West Ham forward Jarrod Bowen says it means "everything" to earn a first England call-up for the Nations League games.

The Western world must prepare itself for a long war in Ukraine that will require ongoing support for Kyiv to guarantee Russia’s defeat, as well as reinforced defenses across Europe to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not underestimate NATO’s readiness to defend “every inch” of its territory, Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance’s secretary-general, told me recently.

The warning came in an in-depth interview at his office on the outskirts of Brussels, as the Russian war machine, after months of failure, was beginning to make progress in its campaign in eastern Ukraine. “Of course it is emotional,” he continued, his anger visible, as we discussed the ongoing butchery along NATO’s borders. “This is about people being killed; it’s about atrocities; it’s about children, women being raped, children being killed.”

For Stoltenberg, however, using this emotion—rather than hiding it—is important. This emotion is the reason NATO has been able to mobilize such support for Ukraine against Russia—a conflict, Stoltenberg insisted, that affects security across the alliance. Although he wouldn’t say it quite so openly, he clearly believes that Ukraine is fighting not only for itself but for the civilized world, for the basic values of life and liberty, land and sovereignty. It is crucial, therefore, that the West continues to be outraged by Russia’s behavior, to not lose sight of Moscow’s barbarity as the war drags on. “In the middle of Europe, we have cities bombed, we have people that are our neighbors killed in the streets, massacred, and raped,” he said. “It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality because that helps us mobilize the solidarity … which we need for the long haul.”

This was the crux of Stoltenberg’s point: The West needs to start digging in for a battle that is unlikely to end anytime soon, a test, he seemed to indicate to me, that was not just about military strength but about character.

And the reality, Stoltenberg admitted, is that Russia continues to make incremental territorial gains in Ukraine. Stoltenberg was also clear that the war is likely to end at the negotiating table and not, as some have hoped, with a kind of Second World War–style unconditional surrender of one side. Still, Stoltenberg rejected calls for the West to find Putin an honorable way out of the invasion, an “off-ramp” to save face and return to Moscow. Instead, he told me, it is crucial for Western security that Putin not be rewarded for his aggression.

Stoltenberg, who is already NATO’s longest-serving secretary-general in 40 years, was due to step down later this year but has agreed to stay on for another year to steer the alliance through its biggest challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union. After taking over in 2014, he quickly found himself tasked with convincing the most volatile and anti-European president in postwar American history of NATO’s merits. The deftness with which he performed this role earned him the respect of many in Europe who feared that Donald Trump would seek to pull the United States out of the alliance altogether. For some, he was the Trump whisperer, one of the few people—other than Putin and Xi Jinping—whom Trump seemed to respect.

Yet his legacy extends beyond this. After years of falling defense spending, all of the alliance’s members are increasing their military budgets; 40,000 troops stand ready under direct NATO command; the U.S. has expanded its presence in Europe; and the alliance’s eastern flank has been reinforced. Even more transformative changes are in the pipeline, with Sweden and Finland set to end their decades-long policy of neutrality by joining the bloc. Of course, much of this has been spurred by Russia’s invasion. Yet Stoltenberg, NATO officials and politicians have told me over the years, has been a capable steward of an often-unruly grouping.

At a NATO summit in Madrid next month, Stoltenberg will oversee further changes to meet the threats of what he said is a more dangerous world, beyond the alliance’s traditional turf. “NATO will remain the strongest alliance in history as long as we are able to continue to adapt,” Stoltenberg told me. “I’m absolutely confident that allies will be able to make decisions to ensure that we continue to adapt.” And this will include, for the first time in its history, articulating a focus on the threat from China.

Still, though the bloc’s response to Russia’s invasion seems to have reinvigorated its sense of unity, purpose, and mission, deepening its members’ commitment and even expanding its territory, there remains a curious contradiction and hesitance at the core of the alliance. This tension can be seen most clearly in NATO’s policy toward China, as the alliance grapples with its history as a regional grouping while facing a globalized world.

When I pressed Stoltenberg on how the war in Ukraine might end, he seemed to glide between two extremes that are sometimes on display within NATO—those, particularly in the U.S., who spy an opportunity not only to defeat Russia but to degrade it permanently, and those, mostly in Europe, pushing for a cease-fire and an acknowledgment from Kyiv that it will have to cede territory to Russia if there is to be any peace.

Stoltenberg appeared to advocate a kind of hawkish third way that fits with his image as the Tony Blair of Norway. “We know that most wars end at the negotiating table,” he said. “But what happens at the negotiating table is totally dependent on the situation on the battlefield, so we have to ensure that Ukraine has the strongest possible position to uphold the right to self-defense, to protect their sovereign nation, and that’s exactly what NATO allies are doing.” The point for Stoltenberg is to make sure whatever concessions Ukraine does make are on its terms.

