The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence said one of his country’s strategic goals is to split Moscow’s frontline between Crimea and Russia

Flawed judgments about military history helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Military history doesn’t say what Ukraine’s critics think]

One line of argument, advanced by some French and German leaders in recent discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that sooner or later Russia and Ukraine can reconcile like Germany and France after World War II. (A German government spokesperson later denied the report, but this is hardly a new recommendation.) It is a terrible analogy. Reconciliation may have arrived a couple of decades after the Second World War, but that conflict had ended with the aggressor not merely defeated but devastated. French troops had occupied Germany, including a part of its former capital. Clear borders between the two countries had been established and German society, if not thoroughly de-Nazified, had moved a long way in that direction.

The Russia-Ukraine case is very different. Russia, as unambiguous an aggressor as was Nazi Germany in 1940, will not, even under the most optimistic assumptions, see its cities flattened, its regime overthrown, its military disbanded for 10 years and only reconstructed thereafter under the supervision of the Western democracies. And the idea that the fighting will conclude with Russia again accepting (as Moscow did three decades ago) the legitimacy of Ukraine’s 1991 borders is barely conceivable.

To suppose that any real peace between Russia and Ukraine is possible within the next decade, after the horrors of the invasion—rape, torture, murder, the wholesale kidnapping of children—is simply naive. Nor are the Arab-Israeli truces a plausible model for the future. Those truces lasted, respectively, seven years (1949–56), 11 years (1956–67), six years (1967–73), and nine years (1973–82). And that does not count the cross-border raids, aerial dogfights, terrorist attacks, and up-to-the-edge-of-war mobilization crises during those truces. In the Middle East, the great powers were able to put brakes on their clients, and the country whose existence was up for dispute, Israel, eventually became the strongest power.

A rather more popular analogy is the truce after the Korean War, which has lasted for a good 70 years. But here as well the comparison is too flimsy to hold up to a closer look. Stalin approved the original North Korean invasion of the South. Only after he died, in March 1953, did the new Soviet leadership indicate that it was willing to bring the conflict to an end. In July of that year, the armistice was finally signed. Not to put too fine a point on it, although Vladimir Putin’s demise would probably make it easier to conclude the conflict in Ukraine, he is not dead yet.

The analogy breaks down in many other ways, as well. For one thing, China and North Korea couldn’t have imagined victory after early 1951. In August of that year American and United Nations ground forces, coupled with the South Korean army, numbered more than 500,000 troops, half of them American. The front line was about the length that the demilitarized zone is today, stretching through 150 miles of mountainous, and therefore defensible, terrain. The lines had been restored roughly to the prewar demarcation between the South and North.

[From the September 1953 issue: Our mistakes in Korea]

In Ukraine, the active front lines are about 600 miles in length, but the Russia-Ukraine border is much longer than that. Ukraine must defend not a narrow, mountainous peninsula but rather wide open spaces and vulnerable cities. No multidivisional foreign force is deployed on Ukraine’s side. And neither side can accept returning to the pre-February 24 lines of demarcation.

The peace on the Korean peninsula was kept only by a robust South Korean military, tens of thousands of American troops, and, for a long period, the presence of American tactical nuclear weapons. Although historians still debate how far the United States was prepared to go during the war, the use of nuclear weapons was a matter of discussion within the U.S. military and government at that time, and presumably word of that reached Moscow and Beijing.

Adroit and historically informed statecraft lies not in casting about for historical analogies and crying “Eureka!” after finding one that fits. It lies, rather, in recognizing the distinctive features of the situation before us. We must understand both the history that has led us here and the personal histories of those making decisions, but we should focus on particulars rather than generalities. Reaching for comparisons is a heuristic, an analytic shortcut that risks at best discomfiture, at worst disaster. “As our case is new, so we must think anew,” Abraham Lincoln said in his message to Congress in December 1862, and he was a statesman if ever there was one.

That being so, how should we think about a Russia-Ukraine peace—or, if that is not possible, a cessation of hostilities?

Begin with the reality that neither side is looking for a cessation of hostilities at this moment, and Western leaders would therefore be foolish to attempt to persuade and nudge the Ukrainian government into it. The record of such attempts (including Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy during the early stages of World War I) is largely one of failure, for the very simple reason that in war, as in other human endeavors, if you do not play the game you usually do not make the rules. It would not only be a waste of time but send all the wrong signals if Ukraine’s partners were to discuss such matters with journalists and pundits before at least one side is ready for it.

In the long term, moreover, a truly peaceful Ukraine is possible under only two imaginable conditions: NATO membership, or the forward deployment of tens of thousands of American troops coupled with a guarantee to wage war on Ukraine’s behalf comparable to that extended to South Korea. The former is unlikely until Ukraine’s borders have been recognized by all concerned, including Russia; the latter is also improbable, at least for now. The notion that defense guarantees by a collection of European states can somehow substitute is risible. No Ukrainian leader believes (or should believe) that French, German, Italian, or Dutch leaders will be ready to wage war against Russia in defense of Kyiv. That, ultimately, is what a defense guarantee means and what its credibility requires.

Any long-term planning for Ukraine and for the West should now also be predicated on the postwar persistence of a malignant and militarized Russia, which may well intend to restart the war once it has had a breather. Potential dissidents have fled the country or are in jail; a societal mobilization built on xenophobia and paranoia is under way; freedom of expression is being stamped out; and any successors to Vladimir Putin are unlikely to be much better. Both Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council, and Dmitri Medvedev, its deputy chairman, have expressed eliminationist views no less rabid than those articulated by their boss. Furthermore, even a defeated Russia will retain, in the Russian general staff, a thinking and planning organ of considerable quality. They will learn, adjust, and come back to avenge their humiliations at the hands of Ukraine and the West. And if they do not feel humiliated, it will only be because they have succeeded in crushing out the life of a free, sovereign, and whole Ukraine.

All of this being so, the best possible outcome leading to a cessation of fighting would be a Russian military collapse. If the West hopes to achieve this, it must provide Ukraine with a massive amount of all necessary weapons short of atomic bombs. Such an effort would require the kind of dramatic increases in output made possible under legislation like the American Defense Procurement Act of 1950.

[From the November 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

The Russian military in Ukraine is in a parlous state. On a large scale it cannot maneuver, it cannot coordinate, it cannot assault. Its losses have been stunning. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have suffered as well, but the indications are that General Zaluzhny has been conserving units for a spring offensive once the mud dries. The West needs to do all it can to ensure the success of that effort.

Should such an offensive succeed in breaking the land bridge between Russia and Crimea, and possibly even liberating Crimea and large parts of the Donbas region, there will be political repercussions in Russia. In all political systems, including authoritarian ones, dramatic failures on the battlefield in a war of choice reverberate in capitals. Already, Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats whisper criticisms of Putin and his war to Western journalists. He will not falter, but others may decide that he needs to be out of power. It probably will not be pretty when it happens, but Putin’s exit could, like Stalin’s death in 1953, open up the way for something better than war at a fever pitch.

At least for a time.

One year ago, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating aggression that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the center of the U.S.’s involvement in the war, relaying intelligence to President Volodymyr Zelensky and working with allies to provide aid to the Ukrainian military. Today, Blinken spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, deterring similar aggression from China across the Taiwan Strait, and what a Ukrainian victory might look like. “There is more convergence now over the last couple of years with our partners in Europe, but also in Asia, than I’ve seen any time in the last 30 years,” Blinken said. “For me, that tells us that America’s place in the world and ability to confront these challenges is much stronger than it’s been.”

Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We’re talking on or about the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion, but the invasion actually began in 2014. The first question I have is actually a very simple one: What is the most surprising event of the past year, excluding the fact that Russia launched a full-scale invasion thinking that it could take Kyiv in a matter of days? What is the most surprising development to you over the past year, either in the Ukraine theater or globally?

Antony Blinken: Well, Jeff, first, let me just say, it’s great to be with you. It’s great to be with the entire Atlantic community. As you’ll notice, my voice is a little bit hoarse. I think I left it somewhere along the way in Munich last week, or maybe Turkey. I’m debating whether it’s God’s way of telling me that I need to be listening even more and talking a little bit less. But we’ll leave that. I hope that’s right.

