US President Donald Trump renewed his criticism of Ukraine and its approach to his push for a peace deal.

Ukraine has no “cards” according to President Donald Trump, while Russia has many. Vice President J. D. Vance has asserted that superior Russian firepower and manpower mean that the war can end only in a Russian victory. Other supposedly realistic commentators agree, arguing that Russia’s advantages are insurmountable.

As military historians, we think this a misreading not only of what is happening on the ground, but of how wars unfold—and, in particular, of the difference between attritional campaigns and those built on maneuver. The Luftwaffe and the German submarine force during World War II, to take just two examples, were defeated not by a single blow, but by a technologically advanced, tactically and operationally sophisticated approach that rendered those organizations, large as they were, unable to function effectively. In the same vein, the advances of the German army in the spring of 1918 concealed the underlying weakness in that military produced by attrition, which ultimately doomed the Kaiser’s army and the regime for which it fought.

We have been here before. Prior to the war, the intelligence community, political leaders, and many students of the Russian military concluded that Russia would easily overrun Ukraine militarily—that Kyiv would fall in a few days and that Ukraine itself could be conquered in weeks. We should consider that failure as we assess the certainty of Vance and those who think like him.

[Graeme Wood: Russia is not winning]

Wars are rarely won so decisively, because attrition is not only a condition of war, but a strategic choice. Smaller powers can, through the intelligent application of attrition, succeed in advancing their own goals. This is particularly true if, like Ukraine, they can exploit technological change and get the most from outside support and allies. Vietnam was outgunned by the United States, as the American colonies were once outgunned by the British empire. Iranian forces outnumbered those of Iraq during a long and brutal war in the 1980s, and lost nonetheless.

The pessimistic analysis has not paid nearly enough attention to the weak underpinnings of Russian military power. Russia’s economy, as often noted, is struggling with interest rates that have topped 20 percent amid soaring inflation, and with manpower shortages made critical by the war. Its condition is dire, as one study noted, partly because the military budget amounts to 40 percent of all public spending, and partly because oil revenue is taking a hit from lower prices, Ukrainian attacks, and tightening sanctions.

Russian weakness is particularly visible in the army. One report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that in 2024 alone, the Russians lost 1,400 main battle tanks, and more than 3,700 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. At the same time, Russian production of such vehicles, including refurbished units, totaled just 4,300, not enough to make up for its losses. In desperation, Russia has turned to restoring its oldest and least effective combat vehicles, many of Soviet vintage. One recent study by Chatham House asserts that the Russian military-industrial complex is “ill adapted to deal with the effects of a prolonged war against Ukraine or to achieve a sustainable future in terms of production, innovation and development.”

The same holds true for Russian manpower. The number of soldiers that the Russians were able to maintain at the front seemed to peak in the spring and summer of 2024, above 650,000. By the end of the year, it had fallen closer to 600,000, despite the extraordinary bonuses that the Russian government offers new recruits, amounting to about two and a half times the average annual Russian salary in 2023.

Russian casualties have mounted steadily. According to the British Ministry of Defence, in December 2022, they stood at roughly 500 a day; in December 2023, at just under 1,000; and in December 2024, at more than 1,500. In 2024 alone, Russia suffered nearly 430,000 killed and wounded, compared with just over 250,000 in 2023.

North Korean reinforcements have attracted attention in the press, but these troops, numbering in the tens of thousands at most, cannot make up for the fundamental deficiencies in Russian manpower. Moreover, the high rates of attrition that the Russians have suffered—roughly the same as the number of personnel mobilized each year—mean that the Russian military has not been able to reconstitute. It is more and more a primitive force, poorly trained and led, driven forward by fear alone.

The pause in American aid last year hurt Ukraine. Now, however, the stockpiles seem to be in better shape for most types of weaponry. Ukraine’s own production has reached impressive levels in certain vital categories, particularly but not exclusively unmanned aerial vehicles. In 2024, the Ukrainian military received over 1.2 million different Ukrainian-produced UAVs—two orders of magnitude more than Ukraine possessed, let alone produced, at the beginning of the war. Ukrainian production rates are still rising; it aims to produce 4 million drones this year alone.

