecast to be less scorching overall. “But the odds of that go down with continued climate change,” Klotzbach said.Global warming doesn’t dictate whether storms like Beryl and Helene exist, but as Earth continues to heat up, more and more of the disasters that arrive on our shores will bear our fingerprints. “You hope, when you go into these years where the forecasts are really high, that maybe we’ll luck out; maybe we won’t get the big hurricane hits,” Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist in Miami, told me. So far, the opposite situation is unfolding. And we still have two more months to go.When I spoke with Truchelut at the start of the season, as Beryl strengthened in the Caribbean, he invoked the importance of chance in avoiding a nightmare hurricane, warning that “we might not be so lucky next time.” This week, Truchelut’s personal luck held out: Even as parts of Florida experienced a historic storm surge—the deadliest aspect of hurricanes, and one that is expected to worsen as sea levels rise—Tallahassee, where Truchelut is based, seems to have been spared. The more Atlantic storms make landfall as hurricanes, the greater the chances that each American town or city will face disasters shaped by a combination of natural misfortune and human-made blight. In our warming world, it seems that hurricane country won’t be able to catch a break.

How Defense Experts Got Ukraine Wrong

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theatlantic.com

One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confidently predicted that Russia would defeat its smaller neighbor within weeks. American military leaders believed this consensus, to the point that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair reportedly told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian attack. Although those analysts’ gloomy assessments turned out to be wrong, they’ve nevertheless made the United States and its allies overly cautious in assisting Ukraine in its self-defense.Both of us are military historians who have a keen interest in contemporary strategic issues—and who, at the outset of the war, harbored grave doubts about the prevailing analysis of Russian and Ukrainian capabilities. One of us, Eliot, has served in senior positions in the U.S. government; the other, Phillips, has advised the British Ministry of Defense on Ukraine and other matters. In a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, we sought to understand how prominent military analysts had been so badly wrong. Why did they assume that Russia could successfully conduct an exceedingly complex lightning offensive and win a major war in considerably less time than the Wehrmacht needed to overrun France, a smaller country, in 1940? Why did they persistently take the most negative possible view of Ukraine’s abilities and prospects?[Anne Applebaum: Is Congress really going to abandon Ukraine now?]As we reread scores of articles and reports, listened to podcasts, and reviewed op-eds and interviews, we noticed how little uncertainty had been expressed. Russia, prominent analysts had insisted, had completely modernized its military. Its soldiers were no longer chiefly conscripts but professionals. Its military doctrine—particularly its organization of units into so-called battalion tactical groups, which are small infantry battalions reinforced with tanks and artillery—was a stroke of organizational genius. Its soldiers and airmen had been battle-tested in Syria and earlier operations in Ukraine. The two of us pored over the maps, reprinted widely, that showed half a dozen or more red arrows effortlessly piercing Ukraine up to its western border.To the extent that analysts discussed Ukraine in any detail, its citizens were depicted as the demoralized and atomized victims of a corrupt government. The country’s substantial Russophone population was portrayed as largely indifferent to rule from Moscow or Kyiv. Ukraine’s equipment was no match for advanced Russian systems. They had experienced only static warfare in the Donbas and would have no chance against a Russian blitzkrieg. Volodymyr Zelensky was portrayed as an ineffective president. He was a comedy performer, not a wartime leader; his government, intelligence services, and armed forces had been penetrated by Russian spies and saboteurs. Ukrainians might not even put up much of a guerrilla resistance. On top of it all came consistent policy advocacy: assertions that Ukraine was not worth arming or that well-intentioned efforts to do so would merely increase suffering.Two and a half years later, the Russians have taken as many as 600,000 casualties; Ukrainian cities have been shattered but still stand, while Ukrainian drones have hit Moscow. Ukrainians have driven the Black Sea Fleet from its anchorages around Crimea, sunk a third of its ships, and freed up sea lanes for the vital export of Ukrainian agricultural products. Ukrainian forces have in the past few weeks seized an area larger than Los Angeles inside the borders of Russia itself.The same expert analytic community