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.

“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.

In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and—at least for one final generation—empire was an inheritance. He studied foreign languages. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. He attended Oxford. He taught German at Eton. By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’.

The deeper truth is more interesting. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law. His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. He entered the secret world early, engaging in deceptions on behalf of his father but also to protect himself against a man who drank, gambled, and wasn’t above beating his son. “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” le Carré wrote in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. “Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood.”

His own service as a spy was short-lived—including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. Still, it was an auspicious and life-changing period. The Cold War was at its apex, at the moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, British intelligence was rocked by the revelation that it was harboring two high-ranking Soviet double agents: George Blake and Kim Philby. The British elite were scandalized. MI6’s networks were decimated. The British secret services were discredited in the eyes of the Americans.

During this period, Cornwell rose early and wrote three novels under the pseudonym John le Carré: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and, in 1963, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. This last book, which turns 60 this year, recast the Cold War: The conflict was not a morality play of good versus evil, as leaders of both sides presented it; rather, it was an ambiguous addendum to World War II waged by gray men in the shadows, broken by their own betrayals and the bureaucracies—capitalist and Communist—that treated them as expendable. The novel became a global best seller, making his (invented) name. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover.

[Read: The singular achievement of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”]

For the rest of his life, he would be John le Carré the writer. Despite his accurate protestation that he “was a writer who had once happened to be a spy, rather than a spy who had turned to writing,” le Carré never really separated himself from his time on the inside. He was not a genre writer. He was motivated less by portraying cloak-and-dagger conceits and more by a searching need to understand the overreach of empires, be they British, Soviet, or American. He wove stories of how individuals and nations reveal themselves through the secrets they carry. In a way, every book he wrote is a symphonic variation on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—in which a British agent poses as a Communist defector in order to take down a brutal East German foe, only to learn that his own service has betrayed him and the innocent are left to suffer the consequences. It is an unsparing look at the cost of moral compromise in pursuit of so-called national interests.

Two years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist.

There is less material that reveals le Carré’s secret lives. The correspondence during his time as a spy often reads like an opaque curtain veiling his cover—a litany of logistics and family updates. Le Carré had numerous infidelities during his two marriages, a habit that doubtlessly benefited from his experience in subterfuge. According to his son, le Carré “covered the tracks” of his infidelities—but there are occasional revelatory exceptions. “Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light,” he wrote in one letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964. “If you live, as I have, so long in the dark, you can’t always, if you are me, have faith in the light.” Clearly, le Carré felt the burden of living secret lives, which must have contributed to his capacity to conjure characters who feel the agony of betraying loved ones while hiding away their truest selves.

His letters also reveal a man who cared deeply about how his work was consumed by the wider world. In 1966, he wrote an open letter to a KGB-controlled literary journal that had critiqued The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In it, he acknowledged drawing equivalences between the Soviet Union and the United States, but not between communism and Western democracy—the issue, instead, was how the West betrayed its own ideals in the methods it used to wage the Cold War. To le Carré, the real tragedy was the wreckage of human lives all around: “The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers.”

The letter can be read as a mission statement for le Carré’s politics at the time. Notably, though, it was published in Encounter, a magazine funded by the CIA—le Carré was expressing his outsider’s viewpoint in a publication that was very much a part of the inside, the same machinery that he was critiquing. This irony recurs in his letters: Le Carré repeatedly offers withering indictments of the powers he served, but he never seems to cast them aside. Later in life, he wrote nostalgically to Alan Judd, a fellow novelist who once served as a soldier and diplomat, of his time at MI5 and MI6: “I miss the Office … In a sense, they are the only places, apart from writing.”

Yet, in other places, he could be withering about the people who become spies, himself included. He explained himself to a friend who learned that le Carré spied on him at university: “I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout self-image as an antidote.” The description is eerily similar to one le Carré offered of Philby in a letter to a journalist: Philby was “a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.” But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. Most writers would have jumped at the chance; le Carré refused.

What he did do was travel the world researching the settings, characters, and themes of his novels. Many of his letters testify to his doggedness. He pursues guides to far-flung places like a spy recruiting sources, and reports back his findings through novels—often by putting us inside the experiences of those on the wrong end of power. He understood this as a key to his own success—a mixture of empathy and exactitude—which depended upon other people trusting him. “Each novel I have written has been a complete life,” he writes to Vladimir Stabnikov, a Russian literary figure who was le Carré’s guide on trips to Moscow. “The novels I wrote about Russia were lives that you enabled me to lead. And when I moved on to other lives: to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Latin America, other people opened doors for me and I was again the beneficiary of kind strangers who became kind friends.”

Although he wandered widely, he returned—again and again—to the profession he knew best. He produced a shelf of books about a British intelligence service whose concerns mirrored the nation’s struggle to determine what it was without an empire. Many of his later books act as broadsides against an American national-security apparatus filled with the hubris of an empire that didn’t know it was hastening its own decline. To le Carré, this wasn’t just a matter of writing what he knew; these books were a useful vehicle for telling the stories he wanted to tell. “If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche,” he wrote in his memoir, “its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look.”