UAVs are crucial because they have replaced artillery as the most effective system on the field of battle. By one estimate, UAVs now cause 70 percent of Russian losses. Ukraine’s robust defense industry is innovating more quickly and effectively than that of Russia and its allies.

Attritional wars take place on many fronts. For example, it is true that Russia has increased its attacks on Ukrainian industry and civilian targets, as well as energy infrastructure. Ukrainian air defenses, however, have been remarkably successful in neutralizing the large majority of those attacks, which is why Ukrainian civilian casualties have been decreasing. Ukraine has, moreover, been on the offensive as well. It has produced some 6,000 longer-range heavy UAVs, which it has used to attack deep into Russia, decreasing Russian oil production. Remarkably, Ukraine appears to be matching the rate at which Russia is producing its own similar drone, the Shahed, which is being built on license from Iran.

Despite American reluctance to provide further aid, Ukraine’s European friends can make a significant difference even though they cannot simply replace what the U.S. has been providing. They do not, for instance, make the advanced Patriot anti-missile system, although they have other capable air-defense weapons. However, Europe can help Ukraine press ahead with more UAV production; Europeans have the capacity to manufacture engines for long-range UAVs, for example, at a far higher rate.

And some European systems not yet provided—such as the German Taurus cruise missile—could increase Ukraine’s advantages. Germany has so far denied Ukraine the Taurus, a far more effective system with greater range and a heavier payload than the Franco-British Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles. The new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has already said he would send Taurus missiles to Ukraine if the Russians did not relent. With these systems, Ukraine could add to the considerable damage it has already done within Russia.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Attritional campaigns depend on an industrial base. The European Union alone has a GDP about 10 times that of Russia, and if you add the U.K. and Norway to that calculation, the imbalance in favor of Ukraine grows even larger. As it is, Europe and the United States have provided Ukraine with roughly equal amounts of its military resources (30 percent each), while Ukraine has produced 40 percent on its own.

The U.S. has provided more than just military material—it has also furnished intelligence and access to Starlink internet services. None of this can quickly be made up, although again, one should not underestimate the depth of technological and intelligence resources available from Europe and sympathetic Asian countries, should they mobilize. The United States has stinted its aid until now, but Ukraine itself and its European allies are filling the gaps.

Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse, and it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is losing the attritional war, which makes the Trump administration’s decisions particularly shortsighted and tragic. Ukraine has plenty of cards, even if Trump and Vance cannot see them. If America’s leaders could only bring themselves to put pressure on Russia comparable to what they put on Ukraine, they could help Ukraine achieve something much more like a win.

Many far-right MPs in Europe are trying to stay in Donald Trump's good books and avoid criticising him, all while retaining credibility at home.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

The fundamental challenge of military leadership lies in creating cohesive teams that can work together in an environment of mortal risk and, when called upon to do so, use lethal force themselves. The task is challenging, to say the least, and presents the dangerous temptation of taking a shortcut to such team building by denigrating those not on the team. The most obvious means of such othering involves using exclusionary criteria—race and gender, but also less visible traits such as sexual orientation—to promote unit cohesion. Although this makes team cohesion and battlefield effectiveness easier to achieve in the short term, professional soldiers resist this approach because its negative focus on identity ahead of standards ultimately results in undisciplined and unreliable forces.

Hegseth has long made clear his opposition to women serving in combat roles, but no argument for excluding them for an inability to meet military standards is sustainable. Women have proved, over 20-plus years of conflicts, that not only can they make the grade, but they are essential to the U.S. military’s combat capability. The undeniability of this fact is presumably why Hegseth has largely backtracked on his opposition.