First of all, we were, of course, not surprised, unfortunately, by the reinvasion of Ukraine—the second shot, as you put it—because as everyone knows, we had extraordinary information for many months leading up to it. And while part of you wanted to believe that Vladimir Putin would simply not pull the trigger at the end, unfortunately, all the information was tracking that way. But once he did, while many months of work that we put into this, through diplomacy, to build a strong coalition, to build strong partnerships in advance—which, by the way, was the big difference from 2014—we had a run-up, and we were able to use diplomacy to bring countries together, both in terms of the support they provide to Ukraine, the pressure they put on Russia, and the strengthening of our NATO alliance in a defensive way. And having done all that work, nonetheless, we weren’t 100 percent certain that the center would not only come together but would hold. And it has.

What we’ve seen a year in is not just an alliance but a broader partnership that is strong, that is solid, that is standing up, providing the support to Ukraine, keeping the pressure on Russia, taking steps to strengthen our alliance. And you see that reflected all the way from the UN to the NATO theater itself and around the world. And finally, Jeff, this resilience has been all the more remarkable because, from energy prices to food scarcity and prices, inflation more generally, all exacerbated by Putin’s war of aggression—despite that, there’s been incredible resilience. And we’ve seen countries coming together and working together to deal effectively with those challenges that were, as I say, put in overdrive by the aggression.

[Read: How and when the war in Ukraine will end]

Goldberg: How surprised were you that Ukraine was able to withstand and then even go on the offensive in certain cases against the invasion of a seemingly overpowering force?

Blinken: I think we’ve had a couple of signs of this in the lead-up. First of all, if you go back before the reinvasion, the re-aggression, for many months, we had been working quietly to make sure that Ukrainians had in their hands what they would need to repel the initial assault, which we did see coming right at Kyiv. And if you go back to Labor Day before the aggression, President Joe Biden did an initial drawdown of military support for Ukraine, things like Stingers and Javelins. And an even bigger one in December, again before the March invasion. So in that sense, they were prepared.

Second, we have been working very closely with them to help them see what was coming and encourage them to make the necessary preparations beyond having some of this weaponry and just getting organized. And they did that and they did that a little bit quietly, because one of the concerns that President Zelensky had was the more that we talked out the possibility of an aggression—before the aggression—the more we all risk talking down his economy and foreign investment. People might be scared off. So he was trying to walk a careful line between being prepared and not raising too many concerns publicly. So it may be that in part because of that, people were a little surprised at how well the Ukrainians did initially. Having said all of that, I’ve got to say we have been in awe of their courage, their resilience, their strength, and their effectiveness. I think it has in some ways gone beyond what we might have anticipated.

Goldberg: Right. Before I get to some even bigger questions, go to this question of President Zelensky and his leadership. We had, in our minds, a model from Afghanistan of a president fleeing in the face of an onslaught and aggression, in this case in a civil war. But President Zelensky stayed. And I’m wondering if you could encapsulate your feelings about him, your analysis of his leadership, and obviously fold into that your understanding of how President Biden understands the performance of President Zelensky over the past year.

Blinken: Right man, right place, right time. Someone who stood up to this moment in history.

I had the almost surreal experience of being asked to tell him on the margins of a summit meeting in Europe back in October that we believed it was likely that his country was going to be invaded in the months ahead. I had the intelligence information that I shared with him. And we were sitting alone in a small room off of this summit meeting and almost two to three feet apart. And I shared this with him, and he took it very stoically, very seriously, brought in some of his advisers so that we could discuss it with him. And I think, from that moment on, he certainly was seized with the very real prospect that this was coming and, as I said, did a lot of work, some of it very quietly, to get ready.

But I think we’ve seen ever since that he’s become an extraordinary figure on the world stage as well, all to the benefit of his country. And, of course, he cajoles, he encourages, he prods us to do even more. If I were in his shoes, I’d be doing exactly the same thing. I think President Biden has a lot of admiration for him, a lot of respect for him. And I think that was on full evidence when the president was in Kyiv, standing side by side with President Zelensky, in a Kyiv that remains free and part of a strong, independent Ukraine.

Goldberg: Take us back to this for one minute. It’s a very interesting diplomatic-craft question. How do you take a president of a sovereign nation aside at a meeting and say, “Hey, listen, by the way, you’re about to be invaded by a superpower?” How do you say that in a way that gets the message through without seeming panicky or without seeming Chicken Little–ish? How does it actually work?

Blinken: Quite simply, in this case, what I shared with President Zelensky was that President Biden asked me, because we were going to be at the same meeting, to share with him the information that we had about Russia’s plans and intentions. Everyone saw the massing of Russian forces along Ukraine’s borders. That wasn’t a secret. Ukrainians saw it. We saw it. Europeans saw it. But what we had uniquely, in addition to that, was very explicit information about what the Russians were actually thinking and what they were planning and what they were plotting to do with those forces, as well as other things that they were going to bring to this fight. And so, in a very direct, deliberate way, I laid out the information that we had. And of course, President Zelensky asked me a number of questions about it but, as I said, took it very seriously and very stoically. And that’s when he brought in some of his advisers. We walked them through it as well. And he said, in effect, “Well, we need to work closely together to make sure that we’re prepared.”

At the same time, we were engaged in intense diplomacy with Russia to try to prevent this from happening both directly through NATO, through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, because, of course, what we most wanted was to try to stop this. And unfortunately, when Russia’s objectives and Putin’s objectives became crystal clear, it was never about NATO enlargement. It was never about some threat to Russia’s security. It was all about Putin’s vision that Ukraine should not be an independent country and should be absorbed back into Russia.

Goldberg: Right. You alluded to a certain level of tension that exists between the Zelensky administration and the Biden administration around the subject of the types of arms and the speed at which Ukraine is being armed. Do you think the United States is going fast enough?

Blinken: Jeff, I do. But again, if I were in President Zelensky’s shoes, I would probably be doing and have done exactly what he’s done, which is to continuously prod the international community, not just the United States, to do even more and do it even faster. And of course, this has been an evolutionary process in a few ways. First, the battlefield itself has shifted dramatically, first from Kyiv, where, as I said, a lot of the work we did months before the aggression helped the Ukrainians repel that aggression with the Stingers, with the Javelins, with other systems. But then, of course, everything moved east and south. The very nature of the conflict changed. What the Russians were doing, where they were doing it, how they were doing it changed. And we had to make sure that we were changing with that. And we did.

Many months ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin set up a very effective process we call the Ramstein process—because the first meeting and subsequent meetings were held in Ramstein, Germany—to bring together all of the allies and partners in this effort so that we were coordinated and could make sure that we were delivering what was needed as quickly as needed. And that process has worked very well. But this is what’s really important. And again, I’d refer you to the secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs, who are the real experts in this. It’s not just the individual weapons systems that count. And of course, we tend to get focused on one at any given time, and it becomes a story in the media.

What matters as much is, can the Ukrainians effectively use that system? And as we’re providing more NATO standard systems to them, it requires training, because these are not things that they’re used to using. Second, can they maintain them? Because if you give them something and it falls apart in a week because they can’t maintain it, it’s not going to do you a lot of good. And third, can it become part of a cohesive battle-plan maneuver, as our military experts call it, that brings to bear various elements all at the same time, at maximum effect? And that, too, requires training and advice. And we’ve now been doing, with a number of other countries, unit-level training. So it’s just not as simple as some people portray this: “Oh, yes, let’s give them this. Flip the switch. They’ll have it. And that’ll be that.” That’s not how it works.

Finally, we’re very focused on what it is that they’ll need in the months ahead to have the maximum effect possible. But even as we’re doing that, we’re thinking about their longer-term defense posture, because at some point, when this is over, what’s going to be very important is to do everything we can to make sure that Russia can’t repeat the exercise a year later, two years later, five years later. And that means building up Ukraine’s longer-term deterrent and defense capacity. So all of those things are being worked on at the same time. We’re running and chewing gum at the same time.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]

Goldberg: I want to come to this question of what “over” looks like in a moment. But let me just stay on this question of arming and escalation. The American defense establishment has a certain level of anxiety around the danger of inadvertently entering into an escalatory cycle that could end conceivably, God forbid, in the use of at least battlefield nuclear weapons. How worried are you that the United States and its allies will cross a line that will provoke Putin into doing something dire?