His letters reveal just how much the United Kingdom and the United States had let him down by the end of his life. “My response to the political scene is vehement,” he wrote to a journalist in 2018. “I hate Brexit, hate Trump, fear the rise of white fascism everywhere and take the threat very seriously indeed; the craving for conflict is everywhere among our pseudo dictators.” Shortly before his death, he sought and received Irish citizenship. Finally, a cord was cut. To an Irish bureaucrat, he wrote, “You have given me back my long friendship with Europe.”

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Terry Fincher / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty

In 2017, I finished eight years working at the center of American national-security policy in the White House. Exhausted by lack of sleep, haunted by world crises unresolved, disoriented at moving from the inside to the outside, and rattled by Donald Trump’s presidency, I sought out reasons to travel. In a bookshop in Hong Kong, I bought a set of le Carré’s first three novels—the ones written when he was on the inside. Near the beginning of the first, Call for the Dead, he introduces us to his finest creation, that owl-eyed observer within “the circus,” le Carré’s analogue for Britain’s secret services: George Smiley.

He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

I couldn’t stop reading. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside.

Something about being on the inside opened the floodgates that allowed le Carré to begin constructing his own canon. By the time I reached The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I marveled at the immediacy with which le Carré was able to distill things that could never have been captured in an intelligence report or a diplomatic cable. Spies seek information to buttress national power; writers seek the truth of the human experience. Le Carré noted this reality in a 1974 letter to Graham Greene: On one of his many research trips, he traveled to Saigon toward the end of the Vietnam War. There, with the Vietcong winning the war, he reread The Quiet American, a 1955 novel that foreshadowed America’s defeat through a piercing story of American hubris. “The sheer accuracy of its mood, and observation, is astonishing,” le Carré wrote to Greene. Greene, like le Carré, had been a spy. Greene’s novels, like le Carré’s, convey truths that elude those who serve power.

[Read: John le Carré goes back into the cold]

On that trip to Southeast Asia, le Carré was researching what would become The Honourable Schoolboy, about a British agent named Jerry Westerby. In the process of unmasking a Soviet intelligence operation in Asia, Westerby’s loyalties shift from his government to a woman. Still, he does the work. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls.

Le Carré describes an exhausted outpost of empire, a bookend to The Quiet American. Through Westerby’s eyes, we see how “a flow of air-force personnel was drifting in and out of the camp, blacks and whites, in scowling segregated groups … The mood was sullen, defeated, and innately violent. The Thai groups greeted nobody. Nobody greeted the Thais.” Westerby meets his contact, an American major drinking brandy while absorbing the news of his nation’s defeat. “I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir,” the major says to Westerby. “The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member.” Westerby, who has traded dreams of empire for the pursuit of love, responds cavalierly: “Proud to have you aboard.” Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost.”

In le Carré’s letters, he expresses flashes of anger at being slotted as either a Cold War writer or a former spy. There was, he knew, something more enduring about his work, even though it depended on the knowledge he’d acquired inside the secret tent: It was literature. So often, ambition in public life can be tethered to achievement in the moment—rising through the ranks, reaching the heights of bureaucracy or political office. But by melding his insider’s knowledge with his outsider’s perspective, le Carré ascended to a greater height. When empires die, the most powerful thing they leave behind are stories. David Cornwell told them.

The heart of occupied Nablus is one of the most ancient cities in the Middle East. With two churches, 12 mosques and a Samaritan synagogue around densely populated residential areas, the occupied West Bank city's nickname is "Little Damascus" because of the way its architecture, arches and even the local accent and food are reminiscent of those of the Syrian capital.

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.”

Gone are the times of US-led Middle East peace initiatives, which means Brussels should pick up the slack amid increasing tensions between Israel and Palestine, Stefano Stefanini writes.

Here’s a round-up of Al Jazeera’s Middle East coverage this week.

Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.

Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens. Between the luck that people can make for themselves and the blind chance they cannot foresee or control.

In the decades of weekly Bible classes he led in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter must have covered Proverbs 19:21. One contemporary translation of that verse renders it as: “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Not everything in his life happened the way Jimmy Carter proposed or preferred. But he made the very most of the years that God and the fates granted him.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Jimmy Carter made his luck, and benefited from luck, when he ran for president. He couldn’t have done it without his own discipline and commitment, and his strategy. He seemed to shake every hand in Iowa—but his team was also the first to recognize that the new Iowa caucus system opened the chance for an outsider to leap into the presidency. At a time when his national name recognition was 1 percent, he spent all day walking up to strangers and saying, “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” Stop and imagine doing that yourself, even once. Carter was easier to admire—when delivering his stump speech to a rapt crowd, when introducing himself at a PTA meeting or in a diner—than he was to work for. But that is probably true of most public figures with such a drive to succeed.

Because he was so engaging in person, and made such a connection in countless small-group meetings across Iowa, he won the caucuses and went on to win the nomination and the presidency. No other candidate has gone from near-invisibility to the White House in so short a time. (Barack Obama became a Democratic Party star with his famous convention speech in 2004, four years before he won the presidency. Donald Trump had been a celebrity for decades.)