And here is where we get into the fact that this war is unlikely to end anytime soon. While Russia has failed in its expansive initial war aims, it is now a “factual thing” that Moscow’s forces are making “incremental advances in [the] Donbas,” he told me. The future direction of the conflict would be hard to predict, but it is crucial for the West to match Putin’s commitment. “It’s extremely important that NATO and partners continue to provide support to Ukraine and that we are prepared for the long haul,” he said. “We can not let President Putin be rewarded for his brute military aggression. That would threaten all our security.”

The West, thus, has two fundamental tasks in Stoltenberg’s view. The first is to help Ukraine stand up to Russia, so that “President Putin does not succeed with his brutal use of force, violating international law, and the challenge to the rules-based order and to reestablish spheres of influence.” The second task, though, is to prevent the war from escalating, “leading to a full conflict in Europe between NATO and Russia.”

To achieve both, Stoltenberg argued, requires strength and commitment, not weakness and concession. Increasing NATO’s military presence and readiness is the only way to “remove any room for misunderstanding, miscalculation in Moscow, about our readiness to protect and defend all allies,” Stoltenberg said. The message to Moscow, he continued, is that the alliance will protect “every inch of NATO territory.”

Stoltenberg’s commitment to dealing with allies as they are, not as he may wish them to be, is perhaps what has made him a good leader for a grouping that seems at times unclear about how deeply it wants to help Ukraine. “Any secretary-general of NATO has to be able to speak to all the leaders,” he told me. “We are 30 countries, from both sides of the Atlantic, with different history, different geography, different political partners in charge.”

The key for Stoltenberg is ensuring that the bloc is strengthened, and, in his words, “institutionalized,” so that it can weather any political storm anywhere in the alliance. Though he didn’t say it, he clearly meant Trump. “If we are afraid of political leaders in Europe or in North America being elected that are not strong supporters of the strong transatlantic bond, then it makes it even more important that the transatlantic bond is institutionalized.”

Institutionalizing NATO would also allow the alliance to think beyond the current crisis to the long-term, strategic threats facing the West. That means not just Moscow but Beijing.

Russia’s invasion seems to have reestablished NATO’s raison d’être in a way that Putin does not appear to have expected. As Stoltenberg told me, the Russian president wanted less NATO, only to end up with a lot more NATO than has existed at any time since the end of the Cold War.

And yet underneath this newfound unity of purpose and mission remains a serious division on the new existential challenge facing the West: China. France and Germany want to forge their own European relationship with China, independent of the U.S. and, as much as possible, NATO. The U.S., Britain, and others, meanwhile, see China as a security threat that must be dealt with collectively by the West. Again, it falls to Stoltenberg to try to find a third way through this challenge.

When NATO leaders meet in Madrid next month, he said, he expects the alliance to focus not just on the conflict with Russia by strengthening the alliance’s deterrence—more troops, capabilities, and so on—but also on new realms of security such as cyber, space, and even climate change. In NATO’s most recent “strategic concept,” agreed on in 2010, China was not mentioned once. That will soon change. “In the strategic concept we will agree in Madrid, I’m certain that we will address China,” he told me.

Stoltenberg’s third way again does not quite fall within either the American-led or European-led camps with regard to China: He was quick to insist that dealing with the Chinese security challenge did not mean that NATO views Beijing as an “adversary.” Still, he added, the alliance needs to “address the security consequences of the fact that China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world, the biggest navy, [and] that they are investing heavily in new, modern capabilities.” Among these new capabilities, Stoltenberg listed nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that are capable of reaching “the whole of NATO.”

To reflect the reality of China’s power and challenge for the West, he told me, NATO will welcome core security partners from outside Europe and North America to the summit: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Three of these four nations are also often invited to summits of the G7 group of advanced economies and, together with the European Union, form the core of the new “West” that stretches across the globe, a network of democratic countries allied to Washington. This is the loose (and voluntary) American empire of which Moscow and Beijing are so suspicious.

The danger for NATO, I suggested, was that rather than actually addressing some of the issues that left Ukraine in limbo—being close enough to NATO to concern its aggressive neighbor, but without the security guarantee that might have prevented this aggression—it risked globalizing them. “We have lots of difficult questions about this situation for vulnerable partners that are not members of NATO but are close partners, and some of them aspiring for NATO membership,” he replied, cautiously, appearing to concede the premise of the question without quite acknowledging whether he agreed or not. He was clear, however, that whatever the answer, nothing excused Russia’s behavior.

Still, aren’t we in danger of making the same mistake, I asked? Why not invite Australia to join the alliance, rather than just becoming closer allies? Wouldn’t this reflect the reality of the West and the shared threat posed by China? Here, though, NATO seems hesitant about how far it must adapt to the modern world.

“NATO is a regional alliance,” Stoltenberg said: “North America and Europe.” This was enshrined in NATO’s founding treaty and, he added, “I’ve seen no appetite in NATO to change the treaty.” The truth is that it’s not just about there being no appetite, but about a genuine divergence of opinion within the alliance about the extent of the Chinese threat generally, and the extent to which it is a threat to the West specifically. This is the crack in the Western world, which may yet grow over time into something more substantial—though that will be for one of Stoltenberg’s successors to grapple with.