Blinken: Well, Jeff, first of all, any administration has to factor in the possibility of escalation into what they’re doing, what they’re providing, and how they’re helping. And, of course, President Biden has been very clear from the start that our support for Ukraine is fundamental, and we’re with them for as long as it takes. But we also don’t want to broaden this war and certainly don’t want to do anything to create a wider conflagration. So the president has had to factor both of those things into the decisions he’s made. And by the way, he’s the one who makes the decisions. The rest of us, we can give him advice, recommendations. If you’re not in government, you can opine and criticize, which is always what’s needed to make sure we’re doing the best that we can. But ultimately, as the saying goes, the buck stops with him. And that’s something that he takes very seriously.

Now, what we’ve seen, at least thus far, is that some steps that we’ve taken that some might have been concerned could be escalatory have not proved to be so. And I think there’s one powerful reason for that, and that is the last thing that Vladimir Putin needs is a wider war, and one that brings in NATO in order to defend itself—which is NATO’s purpose, not to attack Russia. It never has been, never will be, but to defend the countries of NATO who are very concerned about Russia’s aggressive posture. If Putin did something that created escalation and brought NATO in, that’s really the last thing he wants, because as it is, we all know, he is struggling mightily in Ukraine right now. He’s got about 80-plus percent of his land forces committed in Ukraine. And in fact, in an almost perverse logic, because he is falsely concerned that NATO poses a threat to Russia, he has to keep some things in reserve lest there be a conflict that he creates with NATO. So I think that’s been the biggest deterrent against escalation.

Now, there have been moments where the concern has been a little bit heightened. For example, when the Ukrainians went on a counteroffensive last spring and had very significant success, there was some concern that Putin might react even more irrationally. And there was language coming out of Moscow that suggested that he would look to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So that was a concern. But what we did in that case was to not only message him very directly.—I was engaged with my counterpart, Mr. Lavrov; others were engaged with theirs—but we urged and, I think, successfully, other countries that might have a little bit more influence with Russia these days, like China, but also other countries, like India, to engage him directly about their absolute opposition to any use of nuclear weapons. And we know that they conveyed those messages. And I think that had some effect. It’s something we always have to look at, but again, the track record to date suggests that the escalation that some feared has, at least to now, not happened.

Goldberg: Mr. Secretary, you mentioned China. Let me pivot to Asia for a moment, if I may, and ask you this: Do you think that the U.S. and its allies will have more success convincing China to limit its involvement in this conflict, meaning not supply arms to Russia, than the West had in trying to convince Russia not to invade or reinvade Ukraine in the first place? We’re at a very sensitive moment, obviously, in your campaign to keep the Chinese out.

Blinken: Jeff, I certainly hope so and ultimately believe so, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Goldberg: Why do you believe so?

Blinken: I’ll tell you why, but let me give you the background to this first, because it really goes back to the beginning of the aggression. You’ll remember that just weeks before the aggression took place, President Xi Jinping and Putin had a summit meeting in which they talked about a partnership with “no limits.” Well, a phrase like that is of concern. And a couple of weeks into the aggression, President Biden was on a video conference with President Xi and said to him very directly, very clearly, that any Chinese military support for Russia in this conflict—or, for that matter, the systematic evasion of sanctions—would be a serious problem for the relationship between the United States and China. And on subsequent occasions over the months, the president has repeated that message, and others of us have done the same thing.

What we’ve seen to date is China basically holding that line, which is to say there has been some nonlethal dual-use-type support coming from “Chinese companies” that almost certainly was approved by the state, because there’s really no difference. But there has not been lethal military support, and similarly, we haven’t seen to date systematic sanctions—but we also have picked up information over the last couple of months that strongly indicates that China is now considering doing that. And that was one of the reasons that, in the meeting that I had with the senior Chinese foreign-policy official Wang Yi, in Munich, I again directly told him this concern, what we were seeing, and reminded him of the many conversations between President Biden and President Xi, and reminded him that this would be a serious problem in the relationship.

I’m hopeful, but in a very clear-eyed way, that China will get that message, because it’s not only coming from us; it’s coming from many other countries who do not want to see China aiding and abetting, in a material way, Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. And so, to the extent China is trying to engage in a charm offensive these days to reengage with other countries as it comes out of COVID, I don’t think it wants to be in the business of further alienating them by providing lethal support to Russia. The jury’s out. We’re watching it very, very carefully. We’ll see how they react.

Goldberg: Does the Ukraine reinvasion over the last year make it more likely or less likely that China will do something precipitous against Taiwan in the future?

[Read: Taiwain faces it’s Ukraine moment]

Blinken: One of the reasons, I think, that other countries far beyond Europe joined this effort is because they understood the consequences, the repercussions, the implications for issues well beyond Europe. And so, for example, Japan has been one of our staunchest partners in this effort from day one. South Korea and others. And there’s, of course, the fundamental principle here that if aggression is allowed to go forward with impunity, it could open a Pandora’s box where other would-be aggressors conclude that they can take matters into their own hands and get away with it.

So I think the fact that so many countries have come together in the way they’ve come together has to be something that China factors into its own thinking about Taiwan, including, at some point in the future, any potential use of force. And not just of the support to Ukraine itself, but, of course, the sanctions, the export controls that have been imposed on Russia and that are doing serious damage—damage, by the way, that’s going to accumulate, not decrease, in ways that we can get into. So I think that that’s something that China has to factor into its thinking about the future. I think it has to factor into its thinking the huge reputational cost that Russia has incurred. Now, how all of that nets out, I can’t tell you.

But there’s something else that’s really important, and I know we may want to get on to this later if we have time. But one of the reasons that the world is so concerned about a crisis across the Taiwan Strait is because this is not an internal matter, as China would have it, based on its sovereignty. It’s a matter of concern to quite literally the entire world. Fifty percent of the commercial container traffic goes through that strait every day. A big majority of the semiconductors that the world needs for anything from our smartphones or dishwashers or automobiles are produced in Taiwan. If there were a crisis in Taiwan as a result of China’s aggression in some fashion, that would have, I think, disastrous consequences for the world economy and for countries around the world. And that’s the message that Beijing is hearing.

Goldberg: Very large question for you: Are we in a new Cold War?

Blinken: I really resist labeling things, including using labels like the Cold War that are in some ways easy to pull out and give people a frame of reference. But I don't think it reflects the current reality in a few ways. First, when it comes to China, of course, we are in so many ways so much more integrated than we were with the Soviet Union. And not just us—countries around the world. And we also continue to have some fundamental interests in common, although eliciting Chinese cooperation on them is challenging—everything from climate to global health to counternarcotics to the macro economy.

But of course, we are in a fundamental competition, and it’s a competition really to shape what comes next, what comes after the post–Cold War era, which is over. And China’s vision for a world order is fundamentally different from ours: Ours is based on the ideal of having a liberal world order; China’s is an illiberal one. They need an order. They want an order. But it’s profoundly illiberal, not liberal. But at the same time, the complexity of the world is such that we’re not dividing it into ideological blocs. There are many countries in the world that have different systems, different ideologies, different approaches, that nonetheless want what we infamously call a “rules-based order,” an order that functions on the premise of international law. And there’s a good reason for that: These very same countries came together after two world wars to try to put in place understandings, rules, norms, standards, common understandings, to try to make sure that a third world war wouldn’t emerge. And the countries that came together in the UN Charter or, for that matter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights weren’t just the Western countries; it was countries from all sorts of different ideologies, backgrounds and perspectives—including, by the way, China, including countries that, again, are not democracies as we would call them.

So I think our challenge now is to make sure that all countries—that believe that we have to have an international system that functions on some basic rules and understandings and hopefully themselves will make the full transition to democracy, but nonetheless already believe in the need for rules—stand together and help put those rules in place, update them as necessary, update the international organizations where many of those rules are decided and applied, and come together in that way. That’s fundamentally what this is about.

Goldberg: I want to push back a little bit on this Cold War answer, at least in the Russian context, because it seems to me at least as if the United States and Russia are not merely in a Cold War reminiscent of the old Cold War. This period seems to be reminiscent of the most tense periods of the Cold War of the late 1940s to 1990 or so. Talk about the state of Russian-U.S. relations and put this in context historically for us.

