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.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz summarized his country’s approach to the war in Ukraine. “Despite all the pressure to take action,” he said, “caution must take priority over hasty decisions, unity over solo actions.” The line provided Scholz’s most explicit defense to date of Germany’s cycle of denial, delay, and cautious delivery of new weapons technologies to assist Ukraine’s effort against Russia. What appeared to be hand-wringing over sending Leopard 2 tanks earlier this year, Scholz assured the audience, was in fact his government’s latest prudent measure to achieve a decisive victory for Ukraine in the war raging east of the Dnipro River.

Scholz’s allies in Kyiv and elsewhere surely paid careful attention to the evolution that the Munich speech represented. Nearly a year earlier, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the chancellor had boldly declared in another speech that Germany had reached a Zeitenwende, an inflection point in history. During a special session convened in the Bundestag last February, he said his country would have to transform decades of conciliation toward Russia into a clear-eyed will to dissuade President Vladimir Putin from further aggression. Scholz identified the war’s central struggle as “whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the 19th century … or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check.” The challenge “requires strength of our own,” Scholz stated.

The standing ovations that erupted after these key lines echoed the world over, as leaders throughout Europe and North America applauded the chancellor’s remarks. Yet in the intervening 12 months, he has not delivered on his sweeping vision for a more modern, more active German military.

[Anne Applebaum: Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine]

Three days after the war began, Scholz made a promise he repeated this month in Munich: “Germany will increase its defense expenditure to 2 percent of gross domestic product on a permanent basis.” But his government failed to meet that objective last year, and it will likely fail again this year and next year. Germany now spends the second-largest amount of all governments supplying Ukraine’s defense, but it still spends less on a per capita basis than countries that are smaller and less affluent. Germany finally sent tanks to Ukraine earlier this year, but those donations have proved easier than genuine reform at home. Although Berlin has made good on its promise of a boycott of Russian fossil fuels, its contribution to NATO’s “Very High Readiness Joint Task Force”—a German-made infantry fighting vehicle called the Puma—floundered. In training exercises, the Puma earned the nickname Pannenpanzer, or “breakdown tank.”

A year ago, Scholz announced a special investment fund of more than 100 billion euros to strengthen the German military, but less than a third of those euros have been assigned to contracts. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently aired concerns that Germany’s stockpiles have been depleted by its generous transfers to Ukraine. These comments strain common sense when most of the “special funds” remained unspent until December, when lawmakers finally approved the first procurements. This month, Scholz also abandoned plans to establish a National Security Council, a body that would have been well suited to manage an expanded role in the defense of Europe.

The lumbering pace of change that Germany has adopted to improve its military competence has immediate consequences for the war in Ukraine. It gives Putin leverage by demonstrating that the continent’s wealthiest society lacks the tenacity to stand firm against revanchism. Fewer than 1,000 miles separate Germany from Ukraine’s borders, and Russia still governs a chunk of the former East Prussia—Kaliningrad Oblast. Berlin can’t project power in these close geographic quarters merely with words.

In Europe more broadly, the implications of a shrinking Zeitenwende are just as dire. As Germany shirks on military modernization, it makes way for governments seeking a greater say. Shortly after Brexit, French President Emmanuel Macron articulated a new guiding principle for his country—“strategic autonomy,” the idea that the continent should conduct its external relations independently of American designs. Macron has championed the idea particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, during trade tensions, and following Russian nuclear threats. His controversial one-on-one calls with Putin since Russia’s invasion imply that Macron feels fit to lead negotiations with Russia on Europe’s behalf. After all, France is the European Union’s sole nuclear power, controls the bloc’s most powerful military (underwritten by a potent defense industry), and has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Yet this vision of Europe’s future sounds obtuse given that, without the United States, Europe’s response to Russia’s most recent incursions would be woefully inadequate. European forces rely on American infrastructure to coordinate basic tasks. NATO, which binds the United States to European security, bolsters that work. Scholz can’t seem to decide where Germany fits in. He placates French counterparts preening about the EU’s supposed geopolitical self-reliance. But his government also always defers to America’s stabilizing position. If Germany were to spend more on defense, it would have the authority to advocate for a position somewhere between France’s vision of autonomy—epitomized by Macron’s 2019 declaration that NATO was becoming “brain dead”—and its own preference historically to work with the United States to promote Europe’s security.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Tanks for Ukraine have shifted the balance of power in Europe]

Of course, a stronger German military will take time to mature. Reaping its dividends will take even longer. Abandoning that job prematurely, however, will leave the larger threats posed by Russia and its imperialist ambitions unanswered. Although Scholz’s predecessor, Angela Merkel, has remained reticent on the conflict, she astutely typecast Putin last year by saying, “Military deterrence is the only language he understands.”