that erred early in the war continues to dominate much of the public and governmental discourse. Many of them persist in downplaying Ukrainian chances and counseling against giving the Ukrainians weapons that they have repeatedly shown themselves able to use with great effect. Some of them still warn of Russian escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, even as one Russian red line after another has faded to pink and vanished.One reason for such larger errors rests on what our friend and colleague Hew Strachan, a British military historian, describes in his foreword to our report as Military Balance analysis. A thick volume produced every year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance is an invaluable resource. It documents important statistics such as the size of each nation’s armed forces, the amount and type of equipment it has available, and the number of men and women it has actively deployed. But those metrics are often far less important in war than immeasurable factors such as organization, discipline, fighting spirit, and quality of command at all levels.The standard analysis of Russia and Ukraine paid almost no attention to the documented corruption of the Russian military, the rote nature of its exercises, and the failure of attempts to professionalize it. Far from having an abundance of well-trained personnel akin to American and British soldiers, Russian forces consisted for the most part of conscripts who had been bribed or coerced into signing up for a second year of duty in the same old abusive system. Many commentators wrongly compared Vladimir Putin’s forces to their Western counterparts, yielding predictions that Russia would employ “shock and awe” against the Ukrainians—as if its air force had experience and organization similar to that of the United States. But the Russian military was not a somewhat smaller and less effective version of America’s. It was a brutal, deeply flawed, and altogether inferior armed force.Many observers also paid scant attention to all that had changed in Ukraine since 2014. This point is crucial: Many Western analysts had been trained as Russia specialists. Implicitly, perhaps subconsciously, they viewed Ukraine the way Russian imperialists did: as adjunct to Russia. In many cases ignorant of Ukrainian history, and even dismissive of its claims to national identity and political cohesion, authors of nearly a quarter of the reports we read did not even attempt to describe Ukraine as anything more than a target set for Russia. Many had never visited Ukraine, or spoken with Westerners—including members of allied training missions who had served there—who might have had different and better-informed views.[Read: Ukraine was biding its time]Possibly most disturbing, the two of us discovered just how small and insular the world of Russian-military analysis was. Think-tank political scientists with narrow specialties had enormous influence in a community whose incentives, unlike those in more vibrant academic disciplines, were for consensus rather than vigorous debate. Many authors made oracular pronouncements and seemed to resent serious questioning by outsiders, even including retired senior military.We do not doubt prominent analysts’ smarts or honest intentions. But we were reminded of how some public-health experts acted in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic: confidently rendering judgments, dismissing doubts about them, excluding other experts—such as child psychologists, on the question of closing or opening schools—with relevant expertise different from their own.Many in the public-health community have since engaged in some introspection. Russia experts have shown little such self-awareness, let alone self-criticism. The same experts continue to appear in the same forums, visit the White House, and brief an intelligence community that largely shares its views.What is troubling is that analytic failures can happen again in any setting where small groups of experts in a particular country exercise outsize influence. Let’s hope analysts of the People’s Liberation Army will take a different approach if tensions with China continue to escalate.“You should never trust experts,” the late-19th-century British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury famously wrote. “If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”The correctives for recent intelligence failures do not include, obviously, chucking expertise altogether. But our report shows why, especially in moments of crisis, governments and the public need to hear from a wide variety of experts, demand relentless commonsense questioning, and, above all, create incentives for open, sharply expressed disagreement on fundamental issues. Expertise is not a form of occult knowledge, and those of us who consume expert opinion should always do so with a strong dose of skepticism. The analytic failure in Ukraine makes a strong case for something so often lacking in military analysis and the academic world more generally: intellectual humility.

