Taiwan's Tsai Ing-wen's stopover in the US is 'normal' and consistent with longstanding US policy, White House says.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian discusses his county's eastern-focused foreign policy.

The European Union knows all too well what it means to be the target of economic coercion.

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On Wednesday the group Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor warned that the global arsenal of nuclear weapons is increasing.

Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Ukraine last year and, for that matter, its first invasion of its neighbor eight years before are impossible to justify. Putin is trying to convince his public that this war is existential, but with little success. Russia’s existence as a strong, sovereign state is not dependent on its control of Ukraine or even parts of the Donbas or Crimea. That’s why since Russian President Vladimir Putin implemented a partial mobilization last fall, hundreds of thousands of men have fled Russia rather than march to the sound of the guns, and it’s why he still refuses to declare war and order a full mobilization.

And yet a small band of critics has rallied beneath the banner of realism to argue against continued Western support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself. “Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law,” Mario Loyola wrote in a recent essay in The Atlantic, “but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine.” But actual realism must be grounded in the details of the situations it assesses. And in the case of Ukraine, those facts lead to very different conclusions.

[Mario Loyola: Ron DeSantis is right about Ukraine]

The borders of Ukraine that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 were enshrined in international law and in numerous treaties and agreements that Russia signed, over and over. They were not a “formality,” as Loyola suggests, nor was Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, and illegal annexation of Crimea, justifiable because “Russia felt it had no choice … because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol.” Russia shared Sevastopol with Ukraine for more than a decade and had a lease that would have lasted until the middle of the century. Ukraine was living in peace with Russia until 2014. Putin didn’t like democratic revolutions in neighboring countries, especially in Ukraine, because he feared that Russians would want the same thing, threatening his corrupt, authoritarian system. That’s why he invaded in 2014, and one of the main reasons he launched round two last year.

Loyola is not alone in suggesting that Crimea’s status be treated as a special case for Russia, that it was transferred to Ukraine “only” in 1954 and “is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now.” Crimea is part of Ukraine. For centuries—until Stalin forcibly moved them to Central Asia during World War II—Crimean Tatars were a major presence in the peninsula even after Russia took control at the end of the 18th century, making up about 20 percent of the population at the time of the deportation (during which up to 50 percent of them died). According to the last census Ukraine administered in Crimea, in 2001, they made up about 10 percent of the population, and Ukrainians 24 percent. Their leadership has been severely repressed by the Russian occupiers. They are as much Ukrainian citizens as any others living on Ukrainian soil.

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

It’s common to hear echoes of Russian propaganda that Ukraine’s pro-Russian government in Ukraine “was deposed” in 2014—but that does not make it true. Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and wound up in Russia. Another line often heard in Moscow and repeated by some in the West is that pro-Russia presidential candidates won elections until 2014. After 2004’s Orange Revolution, the pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko beat Yanukovych in the rerun of the 2004 presidential election, despite the latter’s efforts to steal victory.

Then there is the argument that NATO enlargement was the reason behind Putin’s invasion in 2014. That, of course, overlooks the fact that Yanukovych legislatively ended Ukraine’s pursuit of closer ties with NATO—and yet Putin wasn’t satisfied with that. Had Putin not pressured Yanukovych into rejecting agreements with the European Union in 2013, the Euromaidan revolution never would have happened. And when current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky floated the idea of neutrality for Ukraine in the very early stages of Russia’s most recent invasion (before the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha and other sites), Putin wasn’t interested. Finally, Putin expressed no concerns about the Finns and Swedes applying for NATO membership.

Loyola and other realists often deny Ukraine and Ukrainians agency. Zelensky, who has performed heroically throughout the war, was democratically elected and has to take into account the views of the Ukrainian people. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute shows that 97 percent of Ukrainians think they can win the war and 74 percent believe Ukraine will maintain all territories from within its internationally recognized borders defined in 1991. Ukrainians strongly oppose any territorial concessions or compromises. They also don’t trust Russia, given how Moscow never lived up to its past commitments to Ukraine, not least the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements.

Moreover, Russia’s tactics—its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—have alienated Ukrainians for the foreseeable future. Putin has significantly bolstered Ukrainians’ desire to join NATO: 82 percent now say they would support joining the alliance. Invading neighbors and subjecting them to appalling abuses tends to alienate, not win over, the populations in these countries. When Loyola writes that peace “should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise,” he omits that this would require forcing a deal on the Ukrainians that they vehemently oppose. It also ignores the fact that senior Russian officials, such as former President Dmitry Medvedev, and the Russian media have said that a key objective of the invasion is to destroy “Ukrainianness,” which is why some observers accuse Moscow of committing not just war crimes but genocide.