Instead, he’s chosen to demean the much smaller population of transgender service members. Although they have amply demonstrated honorable service and the ability to meet military standards, he has repeatedly denigrated them and is now enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order that denies transgender service members’ capacity to be “honorable, truthful, and disciplined.” A more limited version of the order, simply restricting accommodations for transgender service members, was an option, but this blew straight past that. Instead, their unjustified, wholesale exclusion from the military is now another example of othering by the Hegseth-led Department of Defense.

The language of the order—that transgender identity is a “falsehood” that contradicts “biological truth”—sets the tone for seeing these service members as less than human. It mimics the worst way Americans have sometimes talked about our enemies in war. This type of dehumanization may help soldiers in the act of killing, but it also opens the door for unrestrained violence and war crimes.

Hegseth’s penchant for othering is not limited to women or the transgender population. In remarks and books, he has also made clear his disdain for Muslims. He went so far as to say that “Islam itself is not compatible with Western forms of government.” How offensive such a record of statements might be to the thousands of American Muslims serving in the U.S. military seems not to have occurred to the new defense secretary.

[Tom Nichols: Who’s running the defense department?]

Hegseth’s willingness to find enemies within is of a piece with his firing of senior military lawyers and his overall approach to war. During his time as a TV host, Hegseth relentlessly lobbied for those accused or convicted of war crimes to be pardoned. One case involved Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who, in his first three days of leading a platoon in Afghanistan, repeatedly filed false reports to his leaders, threatened innocent Afghan civilians with violence, and gave an order to kill two unarmed Afghan men. The soldiers under his command had been operating in the area for months, and many had deployed several times. They were, to use a term of Hegseth’s, “dusty boots” soldiers in every sense. They themselves were disgusted by Lorance’s conduct and reported it up their chain of command; 14 of them later testified against Lorance at his court martial. In Hegseth’s portrayal, however, this outcome was somehow an example of military lawyers exerting undue influence on the battlefield and constraining service members in a way that put them at risk.

Lorance was convicted of murder charges in 2012, and served six years in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2019—something that Hegseth and his Fox News colleagues had clamored for. Lorance’s war crimes were precisely the result of the dehumanization of enemies—without and within—that the U.S. military has long sought to discourage. It is the opposite of the disciplined toughness that our uniformed leadership has historically cultivated; it is also wildly ineffective. The soldiers who had to operate in the aftermath of Lorance’s actions described an environment in which they had completely lost the trust of local Afghans. As a consequence, they faced an embittered population more willing to support the Taliban.

For Hegseth and Parlatore, the nuances of assessing who is friend or foe on the basis of how they act appear to be an unwelcome distraction. Crude binaries based on identity are so much simpler—whether they determine who is permitted to serve in our armed forces or who is a potential target for killing. Hegseth likes to emphasize military standards, yet shows a reckless disregard for the very benchmarks of discipline and combat effectiveness that have guided the American military for generations. This culture warrior’s identity politics will ultimately make the U.S. military weaker.

Just hours before the White House Crypto Summit, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a separate stockpile of other digital assets. The news plunged Bitcoin to $84,000 Thursday evening, however, as the federal government isn’t purchasing new bitcoins under the…

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Financial Times US Editor Ed Luce argues that President Donald Trump is declaring a ‘global power vacuum’.

“I’m avoiding getting too high on the good days and too low on the bad days,” Mitch McConnell was telling me.

“Is today a good day or a bad day?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” was all McConnell said, chuckling.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to arrive at the Capitol to address Congress. Earlier that day, the White House had imposed 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico and a new 10 percent tariff on all imports from China. The stock market was cratering. Trump seemed to be systematically dismantling the federal government and methodically abandoning Ukraine and freaking out scores of leaders and citizens from Kyiv to Panama City to Ottawa to Nuuk to, perhaps most of all, Washington. And McConnell was sitting in his Senate office, wondering what fresh horrors Trump had in store for the evening.

Or at least that’s what I imagined McConnell was wondering. He’s not one to offer up much confirmation about what he’s wondering.