The Kleptocracy Club

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theatlantic.com

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsSince the earliest days of the republic, America’s international friendships have shaped domestic politics. And some of those friendships helped America strengthen its democratic principles. So what happens if America’s new friends are autocrats? John Bolton, former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island argue that if America no longer leads the democratic world and instead imports secrecy and kleptocracy from the autocratic world, American citizens will feel even more powerless, apathetic, disengaged, and cynical.This is the fourth episode of Autocracy in America, a five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.The following is a transcript of the episode: John Bolton: It started as we were going out to the NATO headquarters for the summit. He had spent the night before in the ambassador’s residence, as presidents often do. I was coming over from the delegation where we had stayed, and he called me on the car phone and said, You ready to make history today? Anne Applebaum: This is John Bolton, the former national security advisor for President Donald Trump. Bolton: And I said, Pardon me, or something like that. And he said, I think we need to get out. So I said, Let’s talk about it as soon as I get there. And shortly thereafter, Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, came by. It was very clear what Trump wanted to do. And we all rode out to the NATO headquarters. I called Jim Mattis, the defense secretary. I called John Kelly, the chief of staff. I said, It’s all hands on deck. [Music]Peter Pomerantsev: Anne, even the idea that America might leave NATO was in and of itself pretty destabilizing for global security.Applebaum: Right. NATO was created to be a deterrent—to prevent wars, to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe in the past, a Russian invasion now—and it was built around a promise of collective defense, that if one of the allies is attacked, the others will come to their aid.But over the past 75 years, it also came to represent something else. The alliance helped cement the deep economic, cultural, and political ties between the United States, Canada, and Europe. And it worked, mostly because most of the members shared the same values. But as Secretary Bolton told me, the most successful alliance in history almost didn’t make it through the first Trump administration. Bolton: Right up until the moment when Trump spoke at that huge table, in the NATO headquarters, we didn’t know what he was going to do. And I think he was within an inch of withdrawing. I believe that, and I believe that’s still what he wants to do. Applebaum: Trump’s threat implied that he would not honor the promise of collective defense. It also created discomfort because everyone understood that it reflected something deeper: The emergence of a different kind of America, an America that could turn away from its democratic partners and, instead, draw closer to the autocracies—a completely different vision of America’s role in the world.[Music]Pomerantsev: Well, even though it was new to the U.S., it’s a move straight out of the autocratic handbook.Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.Pomerantsev: This isn’t a show about America’s future. There are authoritarian tactics already at work, and we’re showing you where. There’s the rise of conspiracy theories, widening public apathy, politicized investigations, the takeover of the state.Applebaum: And in this episode: America joining the kleptocracy club.Peter, I’ve always thought of the United States as a country that leads an alliance of like-minded democracies. And I never questioned our promise to defend them, in Europe as well as Asia. We have military bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, more recently in Poland for exactly that purpose. But lately, I started thinking about how our alliances and our friendships around the world and our promises to help defend people also help strengthen our democracy here at home.Pomerantsev: Historically, it is kind of true. Britain is one of America’s oldest allies. And one of the countries America has this long, supposedly special relationship with, Britain, has had a big influence in America. The British abolished slavery before America did, for example, and a lot of British abolitionists inspired the rise of American abolitionism. Frederick Douglass spent time in Britain, as did many other abolitionists. And American and British campaigners against slavery supported one another. I think that mattered.Applebaum: Yeah, we also forget how, even more recently, American thinking has been affected by our awareness of our international role and reputation. Consider what the Justice Department was saying at the Supreme Court during the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.They filed a brief arguing that desegregation was in the U.S. interest, not simply for domestic reasons and not simply because it was right, but also because racist laws prompted, and I quote, “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”Pomerantsev: That’s quite a phrase: “our devotion to the democratic faith.”Applebaum: That’s what I mean by the influence of our allies. America put democracy at the center of its foreign policy, but it was also a part of our national identity: This is who we were. This is who we want to be. This is how we want to be seen. These are the countries that we have the closest relationships with. Other democracies, other republics—they