Germans explain their difficulty in increasing defense spending by pointing to bureaucratic hurdles. These excuses have become less credible as the war in Ukraine has dragged on. The chancellor is willing to sidestep procedure when tending to Germany’s economic interests. He tried to preempt debate in his cabinet when selling a significant share of a terminal in Hamburg’s port to a Chinese-owned company last fall, for instance. (He renegotiated the sale only after public furor.) The same urgency seems to fail him when fulfilling his declared goals of military modernization.

Shortly after admitting that his government had not spent 2 percent of its GDP on defense last year, the chancellor wrote a 5,000-word article in Foreign Affairs aiming to elaborate on what he had meant by the word Zeitenwende in his Bundestag speech. Instead, he redefined the term. Rather than a roadmap for his government, it became a worldwide phenomenon. All states, he wrote, have to contend with a “new multipolar world,” an era in which “different countries and models of government are competing for power and influence.” His crisp statement a year ago about how Germany could overcome obstacles had morphed into a lengthy meditation on their intractability. Diluting the original Zeitenwende will not wash away what catalyzed it.

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.

The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.

Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.

The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are When a Christian revival goes viral The invisible victims of American anti-Semitism

Today I Grieve

Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.

When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.

If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.

This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.

In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.

And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

Related:

How and when the war in Ukraine will end Biden’s hope vs. Putin’s lies

Today’s News

The prominent South Carolina former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is being tried for the murders of his wife and son, testified in court; he has pleaded not guilty on both charges. The musician R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a different 30-year prison term for a 2021 conviction. Authorities said that a man in Orange County, Florida, shot and killed a fellow passenger in the car he was riding in, and then returned to the same neighborhood to shoot four more people, including a journalist who was covering the original shooting.

Dispatches

Unsettled Territory: Reading banned books and studying verboten topics are ways to defeat the forces of exclusion, Imani Perry writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Chase / The Atlantic

The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat

By Yasmin Tayag

Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Happiness is a warm coffee. Never mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce.” Why this Democratic strategist walked away

Culture Break

20th Century Fox Film / Everett

Read. “The Body’s River,” a new poem by Jan Beatty.

“When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there.”

Watch. Revisit Titanic. Twenty-five years later, it feels different.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.”

A

t the small elementary school in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, in northeastern France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents, and her real mother must have been a whore. It was the late 1940s, just after the war, a time when whispered stories like this one passed from parents to children. Women who were said to have slept with occupying soldiers—“horizontal collaborators”—had their heads shaved and were publicly shamed by angry crowds. In the schoolyard, children jeered at those who were said to be born of “unknown fathers.”

The idea that Gisèle might have been abandoned by someone of ill repute made her terribly ashamed. At the age of 10, she gathered her courage and confronted her mother, who told her the truth: We adopted you when you were 4 years old; you spoke German, but now you are French. Gisèle and her mother hardly ever talked about it again.  

Gisèle found her adoption file, hidden in a drawer in her parents’ room, and from time to time she snuck a look at it. It contained little information. When she was 18, she burned it on the stove. “I said to myself, If I want to live, I have to get rid of all this,” she told me.

Gisèle is 79 now, and she does not regret burning the papers. For a time, she was able to put aside questions about her origins. At 17, she took a job in a children’s home and hospital and realized she had found her calling. She spent her career working mainly in day-care centers, and eventually founded her own. In 1972, she married Justin Niango, a chemistry student from the Ivory Coast. They bought an old hotel just behind Stanislas Square in Nancy and turned it into a house.  

I visited Gisèle there in June. It was easy to imagine the vibrant family life that once took place inside: her children—Virginie, Gabriel, Grégoire, and Matthieu—running up and down the stairs and playing instruments in their rooms. At school, they were sometimes the only Black kids in their class. Gisèle has a lot of stories about the cruel comments made through the years; all the stories end with her confronting the culprit.

Gisèle at home in Nancy, France; a young Gisèle in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, France (Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Gisèle Niango)

Gisèle held off on telling her children that she had been adopted, because she was worried that the revelation might weaken their bonds with her parents. Sometimes, though, the secret “burned a bit.” She knew she would share it eventually.   

When her mother died, in 2004, she gathered her children and told them. They were shocked, and asked questions whose answers she did not know.

After years of denial, Gisèle longed to find those answers. She remembered the name and place of birth that had been listed in her burned adoption file: Gisela Magula, born in Bar-le-Duc, in northeastern France. She started her research there, and went on to write to the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, in Germany, to ask if there was any mention of her in the organization’s extensive records.

In March 2005, Gisèle received a reply: She had not been born in Bar-le-Duc after all, but near Liège, Belgium, in a Nazi maternity home at the Château de Wégimont. That home and others like it had been set up by the SS, an elite corps of Nazi soldiers, under the umbrella of the Lebensborn association, through which the regime sought to encourage the birth of babies of “good blood” in order to hasten its ultimate goal of Aryan racial purity.