Blinken: Jeff, in a funny way, you’re right. It may even be in one sense worse. For example, take the news this week that Russia is suspending participation in the new START agreement. It’s the one remaining arms-control agreement that’s clearly to the benefit of both countries but also to the world. It’s a profoundly irresponsible action, and one that I think the world sees as yet another deeply negative step. And even during the Cold War, by the time we got around to forging these arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, we both abided by them, even in some of the worst moments.

But having said that, this conflict between many countries and Russia over Ukraine is not about ideology, as the Cold War was. It isn’t communism versus the free world. It is about an imperialist power that is seeking to aggress another country and to aggress the principles at the heart of the UN Charter that are there to try to keep the peace around the world, and many countries standing up against it. So in that sense, I don’t see it as a Cold War. I see it as a large part of the world united in standing up against aggression, and standing up against aggression because it not only poses a threat to Ukraine and its people, but to peace and security around the world, to the extent that other would-be aggressors get the wrong message from what Russia’s doing.

Goldberg: Let’s stay on the subject of the alliance. There are obviously many, many countries in the alliance that you’ve helped to construct. And quite obviously, NATO is reinvigorated by what is happening. However, you see a lot of countries—many, many countries, including U.S. allies, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, even Israel—staying on the sidelines or not engaging to the level that certainly Ukraine would love them to engage in. And then you have a whole basket of countries, including some surprising ones—South Africa, for instance, but also India and so on—that are behaving in ways reminiscent of the old nonaligned bloc during the actual Cold War. And I’m wondering whether you’re surprised by the extent to which many countries are staying on the sidelines and seeing which way the wind blows—and what you’re doing about it.

Blinken: I think you have to disaggregate and pull some of these threads apart, because first, what are we seeing? In the body that brings together the entire world—the United Nations General Assembly—on two occasions, 141 and then 143 members voted, stood up, and spoke out against the Russian aggression. And that’s two-thirds of the world’s countries or more. So I think that speaks very powerfully to public-square opinion around the world on what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Second, if you look at it, there are different baskets of support for Ukraine: military support to help them defend themselves and take back their territory, but also economic support, humanitarian support, support for their electricity grid that’s being systematically targeted by Russia, support for the refugees who have fled out of Ukraine in the face of the onslaught. And what you see is different countries participating in different ways—some in all of those baskets, some in one or two. But all of that is good.

And then, finally, there are countries that have long-standing, decades-long relationships with Russia, with the Soviet Union before, that are challenging to break off in one fell swoop. It’s not flipping a light switch; it’s moving an aircraft carrier. India, for decades, had Russia providing military equipment to it and its defenses. But what we’ve seen over the last few years is a trajectory away from relying on Russia and moving into partnership with us and with other countries, France and so forth. But you can’t do that again by flipping the switch. South Africa has, again, a long-standing relationship going back to the apartheid years, where the Soviet Union was supportive of the freedom forces in South Africa. More than unfortunately, the United States was much too sympathetic to the apartheid regime.

So that history also doesn’t get erased overnight. It’s a process. But I think you see that process moving with those kinds of countries as well as with the support that many are providing in different baskets. One last thing: Some countries are doing this quietly, not advertising. That’s okay, as long as it gets there.

Goldberg: You’re well aware that it’s much harder to build a coherent foreign policy when American politics is incoherent. And we’re in a moment now when parts of the Republican Party, at least, are more isolationist in orientation than they certainly were during the Cold War. I’m wondering how that affects your ability to sustain what could be a very, very long and costly campaign to keep Ukraine fighting effectively and then to help Ukraine protect itself for years to come.

Blinken: Jeff, I just came back from Munich, the security conference there, which is a big gathering moment for many of us involved in these issues. But I was not the only American there. Obviously, the vice president was there leading our delegation. But so, too, was what I believe was the largest bipartisan, bicameral congressional delegation that Munich has ever hosted. And before we went to Munich, I sat down with leader Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans who were off to Munich. I talked to Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who also brought a number of members with him. And in my conversations with leading Republicans who are leading their party in both the Senate and the House, I find the support to be very strong and ongoing for Ukraine.

The fact that this strong bipartisan congressional delegation was in Munich spoke very powerfully to the Europeans who were there and to the Ukrainians who were there, because it is indicative of the ongoing support, the fact that the center is holding. Now, of course, you hear voices that are questioning the support for Ukraine, and they’re there. But I think that the best way to answer them is to continue to show success, continue to help the Ukrainians show success. And also, there is an important issue that we’re very focused on and which I respect from some who raised questions or who are critical, and that is the need to make sure that the incredible generosity of American taxpayers is being used the way it’s intended, that the money that funds the weapons being provided is not in any way misused or diverted. And we are very focused on that. I think the steps President Zelensky has taken in recent weeks to crack down on corruption in some of his ministries, including by firing people, is very welcome, because it demonstrates Ukraine is committed to that too.

Goldberg: Let me ask you one last question—I would do this all day, but I’m afraid for your vocal cords. The last question is the biggest of all: What does victory look like to you?

Blinken: On one level, there’s already been a victory in the sense that Putin’s first objective, his primary objective, was to erase Ukraine from the map, to end its identity as an independent country, to absorb it into Russia. That has not happened; that clearly will not happen. So in that sense, in terms of Putin’s fundamental objective, he’s already failed. It’s also important that there be an end to the fighting, but in ways that are both just and durable. By just, I mean an outcome that reflects the basic principles of the UN Charter when it comes to things like territorial integrity and sovereignty. Durable, in a sense that when this ends, the way it ends is found in a way that makes it much less likely, if not impossible, that Russia will simply repeat the exercise a year or five years later. So the actual contours of that, exactly where the lines are drawn, when they’re drawn—that really is fundamentally up to the Ukrainians. But we have a shared interest in making sure that we can confidently say that the result is a just and durable one.

Goldberg: Is it victory, though, if Russia remains in any part of Ukraine, including those parts it seized in 2014?

Blinken: The success that’s already been achieved in ensuring that Ukraine remains an independent sovereign country, that’s fundamental, and that’s already there. But it’s really, I think, vitally important that exactly where this settles, as I said, is basically just and durable. That’s up to Ukrainians to decide. They may decide that they rightly believe that one way or another, every part of Ukraine needs to be made whole. “One way or another” could be by continuing the fight on the ground. “One way or another” could include negotiations at some point over what remains. All of that is basically up to them. And our job is to make sure that, for example, if it does come to a negotiation, they’re in the strongest possible position from which to negotiate, which is why we are maximizing the efforts that we’re making now to help them regain territory that was taken from them, whether it’s since February or since 2014.

Goldberg: Let me throw one more bonus question on you. It’s a very important anniversary. It’s not a question about what surprises you, but what have you learned as an American about the nature of history? I don’t want to misinterpret Frank Fukuyama, who didn’t actually say what people think he said. But there is this idea that—and when you were involved in diplomacy in the 1990s, big issues were Middle East peace, Bosnia, the Balkans, but now we’re talking the U.S., Russia, and China. We’re talking about enormous systems colliding with each other in ways that are at least reminiscent of a bipolar, tripolar world of the second half of the 20th century. What is the biggest lesson for you about history and authoritarianism today?

Blinken: The first thing that comes to mind, Jeff, is that those who forget history are condemned to retweet it. So I think we do have to be guided by history but not imprisoned by it. And I mean this by that: First, history suggests—if you look at modern Russian history—that unfortunately, there is a thread that runs throughout it. Go back to George Kennan’s long cable. That’s all there. In fact, if you read Kennan today, if you read the passages from that cable today from 1947, you could literally insert Russia and Putin for what he says about the then–Soviet Union. So I think it’s wise not to forget that even though, of course, we went through a very hopeful period where our entire focus was on trying to integrate Russia into the international community—and I think that was a well-placed hope, but obviously did not factor in, in some ways—some of these enduring threads in Russian history now come back to the fore.