It seemed like a logical assumption, given the outlying position the senator from Kentucky occupies in today’s GOP. Few Washington species are more isolated these days than elected Republicans who despise Trump and are very much despised back by Trump. Not to mention a lame-duck Republican—until recently one of the most powerful figures in his party—who has been a steadfast advocate for free-trade policies and has vowed to devote his remaining time in office to national security, specifically fighting for the causes of Ukraine and NATO and against Russia.

The night before, Trump had announced a halt to all aid to Ukraine. A few days earlier, he and Vice President J. D. Vance had engaged in a televised ruckus with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Virtually no Senate Republicans had raised objections to any of this, with a few exceptions.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

McConnell had not yet weighed in, either. And I felt fortunate to be granted an audience, considering how rarely he gives interviews. I have been writing about politics in Washington for more than two decades and had never spoken to him, although I’ve tried many times in various Capitol corridors. “For the last couple of decades, I’ve spent my time smiling and walking on by,” McConnell told me, summarizing his general approach to hallway press relations. Occasionally, McConnell might blurt out a “Good try” in response to a shouted question, but only if he’s feeling expansive.

I was also eager to speak with him because many people around McConnell have described him as feeling “liberated” now that he has stepped down as head of the Senate Republican Conference after 18 years. This sense of newfound freedom seemed like it would be even greater after McConnell announced on February 20—his 83rd birthday—that he would not run for an eighth term in the Senate in 2026. I wasn’t expecting McConnell to start wearing shorts and a hoodie around the Capitol like his Democratic colleague Senator John Fetterman, but I was curious to ask the former leader what being “liberated” means for him, especially in light of recent events.

“Well, an example is the Washington Post op-ed today,” McConnell told me. He had just published an article about how a government shutdown could be costly to defense spending in the long run: “Extending the 2024 budget through the end of FY2025 would mean the Defense Department would lack the funds to make payroll for 2 million service members,” McConnell wrote. “Especially after accounting for the additional 10 percent junior enlisted pay raise authorized last year.”

The op-ed was not riveting. But I mention it because McConnell did—three times—as an example of his current state of liberation.

I asked McConnell what he thought about that Trump-Vance-Zelensky scene in the Oval Office last week. “Here is the way I look at this whole episode,” McConnell told me. “What we need to avoid at the end is a headline that says ‘Russia Won, America Lost.’”

A sphinxlike response. Or perhaps a nonresponse.

“With this particular president, we know we’re going to have a lot of drama along the way,” McConnell continued. “The really important thing is, how does it end?”

I took another crack at getting his reaction to the Oval Office episode. Trump had actually paused U.S. funding to Ukraine—a massively tangible action, much more than just drama. I also mentioned that a few of his Republican colleagues—most pointedly, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—had been critical of Trump’s recent posture on Ukraine and Russia. Did he have any reaction to the past few days?

“Well, at risk of repeating myself,” McConnell said, before repeating himself: “I’m trying not to overreact to every moment of drama that went on.” When I pressed him on Trump’s funding pause, McConnell said he hoped it would be “just a temporary thing.”

How did McConnell think things were going generally in these first months of the second Trump administration? “Better than expected?” I asked. “Worse than expected?”

“Well, I’ve already answered that twice.”

I tried a different tack. Many people around Washington, of both parties, sound quite concerned about what appears to be happening in the second Trump administration so far. What was his level of concern or despair or whatever the word is?

“I’m not going to answer that,” McConnell replied.

“Okay.”

“You’ll get the answer to it in pieces.”

“How should we look?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, take the Washington Post editorial today …”

The afternoon I met with him, McConnell told me he didn’t know whether he would attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday evening. “I’m sure gonna listen to every word,” he said of the speech. “It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m physically present.” He wound up watching from home.

The senator’s health appears to be in some decline. Over the past few years, he has suffered a number of distressing public freeze-ups and falls. McConnell is currently using a wheelchair; his staff has in some cases attributed his recent infirmities to the lingering effects of childhood polio. His face is gaunt, his voice pinched and his words at times hard to decipher. He has suffered hearing loss.