This is how Carter and his team helped themselves. Other developments they hadn’t planned affected the race—mainly to their benefit.

By early 1976, Carter had become the new thing. He embraced rock music and quoted Bob Dylan. He was as powerful and exciting a fusion of cultures as any candidate who came after him. He was a Naval Academy graduate and an Allman Brothers fan. He was deeply of the South and of the Church. He also spoke about Vietnam as a racist war. He quoted poems by Dylan Thomas. He was, yes, cool. He appeared at a Law Day meeting at the University of Georgia’s law school and upbraided the audience about the injustice of America’s legal system. Here’s just one sample of the speech, which would now be considered part of the Sanders-Warren platform:

I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record … ”Maggie’s Farm.”

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

But what if Hunter S. Thompson had not noticed this speech and announced that he “liked Jimmy Carter” in an influential article in Rolling Stone? What if Time and Newsweek, also very influential then, had not certified him as a serious potential leader with their coverage? What if the civil-rights figures Martin Luther King Sr. and Andrew Young had not endorsed Carter to Black audiences around the country, and reassured white liberals that he was the southern voice an inclusive America needed? (As governor of Georgia, Carter had placed a portrait of MLK Jr. in the state capitol.) What if Jerry Brown had not waited so long to enter the primaries? What if Teddy Kennedy had dared to run? What if Mo Udall had figured out the Iowa-caucus angle before Carter did? What if Scoop Jackson had not been so dull? Or George Wallace so extreme?

And for the general election, what if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon, turning Watergate into Ford’s own problem? (The Carter team knew that this was a campaign plus. But in the first sentence of his inaugural address, Carter thanked Ford for all he had done “to heal our land.”) What if Saturday Night Live, then in its first season and itself hugely influential, had not made Ford the butt of ongoing jokes? What if Ford had not blundered in a crucial presidential debate? What if Carter’s trademark lines on the stump—I’ll never lie to you and We need a government as good as its people—had not been so tuned to the battered spirit of that moment, and had been received with sneers rather than support?

What if, what if. There are a thousand more possibilities. In the end the race was very close. Luck ran his way.

Then he was in office. Intelligent, disciplined, self-contained, spiritual. President Carter made some of his own luck, good and bad—as I described in this magazine 44 years ago. There is little I would change in that assessment, highly controversial at the time, except to say that in 1979 Carter still had nearly half of his time in office ahead of him, and most of his adult life. I argued then that his was a “passionless” presidency. He revealed his passions—his ideals, his commitments—in the long years to come.

In office he also had the challenge of trying to govern a nearly ungovernable America: less than two years after its humiliating withdrawal from Saigon, in its first years of energy crisis and energy shortage, on the cusp of the “stagflation” that has made his era a symbol of economic dysfunction. It seems hard to believe now, but it’s true: The prime interest rate in 1980, the year Carter ran for reelection, exceeded 20 percent. You never hear, “Let’s go back to the late ’70s.”

Probably only a country as near-impossible to lead as the United States of that time could have given someone like Jimmy Carter a chance to lead it.

Despite it all, Carter had broader support during his first year in office than almost any of his successors, except briefly the two Bushes in wartime emergencies. Despite it all, most reckonings have suggested that Carter might well have beaten Ronald Reagan, and held on for a second term, if one more helicopter had been sent on the “Desert One” rescue mission in Iran, or if fewer of the helicopters that were sent had failed. Or if, before that, Teddy Kennedy had not challenged Carter in the Democratic primary. Or if John Anderson had not run as an independent in the general election. What if the ayatollah’s Iranian government had not stonewalled on negotiations to free its U.S. hostages until after Carter had been defeated? What if, what if.

Carter claimed for years that he came within one broken helicopter of reelection. It’s plausible. We’ll never know.

Because we do know, in retrospect, that Reagan had two landslide victories, over Carter and then Walter Mondale, and that the 1980 election broke heavily in Reagan’s favor in its final weeks, it’s natural to believe that Carter never had a chance. But it looked so different at the time. History changed, through effort and luck, when Carter arrived on the national stage in 1976. And it changed, through effort and luck, when he departed four years later.

Effort and luck combined for Jimmy Carter’s first two acts: becoming president, and serving in office.

Luck played a profoundly important role in his third act, allowing him to live mostly vigorously until age 98, and to celebrate his 76th wedding anniversary with his beloved wife, Rosalyn. He had 42 full years in the postpresidential role—10 times longer than his term in office, by far the most of any former president.

This extended span mattered for reasons within Carter’s control, and beyond it. Good fortune, medical science, and a lifetime history as a trim, fit athlete (he was a good tennis player, a runner, and a skillful softball pitcher), helped Carter survive several bouts of cancer and other tolls of aging. But his faith, will, idealism, and purpose allowed him to invent and exemplify a new role for former presidents, and to see his own years in office reconsidered.