Everything Gisèle believed about herself wavered. The family she’d spent her adult life defending against racism, she realized, descended from one of history’s darkest racial projects.

N

azism was an ideology of destruction, one that held as its primary aim the elimination of “inferior races.” But another, equally fervent aspect of the Nazi credo was focused on an imagined form of restoration: As soon as they came to power, the Nazis set out to produce a new generation of pure-blooded Germans. The Lebensborn association was a key part of this plan. Established in 1935 under the auspices of the SS, it was intended to encourage procreation among members of the Aryan race by providing birthing mothers with comfort, financial support, and, when necessary, secrecy. The association’s headquarters were in Munich, in the former villa of the writer Thomas Mann, who had left Germany in 1933. In 1936, it opened its first maternity home, in nearby Steinhöring.

The SS was overseen by Heinrich Himmler, who hoped that its elite soldiers would serve as a racial vanguard for a revitalized Germanity. “As far as the value of our blood and the numbers of our population are concerned, we are dying out,” he said in a 1931 address to the SS. “We are called upon to establish foundations so that the next generation can make history.” An agronomist by training, Himmler supervised this undertaking with a level of attention that bordered on voyeurism; initially, all SS leaders’ marriage applications had to be referred to him. All were expected to reproduce: Four children was considered “the minimum amount … for a good sound marriage.” Himmler had no problem with childbearing outside marriage, and criticized the Catholic Church’s hostility toward illegitimate births. Raising “illegitimate or orphaned children of good blood” should be an “accepted custom,” Himmler wrote. In 1939, he issued an order that called on members of the SS to procreate wherever they could, including with women to whom they were not married.

According to Himmler, the Lebensborn homes were intended “primarily for the brides and wives of our young SS men, and secondarily for illegitimate mothers of good blood.” But the latter were, in practice, a majority. Far from the eyes of the world, single mothers could give birth in Lebensborn homes and, if they wanted to, abandon their babies, who would receive the best care before being placed in an adoptive family—so long as the biological parents met the racial criteria (photos of both were required). Early applicants had to meet a height requirement, and had to prove their racial and medical fitness going back two generations. The German historian Georg Lilienthal found that initially, less than half of the women who applied were accepted.

Lebensborn employees took note of how the mothers behaved during childbirth, and required them to breastfeed their children if they could. “The woman has her own battlefield,” Adolf Hitler said in 1935. “With every child she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation.”

Lebensborn babies in Germany, 1945 (Robert Capa / ICP / Magnum)

The women also received a daily “ideological education,” according to the historian Lisa Pine. Some of the babies were given a non-Christian first name by Lebensborn staff in a ceremony inspired by old Nordic customs. Under a Nazi flag and a portrait of the fürher, in front of a congregation, the master of ceremonies would hold an SS dagger over the newborn and recite this creed: “We take you into our community as a limb of our body. You shall grow up in our protection and bring honor to your name, pride to your brotherhood, and inextinguishable glory to your race.” Through this ceremony, they believed, the child became a member of the SS clan, forever linked to the Reich.

By October 11, 1943, when Gisèle was born, there were about 16 Lebensborn facilities throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. She arrived four days too late to have Himmler as her godfather; the Reichsführer personally sponsored the children who shared his birthday, October 7.

One afternoon last spring, I sat with Gisèle in her living room, dozens of documents and photographs spread out before us. A short woman whose white hair is shot through with a streak of brown, Gisèle is at once reserved and straightforward, with a wry sense of humor. “Himmler really bungled with me,” she joked, referencing her marriage to an African man and their mixed-race family.

Gisèle’s wedding to Justin Niango, 1972; a Niango-family Christmas card (Courtesy of Gisèle Niango)

Gisèle rejects the idea that there’s a connection between her career and her early years spent in a very different kind of day care—she chose her path, after all, long before she knew where she had really come from.

Still, she doesn’t minimize the fact that her life story is inextricable from the history of Nazism. She has often wondered how her origins might shape what she calls her “internal memory”: She has always been terribly afraid of military trucks, trains, and leather boots. She cannot bear to hear babies crying; at her day care, she would often leave her office to comfort the little ones. She worries, too, that she somehow passed something evil on to her children through her genes.

A chance encounter helped Gisèle trace her origins. A few months after her mother’s death, just as she began her research, her cousin went to a funeral where a tall man with blond hair gave a eulogy for the departed, a teacher who had believed in him. The man, Walter Beausert, talked about his arrival in France as a child, in a convoy from Germany. Gisèle’s cousin, who was old enough to remember Gisèle’s adoption and knew that she’d come from Germany, struck up a conversation with Beausert after the funeral. Her cousin wondered whether Gisèle might have been in the same convoy.