When spotted around the Senate these days, McConnell cuts a delicate figure. He is also a delicate topic among his Republican colleagues.

[Read: Mitch McConnell’s worst political miscalculation]

Most of them once granted McConnell their unambiguous allegiance. He was first elected to head the Senate Republican Conference in 2007 and went on to become the longest-tenured party leader in the history of the chamber. But Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP has made it impossible for McConnell to serve in any meaningful leadership role these days.

The mutual loathing between the two men has been richly catalogued. A quick sampler: Trump has called McConnell “dour, sullen, and unsmiling”; a “broken down hack politician”; and a “disaster,” among other things. (He also referred to McConnell’s Taipei-born spouse, the former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”)

In turn, McConnell has described Trump as a “despicable human being,” “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” and someone who “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have.” In a 60 Minutes interview last month, host Lesley Stahl read McConnell some other choice brickbats McConnell had reserved for Trump (“nasty,” “sleazeball,” “not very smart”), which the senator hilariously tried to downplay as “private comments.”

“Well, they’re in your biography,” Stahl pointed out, referring to a recent volume by the longtime Washington journalist Mike Tackett, who drew on about 50 hours of on-the-record interviews with his subject, as well as exclusive access to a series of private oral histories that McConnell had recorded.

“Yeah,” McConnell acknowledged, not disputing any of the descriptions.

It did not matter that McConnell was instrumental in helping Trump achieve his 2017 tax overhaul and his appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court. Or that McConnell, despite saying that Trump’s conduct on January 6 showed him to be unfit for office, voted to acquit the outgoing president after he was impeached a second time. Or that McConnell, in his leadership role, remained a fierce partisan and steadfast in his support for Republican candidates, including Trump, whom he supported again after he became the Republican nominee in 2024.

The tumultuous political alliance between McConnell and Trump clearly could not be salvaged, let alone repeated. McConnell announced early last year—several months before the November election—that he would step down as Republican leader at the start of the current Congress in January.

Since Trump’s reelection, McConnell has come to occupy an uncharacteristic role inside his caucus: The old horse has turned into something of a maverick. His foreign-policy views in support of strong, Reagan-style engagement abroad—especially against authoritarian regimes—run counter to the Trump-styple isolationism that dominates much of today’s GOP. “I picked this issue because it’s the most important thing,” he told me of his focus on national security. “Because we’re talking about world peace here.”

He added that Russia’s “horrible invasion” of Ukraine has had a unifying effect on the world’s democracies. “If you look at who’s on the other side—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s proxies—I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell told me. Yes, I said, although the more pertinent question seemed to be whose side a Donald Trump–led America was on. Did he worry that things might be moving in the wrong direction?

“That’s the doomsday scenario, right?” McConnell said. “I tend to come down on the optimistic side.” He did not say why, other than to reiterate that “there is a lot of drama” and “in the end, it depends on how it works out.”

Freed from the constraints that leadership imposed on him, McConnell did vote against more of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—than any other Senate Republican. Would he have taken the Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard votes if he were still leader? “Probably not,” McConnell told me.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

“When he says that he feels liberated, he is no longer responsible for advancing the administration’s priorities or a strictly Republican agenda,” Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Republican of Maine, told me. Collins, who counts herself as a strong McConnell ally, said that the majority of her caucus respects the former leader, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. “There are a handful of Republican senators who are polite in our conference meetings that trash him online or on television or podcasts,” Collins said, adding that this is “a real problem.” To praise McConnell too fulsomely in public runs the risk of annoying Trump, who tends to see even the most tepid praise of an enemy as disloyal.

In the days after McConnell announced that he would not seek reelection, I surveyed a handful of other Republican senators about his awkward position inside the caucus that he had led for so long. Their responses comprised a hodgepodge of restrained respect, resigned pity, and laughable obfuscation.