Suppose that, like Lyndon B. Johnson, he had died of a literal and figurative broken heart at age 64. His record and achievements would have concluded with Ronald Reagan still in office, and his story would have been summarized as ending on a loss. Carter could never have received the Nobel Peace Prize, which he won while nearing age 80, in 2002. (Nobel Prizes cannot be given posthumously.)

With health like Lyndon Johnson’s, Jimmy Carter would not have had a chance to establish his new identity—and to see prevailing assessments of his role as president change as profoundly as those of Harry Truman did. As with Truman, the passing years have made it easier to see what Carter achieved, and to recognize what he was trying to do even when unsuccessful. But Truman was no longer alive to see that happen. For Carter I think the process of reassessment will go on.

It is hard for most Americans to imagine the Jimmy Carter of those days. It is hard even for me to recognize how different the country is as a whole.

Just to talk about politics: The South was then the Democrats’ base, and the West Coast was hostile territory. Jimmy Carter swept all states of the old Confederacy except Virginia, and lost every state west of the Rockies except Hawaii. In Electoral College calculations, the GOP started by counting on California.

The Democrats held enormous majorities in both the Senate and the House. Carter griped about dealing with Congress, as all presidents do. But under Majority Leader Robert Byrd, the Democrats held 61 seats in the Senate through Carter’s time. In the House, under Speaker Tip O’Neill, they had a margin of nearly 150 seats (not a typo). The serious legislative dealmaking was among the Democrats.

In culture and economics—well, you just need to watch some movies from the 1970s, Rocky, Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon (or, if you prefer, Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars). The United States was a country fraying on all its edges, just beginning to absorb the shock of the Vietnam years, in its first wave of grappling with globalization and environmental constraints.

Prevailing memories reached back far beyond Vietnam to the Korean War, World War II, and the Great Depression. In campaign speeches, Carter talked about the difference it made to him, as a boy, when Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electric power to small communities like his. We on the speechwriting staff could rely on the story for applause. Enough people remembered.

There were no cellphones then, nor even bulky “portable” phones. Computers meant behemoths at major data centers.

And in civic life, Richard Nixon’s downfall seemed to have reinforced the idea that there was such a thing as public shame. It was construed as embarrassing for Jimmy Carter that his hard-luck brother, Billy, was in a penny-ante way cashing on the family fame by promoting six packs of his own “Billy Beer.” Carter, from a small-town business-owning background, felt that he had to sell the family peanut mill to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. After Nixon’s scandals and Spiro Agnew’s resignation, “doing the right thing” mattered, and Carter did so.

Jimmy Carter took office in the “before” times. We live in an unrecognizable “after.” He did his best, in office and out, to promote the values he cared about through it all.

What did he do in office? He did a lot. He was visionary about climate and the environment. He changed the composition of the federal courts. For better and worse he deregulated countless industries, from craft brewing to the airlines. I direct you to Stuart Eizenstat’s detailed and authoritative President Carter: The White House Years for specifics. I’ll just add:

Jimmy Carter did more than anyone else, before or since, to bring peace to the Middle East, with his Camp David accords. The agreement between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat could not possibly have been reached without Carter’s all-in, round-the-clock involvement. I was there and saw it. Any other witness would agree. (This was also the theme of Lawrence Wright’s excellent Thirteen Days in September.) Jimmy Carter saved the United States decades of woe with his Panama Canal Treaty. Jimmy Carter bought the United States several generations’ worth of respect with his human-rights policy. Can such an approach be no-exceptions or absolute? Of course not. Carter recognized as clearly as anyone the tension between ideals and reality. But does even imperfect idealism make a difference? That is the case Carter made in a speech at Notre Dame in 1977. I think it stands up well. Its essence:

We have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy …

This does not mean that we can conduct our foreign policy by rigid moral maxims. We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect—a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.”

In the life of the human spirit, words are action.

Jimmy Carter spoke to the “values” and “engagement” crises decades before demagogues like Trump or healers like Obama. In the summer of 1979, he gave an unusually sober and sermonlike address on the national “crisis of confidence.” This is generally known as the “malaise” speech, and is widely considered a downbeat marker of a down era. But as Kevin Mattson points out in his entertaining What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?, the speech was well received at the time. Carter’s popularity rating went up nearly 10 points in its wake. (Also, the speech didn’t include the word malaise.) Things again started going wrong for Carter soon after that—he made mistakes, and was unlucky—but the speech deserves respect. It was a leader’s attempt to express the fears and hard truths many people felt, and to find a way forward.

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Here's a round-up of Al Jazeera's Middle East coverage this week.

He spent the night making snow. He packed it tightly into balls of different sizes and stored them in the freezer to keep them stable.

For a long time, he had wanted to make something so simple and natural that no one would suspect concerted thinking had gone into it. He wanted the greatest possible concentration of thought along with the greatest possible efficiency in the execution of that thought.