The jockeying to replace Stoltenberg has already begun, with different cliques within the alliance pushing various cases as to why it is their turn: Southern European nations argue that after Stoltenberg and, before him, the former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the next leader should be from the Mediterranean. In Britain and Turkey, officials fear that the French and the Germans will try to foist an “EU candidate” on the bloc, presenting a fait accompli candidate representing their interests. Eastern European countries, and the Baltics in particular, argue that there has never been a NATO secretary-general from the East. The alliance has also never been led by a woman, and it may be high time that this is corrected too. As ever, the U.S. will be the dominant actor, and will seek to broker a deal acceptable to all.

This choice will be important not simply because it will point to which powers are ascendant and which priorities will be placed foremost within the alliance. Each prior leader of NATO has imposed their will on the organization, and so the background and character of the next secretary-general will have a significant impact on NATO’s future. Stoltenberg is no exception.

As the interview was coming to a close, he gave me a tour of his somewhat sparse and modernist office (think Scandi bureaucracy). He showed me a shot of him as a young man with his father, a former Norwegian foreign minister, that sits behind his desk, and another of his children. Two others more clearly revealed the pain that has shaped his life and now shapes his response to the bloodiest war on European soil since 1945. On the wall opposite his desk hangs a photo of his friend Anna Lindh, the former prime minister of Sweden, who was murdered in 2003. And then, right beside his desk, is a calm, peaceful photograph of the Norwegian island of Utøya. The meaning behind the picture is, however, anything but calm and peaceful. This is the island where a neo-Nazi terrorist murdered 69 people in 2011, while Stoltenberg was Norway’s prime minister. The threat came perilously close to the secretary-general himself: The killer had already claimed eight other lives in Oslo with a van bomb targeting Stoltenberg’s office.

Stoltenberg is a well-dressed, controlled man. Yet underneath this calm Scandinavian exterior, you get a sense of anger and emotion—even of fury. When we talked about Ukraine, I noticed that he banged his hands on the table, a physical expression of his feelings. The two tragedies that have occurred on his watch—Utøya and Ukraine—are not directly comparable. Yet his life, and his leadership, has been influenced by both; he applies the appalling lessons he learned from one to his handling of the appalling reality of the other.

How does a peaceful society respond to brutal violence? How can unity be found in the face of such tragedy? How can people channel their fury, and how can they remember? “It doesn’t matter what kind of ideology or religion these people use; it’s about killing innocent people,” he told me, as he showed me the photograph of Utøya. Extremists of all stripes share the belief that “they can use force, they can kill people, to achieve their political goals.” This is Stoltenberg’s challenge as the war continues: to ensure that the West retains its resolve, that it remains united, and that it remembers.

Moscow says supplying arms capable of hitting Russian territory would be a step towards 'unacceptable escalation'.

The former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski once said that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be an empire. It’s a pithy statement, but it’s not true. Even if Vladimir Putin fails to wrest back Ukraine, his country will remain a haphazard amalgamation of regions and nations with hugely varied histories, cultures, and languages. The Kremlin will continue ruling over colonial holdings in places including Chechnya, Tatarstan, Siberia, and the Arctic.

Russia’s history is one of almost ceaseless expansion and colonization, and Russia is the last European empire that has resisted even basic decolonization efforts, such as granting subject populations autonomy and a meaningful voice in choosing the country’s leaders. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia is willing to resort to war to reconquer regions it views as its rightful possessions.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: War will never be this bulky again]

During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Russian empire hit its modern nadir, the United States refused to safeguard the newly won independence of multiple post-Soviet states, citing misplaced concerns about humiliating Moscow. Emboldened by the West’s reluctance, Moscow began to reclaim the lands it lost. Now Russia’s revanchism—aided by our inaction and broader ignorance of the history of Russian imperialism—has revived the possibility of nuclear conflict and instigated the worst security crisis the world has seen in decades. Once Ukraine staves off Russia’s attempt to recolonize it, the West must support full freedom for Russia’s imperial subjects.

The U.S. had an opportunity to unwind the Russian empire before. In September 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, President George H. W. Bush convened his National Security Council. In the lead-up to the meeting, the White House seemed unsure how to handle the splintering superpower. Some of Bush’s closest advisers even called for trying to keep the Soviet Union together.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was not one of them. “We could get an authoritarian regime [in Russia] still,” he warned during the meeting. “I am concerned that a year or so from now, if it all goes sour, how we can answer that we did not do more.” His end goal was clear: as Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates later wrote, Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”

Bush demurred. Rather than accelerate the Soviet disintegration, he tried to avoid antagonizing Moscow, even as President Boris Yeltsin’s administration began pushing the anti-Ukrainian animus that Putin now embodies. For years—as Russia stabilized and eventually prospered, and as Cheney masterminded some of the most disastrous American foreign-policy decisions in recent decades—many believed that Bush had selected the better strategy. Armageddon, as one historian phrased it, was averted.