“Look, I respect the leader, I do, as I said in a tweet that got all kinds of retweets,” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has shown more-than-occasional disrespect for McConnell over the years, told me. As he waited for an elevator just off the Senate floor last week, Johnson noted that McConnell “absolutely reveres and respects” the institution of the Senate. “It’s sad that he’s had these falls. There’s nothing good about getting old,” he added.

A few minutes later, I encountered the Trump loyalist Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley, who had called for McConnell’s ouster long before he stepped down as leader, seemed rather un-thrilled by my questions as I walked alongside him.

“Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for him, or comment,” Hawley told me, when I asked what he thought these last days in the Senate have been like for McConnell, and what his legacy will be. “I don’t want to comment, or commentate.”

I asked Hawley whether he believed that McConnell has been an ally of Trump in the new administration. “He’s voted against a bunch of his nominees, but again, I can’t comment on what his viewpoint is,” he said.

What was Hawley’s own viewpoint on McConnell?

“Well, that’s a big question. In what sense?” he asked.

“As a colleague, as a senator, as a champion of the Republican Party of today,” I said.

“Oh, listen, I think he’s had a very long career. I think he’s served his state and his country with a tremendous sense of duty.”

Hawley did not comment—or commentate—beyond that.

“You realize I’ll be 84 when I leave here. I was 42 when I got here,” McConnell told me. “Half of my life I’ve spent here.”

This was McConnell becoming a bit more chatty, if not expressive, as our interview wound down. My visit to his office also yielded these Kentucky kernels:

He said he hasn’t talked to Trump since Trump’s first term ended. He did speak with Joe Biden recently. “Not in any great detail. He just gave me a ring,” McConnell told me. “We became friends years ago. And I ended up actually being the only Republican at Beau’s funeral.” He said his treatment in the media has gotten considerably better of late. “I’ve discovered how to improve your press,” McConnell told me. “Announce you’re leaving.”

After not quite half an hour, my time was up. McConnell’s time was not, he emphasized—any valedictions or obituaries for his career would be premature. “My story’s going to unfold over the next year and a half,” he said.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

A minute earlier, I’d wondered aloud where the larger story was headed—whether the good guys or the bad guys would prevail, and which team America was on.

“I think between Ukraine and Russia, it’s not hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell said.

“It’s unclear who Trump thinks the good guys are,” I replied, hoping to trigger some reaction. No such luck. “Not gonna touch that?” I said to fill the silence.

“Good try.”

One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly secured a spot in the contemporary canon. The novel elevated Adichie to rare literary stardom—onto the cover of British Vogue, into a Beyoncé song. She continued to write but stuck to nonfiction—long essays on feminism and, more recently, on grief. Yet with the exception of a few short stories, she wasn’t producing much fiction. When I asked her during an interview two years ago about the long wait for a new novel, she said the question made her “go into a panic.”

The drought—which is how she sees it—is now over. Dream Count, her new novel, is about four African women—including three who share Adichie’s Nigerian background—and their love lives. The book’s central occupation is a serious one: how men affect the existences of women, either as destructive forces, objects of longing, or distractions from women’s dreams.

Chiamaka is a travel writer holding out for someone who will make her feel “truly known”; Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who badly wants to settle down and start a family; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is a successful banker in Nigeria who rejects all pressure to live a conventional life; and, finally, Kadiatou, the book’s most interesting and original character, is a Guinean housekeeper who works for Chiamaka, tries to build a new life in America and finds herself the victim of a powerful and predatory man.

[Read: Chimamanda Adichie’s fiction has shed its optimism]

Adichie spoke with me in the days before the novel’s publication. I was curious to hear about the characters but also about how Adichie sees the United States right now. In her usual outspoken way, she had much to say about masculinity, Donald Trump, and the way that politics is skewing art.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Almost all the writing you’ve published over the past decade has been nonfiction, like your essay We Should All Be Feminists. Fiction offers you, as you said in your author’s note to Dream Count, a chance to explore complexities. How does it feel to be back in that fiction mode?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I’ve always wanted to be in that mode, so not being in it was hard. That expression, “writer’s block,” is one I don’t like, but it speaks to what it was: an inability to write fiction. I had that for a few years, and I just remember being terrified. I don’t know how to be moderate in thinking about my own creativity. And so, really, what it felt like when I couldn’t write fiction was: I felt like I was shut out of myself. Because fiction is the thing that gives meaning to me. It just gives me joy.