Beausert was a Lebensborn child. A decade earlier, he had been the first person in France to testify about the Lebensborn, in a 1994 television report on his quest throughout Europe to find where he was born. Gisèle’s cousin put her in touch with Beausert, who soon helped Gisèle recover her own history.

Sisters of Mercy helped care for the displaced children at Kloster Indersdorf, including Gisèle (far left) and Walter (second from right). (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Lilo Plaschkes)

The story that Gisèle has pieced together is still full of holes, but she now knows the identity of her biological mother. Marguerite Magula was a Hungarian woman who immigrated to Brussels with her parents and sister in 1926. Marguerite eventually went to Germany to work, with her mother and sister, in a garment factory in Saarbrücken. When she got pregnant, in 1943, she ran away and returned to Brussels. Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, the author of Lifelong Lebensborn: The Desired Children of the SS and What Became of Them, told me that by then, the Lebensborn program had somewhat loosened its criteria: A fervent belief in National Socialism could make up for being short, as Marguerite was, though an Aryan certificate, a health certificate, and a certificate of hereditary health were still mandatory for both parents.

Gisèle’s feelings toward Marguerite have changed over time. When she learned from the Steinhöring archives that some mothers had searched for their children after the war, trying to get them back, Gisèle came to hate her. “She never sought me out,” Gisèle said. “I have no compassion, nothing; quite the opposite. That’s not a mother.” A postwar document denying Marguerite’s request for Hungarian citizenship (she and her sister were then stateless) mentions her “bad life.” Had Gisèle and Marguerite met, maybe she could have explained. But Marguerite died in 2001, just a few years before Gisèle began her search.

Gisèle has been less curious about the identity of her father; she imagines him as the stereotype of an SS officer—undoubtedly “a bastard.”

In 2009, Gisèle met a half brother, Claude, born after the war, who was raised by Marguerite. They still visit each other from time to time. Claude, she said, describes their mother as having mistreated him. He once told Gisèle she was lucky not to have grown up with their mother.

L

ike Gisèle, Walter Beausert owed the discovery of his origins to chance. At the birth of his first daughter, Valérie, in 1966, the midwife stared at Beausert, then 22 years old. Behind his helmet of straight blond hair, she noticed his light-blue eyes—one of them was a glass eye that never closed—and remembered the 17 small children who had arrived by train at the hospital in Commercy in 1946. “I think you come from Germany,” she said to him. It confirmed something Walter had always suspected.

Walter was the only child in that convoy to France never to have been adopted. He grew up in children’s homes and became a guarded, tough teenager. Unusually for a Lebensborn child, Beausert was circumcised. He never knew why. “My father was obsessed with the search for his family. He looked for his mother all his life,” Walter’s daughter Valérie, now 56, told me when we met at an old art-nouveau brasserie in Nancy.

Valérie Beausert; her father, Walter Beausert (Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Valérie Beausert)

In 1994, while filming the television report about the Lebensborn, Walter traveled to the site of the former Lebensborn home at the Château de Wégimont, where he heard from locals about a woman named Rita, a Lebensborn cook, who had had a baby boy named Walter. As German soldiers tried to take Walter away from Rita, the story went, he was dropped and his left eye was injured. This was the lead the grown-up Walter had been waiting for—Rita, he came to believe, was his mother.

“Except that’s not true,” Valérie said. “We met this Rita; we know who this Walter is. He’s not my father. But he didn’t want to hear anything about it. He said Rita had a second child who was also named Walter. I told him, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’ His denial was pathological.”

Valérie, who has the same light-blue eyes and straight blond hair as her father, was called a “sale boche”—“dirty Kraut”—at school during her childhood, just as her father had been called a “white rat.” In 1986, Valérie fell in love with a man who was a refugee from Vietnam. “My son’s father was the first person of color in our village,” she said. “But for me it was a nonissue. I felt like an outsider myself.”

A young Walter; Walter and his grandson Lâm (Courtesy of Valérie Beausert)

Their son, Lâm, was born with one brown eye and one blue eye. One eye—the blue one—presented with a deficiency. The doctor identified a congenital abnormality that could cause blindness, which Valérie also carried and had passed on to him. Her father’s glass eye, she realized, was not the result of an injury at all. “When my son had to undergo an operation, I told my father, ‘You see, it is congenital.’” Her father was outraged, Valérie recalled: “Nonsense! You can’t say that!”

It wasn’t just that Walter wanted to believe that his glass eye was the result of his biological mother’s struggle to protect him from German soldiers; he was also terrified of disease, of being “a carrier of defects,” Valérie said, and went to great lengths to prove his superior strength and stoicism. One day, while he was chopping wood, his friend’s chainsaw ripped through a trunk, cutting both of Walter’s calves to the bone. Walter made himself two tourniquets and drove home. Valérie remembers him walking up the stairs as if nothing had happened, both legs bloody, and calmly asking her to call an ambulance.