In 2022, as Putin tries to restore the Russian empire by littering corpses across Ukraine, Bush’s position appears myopic. He—and American policy makers after him—failed to see the end of the Soviet Union for what it was: not just a defeat for communism, but a defeat for colonialism. Rather than quash Russia’s imperial aspirations when they had the chance, Bush and his successors simply watched and hoped for the best. As Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft later said about the Soviet collapse, “In the end, we took no position at all. We simply let things happen.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Who perseveres, wins]

We no longer have that luxury. The West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to fully decolonize Russia.

Many of Russia’s former colonies, including places such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Armenia, succeeded in achieving and sustaining independence after the fall of the U.S.S.R. But only Ukraine’s independence has become an obsession for Putin. It’s not hard to see why. Stiff-arming Russia at every turn, Ukraine emerged as the biggest hurdle to the Kremlin’s efforts to reconsolidate its empire and undo the independence movements of the early 1990s.

Not every one of the Kremlin’s colonies was so successful in achieving independence in those years. Scores of nations—“autonomous republics” in Russian parlance—never escaped the Kremlin’s control. For many, the process of decolonization made it only halfway.

Chechnya, for instance, endured multiple horrific wars after declaring independence in the early ’90s. Yet when Chechen leadership turned to the West for aid, U.S. officials looked the other way. Many across the West remained blinded by the “saltwater fallacy,” which posits that colonies can be held only in distant, overseas territories. Instead of viewing places such as Chechnya as nations colonized by a dictatorship in Moscow, Western officials simply saw them as extensions of Russia proper. So rather than recognize the Chechens’ struggle as part of the global push toward decolonization, American President Bill Clinton compared them to the Confederacy and backed Yeltsin despite his brutality. Clinton’s position not only effectively sanctioned the horrors unleashed on innocent Chechens, but it showed Putin, then a rising bureaucrat, that Russian force would go unchallenged by the West. As former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar said, Western pressure could have prevented the violence in Chechnya. Analysts agree. Yet Washington twiddled its thumbs, and Grozny was flattened.

Chechnya’s story is one of many. Nation after nation—Karelia, Komi, Sakha, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Kalmykia, Udmurtia, and many more—claimed sovereignty as the Soviet empire crumbled around them. Even regions that had been colonized by the Kremlin for centuries pushed for independence. In a 1992 referendum in Tatarstan, nearly two-thirds of the population voted in favor of sovereignty, even though Soviet authorities had drawn the republic’s borders to exclude some 75 percent of the Tatar population. As election observers wrote, the republic was motivated by “years of pent-up resentment” against Russian colonialism, and saw “huge support” for the referendum in ethnically Tatar regions.

Instead of propping up these emergent nations, the U.S. prioritized stability. Washington feared that any volatility in the region might cause Russia’s nuclear and biological weapons to fall into the wrong hands. Administration after administration made the same mistake. In his “Chicken Kiev” speech, George H. W. Bush warned Ukrainian separatists against “suicidal nationalism” (which Ukrainian separatists promptly ignored). Bill Clinton kept up his buddies-and-belly-laughs relationship with Yeltsin while Russian forces slaughtered Chechens en masse. George W. Bush took a hands-off approach to the entrenchment of Putin’s regime, even as Russian forces steamrolled into Georgia. Barack Obama’s blinkered “reset” policy set the stage for Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Donald Trump fawned over Putin and subordinated Ukraine’s interests to his pursuit of domestic political gain.

The result: Chechnya remains dominated by a Kremlin-appointed despot. Tatarstan saw any pretense of sovereignty snuffed out by Putin. On and on Moscow marched, reclaiming nations desperate to escape its embrace. In Ukraine, we see the same story. Moscow is unlikely to stop there.

[Rory Finnin: The biggest threat to Putin’s control of Crimea]

Russia is not the only polyglot nation that has failed to address its legacy of colonization. China currently oversees the largest concentration-camp system the world has seen since the Holocaust, dedicated to eliminating Uyghurs as a distinct nation. And much of the U.S. still refuses to view its own history as one of rote imperial conquest, from the Founding Fathers seizing Indigenous lands to the ongoing colonial status of places such as Puerto Rico.

But it’s Russia—and, more specifically, Russian imperialism—that presents the most urgent threat to international security. Now the bill of allowing Moscow to retain its empire, without any reckoning with its colonial history, is coming due.