He had come up with many ideas in the past. He would sell dirt. He would be a newspaper vendor, but the newspaper he sold would not exist. He would create one issue of the newspaper, make only 101 copies, and sell them. The stories in the newspaper would be outrageous, improbable, yet perfectly believable. He would insinuate, for example, that human beings were disappearing, and that more aliens existed among us than at any other time in history. The paper’s events would make people doubt their reality or the reality of the society in which they lived. He would have an ad for a great dirt sale, giving the impression that people lined up every other week to buy dirt from different parts of the country. He would have another item about a 55-year-old flea, accompanied by a blown-up photograph, giving it a half-familiar, half-grotesque appearance, evoking both the art of William Blake and the largely credible pictures in National Geographic. But the more he considered such an elaborate scheme, the more he felt that its very elaborateness disqualified it from the true naturalness that authentic conception, raised to the status of art, must have.

He abandoned such baroque imaginings. He wanted something childlike. This made him think about childhood, about what’s missing from it and how the city robs children of wonder. He wanted to be a dealer in wonders. But he wanted the wonders to be so ordinary that their very ordinariness would be inseparable from their power to astonish. He made a long list of the most ordinary things. He had done dirt. But dirt was not in itself wonderful. He had done flotsam, bottles, human hair. He had worked with the topography of body and skin, had imprinted the mythology of his color on paper. He had made his physical existence its own work of art. He had explored basketball and heights, had made art out of the dust of his favorite rough, urban streets. Using the detritus of society, he had explored the limits of the conceptual.

He now wanted something innocent. But the more you looked into that innocence, the more ambiguous and complex it became, until it encompassed everything he had been trying to say for most of his working life. Where was he going to find such a natural and transparent object? The object had to defeat thought while endlessly stimulating it. But the object also had to be at the center of an event that could never be duplicated, that had happened only once—and then vanished—and whose occurrence would be a rumor. He wanted an event that everyone could enter, but that only a few people would experience at the time it happened. So many possibilities to be contained in a single, simple object.

For years now, he had been going to a part of the city where people sold the most unexpected things. He often wandered the market in search of materials that the streets had yielded. He had discovered that the refuse, the mountains of rubbish the city disposed of every day, was his most precious resource. It was more valuable to him than expensive works of art, created with expensive materials and costly assistants.

At the beginning of his wanderings, he was amazed by what people threw away. He had found perfectly functioning computers and television sets, radios and microwaves. He had unearthed paintings and posters from famous exhibitions, brochures from art galleries, papers from law firms, the complete 1922 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and books of every conceivable quality. He had rescued old Ornette Coleman records and an incomplete set of the tales of Chester Himes. He had uncovered maps and diaries and tap-dance shoes; evening dresses and top hats and a new pair of suspenders. He had found these among the garbage, the mess of decomposing vegetables and foul garnishes, the broken eggshells and the drool of yogurt and other mucuslike substances. He had dug out reams of government documentation about plans to restrict immigration, had marveled at the abandoned notes of a private detective and love letters that had been thrown away when that love had irrevocably died.

He had become a specialist in scouring the city’s waste. He had a warehouse on the outskirts where he stored all that he found. On some evenings he went around with a large shopping cart stacked with everything he had collected. People always took him for a regular tramp, or for one of the mentally disturbed who ransacked trash cans and pushed their loaded carts around the city all night.

It was in the course of his wanderings that he had discovered this informal market where folks sold the most outlandish things. On his first visit, he was astonished to find a lean, toothless man selling false teeth. Rows of them were laid out on a makeshift table. He had teeth for children and for women. He had a full row of dog and horse teeth. Next to him, another man sold eyepieces. On a table he displayed monocles and strange wire eyeglasses. He even had glass eyes. Some were large, some small, and almost all of them blue. Not far from him, a man sold oddly shaped mangoes from South America alongside huge, bulbous avocados. Behind him someone sold clothes for giants. Next to him, another sold baby shoes.

He watched them and went among them. He bought a glass eye and had a chat with the man who sold false teeth.

“What’s your name?”

“Joe.”

“How long you been here?”

“Today?”

“No, selling here.”

“Couple of months.”

“Sell well?”

“We do all right.”

“I’m looking to sell stuff.”

“Yeah, what d’you sell?”

“Dirt.”

“Real dirt?”

“Real dirt.”

“Hey, Nathan. Come over. This guy sells dirt.”

Nathan came over. He was the one who sold baby shoes.

“You sell dirt?”

“Yeah. Where do you find your baby shoes?”

“In the bins. Where do you find your dirt?”

“In the streets.”

“Good one. You don’t have to rob no one for dirt, do you?”

“Guess not.”

“Come sell here,” said Joe, the false-teeth man.

“Yeah?”

“Every other Sunday. You just set yourself up and that’s it. You mind your business, we mind ours.”

“That simple, yeah?”

“That simple.”

“Great. I’ll come by.”

“Can’t wait to see your dirt.”

He went there every other Sunday for the next three months. He never sold anything; he just went to hang out with the oddball traders. He wore a coarse coat with an ascot and beat-up shoes. Half tramp, half jazzman. He could be either, depending on who was looking at him. He got used to the rough humor of the traders and they got used to his sly, elusive ways.