Second, history also suggests that when a power is rising as China is, that can produce significant friction in the international system. And we’ve seen that particularly in recent years, as China has become both more repressive at home and more aggressive in its region and around the world in a variety of ways—not just militarily, but economically, diplomatically, etc. So that’s an important lesson of history. And in part, it explains the moment we’re in of renewed superpower competition. But we also can’t be imprisoned by it, because we have in other ways a vastly different and vastly more complicated world where the challenges that people are facing in their daily lives come in part from big transnational challenges like climate change, like global health, like food insecurity. We cannot, and we are not, ignoring those, because these are things that actually have a direct impact on people’s lives all over the world, including, of course, our own citizens. And they are interconnected with the superpower competition, because that competition in one way or another can actually exacerbate those problems by the actions, in this case, of Russia or China—or hopefully can help address them, including, one would hope, if China sees self-interest in doing that. There’s only so much that we control.

We can’t fundamentally control the decisions that Putin makes or that China makes, but we can shape the environment in which those decisions will be made. One of the ways we’re doing that is by making historic investments in ourselves. If you look at the trifecta of the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its focus on climate, you put these things together, and that is showing to the world that the United States is dead serious about its competitiveness. It’s dead serious about making ourselves as strong as possible to deal with the issues that our people need us to deal with and that the world needs us to deal with. And as a result, we are getting the second side of the coin that’s so important in being successful in the world, which is greater alignment with allies and partners in dealing with global challenges, whether it’s competition from Russia or China, or whether it’s these transnational issues. There is more convergence now over the last couple of years with our partners in Europe but also in Asia than I’ve seen any time in the last 30 years. For me, that tells us that America’s place in the world and ability to confront these challenges is much stronger than it’s been. And you see that coming together both in dealing with Russia and dealing with China.

Sometimes the best way to understand what’s possible is to ask impossible questions.

One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want.

The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecast a decisive Russian win against Ukraine.

Let’s examine each of these insights in turn.

Beware the fog of war … termination.

First, a meta-point: This exercise is really hard. “No one, including me, has any strong confidence about how or when the war will end,” Dan Reiter, a political scientist at Emory University who wrote an entire book about how wars end, told me.

[Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory]

Wars “proceed in phases,” with “offensives and operational pauses, cycles of increased or decreased intensity in fighting,” and so on; it is perilous to “extrapolate from whatever period you’re currently in and imagine that this will represent the future trajectory” of the conflict, cautioned Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses.

There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances. To put a twist on an old Yiddish expression, people predict, and war laughs.

Prepare for a protracted, protean conflict.

Amid an apparent Russian offensive and anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensives in eastern Ukraine this spring, U.S. officials are reportedly conveying an urgent message to their Ukrainian counterparts: The next several months are crucial to tipping the war in Ukraine’s favor, given that ramped-up Western military assistance can’t necessarily be sustained. Ukrainian leaders and a number of prominent experts argue that Ukraine could actually win the war as early as this year if the United States and its allies speedily provide the types of additional advanced weaponry, such as fighter jets and long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, that Kyiv is requesting.

If the Ukrainian military were to use such weapons to cut off the land bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, Moscow would have a harder time supplying troops and civilians in Crimea and keeping control of it, argued John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work). That, in turn, could pressure Putin to strike a peace deal or even bring about new Russian leadership, Herbst told me.

Many experts I consulted, however, advised girding for a struggle that could last a lot longer, even if the war in its more acute form resolves sooner.

The conflict is “already a long war when compared to other interstate conflicts, and wars of this kind tend to cluster as either being relatively short—lasting no more than weeks or a few months—or averaging several years in duration,” Kofman told me. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average.

Any apparent conclusion of the conflict might give way to a reopening of the war in the future, Kofman noted—particularly if the current wave of fighting subsides because of “a premature cease-fire with none of the fundamental issues resolved, and both parties simply use the time to rearm in the hope of returning to the battlefield.”

The forecasting firm Good Judgment’s superforecasters, a global network of about 180 experts in various fields with a strong track record, tend to “see a long slog coming” in Ukraine, CEO Warren Hatch told me. Some of the superforecasters, however, point to key differences between this war and past conflicts that they believe could produce a faster resolution—including the degree to which the West is arming Ukraine and punishing Russia economically.

As of this writing, the superforecasters had assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario of Russia and Ukraine not agreeing to end the conflict before October 1, 2024, the furthest-out date among the multiple-choice options presented. Good Judgment also posed my questions to its network. When the superforecasters were asked to name the year in which they expected Russia’s war against Ukraine to end, the median answer was 2025, with a minimum of 2024 and a maximum of 2037.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]

The Russian journalist Maria Lipman, now a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, observed that at the moment, “neither side seems to have a clear advantage on the battlefield,” and “neither Ukrainian nor Russian leadership is willing to start peace talks.” This leads Lipman to an endgame scenario that some other experts recently have invoked: an armistice akin to that between North and South Korea, with the United States and its allies supporting Kyiv as they do Seoul.

“One may imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War,” with “the warring sides remaining not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on alert, but more or less securely divided,” Lipman told me. Still, she said, whatever border is drawn between Russia and Ukraine is likely to be far longer and harder to secure than the one dividing the Korean peninsula. And Russia, as a much larger country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a significant economic player, “is no North Korea” and “can’t and will not be isolated,” she noted.

Michael Kimmage, a historian of U.S.-Russian relations at the Catholic University of America who served on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 2014 to 2016, told me,  “The one thing I feel comfortable predicting” is that what’s now playing out on the battlefield in Ukraine will prove “a generational conflict” featuring tensions and hostilities over the next two to three decades, even if the current hot war wanes. It will be a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, “but nested within another conflict between the United States and Russia that’s really over Europe at large.”

The closest analogue is the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union took nearly 20 years—until the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis—to establish “rules of the road” for how to contain and manage the entrenched, multifaceted conflict between the two superpowers, Kimmage argued. In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict. Even as they steel themselves for a long-term contest with China, Americans could find the conflict with Russia becoming more present in their life than it is now—in the form of, say, more Kremlin cyberattacks or election interference, or even direct military confrontation with Russia in a war zone like Ukraine.

Still, Herbst, of the Atlantic Council, noted that the United States is spending only a bit more than 6 percent of its defense budget ($50 billion a year) to support Ukraine militarily and economically, relative to the trillions of dollars that the United States spent over the course of the Cold War. “If leaders explain the stakes and the costs, this is a manageable burden,” he told me.

Keep an eye on whether other countries accept Russia’s claims to empire.

Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian army who now studies the future of warfare, put it plainly: The war is most likely to end “when Putin realizes his imperial fantasies are not possible, and that his army cannot deliver him the victories [on] the ground he needs.”

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, also pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial aspirations as a key indicator to watch, but added that these could be thwarted by developments off the battlefield. She doesn’t foresee a durable end to the war in Ukraine until “the world” (here she especially has in mind countries other than the United States and its European allies) “is no longer of the view that Russia deserves a sphere of influence and has a right to empire.” Only in such a scenario, Hill explained, will the Kremlin be prevented from overcoming Western isolation by deepening its diplomatic, economic, and military ties with other countries, and feel international pressure to engage in serious negotiations to end the war through some international framework.

Persuading countries in regions such as Africa and the Middle East to deny Russia its imperial schemes will require a major shift in how the United States and its allies describe the stakes of the war and even in how they articulate their broader worldview, Hill argued. Rather than framing the war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies or East versus West, U.S. and European leaders should make the case that the Kremlin, in its thirst for empire, has “violated the UN Charter [and] international laws” that keep other countries safe as well.

U.S. officials also might need to move away from the strategic paradigm they’ve embraced in recent years of “great-power competition.” This framework, Hill maintained, risks implying that the fates of nations around the world are subject to face-offs among the United States, China, and Russia—and it can shape geopolitical realities rather than merely describing them as they are. The United States might have to push to reform outdated elements of the world’s security architecture, such as the UN Security Council, so that they no longer reflect a bygone era in which a small group of big powers got to determine the course of international affairs.

Anticipate a messy, provisional peace advanced by a group of global actors.