Decolonizing Russia wouldn’t necessarily require fully dismantling it, as Cheney proposed. The push toward decolonization could instead focus on making the kind of democratic federalism promised in Russia’s constitution more than a hollow promise. This would mean ensuring that all Russian citizens, regardless of region, would finally be given a voice in choosing their leaders. Even simply acknowledging Russia’s colonial past—and present—would make some difference. “As much as decolonizing Russia is important for the territories it formerly occupied, reprocessing its history is also key for the survival of Russia within its current boundaries,” the scholars Botakoz Kassymbekova and Erica Marat recently wrote.

Until Moscow’s empire is toppled, though, the region—and the world—will not be safe. Nor will Russia. Europe will remain unstable, and Ukrainians and Russians and all of the colonized peoples forced to fight for the Kremlin will continue to die. “There is no way for Russia to move forward with Putin and there is no way for Russia to move forward without addressing its imperial past and present,” the analyst Anton Barbashin recently tweeted. “Give up empire and attempt to thrive or hold [on] to it and continue degrading.”

Russia has launched the greatest war the world has seen in decades, all in the service of empire. To avoid the risk of further wars and more senseless bloodshed, the Kremlin must lose what empire it still retains. The project of Russian decolonization must finally be finished.

President Putin says to be ready to overcome the food crisis if 'politically motivated' restrictions are lifted.

Since cases of monkeypox started popping up in Europe and North America, news stories and social media posts have been buzzing about it, some of them adding to the stigma surrounding the disease.

The virus that causes monkeypox, which is endemic to 12 countries in West and Central Africa, is transmitted via close contact with an infected person or material. Many of the cases reported so far in this outbreak have been in men who have sex with men. This is partly because many members of this community tend to be vigilant about monitoring for sexually transmitted diseases. Experts anticipate that, as they expand their surveillance, the number of cases beyond this group will rise.

But that hasn’t stopped some people from jumping to conclusions and associating monkeypox with gay and bisexual men. “This is not a ‘gay disease,’ as some people on social media have attempted to label it,” said Andy Seale, an advisor specializing in HIV at WHO, during a recent Q&A.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Counting the votes cast in Hong Kong’s chief-executive election last week took just 23 minutes. There was no hyperefficient voting technology or army of poll workers. The speed was due instead to the paltry number of ballots: Only 1,461 needed to be tabulated, and they listed just one candidate. So with a vote share that would make a dictator grin (99.2 percent), John Lee became the fifth person selected to lead the city in the postcolonial era.

Lee takes office this summer, when Hong Kong will mark 25 years under Chinese rule, the halfway point of the “one country, two systems” experiment that was meant to grant the city a high degree of autonomy, a moment rumored to be marked with a visit from President Xi Jinping. Lee’s elevation is reflective of the distrust and paranoia that has flourished in Beijing and among Hong Kong’s political elites since the 2019 prodemocracy protests, which he helped both trigger and eventually put down.

The foreign connections that have been one of Hong Kong’s defining features are seen now in a more suspect light—possible weaknesses to be exploited in an unstable world where China is under constant threat and where the city will need to be less reliant on the West, particularly the United States. Even as officials speak of exiting strict pandemic protocols that have isolated Hong Kong for years and of a need to reinvigorate it as an international business center, the overriding priority will be that of law and order. This will be maintained through a sprawling, powerful security apparatus, backed up by a judicial system that embraced Beijing’s draconian new national-security law while at the same time discovering a penchant for oppressive colonial rules once wielded by the British. On all counts, Lee—a former police officer and security chief who is already subject to American sanctions—fits the bill.

Though none of Lee’s predecessors were elected through genuine democracy, they all made attempts to balance the desires of Beijing’s leaders and Hong Kong’s people, desires that were often at odds. In the city’s new iteration, this will be less necessary. Lee will likely work to portray the chief-executive role as strong and nonpolitical, supported, more so than challenged, by an obedient legislature—all with the knowledge that the chances of any popular pushback are exceedingly scant. Lee’s vision of Hong Kong is a dark one, and Beijing has cast him as the only patriot strong enough to enact it. The Chinese authorities want “someone who can stand firm against any pressure coming from the outside, protect the interest of the country, and keep away foreign interference,” Jasper Tsang, a former president of the legislative council and the founder of the city’s largest pro-Beijing political party who supported Lee’s election, told me. “This is what is needed now.”

Lee, 64, attended a Jesuit all-boys school and, upon graduating, joined the Hong Kong Police Force in 1977, when Britain still ruled the city. By the late 1990s, he was involved in some of the city’s biggest cases, including the pursuit of Cheung Tze-keung, a gangster known as “Big Spender” for his lavish gambling habits. Cheung had undertaken a string of brazen airport thefts and abductions, kidnapping two tycoons in 1996 and 1997, respectively, and extracting tens of millions of dollars in ransom for their releases. Lee led a stakeout that uncovered a massive cache of explosives belonging to Cheung, who was caught soon after on the mainland. He was swiftly tried, found guilty, and executed by firing squad.