Walter found others’ fragility unbearable. When his wife, Valérie’s mother, was diagnosed with cancer, Valérie sometimes kept him out of her room. “He would tell her, ‘You have to fight; you must eat; that’s how you get better.’ It was a form of psychological abuse.”

To Valérie, this trait in her father was a troubling echo of the Nazi emphasis on physical superiority. “A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp steel,” Hitler proclaimed in 1935. Lebensborn children born with conditions such as Down syndrome, cleft lip, or clubfoot were thrown out of the homes, or killed.   

Sometimes Valérie worries about what she, and her son, might have inherited from her father. “When I see some of my son’s character traits—a little tough, a little authoritarian—which could belong to my father but also to me, I always have this fleeting anxiety: Did we pass along something of the Lebensborn?”

I

n the summer of 1945, Life magazine published a report, with pictures by the photographer Robert Capa, on the “super babies” of a Lebensborn home. “The Hohenhorst bastards of Himmler’s men are blue-eyed, flaxen-haired and pig fat,” one caption read. “Too much porridge, plenty of sunlight have made this Nazi baby in hand-knitted suit and bootees so fat and healthy that he completely fills his over-sized carriage,” read another. “Grown pig fat under care and overstuffing Nazi nurses, they now pose to the Allies a problem yet to be solved.” The tone gives an idea of the level of resentment that Americans and Europeans felt in 1945 toward those who were spared the war’s horrors—even toddlers.

But not all Lebensborn babies were blue-eyed, flaxen haired, or even, for that matter, “pig fat.” Likely because of the lack of bonding with a single caregiver, some children were developmentally delayed. Medical exams performed after the war indicate that Walter was underweight. A document from French social workers describes Gisèle as having had tantrums upon her arrival in France.

For Gisèle and her fellow Lebensborn children, the Allies’ liberation of Belgium marked the beginning of a journey—in wicker cradles wedged in the back of military trucks—through a devastated Europe. In The Factory of Perfect Children, the French journalist Boris Thiolay recounts that German soldiers in retreat left the Lebensborn home near Liège on September 1, 1944, with about 20 toddlers. After several stops in Germany and Poland, the children found themselves at the very first Lebensborn, in Steinhöring. Walter Beausert had ended up there too.   

In Steinhöring, SS officials were crammed together with children and pregnant women from other institutions that were now closed. Boxes of documents cluttered the corridors of the maternity ward, where women continued to give birth.  

When the news of Hitler’s death broke, officials burned as many documents as they could. Thiolay describes the goals of this purge: “The birth registers, the identity of the children, the fathers, the organization chart, the names of the people in charge: everything must disappear. The evidence of the Lebensborn’s very existence must be removed.” But the Nazis’ obsession with documents made fully expunging the records an impossible task—there were too many.  

A few days after Hitler’s death, a small detachment of U.S. soldiers arrived in Steinhöring, and the children changed hands: The Americans were responsible for them now.

Later in 1945, Gisèle and Walter were transferred to Kloster Indersdorf, nine miles from Dachau, where they were housed in a 12th-century monastery that had been requisitioned by the U.S. Army for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to use as a reception center for displaced children. There, the Lebensborn children lived together with survivors: Jewish children who had made it out of the concentration camps, as well as Eastern and Central European gentile teenagers who had been forced laborers during the war.

Lillian Robbins, the American social worker who directed the displaced-children’s center at Kloster Indersdorf, consults with a nun in 1946. Walter Beausert is visible at far left; Gisèle is sitting up at Robbins’s feet. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Lilo Plaschkes)

The older children were encouraged to help the younger ones. A picture shows three small blond girls gently combing babies’ hair and spoon-feeding them as if they were playing with dolls. Another photo shows a group of babies on a checkered comforter under the watch of the American social worker Lillian Robbins and a Sister of Mercy. In the corner, sitting on the floor away from the other toddlers, is little Walter, one eye closed, smiling at the photographer.

The UNRRA staff tried to find the children’s surviving family members, if there were any, though some children had no recorded identity. Some were given an approximate birth date. This was perhaps what happened with Walter Beausert, whose official date of birth falls on a suspicious, though of course possible, date: January 1, 1944. His birthplace was unknown, but, likely because he was believed to have previously lived at a Lebensborn home in France, UNRRA staff decided to send him there from Indersdorf.

As for young Gisela, her file showed that she was born in “Wégimont” (omitting the château’s full name), which staff believed to be a French town. She joined Walter in the convoy bound for the Meuse region of France, whose population had never recovered from World War I. Gisela became Gisèle, and her life as a French child began.

W

ere they “survivors,” these toddlers who owed their existence to Nazi birth policy, who ate fresh fruit and porridge while other babies were gassed or starved to death?

On October 10, 1947, in Nuremberg, four Lebensborn leaders appeared before a special American military tribunal as part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted ancillary Nazi leaders. Three charges were brought against them: crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. Three out of the four leaders were found guilty of the third charge. But the tribunal established that the Lebensborn had been only a “welfare institution.” The children, therefore, were not considered victims.