“When you going to start selling dirt?” said the false-teeth man.

“When the weather’s right.”

“There’s a blizzard coming. You better start collecting dirt now or you won’t be able to find it. You know how the city gets covered when it snows.”

“Dirt man here’s got to find the right kind of dirt, yeah?” said baby shoes. “That must be hard.”

The traders laughed. He laughed wryly with them.

“Right kind of dirt is the hardest thing in the world to find. Harder than finding gold.”

“How hard can it be to find the right kind of dirt?” asked baby shoes.

“Takes the right kind of eyes. And that ain’t common.”

“It sure ain’t,” said baby shoes, and they all roared again with laughter.

Two days before the next market day, a thick blanket of snow covered the city, its cars and skyscrapers, its fields and lampposts. At home, he watched the snow coming down. He went for a walk and saw the city under a pall—under a spell—of whiteness. What if snow were black? he thought. Now that would be something. When snow fell, it would be like night raining down. The houses and the trees and the cars and the roads would be covered in blackness. They’d be singing of a black Christmas. They’d make black snowmen. It would create a different mythology. He mused on this as he wandered the city. The sidewalks were under sheets of snow. Winter kept us warm. He watched children in a nearby field throwing snowballs at one another. A fist-size snowball missed its target and whacked him in the chest. The kids were scared by what they’d done and ran off laughing and screaming, imagining that he was after them. He picked up the broken ball of snow and repacked it and took it home with him, still musing. Covering Earth in forgetful snow.

At home he made two phone calls. The people who received the calls were puzzled by his instructions. One was to bring a camera to a certain place at a certain time.

“Do not talk to me like you know me. Just take pictures. Be as inconspicuous as possible. Blend in. Don’t be like a goddamn tabloid photographer. You were just going past and you saw something that caught your eye and you took pictures of it and then you moved on.”

“Is that it?” said the photographer.

“Pretty much.”

“What’s it about?”

“You don’t need to know. Better if you don’t know. Just be there.”

And to the other caller he said:

“You free on that day?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s it about?”

“Just show up. Don’t act like you know me. Buy something. Stick around for a bit. Then move on.”

“Up to your stuff again?”

“Something like that.”

“One day you’re going to get into trouble pulling stunts.”

“If life ain’t trouble, what’s the point of it?”

They laughed and he put the phone down. He sat by the window and watched the snow falling. He tried to make out a single flake as it formed, and then he tried to follow the downward trajectory. The flakes were like cataracts falling over the eye. He watched the forms the snow made of the stationary cars. Some of them looked like giant hats in the street. He thought about snow: It’s all in there. All the contradiction’s in there. Is it one thing or another? Is it the sky’s fault that snow is white? The whiteness of the whale. How much should a snowflake cost? If nature were selling snow, how much would we need to spend to decorate the whole city with it, how much for the bridal garment of the cathedral, how much for the mantle on the Statue of Liberty? If a gram of snow were the same price as a gram of gold, how much would it cost us to deck the city in splendor? Gone are the snows of yesteryear. Everyone has a memory of snow. Most enchanting thing in the world. The priceless marvel that falls without a sound. Stilling the city and making silence audible. Not the snowmen that melt and, before they vanish, turn ugly and lumpish; not the curves of snow on church domes and telegraph wires, but maybe the way the heart jumps with delight when you step out in the dark or in the morning into the soft miracle of its revelation as it changes the visible world into an innocent paradise that children love.

Can’t put a price on it. How do you put a price on that compression of the sky? Then it melts and is gone, an evanescent memory, fragile like beauty, leaving its midway state and returning to one of the primal elements. Too precious for art. Put it in an art gallery or a museum, and it makes no sense. Exposes the fraudulence of making and pricing. A little piece of transcendence and ephemerality, all in a little flake, the pollen of winter. What complexity is contained in it—commerce, class, race, design, spirituality, fragility, tenderness, childhood, nature, surprise, wonder. Neither ice nor water; part air, part dream. Spirit substance. Black kids in the snow. That indefinable happiness in which the history of the brutalization of bodies is dissolved. Snow equalizes the heart. Perhaps the only truly democratic thing in this divided republic. Life, liberty, and the perfection of snow.

He left the window.

“I got my next thing,” he said to his wife, in the bedroom.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“It’s going to happen and no one will see it. Then it will be a rumor. Then there will be these bits of evidence that it took place. Not a single curator, gallery owner, or museum director will be anywhere near it. Only kids and passersby, the poor, the simple, people who don’t look at art and don’t give a fuck what it is. It will be the most democratic show in the country. It will take place under a bridge, near hoboes and dropouts, drug dealers and tramps. No one will know they are looking at it. Because it will be something so simple and ordinary that it will look like everything else, except for a few tiny details. Then it will be over, as if it had never happened.

“Afterwards, 20 times more people than were there will claim to have been there. What is nothing will become something, and it will become more something with the passing of years, as the event itself fades into oblivion and becomes either a myth or nothing. The years will pass and everything will become old, but this thing that may or may not have happened will become more real and at the same time more strange.