Lee’s background and education are very much unlike those of Hong Kong’s previous chief executives—and, from Beijing’s point of view, that is a strength. Whereas prior leaders studied at places such as Harvard and Cambridge, or were Fulbright scholars, Lee obtained a master’s degree through an Australian distance-learning program. Previous chief executives were businesspeople or career bureaucrats. By contrast, Lee’s blue-collar background in the police and his lack of connections to political and business elites have been touted by pro-Beijing pundits, who say that he will be unencumbered by the vested interests who hold substantial power in the close-knit world of Hong Kong politics.

Lee rose through the force’s ranks over 35-odd years, but in 2011 was passed over for police commissioner in favor of a more operationally focused and charismatic candidate, a former colleague said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivities. Another former officer described Lee as tough and competent, but with a temper that sometimes flared because of his chronic back pain. Occasionally, during one of these outbursts, Lee would toss a stack of files into the air. “I hope he has learned to control himself better,” this person told me, “otherwise Hong Kong is in for an interesting time.”

His path to the top of the police at a dead end, Lee joined the government. In a profile of Lee published after he was named chief executive, Ta Kung Pao, a state-controlled newspaper in Hong Kong, highlighted his role in outlawing the Hong Kong National Party in 2018. The small, fringe group had advocated for Hong Kong’s independence from China, a position that is viewed as a redline for Beijing. The following year, Lee played a leading role in responding to the enormous prodemocracy demonstrations that swept Hong Kong for months, after helping spur them on.

In February 2019, Hong Kong’s Security Bureau, which Lee was by then leading, delivered a paper to the legislative council’s security panel outlining why changes were necessary to the city’s extradition policies. Mundanely titled “Cooperation Between Hong Kong and Other Places on Juridical Assistance in Criminal Matters,” the paper proposed reforms driven by the murder in Taiwan of a young pregnant Hong Kong woman by her boyfriend, who fled back to the city and confessed to the crime, creating a quagmire: The crime was not committed in Hong Kong, so he could not be prosecuted in the city, yet no framework existed for sending him back to Taiwan to face justice. The cause was quickly taken up by pro-Beijing politicians.

The proposed legislation, largely unnoticed at first, included provisions whereby suspects could be extradited from Hong Kong to mainland China, which has a separate judicial system. While the bill alarmed prodemocracy figures, who saw it as eroding the wall between Hong Kong’s common-law courts and the mainland’s opaque system, wealthy business people were at first the fiercest critics. Many trace their fortunes to investments made on the mainland at a time where bribery and corruption were commonplace. They feared that they could be targeted in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown and brought to the mainland for trial. Lee was tasked with selling the bill to skeptical foreign consulates and chambers of commerce, working with business leaders to create carve-outs, though doubts remained over why the bill was necessary at all.

Like the outgoing chief executive, Carrie Lam, who refused to back down on the legislation as protests escalated, Lee hardened his demeanor when faced with criticism. Lee’s backers claim that he was instrumental in putting down the ensuing demonstrations, the biggest in Hong Kong’s history, marshaling the police to use aggressive, violent tactics to stamp them out. This assessment is certainly true, but incomplete. It fails to reckon with or account for Lee’s role in exacerbating the demonstrations, through his work with Lam to push the bill forward despite mass protests that eventually escalated into acts of violence and vandalism.

HK01, a centrist newspaper, wrote an editorial in 2019 ripping Lee for his performance and his flippant dismissal of people’s concerns about police conduct during the protests, describing him as “just one of the incompetent officials” among “a group of ‘John Lees’ whose heads are extremely in the clouds, leading Hong Kong into chaos.” On the streets, Lee was mocked as Pikachu, the chubby yellow rodent Pokémon, a play on his full Chinese name John Lee Ka-chiu. (The name may not have been as original as protesters thought: One of Lee’s former colleagues told me that fellow members of the force called him that decades earlier.) By the time the protests were quashed, done in by a combination of the pandemic and the national-security law imposed by Beijing, the reputation of Hong Kong’s police was ruined, the confessed murderer was living freely in the city, and Lee had been promoted to the city’s No. 2 position.

He carried his harsh tone and dark vision of Hong Kong to the new role. Lee pledged to relentlessly pursue the “cowards” who fled the city to escape possible jail time and welcomed the arrest of seven journalists, calling them “evil elements” who themselves had damaged press freedoms. Ta Kung Pao’s profile of Lee listed the closing of Apple Daily, a prodemocracy newspaper, as among his major accomplishments.