Beckerman: I wanted to read you a quote from a 2016 interview you gave that I think is a kind of keystone for understanding the bigger themes of Dream Count: “Put a group of women together, and the conversation will eventually be about men. Put a group of men together, and they will not talk about women at all … We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men, because it’s fun, but otherwise, we should also be talking about our own stuff.” The four women in this book are each contending with the men in their lives, and men who are mostly doing damage to them.

Adichie: I might have to revise that number: maybe more like 15 or 18 percent. I should say that that is more about what I wish the world would be than about what the world is. And I think that fiction, if nothing else, has to be honest. It has to be unforgivingly honest. And I don’t want to write about women’s lives as I wish they were. So, for example, I know many women who, looking at their relationships from the outside, it’s very clear to me, and I think to most people, that it’s an unhealthy relationship. But I’m always interested in how women justify to themselves remaining in those relationships. Someone actually just said to me that all the men in the book are jerks.

Beckerman: I was about to say that too!

Adichie: Really? I feel like I’ve been grossly misunderstood. Good Lord, come on. There’s one that we might argue is not the most appealing of men. But even [him], I think, we could view with some empathy. But I feel like the other men are not jerks. I suppose if I’m hearing it this often, it must mean there is some truth to it.

Beckerman: It does seem that what matters more in the book is the way their actions end up affecting each of the four women.

Adichie: I would argue that heterosexual women’s lives are, in fact, shaped quite often by men. Girls are often socialized from childhood to be nice in a way that boys are not socialized to be nice. You know, it’s women in relationships who almost unconsciously make compromises and sacrifices; we’re often taught that love is self-sacrifice, and that makes us feel ashamed to think about ourselves. Men do not have the same kind of fear of consequences if they’re selfish. I don’t even know if it occurs to men.

Beckerman: I know you don’t think all the men were jerks, but while I was reading, the idea of a certain aggressive, careless, destructive masculinity was inescapable, especially at a moment when American politics and culture have been overtaken by what one writer in our pages just called an “Adolescent Style.” Do you think this novel has something to say about the particular form of what might be called immature patriarchy that we’re living under right now?

Adichie: I think that many of the women in my book do, in fact, escape masculinity—if not escape, then they have figured out ways to sort of push it to the side. Honestly, just thinking about what is happening in this country, it feels as though America is no longer America. It feels to me a disservice to my novel to try to talk about the masculinity of my beloved characters alongside this confederacy of dunces.

[Read: The key mismatch between Zelensky and Trump]

Beckerman: But I do feel like, reading this right now, there was something that echoed with our times.

Adichie: I would actually say that the actions of the Trump administration feel more like those of toddlers, not men. How they are acting doesn’t feel manly. I think I want to make a distinction between manly and masculinity. So there is a kind of ugly, masculine energy, but it’s not a manly energy. I think to be manly is to show maturity, responsibility—and there’s none of that. But what I’ve been thinking about more in this novel, as in all my work, is love. I’m a hopeless romantic who hides it behind sarcasm. I remember a few weeks ago thinking that what we’re witnessing from Trump is actually from a lack of love. So you cannot love a country and treat it with such careless recklessness, you just cannot.

Beckerman: When you say that America doesn’t feel like America anymore, how does that affect how you think about your role as a writer?