Many experts I consulted were pessimistic about the prospect of a negotiated settlement to end the war in the foreseeable future. But a couple offered scenarios for what such a settlement could look like, portraying them as more guesswork than predictions. Both scenarios involved the mediation of other world powers. Neither featured a tidy, satisfying resolution.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cut the baloney realism]

Mathew Burrows of the Stimson Center, a former top U.S. intelligence official focused on strategic foresight and global trend analysis, sketched one potential path in which a stalemate leads to a brittle, occasionally violated cease-fire mediated by actors like the United Nations, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Eventually, perhaps if U.S. commitment to Ukraine fades or Putin is weakened by significant opposition during Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, there could be a difficult, lengthy push for a sturdier peace deal involving bigger concessions, with Ukraine encouraged to negotiate by Western and Southern European countries and Russia pressed to do the same by the other “BRICS” nations (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa). That effort would require extensive U.S. involvement as well, and could serve as a springboard for China to assert itself as a diplomatic power, as the United States did during peace talks after World War I.

Reiter, the scholar of how wars end, provided another rough outline: If Russian and Ukrainian offensives this spring fail to result in a clear military victory for either side, a neutral country such as Brazil or India could broker secret peace negotiations. Ukraine and Russia might be more receptive to these diplomatic efforts than before—Putin on account of an exhausted Russian military, Ukrainian leaders out of concern about the war’s mounting economic and humanitarian toll and the slackening of Western military assistance. The talks could yield a shaky cease-fire in which Russia consented to remove its forces from Ukrainian territory (a commitment that all parties think the Kremlin will probably renege on by maintaining a military presence in the country’s east) and Ukraine vowed to reestablish a water supply to Crimea without recognizing Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The agreement also could include a tacit understanding that Ukraine would not formally join NATO. Such a deal could provide Putin with a “fig leaf” to “declare victory for domestic political audiences” and enable Ukraine to begin postwar reconstruction, Reiter reasoned. But it would leave the core issues of sovereignty that triggered the war unresolved.

Don’t expect the war to end in a mushroom cloud.

Over the past year, there has been an ebbing and flowing fear of the war in Ukraine ending apocalyptically, with Russia resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, stirred most recently by Putin suspending cooperation in the nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States known as New START. But many experts I turned to were not seriously concerned about such an outcome.

[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]

In explaining why, Reiter pointed to “the heavy diplomatic costs of [Russia] using nuclear weapons, the lack of military utility of using nuclear weapons,” and the risk that such use would “increase NATO military involvement” in the war. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale, told me he stands by an assessment he made in October in which he similarly argued that a Russian nuclear detonation was highly unlikely. “We are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending,” he wrote at the time. More likely, Snyder argues, Putin is trying to instill fear in order to buy his military time and undermine international support for Ukraine.

And don’t assume that the war will conclude with regime change in Moscow.

When my colleagues at the Atlantic Council and I recently surveyed more than 150 global strategists and foresight experts about what the world could look like in 10 years, nearly half of the respondents expected Russia to either become a failed state or break up internally by 2033, presumably driven at least in part by Putin’s disastrous war against Ukraine. But even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall.

In his October assessment, Snyder floated one scenario in which Ukrainian military victories prompt a power struggle in Moscow that leads Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, as Putin and his rivals judge that the armed forces loyal to them are most useful on the homefront. But what Snyder envisions is Putin prioritizing his political survival in Russia over his personal and ideological designs on Ukraine, not necessarily Putin’s removal from power.

Kofman, at CNA, considers “leadership or regime change in Russia” to be “unlikely in the near term,” and pointed out that “a change in leadership will not necessarily lead Moscow to end the war.” Kimmage, at Catholic University, estimated that the odds are “one in a thousand or one in a million” that a new Russian leader will emerge who is willing to withdraw Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, subject Russian perpetrators to war-crimes tribunals, and pay reparations to Ukraine—all objectives Kyiv has articulated.

Lipman, the journalist and scholar, expects “a long period of decline or decay in all spheres of life” for Russia, but she currently doesn’t foresee political upheaval. Putin’s “grip on power has grown even tighter and his authority even more unlimited” over the past year, with broad “public acquiescence” to the war and Russian elites still relying on Putin for “security and stability,” she noted. “Will the situation change to a point when taking the risks to oppose Putin may appear justified? That’s something very hard to imagine, looking from today. Right now, pledging full allegiance certainly appears to be a safer strategy.”

Kimmage, for his part, worries that the United States and its allies might expect a “Hollywood version” of the war’s ending, featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “the David who’s going to beat Goliath.” The danger, he said, is that “if there’s too much of an expectation of quick-fix, instant-gratification heroism … we’ll end up getting frustrated with Zelensky and the Ukrainians” and then could wind down support for their struggle. Zelensky “deserves all the praise he gets, but the script is not written. And the script is not destined to have a happy ending. And it’s not destined to have a happy ending soon if there is a happy ending,” Kimmage explained. “We have to build a narrative of the war that’s durable enough that it doesn’t depend on that happy ending.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Young women are struggling. “Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago—according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” The Washington Post reports. Drawing on the same study, Axios notes, “About 30 percent of teen girls said they had seriously considered attempting suicide, up from 19 percent in 2011.” What is going on? Whether you have young women in your life who have shaped your perspective or other experiences with this topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

When Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed in 2015, I hoped his numerous illustrations of online mobs meting out cruelty in the guise of holding others accountable would persuade the masses that joining digital pile-ons does more harm than not––both because the facts of various matters so often prove different, or more complicated, than they at first seemed and because even in cases where an individual deserves some punishment or sanction, zealous hordes are incapable of proportion. The hate of uncoordinated vigilantes who purport to hold others accountable can add up to so much punishment that their targets wind up pondering suicide.

For individuals, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” is an undervalued rule. For media institutions, who purport to act in the public interest and rightly consider accountability in their ambit, I‘d posit a special responsibility to refrain from initiating or amplifying false or misleading stories––and where coverage is later proved to be misleading, to revise unjustly unflattering portraits of individuals as prominently as they published them.

Alas, even in cases where targets of public opprobrium are especially rich and famous––which is to say, possessed of more ability than most of us to counter false or misleadingly one-sided information––coverage that seems likely to tarnish a person’s reputation is too often far more prominent than coverage that seems likely to burnish or revive it.

For example, in “Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence,” the journalist James Kirchick revisits the case of an actor whose career was destroyed when he faced accusations of extreme sexual misconduct. Although Kirchick’s reporting doesn’t resolve anything definitively, it includes significant facts that readers of the original coverage ought to know as updates, as they give very different impressions of what might have happened. As yet, however, publishers of bygone coverage have not updated their articles. (Kirchick has expounded on his reporting process for Meghan Daum and The Fifth Column.)

And at The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper is launching a series, “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” that will probe the vilification of the famous author of the Harry Potter books. Rowling is portrayed by some as a transphobic bigot whose views are egregiously beyond the pale––and were that true, opprobrium would be appropriate. Bigotry against trans people is indeed odious. But do Rowling’s actual words validate the ways that she has been characterized? Cathy Young, Kat Rosenfield, Brendan Morrow, and the Blocked and Reported podcast have all found significant evidence of dubious attacks––and at least one Rowling attacker retracted his claims rather than defend them in court.

Less famous subjects of vilification are far less likely to have anyone following up to vindicate them (commentators on the populist right are throwing around accusations of “grooming” children as widely and frivolously as any character assassins in American life). However, Nicole Carr of ProPublica proved an exception to that rule last year, telling the story of Cecelia Lewis, an educator wrongly hounded out of a job and followed to another during a moral panic about what participants erroneously thought of as critical race theory.

Whether a person is famous or obscure, blameworthy or blameless, they deserve, at the very least, scrupulous accuracy when their behavior is described to mass audiences. Folks on the right and left who fall short of that mark are more alike than they think. As long as their carelessness is so frequent, the case against pile-ons is airtight.

Joe Biden’s Criminal-Justice-Reform Failures

At The Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey argues that the administration has failed to clear a low bar that it set:

Last May, President Joe Biden sat with family members of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the White House as he signed an executive order he called the “most significant police reform in decades.”

One of the more notable promises in the order was setting up a “National Law Enforcement Accountability Database,” that would collect detailed information about officers who committed misconduct. The deadline to launch it was Jan. 20, the same day that five Memphis police officers were fired for the beating death of Tyre Nichols—a killing that has once more ignited national debate about policing. The Department of Justice has yet to announce the database, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its status.