Nearly 200 people have been arrested for alleged national-security crimes, according to an analysis by Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law. “The vast majority of arrests targeted activities that would be considered peaceful and constitutionally-protected exercise of basic political and civil rights in other jurisdictions,” two academics from the center wrote this year. “In fact, such activities would have been protected in Hong Kong itself prior to the NSL’s enactment in July 2020.” Lee was among several officials placed under U.S. sanctions after the law was imposed. In modern Hong Kong, however, this albatross around his neck may be more a medal of valor, one that helped rather than hurt his chances for advancement. Having already been sanctioned, Lee has removed a possible pressure point at a time when Beijing is growing more concerned about the threat of sanctions, given the impact they have wrought on Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Beijing clearly “wants to keep the current level of control,” Liu Dongshu, an assistant public-policy professor at the City University of Hong Kong, told me. This goes far beyond just stopping protests and ridding the legislature of opposition, and extends to dismantling the bonds and shared identity forged among Hong Kongers during the 2019 protests. This week, for example, state media warned that taxi drivers and shops displaying any prodemocracy symbols could be violating the national-security law.

In a rare moment of introspection, Lam admitted in 2020 that Hong Kong’s chief executives “have never succeeded on any occasion when it comes to [the] very sensitive Hong Kong–mainland relationship.” She cited numerous failures that have befallen her and her three predecessors, showing the limitations of the role despite all having the backing of Beijing as well as a political field tipped heavily in their favor.

With a legislature now stripped entirely of opposition, pro-Beijing outlets have pushed the narrative that the government will be more efficient and better able to improve livelihoods. The authorities, this narrative goes, will in turn be able to win over a population that has faced down rubber bullets and tear gas, voted for prodemocracy candidates in a landslide in the city’s last free election, and seen their freedoms torn away.

For some issues, this is likely true, though not necessarily good. Lacking a prodemocracy opposition, a batch of subversion and security legislation—which triggered huge street protests in 2003 and helped to prematurely end the career of the city’s first chief executive—will finally pass. A “fake-news law” will probably also be implemented, a development that has raised concerns among Hong Kong’s already beleaguered press corps. Additional controls on the internet appear imminent.

Lee has made no efforts to reach out to the few remaining members of the prodemocracy parties, which have been decimated by the national-security law as well as the reengineered election system. Unsurprisingly, he has said that he will not pursue political reform toward universal suffrage, the city’s most vexing issue.

Yet even with a legislature that is trending toward a rubber stamp, there are certain issues that cannot be quickly or easily solved. Strict pandemic regulations have kept Hong Kong largely cut off from the rest of the world, and damaged the economy: Unemployment has ticked up to 5.4 percent, just one of the challenges weighing on growth. It is uncertain how or when Lee will be able to fully open the city to the mainland, let alone elsewhere. Lee has also pledged to tackle the city’s exorbitant housing prices, but that will require challenging the confraternity of real-estate tycoons and their gilded heirs who are obscenely powerful, and tackling artificial land scarcity that keeps prices so high. The city has also become drastically more unequal in terms of income and wealth since the 1997 handover, but the authorities have shown little interest or appetite in addressing this shift.

Whatever his efforts on these issues, however, Lee’s overarching vision is unquestionably antidemocratic, and subservient to his ultimate masters—not Hong Kong’s people, but Beijing’s leaders. This city was never the beacon of liberal democracy existing on the border of an autocracy, as its most vocal proponents like to claim, but it was still free. The press could criticize the authorities, the police were held to account, and the courts operated according to the rule of law. John Lee’s elevation makes clear that this prior golden era of sorts is over, and a new one is under way.

One former pro-Beijing lawmaker and businessman, like others I spoke with, told me that he was cautiously optimistic about Lee, that perhaps with the right team and guidance he could steer the city through its many issues. But, he admitted, to people outside the city, “the image is that the guy with the gun is now running Hong Kong.”

The West has accused the Russian military of holding food supplies for millions around the world hostage.

Zouma was filmed kicking his Bengal cat across his kitchen, before throwing a pair of shoes at it and slapping its head in February.

I never attended Ranger School, the U.S. Army’s nine weeks of unadulterated misery in woodland, mountain, and swamp. But I know plenty of those who have, and they have all reported the same thing: The instruction they received in patrolling and minor tactics was insignificant compared with the lesson they learned in perseverance, to “complete the mission though I be the lone survivor,” in the words of the Ranger Creed.

It is a lesson that has applications in the realm of higher policy, too, and now more than ever as politicians, academics, and pundits begin to talk—hesitantly, but their voices will grow louder—about pressuring Ukraine to accept further dismemberment at the hands of Russia. Speculating about motives is pointless. What matters is knowing why, despite these voices, the moment calls for intestinal fortitude, standing by the government and people of Ukraine, arming them to the teeth, and pressing for the defeat of the Russian invaders.

[Charles A. Kupchan: Ukraine’s way out]

From a purely geopolitical point of view, this war matters enormously. Should Vladimir Putin pull victory from his initial catastrophes, we can expect a riven Europe, which would disable the uneasy alliance that won the Cold War and gave the world more than half a century of prosperity after World War II. A Russian victory would encourage China to eye the possibility of conquering Taiwan and imposing its hegemony in East Asia. And it would lead countries around the world to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, because they would know that, in the final analysis, they are alone. And lonely, fearful countries with nuclear weapons may very well use them.