Adichie: I’m still a little bit dizzy. It’s been a month, and just so much has happened. But in general, I like to make a distinction between myself the writer and myself the citizen. Yes, of course, political issues do inform my fiction, but I hope that I never let it either propel or become a hindrance to my writing. I think of my writing as something that’s quite separate from my political self, if that makes sense. Which is not to say they aren’t intertwined, because most of my fiction is political. As a citizen, things have changed for me. I mean, you have to remember that I come from Nigeria, where, growing up, America was the place where everything went the way it was supposed to go. And the reality is that Nigeria and the U.S. are the same now. Someone said to me, “Are you thinking about moving back to Nigeria?” Well, no, because it’s the same.

Beckerman: Nigeria moved to you.

Adichie: The only difference is that I don’t have to use my generator as much here in the U.S. In Nigeria today, we have a president who, in my opinion, was not elected. And Nigerian politics has always been a politics of patronage: the Big Man, and you give your friends jobs, that kind of thing. But I think that Nigerian leaders, even if they just pay lip service to ideas like competence, they are not likely to be so brazen about creating sort of long, lasting actions from personal vengeance. It’s the brazenness of it [in the U.S.] that just feels to me stranger, stranger than Nigeria.

Beckerman: I wanted to ask you to talk about the Kadiatou character in the book, whom you based on the story of Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who was allegedly assaulted in a New York City hotel suite in 2011 by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. You write about her in your author’s note, and the idea that fiction can become a kind of justice, that your depiction of her was “a gesture of returned dignity.”  Did it worry you at all as a fiction writer, interested in complexity, about approaching the creation of a character with that motive in mind?

Adichie: Actually, I feel as though the motive came afterwards. And honestly, I did not want to write an author’s note. The legal department of my publishers felt I should. And it made me go back and read my own work. I also don’t think of my fiction in terms of themes. I only find out the themes afterward. And I realized I was fascinated by her, but also I loved her.

Beckerman: Did that make it hard to write about her in complex ways? The way you would if you were inventing someone?

Adichie: Well, she’s the character who I spent the most time on, but that’s also because I did a lot of research. Guinea is a country that’s not familiar to me. I talked to people. I watched endless videos of Guinean women cooking. She’s the character who took the most work. I hear you about the complexity, because I had unconscious “noble ideas” for her. To write honestly about people is to start off with the premise that people are flawed. I think what I worried about most was just having her be a believable human being. And to do that, I decided at some point just to completely put aside everything I knew about the real person.

[Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America]

Beckerman: The book is full of women taking account of the men in their lives, but it is also very much about mothers and daughters. You write in the author’s note that this was a book about your own mother, who recently died.

Adichie: I started writing it after my mother died, but I did not set out to write about my mother in any way. And actually, again, it was when I went back to reread this book that I just thought, My goodness. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, I just felt my mother’s spirit, and it was actually very emotional for me. I remember just weeping and weeping after I had read it. I became a bit dramatic. I feel as though she opened the door for me to get back into my fiction and my creative self. But just seeing how much of it was about mothers and daughters, I thought, Is this all this novel is about? And I did not think this in a hopeful way. I was thinking, I hope it’s also about other things.

Beckerman: Well, it’s also about jerks. But we won’t relitigate that. More than a lot of other writers, I feel like you really have insisted in your public comments on that need for complexity. And you say some version of this, again, in the author’s note. You talk about contemporary ideology—I think you’re thinking about the left here, though it’s obviously also true of the right—that sort of stamps out that possibility of contradiction. You talk about “reaching answers before questions are asked, if the questions are asked at all.” I wonder if you worry at all about art being shaped by that ideology.

Adichie: I do worry, and I am seeing that. Even the idea of an author’s note, which you could read through an ungracious lens as being defensive, as explaining too much. I think we live in a time of this kind of ideological capture, and you’re right that it exists on both sides. It’s almost as though the intellectual right doesn’t exist anymore. But of course, I’m more interested in the left, because it’s my tribe. And if there was some magical way, I would want to protect fiction writers and artists from what is a kind of tyranny, this ideological conformity. And also, I think that there are young people who are really brilliant, who are original, but who see the climate that we live in and who then, in some ways, dim their lights. And we suffer for it.

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