Deadlines for other initiatives in Biden’s order, like new standards for credentialing police departments, appear to have also come and gone without acknowledgement or public results.

On Art and Supposed Harm

In a New York Times column about the censorship of art and “the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety,” Michelle Goldberg writes:

I’m not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work.

A Business Contagion

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey argues that layoffs at one company tend to spur layoffs at other companies for various reasons that may have nothing to do with a financial imperative to carry them out:

When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so.

Shedding employees when everybody else is doing it avoids drawing public scrutiny to or creating reputational damage for a given firm, for one. A lone business announcing that it is downsizing is likely to be described as mismanaged or troubled, and may well be mismanaged or troubled. However merited, that kind of reputation tends to hinder a company from attracting investment, workers, and customers. But if a firm downsizes when everyone else is doing it, the public seldom notices and investors seldom care.

Copycat layoffs also let executives cite challenging business conditions as a justification for cuts, rather than their own boneheaded strategic decisions. In this scenario, the problem isn’t that corporate leadership poured billions of dollars into a quixotic new venture or hired hundreds of what ended up being redundant employees. It’s not that the C-suite misunderstood the competitive environment, necessitating a costly and painful readjustment. It’s Jay Powell! It’s a COVID-related reversion to the mean! Who could have known?

In addition to being simpler for executives to explain to their shareholders or the board, large-scale copycat layoffs are easier to carry out and better received by employees than selective or strategic layoffs. Managers let staffers go instead of firing them, blaming economic conditions rather than detailing their direct reports’ shortcomings. Morale might take less of a hit if the remaining workers fault the broader business environment instead of their bosses.

Another possible reason layoffs are contagious is that executives might take other firms’ hiring and firing decisions as a kind of market intelligence. Even when a company’s own financials appear sound, it may interpret a competitor’s layoff announcement as a sign of worsening conditions.

Provocation of the Week

In Unherd, Thomas Fazi explains why he is worried about World War III:

By providing increasingly powerful military equipment as well as financial, technical, logistical and training support to one of the warring factions, including for offensive operations (even within Russian territory), the West is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with Russia, regardless of what our leaders may claim.

Western citizens deserve to be told what is going on in Ukraine—and what the stakes are. Perhaps the wildest claim being made is that “if we deliver all the weapons Ukraine needs, they can win,” as former Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently asserted. For Rasmussen, and other Western hawks, this includes retaking Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 and which it considers of the utmost strategic importance. Many Western allies still consider this an uncrossable red line. But for how long? Just last month, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is warming up to the idea of backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea.

This strategy is based on the assumption that Russia will accept a military defeat and the loss of the territories it controls without resorting to the unthinkable—the use of nuclear weapons. But this is a massive assumption on which to gamble the future of humanity, especially coming from the very Western strategists who disastrously botched every major military forecast over the past 20 years, from Iraq to Afghanistan. The truth is that, from Russia’s perspective, it is fighting against what it perceives to be an existential threat in Ukraine, and there is no reason to believe that, with its back against the wall, it won’t go to extreme measures to guarantee its survival. As Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, put it: “The loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war. Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

During the Cold War, this was widely understood by Western leaders. But today, by constantly escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the United States and Nato appear to have forgotten it, and are instead inching closer to a catastrophic scenario.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

In 2016, two years after Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, I was invited to the Kyiv Suvorov Military School to present the Ukrainian edition of my novel set in Afghanistan. The auditorium was mostly filled with fresh-faced cadets and their instructors, some of whom had recently returned from fighting in the east. After an hour’s discussion, the cadets filed back to their barracks. Then, out of the dark recesses of the auditorium, three men in their mid-50s approached me.

They each had a thick neck, cropped hair, and a thigh-length black leather jacket. One spoke rapidly with my interpreter. When he took something from his pocket and reached for me, I flinched. But he was already holding my lapel as he pushed a pin through it. My interpreter explained that these three men were Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Because I was a veteran of the American Afghan War, they wanted to present me with a lapel pin from the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan as a gesture of friendship. All three of them wore the same pin.

[Elliot Ackerman: The rivalry that defines America]

After the event, my interpreter told me that veterans of the Soviet war existed in a cultural limbo in Ukraine, which was why these men so appreciated any public discussion about Afghanistan. They had served in the Soviet military, which—adjacent as it was to the modern-day Russian military—made their service suspect to many younger Ukrainians. However, when they’d fought in the Soviet military, they’d done so as Ukrainians. The Soviet military legacy—in Afghanistan but even more importantly in the Second World War—wasn’t simply a Russian one but a Ukrainian one.

Last week marked the 80th anniversary of the Battle for Stalingrad, the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, which turned the tide of the Second World War. To mark the occasion, President Vladimir Putin traveled to Stalingrad, now called Volgograd. In a televised speech, he said, “The legacy of generations, values and traditions—this is all what makes Russia different, what makes us strong and confident in ourselves, in our righteousness and in our victory.” What he neglected to mention was that the victory at Stalingrad over the Nazis and fascism wasn’t simply a Russian victory; it was a Ukrainian one too.

After I met those Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, my interpreter recommended I read the work of Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Soviet Jew born outside Kyiv. Grossman was at Stalingrad and became perhaps the greatest chronicler of the Soviet experience in the Second World War. Although he was Ukrainian, he wrote in Russian and died in Moscow.

Grossman authored several novels about the Second World War, but the interplay among Ukrainian, Russian, and Soviet identities and narratives is most prominently on display in his 1942 book, The People Immortal. Told through a series of interconnected vignettes, the book chronicles the Red Army’s retreat through Ukraine in the months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941:

Dust hangs over Ukraine and Belorussia; it swirls over the Soviet earth. At night, the dark August sky reddens from the sinister glow of burning villages … Old men, women and children in villages and hamlets wave the retreating soldiers on their way, offering them curd cheese pies, cucumbers and glasses of milk. The old women weep and weep, searching amid thousands of grim, dusty, exhausted faces for the face of a son. And they hold out the little white bundles with their gifts of food, “Take this, love. You are all my own sons. Every one of you has a place in my heart.”

In the pages that follow, calamity piles on calamity as the assembled cast—soldiers, political commissars, and civilians alike—absorb the brunt of Hitler’s invasion. The place names read as if they were taken from today’s headlines: Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernihiv.

The drumbeat of military disasters in The People Immortal would make for intolerably dark reading if not for our knowledge that this string of Soviet military defeats is simply a prelude to the victory at Stalingrad and the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. From the first page, we know the ending, and it is a triumphant one. The book derives its momentum because the reader is situated within a well-understood narrative. However, when reading The People Immortal through the lens of Russia’s current war against Ukraine, there is no clear ending to place the reader at ease.  

Putin has repeatedly justified his invasion of Ukraine under the pretense of de-Nazification. Grossman’s descriptions of the Nazi military machine, however, are disturbingly reminiscent of today’s Russian-invasion force. Sergey Bogariov, one of the Soviet commissars in the novel, describes the Nazi invaders as follows: “Every realm of German creative thought has been rendered sterile. The Fascists are powerless to create; they cannot write books or compose music or poetry. They are stagnant—they are a swamp. They have brought only one new element to world history and politics: shameless brigandry and organized atrocity!”

Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities from Mariupol to Kherson certainly feels like “shameless brigandry and organized atrocity.” Grossman’s recounting of the relentless Nazi bombing of civilians reads like a dispatch from Bakhmut, which the Ukrainians are defending much as their Soviet forebearers once defended Stalingrad. Tragically, the societal sterility that Grossman associates with fascism is applicable to Russia today. Putin’s war has made Russia a pariah, relegating its historically vibrant culture to the margins.

Many Ukrainians—both before and after February 24, 2022—have been suspicious of any narrative that places blame for Russia’s aggression solely on Putin and does not extend that blame to the Russian people who have enabled him. Russia has a history of paternalistic attitudes toward Ukraine, attitudes that persist and have contributed to the current war. The two countries remain closely bound, though, despite their distinct identities. It’s impossible for either Russia or Ukraine to claim sole ownership of the heroic narrative of Soviet resistance in the Second World War. Grossman’s work proves only how inextricably linked both national identities are to the Soviet narrative legacy, one that Russia has weaponized against Ukraine even as Ukrainians are displaying the mettle of their Soviet predecessors in battles fought on the same ground where Nazis and Soviets clashed 80 years ago.