Conversely, the benefits of victory for Ukraine—defined as at least its return to the borders it had on February 23, consolidation of its freedom and independence, and abundant reconstruction aid—combined with defeat of Russia, to include the destruction of most of its land power and the crippling of its economy, promises a great deal. A Europe whole and free, well-enough armed to relieve the United States of most of the burden of defending it, would be a strategic contribution to America’s security. China would find such a manifestation of the strength and resilience of the West sobering. A Ukrainian victory would encourage if not guarantee change in a Russia that has yet to accommodate itself to the loss of empire and still evidently aspires to its restoration.

The moral stakes are equally high. In few wars has the balance of right and wrong ever been so completely lopsided. Ukraine is the victim of unwarranted and unprovoked aggression. Russian behavior—deportations, massacre, rape, and torture—has reached levels of abominable conduct seldom seen since the Second World War. The result is the most important test the Western democracies have faced since Munich in 1938.

One of the greatest lessons of military history is that persistence matters. It often matters as much as strategy and skill, armament and technology. Many intellectuals and some politicians misunderstand this, overvaluing elegant ideas and the subtleties and conceits of diplomatic maneuvers. But when Winston Churchill said in 1940 that Great Britain was willing to fight “if necessary for years, if necessary alone,” he meant it. When Abraham Lincoln decided in 1860 that “the tug has to come, and better now than later,” he also meant it. In much of their domestic policy, both men were negotiators and compromisers. In their wars, with stakes they understood better than all others, they had a different view. They realized that there is a time to talk and a time simply to put your head down and fight as hard as you can. Churchill would not talk with Hitler in 1940, and Lincoln would not talk with Jefferson Davis, save to accept his surrender.

Both Churchill and Lincoln faced critics who made sophisticated arguments about why compromise was necessary—why one should accommodate German domination of the continent in order to preserve the British Empire or why the reconstruction of the Union with a reversal of the Emancipation Proclamation would prevent further bloodshed. Both men persisted through setbacks and defeats, from Tobruk to Fredericksburg, from Singapore to Cold Harbor.

Something of this spirit is required now. That Ukraine will suffer defeats is to be expected; that, after it has done a masterly job of concealing its losses, we will learn more of them is inevitable; that we will hear stories—assiduously spread by Russia and its sympathizers—of Ukrainian inefficiency or incompetence or corruption is certain. To some degree, these stories will all be true. But the key thing is, nonetheless, to persist.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Edward Stringer: The overlooked reason Russia’s invasion is floundering]

In war, we often brood on our own side’s weaknesses and are appalled at an enemy who is seemingly impervious to loss. When the historians peer through the records after a war, however, they invariably learn that both sides were subject to the same psychological and emotional pressures. War is thus a matter of comparative stress and breakdown.

The great theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz once observed, “In war more than anywhere else things do not turn out as we expect.”

Nearby they do not appear as they did from a distance. With what assurance an architect watches the progress of his work and sees his plans gradually take shape! … By contrast a general in time of war is constantly bombarded by reports both true and false; by errors arising from fear or negligence or hastiness; by disobedience born of right or wrong interpretations, of ill will, of a proper or mistaken sense of duty, of laziness, or of exhaustion; and by accidents that nobody could have foreseen.

Today, all of us are like the generals of the early 19th century that Clausewitz described: bombarded by false impressions and fantastic fears generated from fragmentary information. We can see videos of exploding ammunition dumps and burning cities, and trace troop movements on maps updated daily on social media. The phenomenon, however, remains the same, and so does the remedy. “Perseverance in the chosen course is the essential counterweight, provided that no compelling reasons intervene to the contrary,” Clausewitz concluded. “It is steadfastness that will earn the admiration of the world and of posterity.”

So it is now. With arms delivered at scale and with a sense of urgency by the wealthy liberal democracies, with assistance in managing logistics and training, with intelligence provided by a dozen highly competent Western agencies, Ukrainians fighting for their homeland will defeat Russia. Those who deny this possibility have to explain why Israel could defeat invading Arab armies in 1948, or why Vietnamese Communists could defeat first France and then the United States.

There is abundant evidence of Russian weakness, including the physical frailty of its leader, the refusals of its soldiers to fight, the murder of its soldiers by officers and vice versa, and the courageous, if limited, bursts of internal dissent. Russia will feel in the coming months (indeed, years) the consequences of the flight abroad of hundreds of thousands of its best-educated and most productive citizens, the isolation from the Western technology and skill on which its economy depends, and the gradual shrinkage of currency from the sales of its most important resource, oil. The evidence is there if only one cares to see it.

There is a time for clever policies, subtle diplomacy, considered overtures, and exquisite compromise. This is not it. Instead, it is up to the liberal democracies to support a country that is fighting for all who share its values, and to persist, trotz alledem und alledem, despite everything and everything, as an old German poem has it. Should the West do so, it will help bring a victory that is essential to its own security freedom, and not just Ukraine’s.