“I always wanted to do something that will work with the passing of time itself, and I think I’ve found a way. It’s going to be about everything and nothing. It’s going to be about whatever you want it to be about. And yet no one’s going to be able to lay a finger on it. It’ll be like snowflakes, evanescent; and like dreaming, persistent; and like a stone wall, tangible.”

The wife stuck her head out from the bedroom.

“How you going to do all that?”

But he didn’t reply, because he was watching the dance of snowflakes falling onto the black streets.

Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum

Days later , on a cold Sunday when the snow had stopped falling, people walking past the market under the bridge saw something they had never seen before. They saw the regular sellers of false teeth and baby shoes and clothes for giants. But they also saw a stall where snowballs were laid out on a Moroccan patterned rug of red and orange and blue. The larger ones were at the top, and in a descending scale of size, the smaller ones were lower down. The smallest ones were quite tiny, the size of a wren’s egg, but perfectly white and perfectly round. The snowballs formed their own immaculate pattern against the Moroccan arabesques. At the back of the stall, hovering over the display, was a man in a dark-brown jacket and dark trousers, with a natty ascot and a rimless dark hat. At first glance he looked like a bum. But when you looked at him again, you noticed a certain secret care about his attire. He was talking to the false-teeth trader, and they seemed to be laughing lightly at some joke.

Many people went past and could not entirely compute what they were seeing. Some were not sure that they had seen what they had seen. They doubled back to get another look. Then they scratched their heads. A man with a whiskey bottle came by, saw the display, and stopped.

“You selling these?”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“But I could make these myself,” said the man with the whiskey bottle.

“You think?”

The whiskey man stared at the rows of snowballs and blinked as if he were not seeing right and then staggered away. He paused at the false-teeth stall and bought a pair. Then he went off singing something that resembled a sea shanty.

A moment later another man came along, and when he saw the rows of snowballs, he began to laugh.

“Only in America,” he said, between laughs. “You selling these for real?”

“For real.”

“How much?”

The price of the snowballs rose with their size, he was told. The smallest was 50 cents and the largest was $1.

“A dollar for a snowball?”

“Cheap at the price.”

The man stared at the pristine rows of snowballs and then at the trader and back at the white rows. He sensed a profound incongruity between the whiteness of the snowballs and the haziness of the trader, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“You some kind of magician or something?”

“Got to be to stay alive, right?”

The prospective client laughed again. He couldn’t control his laughter. He found the whole setup funny but couldn’t say why. The trader watched him, his back against the wall of the rundown bridge.

“This is just the best jive I ever seen. If I buy one, it gon’ disappear or something?”

“You pay your money, you takes your chances,” the trader said.

The man lingered, unable to leave and unable to commit to a purchase.

“You into some kind of scam here and I just can’t see what it is. You sold any of these already?”

“I done all right,” came the reply.

While he hung around, a woman wheeling her son in a stroller saw the snowballs and stopped. The man sloped off.

“Can I have a snowball, Mommy?” the boy said.

“It depends on if this gentleman is selling them, honey,” she said to the air generally. But she maneuvered the stroller to the front of the stall and looked at the smiling face of the trader.

“That’s a bright boy you got there,” he said, not coming forward, his smile going on ahead.

“They are magic!” the boy said. “I want one. Can I have one, Mommy?”

“Are you selling these snowballs?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Did you make them yourself?”

“I think God did, but I lined them up.”

“So pretty. Never seen snowballs look so pretty before.”

“Can I have one, Mom?”

The trader came forward. He looked at the kid, who was sitting in his buggy like a little emperor. Then he said: “Which one would you like?”

“A small one. That one,” the boy said, pointing to the lower line of snowballs, to the tiny ones like wrens’ eggs. The man reached down and picked out the snowball indicated, as well as a big one from the top, and gave them to the boy, who breathed out a cry of wonder.

At that moment, a camera clicked.

“They’re real, Mom. They’re real snowballs.”

“How much are those?” the mother asked.

“On the house, ma’am, on the house.”

“Oh, you are a gentleman.”

“I’m sure you’ll do the same thing for my kid.”

The woman, looking at the trader, reddened and was momentarily flustered. She wheeled the stroller around and began to walk away. But then she stopped and came back and stood gazing at the snowballs. The camera clicked again.

“They are just the prettiest things, and the rows of them are just so funny. Made my day, sir. You made my day.”

The trader nodded. Joe, seeing the interest around the snow stall, came over.

“Ma’am, can I interest you in a new set of teeth?”

But the transition from snowballs to false teeth was perhaps a little too bold for her, and she took off into the streets, looking back from time to time at the gleaming rows of snowballs on the patterned rug.

Many people stopped, drawn by the mysterious and orderly form of the snowballs at the stall. Some came to banter, some came to test their wits, some came with cracks about capitalism. Another man saw the perfect rows of whiteness and couldn’t stop laughing. He meant to ask a question about how much they cost, but something about the setup seemed so hilarious to him that he just laughed and laughed and came close to choking. The trader had to come around the stall and pat him on the back ’til he calmed down and wiped the tears of laughter from his cracked, life-beaten face. When he laughed, he showed no upper teeth, and false-teeth man sold him a set at a knockdown price. The man was still laughing in the distance and saying something about always reinventing the dream, brother.