Grossman published The People Immortal in serialized form in Red Star, the official newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. It was received with general acclaim both at home and abroad as the first book on the Soviet military experience against the Germans. Grossman, who eventually became the Soviet Union’s preeminent war correspondent, steers away from criticism of the Stalinist regime. In the hands of a lesser writer, Grossman’s tales of heroism, of the solidarity between regular soldiers and political commissars, and his romanticized descriptions of Soviet life under Stalin, would be sentimental, except Grossman is self-aware to a fault. He understands that, like the infantrymen and tankers he describes, he’s a soldier, too, only stories are his weapon.

As a storyteller, he has much in common with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has also demonstrated a preternatural understanding of the importance of narrative in war. Zelensky, like Grossman, has taken a side and is a participant in the events, but as storytellers, neither hides their biases and both can be subversive. The world will long remember Zelensky’s publicized response to the Biden administration’s offer of an evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

[Read: Liberation without victory]

Grossman is often subversive, perhaps no more so than in his book’s title, The People Immortal, which, as its chapters unfold, begins to ask: Who are the immortal people?

It would be the Soviets, except the Soviets no longer exist as a people. A passage in the book’s final pages seems to answer the question for today’s readers:

The wind whistled over the fields. Two men appeared from where the fires were starting to die out … Blood was seeping through their clothes. They were taking slow, heavy steps, each supporting the other. Where it flowed down onto the ground, the blood of the two men mixed together. They were brothers; nothing in life or death could now separate them.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (Ret.) tells CNN's Fareed Zakaria why the Russian-occupied region of Crimea could be a decisive area for the Ukrainian military in the next phase of the war.

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Only a few years ago, democracies around the world seemed to be turning toward the pluto-populists, the wealthy men and women who convinced millions of ordinary voters that liberal democracy had run its course. They’re still out there—but their star may be dimming.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Do Republicans not know Trump will betray them? The hidden link between workaholism and mental health Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold.

Pushing Back the Tide

In the autumn of 2017, I was in the Czech Republic on a speaking tour at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State to talk about the problem of disinformation and democracy. One night in Pilsen, a lovely city about an hour from Prague, I finished my presentation and asked for questions and discussion. A young man, speaking very good English, asked me if I would like to comment on the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were involved with a ring of pedophiles, a common internet conspiracy theory that had already been around for a while and is now at the heart of the QAnon madness. I responded that this was a debunked story and that I was not going to be drawn into a debate about it.

After the talk, I spoke with this young man. I said, “You know better than this.” He smiled and admitted that the story was bunk, but that he’d just wanted to see what I would say. “And to make sure everyone in the room heard it,” I said. He smiled again and shrugged.

In other cities around the Czech Republic that fall, I fielded questions that included other conspiracy theories about NATO, the European Union, or Ukraine (or all three together); the movement of American nuclear weapons; criticism of the Western outrage at Russia for seizing Crimea; and other topics that seemed to be pulled right off of trashy websites. I began to see why other members of my various audiences (usually university-age young people) were pessimistic: In a country where Russian propaganda fell from the skies like electronic acid rain and oozed from computers like sludge from a cracked sewer pipe, how could ordinary citizens ever make informed decisions?

At the time, the Czech government was led by a pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, who was soon to be joined in the government by a populist prime minister, Andrej Babiš. A billionaire, Babiš campaigned on the high-minded slogan that “everybody steals” and vowed to run the government like a company. (That should sound familiar to American voters who had to listen to similar cynical bloviations from Donald Trump for so many years.) Zeman won a second term in 2018, and Babiš remained prime minister until late 2021. Pro-Western sentiment in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Warsaw Pact nations that had since joined NATO, looked to be fizzling out.

Last month, Babiš not only lost his bid for the Czech presidency but also lost it to Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who once held a senior position in NATO’s military leadership. Pavel is a newcomer to politics, but he clobbered Babiš—who by sheer virtue of name recognition and money should have been the favorite—garnering 58 percent of the vote in an election with a record 70 percent turnout. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a repudiation. Babiš, especially when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, was lousy at governing, as populists almost always are. But the Russian onslaught against Ukraine also seemed to break the spell for many Czechs, and this election is likely one more example of Vladimir Putin’s brutality in Ukraine undoing years of the careful propaganda that once bolstered Russia’s position in the world.

Pavel’s career began in the Czechoslovak military, where he was a member of the Communist Party. (This caused some griping and cheap shots among his opponents, but a young officer joining the Party as a matter of course was an expected part of a military career in those days.) After 1990, Pavel served in a United Nations peacekeeping mission and later as the chairman of NATO’s military committee, the top military body in the Atlantic Alliance.

If you want a sense of his campaign, one of his signs said, “Enough of chaos. I offer order and dignity.” (Again, millions of American voters can probably relate.) His views are an about-face from those of figures such Zeman and Babiš; he is proud of Czech aid to Ukraine and has said that the Ukrainians now “really deserve” NATO membership. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, but it is refreshing to see a government in Prague taking the regime in Moscow seriously as a mortal threat.

This is all good news not only for the Western allies but for democracy itself. Nevertheless, Pavel and the leaders of other democracies still have a full plate. The Czech presidency has some influence as a national symbol, but the Republic is a parliamentary system in which executive power rests with the prime minister (currently the center-right politician Petr Fiala). And in a classic Trumpy move, Babiš issued this ominous farewell: “Forget Babiš. Try to live without Babiš. Stop waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling hatred for Babiš.” What this likely means, of course, is that Babiš—who still commands significant political and material resources—will be back.

Likewise, the move to the populist right is not over in neighboring Poland. And Viktor Orbán still rules Hungary, attended by a circle of American courtiers who believe he is the future of post-liberalism. (One of his admirers, Rod Dreher, just made the foolish mistake of accidentally reporting the truth: He publicized some of Orbán’s creepy pro-Russian and anti–European Union comments, and then backtracked quickly.)

Still, the Czech diplomat Petr Tuma (now in residence at the Atlantic Council, in Washington) is right to note that Pavel’s win “seems to follow a tide turning against global populism, including the defeats of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.” We could add the American 2022 midterm elections to this list.

It’s been a tough few years for democracy, but populist leaders—as they almost inevitably do—are now reminding voters that they never have very much to offer beyond angry slogans, mistrust, and paranoia. (These days, many of them also have Putin’s war hanging around their neck.) The Czech presidential election is one more reminder that when voters decide in favor of freedom and decency, and then actually show up at the polls, democracy wins.

Related:

The Czech Republic’s fake-news problem (2017) We might have reached peak populism. (2021)

Today’s News

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a vote supported by the GOP House majority. The U.S. is increasing its military presence in the Philippines as part of an effort to counter China and prepare for a possible conflict over Taiwan. More than 15 million people in the Northeast are under wind-chill warnings or advisories, with potentially record-low temperatures expected starting tomorrow.

Evening Read

Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty

Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset

By Clint Smith

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.

The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.

Read the full article.

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Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui in "Knock at the Cabin" (Phobymo / Universal Pictures)

Read. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story, “Background.”

“Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.”

Watch. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin infuses a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’ve never been to Prague, it’s a wonderful place and one of my favorite cities. It’s also, arguably, where the Soviet empire began its slide into oblivion. In early 1968, reformers in the then-Czechoslovak leadership took over the government (thus giving us the term “Prague Spring” that we now apply to other uprisings). In August, Soviet tanks moved in and crushed the whole project, causing many of the men and women in the old Eastern bloc, and in the U.S.S.R. itself, to doubt their faith in Moscow and the future of Soviet communism. One of the best books on this, Nightfrost in Prague, was written by one of the officials who was forcibly taken to the Kremlin, but unfortunately, it’s out of print and kind of hard to get.

A former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, however, wrote a book in 2018 titled The Last Palace, which is a good introduction to the city and its history—and even its architecture, too, as it is told through the notable history of the ambassador’s residence. Eisen is known to news junkies as a regular commenter on cable news; he was the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including during Trump’s impeachment. The history of Central Europe can get a bit chewy for a general reader; instead, give The Last Palace a read—but beware of the urge it will instill in you to go and walk along the Charles Bridge.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.