can be constitutional monarchies. They can have parliaments instead of congresses. But these are our friends, and this is our world. And I think Americans felt it was important to remain in that group, and that had consequences for domestic policy as well.Pomerantsev: But just as there is a network of countries who push each other towards ever more democracy, there’s also a network of autocratic countries whose leaders are kleptocrats, essentially. They’re governments who share the same interest in stealing and hiding money—Applebaum: —and oppressing or arresting anybody who tries to stop them.Pomerantsev: Right. I mean, they aren’t connected to one another by ideology. They’re not all—I don’t know—theocracies or communist regimes, but they are united in their need to undermine the rule of law and repress their own people, as a result of wanting to steal money.Applebaum: Absolutely, and countries have moved from one camp to the other in the past. Look at Venezuela.[Music] Leopoldo López: Chavez created close relations with Putin. Applebaum: Leopoldo López is a former mayor of Chacao, a municipality of Caracas. He saw things begin to change there in 2006. López: It started when Chavez decided to change the assault rifle of the armed forces of Venezuela from a Belgian FAL rifle to an AK-103 and changing the F-16s [aircrafts] to the Sukhois. Applebaum: Venezuela was once one of the most successful democracies in our hemisphere. It was the richest country in South America and on a trajectory to become even richer. But when Hugo Chavez was elected leader—democratically elected—he went on to slowly dismantle Venezuelan courts, to break up the media, and, eventually, to undermine the economy. And Venezuela aligned itself with the group that I like to call Autocracy, Inc., or Autocracy, Incorporated. López: The level of investment that went from Venezuela to buy Russian equipment was huge—billions of dollars have been reported in the arms— Applebaum: And they were buying Russian arms because the Americans wouldn’t sell them arms, or others? López: Well, it started because of that, but then it just became more comfortable. And then Chavez invested billions of dollars in the air defense. [Music]Applebaum: López not only witnessed the decline of Venezuela, the end of Venezuelan democracy, but as a long-time prominent leader of the Venezuelan opposition, he experienced it as a political prisoner in solitary confinement—as a leader behind bars. He now lives in exile, where he writes and speaks about the rise of the modern autocratic, kleptocratic network and also about how Venezuela became part of it. He told me that Russia wasn’t the only country that Chávez made deals with. López: The Chinese came in with investments, and this is the practice of China in Africa. It’s very well known what they do in terms of locking in investments, that then they basically take ownership of critical infrastructure. And that happened in Venezuela. Applebaum: Peter, López is talking about billions of dollars pouring into Venezuela, but although it was described as a Chinese investment in the country, it didn’t ever really translate into improving the well-being of the Venezuelan people. López: Just to give you an example, one of the flagship projects of this relation between China and Venezuela was a train system. Applebaum: Yes, that train system, which was only partially built and even now, 15 years later, reportedly less than 1 percent operational— López: But billions of dollars were channeled into this. Then billions of dollars went into programs for housing of the Venezuelan people, and that’s nowhere to be seen. Applebaum: It all just vanished. López: It all just vanished. The Chinese don’t ask questions. Basically, it’s about using these investment engagements to create tighter relations and to lock in governments. So that’s Russia. That’s China. And then there’s Iran. [Music]Applebaum: Peter, Iran came for business agreements, for economic exchanges, even some involving nuclear energy. And Iran wasn’t just funding Venezuela. The Venezuelans also began helping the Iranians. López: They were giving Venezuelan passports to Iranian nationals, to people that ended up being members of Hezbollah. Applebaum: If America continues down a similar path, away from democracy and towards something different, what does that mean for countries like Venezuela? López: Well, that would mean—I wouldn’t say the end. But that would mean that the possibilities to transition for democracy in Venezuela would be greatly affected, without a doubt. NBC News journalist: Thousands protesting Venezuela’s contested election, the demand for freedom and democracy playing out in cities throughout Venezuela as well, condemning leader Nicolás Maduro, who insists he won re-election over opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia. [Crowd chanting] López: People hate Maduro. Applebaum: Venezuelans voted in huge numbers against Maduro in July’s elections, despite his enormous campaign of propaganda and harassment. When López and I talked, I had asked him how Maduro managed to stay in power for so long. López: Even though there are many ways to answer this question, I truly believe that the main reason why Maduro is still in power is because of the support he gets from Russia, from China, from Iran, from Cuba. So the struggle for a transition to democracy in Venezuela, as much as we would like it to be a sovereign issue, it’s not true, because we are fighting a global fight. We are fighting really against Maduro but also against Putin, against Xi Jinping, against the mullahs from Iran, because they are the lifeline of Maduro. Srdja Popovic: We figured out that authoritarianism, dictatorships are very different animals than they were 20, 30 years ago. Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Srdja Popovic. He’s an activist. He helped overthrow Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000.Hearing you speak with Leopoldo López and his descriptions of the changes in Venezuela over the last 20 years made me think of the work Popovic has been doing. He studies how dictators function in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. And, Anne, Popovic’s research supports the thesis of your new book Autocracy, Inc., and how you’ve described this club of autocratic leaders. Popovic: Studying the field, working with people from authoritarian countries—20, 30 years ago, they would always require some kind of ideological component. Whether you’re talking about the Soviet Union, whether you’re talking about the Nazi Germany, it’s a different ideology that’s in the core of it. Modern autocracies—take Russia, for example—they look like corporations. You have the boss of the corporation, and then you have, in Russia’s case, tycoons that own all the companies. And then you have tools of maintaining the corporation, like military, media. These are all the tools. Basically, part of being incorporated means that you are cooperating with other parts and legs in the corporation. [Music]Pomerantsev: So what Popovich describes here, Anne, is an authoritarian network that functions as a corrupt corporation, basically.It’s funny—I saw this for myself when I was living in Moscow. It was in the mid-2000s. I remember walking down the high street, down Tverskaya, and it was full of these glitzy shops everywhere, and everybody was dressed in a very glamorous way, and the city was sort of bankers and lawyers, like the financial district of many Western capitals.And every couple of meters, there was a bank. And I was like, What on earth are all these banks doing? I remember going into one and trying to open, like, a personal checking account. And they just stared at me like an absolute moron, like, Why would you open a personal account in this bank?So I started asking people that I knew, Russians, What are all these banks doing? And they just started laughing, going, Well, they’re not banks the way you understand banks; they’re money-laundering vehicles. They’re vehicles tied to this minister or that businessman, and they open loads of these banks, or pseudo banks, and move their money through them and then move them abroad.But they were everywhere. This wasn’t like one little money-laundering exercise. You know, the whole city was basically one big money-laundering exercise. And I remember thinking, I don’t understand the model of this regime very well at all.Applebaum: And you didn’t understand it for a reason. You didn’t understand it because it was deliberately made incredibly complicated. Ordinary citizens, ordinary people aren’t meant to know where the money is or what the bank does. They’re not meant to have any influence or understanding or knowledge of politics at all because the essence of modern autocracy and modern dictatorships is secrecy.You know, they have ways of stealing and extracting money. They hide the money in different places around the world: It’s done through anonymous companies. It’s done through shell companies that are able to move money very quickly from one jurisdiction to another—so from Cyprus to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas to Delaware and back again in a blink of an eye.It’s very, very difficult to trace this money. It’s very hard for civil servants or police officers or white-collar-crime investigators to find it. It’s very, very hard for journalists to find it and understand it. And you aren’t meant to know, and you’re meant to be confused by it.[Music]Pomerantsev: Up until now, Anne, we’ve been talking about how these things work in other places, but it’s here in the U.S., too.Applebaum: Yes. Dark money, hidden wealth, untransparent purchases, anonymous companies—these aren’t just things that exist abroad on palm-fringed Caribbean islands or in some distant dictatorship.More on that after the break.[Break]Applebaum: Peter, when you were talking about the empty banks that weren’t really banks, I immediately thought: American real estate.[Music]Applebaum: Until recently, realtors here were not required to closely examine the source of the funds being used to buy property, and it was perfectly legal for anonymous companies to acquire real estate providing no information about the owners, at all. And that’s why the sector became a magnet for foreign wealth. Casey Michel: There has never been a figure in American political history quite like Trump that opened up himself, his administration, his businesses to so much foreign access, so much foreign lobbying, so much foreign wealth. We’ve really just scratched the surface. Much of that is because Trump rose from one of the key industries in modern kleptocracy: the real-estate—and especially the luxury real-estate—sector. Applebaum: Casey Michel is the author of American Kleptocracy. Michel: I have no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump as president would task his administration with rolling back all of the progress we have seen in the last few years, not only in terms of the transparency requirements for shell companies that we’ve finally seen imposed. I have no doubt that he would say, Do not enforce this legislation whatsoever. But that is just one element. If he is back in the White House and aligns himself more fully with Russia, what