Until the 1970s, Lebensborn homes were treated as a rumor, or described as stud farms where SS men mated with racially selected women. The first book to be published about Lebensborn came out in France in 1975 and contributed to this misunderstanding by suggesting that the “nurses” were in fact selected to be breeding mothers. Georg Lilienthal wrote the first academic work on the program, in 1986.

In the nine years the program lasted, at least 9,200 children were born in the homes. Some 1,200 were born in Norway, which had the most SS maternity homes outside Germany. After the war, these children, along with women who were suspected of having had affairs with German soldiers, were ostracized. Some of these women were even interned in camps. France had only one Lebensborn home, which operated for less than a year, so Lebensborn children there were far less likely to be recognized as such.  

In 2011, Gisèle and Walter traveled to Indersdorf to join the annual commemoration held there by former residents of UNRRA’s reception center; Gisèle described the organizers as “Jewish children,” just as she still refers to herself as a “child of the Lebensborn.” “It was extraordinary” to be included in the ceremony, she told me. While she was in Indersdorf, she went to visit Dachau twice. She felt she needed to confront what she might have believed in had she been raised in an SS family.

Together, Gisèle and Walter started the Association for the Memory of Child Victims of the Lebensborn in 2016, an effort to encourage public recognition of Lebensborn children as victims of war.

Walter, for his part, became obsessed with gaining acceptance from the Jewish community. He studied the Torah and identified as a Zionist. “He used to celebrate Jewish holidays,” Valérie remembers. “His Jewish friends were a great help to my father. To tell him, ‘You are also a victim, Walter’ was the greatest gift.”

He died in 2021, wearing a Star of David around his neck. He had been in poor health, and living in a retirement home. A few days earlier, for the first time in his life, he had admitted that maybe Rita was not his mother.

Valérie has kept a comb that still contains her father’s hair. One day, she hopes to find out what secrets his DNA might contain.  

G

isèle’s husband, Justin, died 15 years ago, but she still spends nearly every winter in Africa, in his village, where she is “famous,” she said, in part because residents saw her on TV, in a segment about the Lebensborn.  

At home in Nancy, she keeps a photograph of her biological mother on display, though she doesn’t look at it much anymore. “It’s my heritage. I don’t want to forget that I was born from this woman,” she told me. All she wants now is for her story to be told. “I’m modest,” she joked. “I want the whole world to know about it.”

Her son Gabriel married a German woman, and her grandchildren speak German, a language she has completely forgotten. “It shows that history goes on,” she said. Her son Matthieu is working on a book about the Lebensborn, and with his wife, Camille, he wrote a play about the children’s story. Recently, I attended a reading at a small theater in Paris. I watched Gisèle, seated next to her daughter Virginie, as she watched her own story acted out.

“They say history is written by the victors,” one actor said. “But most of all, it’s written by the adults.” Gisèle discreetly dried her tears behind her glasses.

Americans hate—or claim to hate—their politicians, but even by those standards, the early shape of the 2024 presidential race is a little bizarre. More than 20 months out from the election, Americans consistently say they don’t want to see a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet the most likely outcome today is a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

As Biden’s political fortunes have risen since late 2022, Democratic elected officials have slowly come around to the idea that he’s likely to be the nominee again next year, but Democratic voters remain skeptical, as I wrote recently. Still, they’re likely to get Biden, thanks in part to the advantage of incumbency.

On the Republican side, Trump looks weaker than he has at any time since shortly after he entered the 2016 race. His overall favorability is low, but that’s not new—he’s never won the national popular vote, and many of his chosen candidates have lost. More worryingly from the Mar-a-Lago point of view, a good chunk of Republicans now seem ready to move on from Trump, and he hasn’t managed to clear the field of rivals. Nikki Haley, who vowed not to run if he did, changed her mind. Ron DeSantis has not declared but seems sure to, and poses a larger electoral threat. Yet Trump still manages to top primary polls with a plurality of support.

How did we end up in such a situation? What in the structure of contemporary American politics led us to the cusp of a clash of meh? One easy answer is incumbency. Not since fellow Democrat Franklin Pierce in 1852, when Biden was just a wee lad, has a sitting president lost his party’s nomination. (That’s a joke, by the way.) Trump is not in office, but he is a sort of demi-incumbent as the most recent Republican president, a status he has reinforced with his false claims that he actually won in 2020.

Political scientists I asked about this offered a couple of additional, nuanced views. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, told me that the increased ideological unity within each of the two parties might explain the rise of unpopular standard-bearers. For most of U.S. history, the parties were a little more mixed, and a large portion of affiliated voters might still consider voting for a candidate of the other party.