Later, another man showed up. It seemed he was a lawyer from upstate and was in the big city for a conference. He had gone on a stroll and his feet had led him here; he took the snowball display very seriously and began haggling for the price of a middle-size ball. He was thinking of bringing it back home to his son, who he was sure would love it. Only he wanted to know if it would keep.

“Put it in a fridge soon as you get back to your hotel. They’re packed pretty tight so they’ll hold for a while, so long as you’re not planning a trip to the Mojave Desert,” said the snow trader.

The lawyer was very excited by this unusual purchase and took out his wallet.

“I knew you guys were pretty wacky in the city, but this is the wackiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

And all the while, the camera was clicking. No one really noticed the photographer, because he didn’t look the part. He blended in a short distance away and could be taken for a curious tourist, from the Middle East perhaps, someone overawed by the mesmerizing things the great city had to offer those with an eye for its quotidian oddities.

The lawyer went off, chuckling to himself, with his wrapped-up snowball. He didn’t look back to see that the rows of whiteness on the resplendent rug had almost magically replenished themselves, so that they were again a perfect pattern of serial globes. Young women came by in their winter coats and their mufflers and their impeccable gloves. They couldn’t stop giggling at the cuteness of the row of small snowballs. They looked at the trader shyly, and he asked where they were from and engaged them mildly and carefully, tossing at them the occasional mot juste, or a throwaway line with a salty turn of wit, which they didn’t quite catch. They debated among themselves whether the snowballs would make a perfect birthday present for a friend and speculated about his reaction. While they pondered, someone else came by who was surprised to see the seller of snowballs and began to let out a cry of astonishment. The strange, severe look on the trader’s face stopped him in his playfully caustic greeting.

“What’s up, brother?”

“Just go away, or behave like you don’t know me,” whispered the snow seller in a fierce undertone.

“Oh, all right, I get it,” said the newcomer, clearly an acquaintance.

But he didn’t leave, sensing intrigue and a story, sensing that, with his usual good timing and excellent luck, he had stumbled on something, maybe a scoop, maybe just a good old tale to tell the folks. And so he lingered and examined the serial snowball display with the gravity of a connoisseur, dwelling on each detail. He asked the women, who were still debating, if they had a magnifying glass. They said they didn’t and, giggling again, wandered away.

“This ain’t a museum,” the seller of snow said. “Move on, or I’m closing the stall.”

The old friend stood up.

“Okay, keep your stone hair on. I’ll push off, but that’s dinner you owe me.”

“Call you next week.”

“Can’t wait.”

He left, walking in a lopsided way, as if he were conscious of being watched, which he was, by the snowball seller. The old friend made a backward gesture, a half wave, before disappearing round a corner. The snow seller called to Joe.

“You got the time?”

Joe shouted it across.

“You thinking of packing up already?”

“I’ll give it another half hour.”

“Getting too hot for your snowballs?” Joe said, laughing and rubbing his palms together to warm them.

“Sometimes the wrong people show up.”

“Hazards of the trade, my man. The other day my ex-wife turned up. Offered to give her some of these here teeth instead of monthly maintenance. She didn’t want ’em.”

“Can’t say I blame her.”

“Put me right off my stride. Knocked the wind out of me, her turning up like that.”

“Like you say, hazards of the trade.”

“Ain’t that right.”

A beautiful young woman arrived and stood in front of the snowball stall. With a solemn expression, she studied the glistening rows of snowballs. She seemed mesmerized, lost in a faraway musing. The depth of her absorption made her look even more beautiful. She stood there silently for a long time. The camera clicked discreetly. The seller of snowballs did not interrupt the young lady’s musings. With a half smile, he looked away and took his mind off her. Some things are just perfect if you let them be, he thought. Sometimes a moment is the ideal image of life. You couldn’t improve it if you had a thousand years. The camera worked unobtrusively. The seller of snowballs let his eyes wander over the city’s skyline. The rooftops were edged with snow. All of the boundaries were blurred. The snow linked things that seemed separate. It was falling now, flakes in pirouettes, bringing silence. It was time to make the show disappear. Our revels now are ended. The real magic begins when things disappear. It begins with erasure, with absence. The snowfall was obliterating the city, anonymizing its uniqueness. But the true enchantment is when from death things begin to return, long after people knew of their existence. You have to get people to know that something once happened, that it once existed, before you can make them know that it can never happen again, that it is lost in time forever. Lost in time, but resurrected in myth, or rumor, or stories.

“Joe,” he said, “it’s been nice knowing you.”

“You make it sound like a valediction.”

“For a man who sells false teeth, you sure got one hell of a vocabulary.”

The young lady smiled, and asked how much the snowballs cost, just as he began dismantling the show.

This short story appears in the March 2023 print edition.