we’re going to end up seeing is the trajectory that Russia has undergone maybe 20, 25, 30 years ago or perhaps what countries like Hungary have undergone 10, 15 years ago. Applebaum: Peter, that’s how modern autocracies begin: not with a coup d’état but by the slow emergence of a secretive elite who are able to control financial resources and who can then hide their wealth, take it out of the country, do what they want with it without anybody else knowing.Pomerantsev: They’re not limited by the same forces that you and I are.Applebaum: Yeah, a lot of journalists have tried to come up with names for it— Moneyland or Kleptopia. You know, this alternate world in which the normal rules that apply to the economy that you and I live in don’t apply to them.Pomerantsev: I think we underestimate how much that degrades democracy. Sheldon Whitehouse: Secrecy and democracy are antithetical. Applebaum: Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee. Whitehouse: If American citizens aren’t allowed to understand who’s who on the political playing field—who’s playing for what team, who they really are, who they’re representing—you have disabled perhaps the most fundamental foundation of democracy. Steve Scully, host of Washington Journal: Let’s get right to the issue of super PACs and the direct result of the Citizens United case, in 2010. Whitehouse: I first ran for the Senate back in 2006, and I got elected and sworn in in 2007. There were no such things as super PACs then. They didn’t exist. This is a new beast that is stalking America’s political landscape, and it has no reason for being, except that you can use the super PAC to hide who you are giving money. The super PAC only has to report the last screen through which the money came, not the actual donor, and you can dump unlimited amounts of money into politics through it. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of Center for Responsive Politics: Groups that derive their funds from secret sources have spent more than $21 million so far, compared with just $6 million at this point in 2012. Amna Nawaz, anchor for PBS NewsHour: By all accounts, the 2020 election will be the most expensive in history. It’s part of a trend that sees each election more costly than the last. William Brangham, anchor for PBS NewsHour: The 2024 campaign was already shaping up to be the most expensive election of all time. But now several high-profile billionaires are dumping massive amounts of money into the presidential race. Whitehouse: It shifts power to those big special interests and away from ordinary voters. It shifts the attention of Congress away from ordinary voters and to those big special interests, who can deliver that kind of money secretly. [Music] Pomerantsev: When you live in this world where you don’t know which money, which powerful figures are behind which political decisions that are being made around you and influence you—when it’s all sort of wrapped in this sort of mist—then you feel kind of helpless. You feel you have no agency. You feel you don’t matter. You feel as if you have no say. Whitehouse: Knowing who’s speaking to you is a pretty important proposition in a democracy. [Music] Applebaum: And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse. Whitehouse: There’s a whole infrastructure that creates this political secrecy right now. So, there is a huge transformation that has taken place, that is represented by an entirely new bestiary of corporate entities designed to corrupt American elections. That is new, and that is awful, and we should not get used to it. Applebaum: And, Peter, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that what is, in effect, a new political system has also given rise to a new kind of politician. Bolton: I think he has trouble distinguishing between the country’s national interest and his own personal interest. He sees them as fundamentally the same thing. Applebaum: That’s John Bolton again talking about his old boss Donald Trump. Bolton: So if he could have, for example, with Xi Jinping: If he could have good personal relations by giving away something that offended Xi but had been decided because it was thought to be in our interest, he would do it. So in one conversation, a phone conversation with Xi Jinping—and I listened in to all those; that’s one of the national security advisor’s jobs, is to be in all those conversations—Xi complained about sanctions that Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, had imposed on Chinese telecommunications. And I might say: for very good and sufficient reason. And so in the course of the conversation, Trump said, I’m going to lift the sanctions. And he tweeted about it the next day, saying it would help maintain Chinese jobs, as if that’s the job of the American president. [Music]Applebaum: Trump has been a sympathetic ear for complaints like these. He’s seemed keen to be friends, for example, with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Un, as we know, regularly holds military exercises designed to intimidate South Korea. The U.S. leads joint exercises with South Korea to communicate power and military readiness back at North Korea. But when Kim Jong Un allegedly expressed frustration over those exercises— Bolton: Trump said, You know, you’re right. And besides, they’re expensive. I’m going to cancel them. Just said it right there. None of us knew what he was going to say it. Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, called me after he heard about this on the radio back in Washington and said, What did you do? Why didn’t you tell me? I said, Jim, I would have been happy to tell you if I had known what he was going to do. [Music] Pomerantsev: Anne, the thing is, when governments start to act like these self-interested corporations, it doesn’t just make these governments less efficient and less positive for the people; it also leads to a fundamentally different type of government.I mean, think about it: Once you have people running the country who use it to enrich themselves, then they don’t want to let go of that resource ever again. And they find ways to make sure they, essentially, never leave power. They rig elections. They curtail rights of anyone who wants to challenge them. They want to repress people who ask too many questions about where their money comes from. And then they institute a system of surveillance and control to make sure that repression succeeds. Daria Kaleniuk: So kleptocracy is when the state is being owned by a small group of people. Like, in Russia, there is kleptocracy, which actually turned into the complete totalitarianism. Pomerantsev: Daria Kaleniuk is the executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-corruption Action Centre. Kaleniuk: And the same small amount of people are in the political control of the state. That is extremely dangerous. That means that kleptocracy is actually the bridge between democracy, authoritarianism—towards the totalitarianism. And this is what has happened in Russia. Applebaum: Peter, what Kaleniuk is describing in Russia, it sounds like exactly the same thing that Ukrainians were fighting against in their own country over the last decade.Pomerantsev: Exactly. At that time, Ukraine was also starting to head in the direction of kleptocracy. Kaleniuk: And this is what has happened in 2013. Eleven years ago, there was a revolution of dignity in Ukraine, where Ukrainians were pissed off—our president controlling all the natural resources, controlling all law enforcement, all the judiciary, and we were pissed off him being supported by Russia. [Protest sounds] Pomerantsev: Anne, as you know, the revolution became deadly. About 100 people died—some of them from corrupt, Russian-allied police, who opened fire on protestors. But the revolution of dignity succeeded.[Music] Kaleniuk: We want to have freedom. We want to have dignity. We want to have trust in our institutions. We want to be able to go to the court and protect our rights. We want to have justice. Applebaum: So for Kaleniuk, fighting for democracy and fighting against corruption was the same thing?Pomerantsev: For her and for many in Ukraine. Kaleniuk: Absolutely. And it’s still the case. Pomerantsev: So, Anne, fast-forward to the start of the war: In revenge, and in its desire to take away Ukraine’s freedom and impose a corrupt, puppet government controlled by Moscow, Russia invaded, first in 2014 and then at an even grander scale in February 2022. I’m not sure Ukraine would have been able to survive these invasions without America’s help.And so this is the central question and one I asked Kaleniuk: What happens if America decides it no longer cares about fighting corrupt, authoritarian regimes? Kaleniuk: I want to believe that America has strong institutions and American democracy will survive any shake-up. But if it was just up to American people, that would be very easy. However, if America is exposed to all these external influences of authoritarian systems and dirty money, that is much harder because sometimes you don’t understand, actually, who is doing some operations on your ground, who is manipulating you. And that is a very dangerous situation. Pomerantsev: What would it mean to you if America switched sides? What if America was part of an alliance of kleptocracies? Kaleniuk: Well, if there is alliance between America and Russia, between America and China, there will be end of democracy in America. It’s as simple as that. Applebaum: Peter, Ukraine’s two-decades-long flirtation with grand-scale corruption left it really vulnerable. Many of the country’s elite businessmen were interested in themselves and their profits, and not the country. And that opened the door both for the hollowing out of the institutions of government and of the state but also the weakening of the military and the security apparatus. And that was what made Ukraine so vulnerable to Russian invasion.Pomerantsev: But as you know, Ukraine is fighting heroically against this invasion. I sort of feel that Ukraine is fighting and dying for ideals that Americans seem ready—in some way—to walk away from.There’s two interlinked stories here. There’s Ukraine’s battle for freedom, for democracy, and against strategic corruption. And you have America, which, for the moment, is still supporting Ukraine in this cause but is also sort of fighting the temptation to become more corrupt and less democratic. And if America loses that battle inside, then Ukraine and, perhaps, other vulnerable democracies would likely lose their battles as well.[Music]Applebaum: Autocracy in America is hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and me, Anne Applebaum. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak fact-check by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.Applebaum: Peter, the things the Ukrainians have done to fight back, to preserve their freedom, they’re evidence of the work it takes to build a democracy and to keep it.Pomerantsev: But in America, freedom is actually a double-edged sword. Jefferson Cowie: My nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom. Pomerantsev: Next time on Autocracy in America: how “freedom” can be the enemy of democracy.Applebaum: We’ll be back with more on that next week.