“That kept it so both parties would nominate candidates that were broadly appealing to a larger swath of the country,” he said. Now the real prize is to win the primary, because once you’re the nominee, the party will coalesce around you, no matter what—a point that Trump 2016 and Biden 2020 both proved. “As the parties have polarized and separated, what’s happened is that while the parties remain internally fractious, what unites them more than ever is hatred of the other party.”

Julia Azari, a political-science professor at Marquette University, made a dovetailing point about the primary process, which has changed since the mid-20th century. Once largely under the control of the party organizations, it’s now much more open and small-d democratic—which ironically can produce candidates voters don’t actually love. “I think the free-for-all nature of presidential primaries makes it easier for candidates who can command roughly 40 percent of the primary vote to win the nomination while the rest of the field is fractured,” she wrote in an email. “In a weird way, it would be easier to navigate intra-party divisions if the parties had clearer and more organized factions that could consolidate around candidates with similar views and bargain at the nomination stage to incorporate multiple ideological perspectives.”

Once a candidate emerges from that process, he or she can rely on the party rallying together. As Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.” And if it comes down to Trump and Biden, lots of voters from both parties will be swallowing hard and doing just that.

This cheat sheet will track who’s in, out, up, and down in the 2024 races. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Not officially, but in every other respect, yes. Every time he’s been asked, he says he expects to run, and when his longtime aide Ron Klain departed as chief of staff, Klain said he’d be there “when” Biden runs in 2024. An announcement could come soon, now that the State of the Union has passed.

Why does he want to run?
Biden has always wanted to be president and is proud of his work so far; he also seems to believe that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
If he runs, it’s probably his for the taking. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden does not, she’s expected to be the favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
It’s too soon to tell, but she’d start with an advantage if Biden sits this out.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden bows out.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden doesn’t, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
Say it with me: No, but if Biden doesn’t, she might.

Why does she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Not officially, but she has visited New Hampshire and tells The New York Times she’s considering a run, Biden or not.

Why does she want to run?
She told the Times she wanted to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
If Biden, etc.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP are still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Not officially, but clearly the answer is yes. DeSantis is getting a campaign and super PAC up and running, marshaling donors, and inserting himself into national politics. He reportedly might not announce until May or June.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early 2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
Members of the Republican establishment who want a pugilistic alternative to Trump, disaffected MAGA types.

Can he win the nomination?
No one quite knows how a Trump-DeSantis battle will play out, but it seems very possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Perhaps as a MAGA-friendly alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say, as my colleague Tim Alberta has chronicled. Haley served under Trump, condemned him over January 6, said she wouldn’t run if he ran, and now is running anyway.

Who wants her to run?
That’s also hard to say, but if DeSantis stumbles in the spotlight, she could make a play for his supporters.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, a longtime member of Congress, is now governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
It sure looks like it. He’s been making the rounds and having the conversations one has if one is going to run, and he says he will probably decide by April.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying he disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the election.

Who wants him to run?
Some old-school Republicans would welcome his candidacy, but it’s hard to imagine a groundswell.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
He says he’s giving a campaign “very serious consideration.”

Why does he want to run?
Hogan argues that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

Who wants him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Can he win?
Hard to imagine.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
“Maybe I run, maybe I don’t,” he said in early February. But he passed on a Senate run last year and just created a fundraising vehicle that typically presages a candidacy.

Why does he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and sees his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Maybe. Scott has visited Iowa and considered a campaign, and says he doesn’t plan to run for another Senate term.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him.

Can he win the nomination?
Who knows? The soft-spoken Scott is untested in this kind of campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
Most likely. He’s released a campaign-style memoir, though he had to blurb it himself, and has pointedly distanced himself from Trump on some issues.

Why does he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wants him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
He hasn’t said, but he’s been traveling to stump for Republicans and meet with donors, and he’s limited to a single term as governor.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Republicans who see him as able to run on Trumpy cultural issues while keeping some distance from Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as governor of Indiana and U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Pretty likely, though he hasn’t declared.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His time as Trump’s VP both makes him more plausible and probably rules him out, because he’s fallen afoul of his old boss.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers.

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.

The US ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that China would cross a "red line" if the country decided to provide lethal military aid to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

The nascent 2024 presidential campaign seemed to hit a different gear this week with Nikki Haley entering the Republican primary. The former South Carolina governor and onetime United Nations ambassador joins former President Donald Trump as the only major competitors to declare bids for the presidency.

“Shame on you for partnering with the murderous government,” read one comment on Twitter. “How much did the mullahs pay you?” another user wrote. And a third: “You have sold your soul.”

These people had written to me because I was in Iran, on a week-long reporting trip. They believed I must have struck some sort of bargain: favorable coverage in exchange for access. They assumed that in an authoritarian state, we would see only what the government wished us to see. The comments, while ungracious, prompt a reasonable question: What is the value of flying 6,000 miles to a country where months of anti-government protests have been largely stilled, a country where—on the surface—things appear calm?

NPR, where I anchor All Things Considered, has been committed to covering Iran for decades now, from the outside when we must and on the ground when we can. My team and I applied for visas back in September. We pushed. For months, we got nowhere. And then, one morning at the very end of January, an email arrived from Tehran. Subject line: “Your visa has been approved.” Six days later, two NPR colleagues and I were on a plane.

[Kim Ghattas: A whole generation revolts against the Iranian regime]

Visas for American journalists to visit Iran are rare and typically granted for just a few days. This marked the first time since 2021 that NPR would be able to report from inside the country. Our plan for the trip was pretty basic: talk to everyone we could find. Ask what’s on their mind. We interviewed people in parks, on street corners, in their home. We shared a table and sipped cardamom tea with young women who wanted to know why America isn’t doing more to help their country.

We reached out to Iranian officials too. In an interview in his office, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told me that people in Iran are free to speak their mind. This is not true. Many people we approached were visibly frightened to talk with us. Some pointed up, scanned for cameras, and whispered, “They’re watching.”

One perfume seller in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar spoke at length of his disgust for the government. We agreed not to use his name or take his picture, but we recorded his comments. After the interview, he followed us out of the shop and asked if we could disguise his voice.

As we discussed what might be possible, he changed his mind.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Use it. I want you to. People need to know what is happening here.”

What is happening in Iran is that following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s so-called morality police, protests spread to some 150 towns and cities. The regime crackdown was swift, and it was ferocious. According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, hundreds of protesters have been killed, thousands detained, and four executed. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that nearly 100 journalists have been detained in Iran since the protests began last fall. One was arrested the day we flew in, another the day before we left. There is no First Amendment in Iran, no constitutionally protected right to free speech.

And yet.

“It’s almost like they can’t help themselves,” one of the producers traveling with me observed, with more than a little awe, as person after person in Iran acknowledged that it’s dangerous to speak with visiting American journalists, and then proceeded to pour their heart out. I stopped to buy a chocolate bar from a corner grocery store one day and struck up a conversation with the man at the register. He said that rampant inflation—Iran’s currency recently hit a record low against the dollar—means he can’t afford a house or a car or any of the things he needs to be independent.

“Who do you blame for the economy and for daily life being like this?” I asked.

“The regime,” he said. “If I want to be clear, the regime.”

As for us, we were assigned an interpreter but were able to ask whatever questions we wanted. We were able to visit some, but not all, of the places we wanted to see. American journalists are required to secure permits and pay extra fees to report from outside Tehran; we asked for permission to travel to Isfahan, a city of about 2 million people in central Iran, and it was granted. We asked to go to Evin prison, in Tehran, where political prisoners are held. We were told that this would not be possible.

[Roya Hakakian: The real reason Iran says it’s canceling the morality police]

We were stopped twice, both times during the pro-regime rally on Revolution Day, marking the 44th anniversary of the 1979 revolution. The first time was by uniformed police. The second was by a plainclothes squad that materialized out of a sea of people carrying Iranian flags and Death to America, Death to Israel signs. They checked our papers, our driver’s and interpreter’s papers, and our temporary press passes. We were waved on.

A journalist’s job is not to advocate for particular policies or reforms, but rather to document what we see and hear, put hard questions to people in positions of power, and then let our listeners and readers make up their mind about the answers. In Iran, we witnessed a country where people are angry, where protests are not completely extinguished, but where the regime—for now—remains firmly in control.

I don’t pretend to feel neutral about that. Journalists are human; we bring opinions and biases to our work and to our lives. The Atlantic’s George Packer proposes that instead of neutrality, the goals instead should be independence and accuracy. He described our trade in these pages as demanding “the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level and square.”

Okay, then: For an assignment like Iran, the necessary effort involves being on the ground. I acknowledge the inherent limitations of any foreign correspondent, the impossibility of an outsider grasping the complexity of a place with anything close to the insight of a local reporter. But there is value to fresh eyes and ears, and to the resources and international platform that a major news outlet can bring to a story.

In Iran, things seem quiet. But when you get there, a truth becomes apparent: Iranians with differing views will always find ways for their stories to be told. On the eve of Revolution Day, the government put on a fireworks show, and as the explosions crackled across the night sky, my producer suddenly cocked her head. “What are they saying?” she asked. We threw open our hotel windows to hear cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “Freedom!” echoing from the apartment buildings around us.

That moment demonstrated the divisions playing out in Iran. It revealed a narrative very different from the one the government has spent the past five months promoting. And we would have missed it, had we not gotten on a plane to witness it firsthand. There was no contradiction in that act, no selling of our souls.

Journalists can want the people of Iran to have the government they deserve—one that believes in human rights, equality, and free speech—and also honestly and unflinchingly report what we find when we go there.