The presence of Russian occupiers in Ukrainian territory is unacceptable to Ukrainians. Not only would a peace deal ceding territory betray Ukraine and the concepts of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but it would also justify Putin’s view that the West is weak, and that he can accept its gift of part of Ukraine now—effectively a reward for aggression—and then come back for more, in Ukraine and farther West. China’s President Xi Jinping is also watching the West’s response, and drawing lessons about what the international community might do were he to attack Taiwan.

[Anne Applebaum: China’s war against Taiwan has already started]

Echoing other realists who tend to blame America first, Loyola implies that we pushed Ukraine into war. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Biden administration did everything it could to avert a Russian invasion, and Ukraine also tried to prevent one. Putin wanted to hear none of it, and instead made absurd demands in December 2021 that would have rolled NATO back to its pre-1997 borders and entrenched Russian control over the Eurasian region. What’s more, despite the dreadful performance of his military, Putin has yet to jettison his original, maximalist war aims.

The costs of letting Putin have his way in Ukraine, including the damage it would cause to the decades-old international order, are too grave to bear. If not stopped and defeated in Ukraine, Putin will try his luck in other countries in the region, including Moldova and possibly even the Baltic states. A Russian move against Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania would implicate NATO’s Article 5 security guarantees, potentially pulling the United States into a war with Russia. As it is, the Baltic states have been constant targets of Kremlin provocations, including the cyberattack on Estonia in 2007; the kidnapping of an Estonian official in September 2014, shortly after a visit by President Barack Obama; and the buildup of troops in Moscow’s western military district. If Putin is able to bluff his way to victory in Ukraine, on what basis can we assume that he will not attempt the same in the Baltics? This is clearly understood in Eastern and Northern Europe, and is why traditionally neutral Sweden and Finland want to join NATO.

In Ukraine, the Ukrainians are the ones doing the fighting, and tragically the dying; the United States has no soldiers on the ground. But we have every interest in providing the military support Ukraine needs to win this war and drive every Russian occupying and invading force off Ukrainian territory. No one wants the war to end sooner than the Ukrainians, but they also believe, and with good reason, that they can win, if they get the assistance they need soon. Now is not the time to snatch Russian defeat from the Ukraine’s jaws of victory.

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Last year, Pakistan was hit with floods so devastating that they were hard to comprehend. In some areas, 15 inches of rain fell in a single day. And the rain went on for months, inundating one-third of the country, spreading disease, and displacing nearly 8 million people. Six months later, Pakistan is still in crisis—nearly 2 million people are living near stagnant floodwater. Pakistan has estimated that it needs about $16.3 billion to recover from the floods, a sum that does not take into account so many ripple effects of the crisis: grief over those who died, education abruptly ended, the struggles of girls married off young as their families coped with a sudden plunge into poverty.

But these floods were not a “natural disaster.” The monsoon rains were up to 50 percent more intense than they would have been without climate change. So although Pakistan has to foot this bill, or at least most of it, the country bears little responsibility: Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, while the United States is the world’s second-biggest emitter, accountable for about 20 percent of emissions since 1850. But there is no mechanism for the United States or any other country to pay for the loss and damage that it is at least partially responsible for.

That may be changing. In November, world leaders at the most recent big climate meeting, known as COP27, agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund, bankrolled by rich countries, to help poor countries harmed by climate change. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the details: This week, a special United Nations committee set up to plan the fund will meet for the first time, in Luxor, Egypt. Delegates will start negotiating which nations will be able to draw from the fund, where it will be housed, where the money will come from, and how much each country should pitch in. At this point, the fund is “an empty bucket,” says Lien Vandamme, a senior campaigner at the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, who is in Egypt for the negotiations. “Everything is still open.” Other meetings will follow, and the committee will make its recommendations to the world this fall in Dubai at COP28.

If the past several decades of climate negotiations are anything to go on, the loss-and-damage fund will be poorly endowed, or filled with money that got moved over from some other fund and relabeled, or in the form of loans rather than grants. If that happens, it will likely be perceived by poorer nations as yet another inadequate response by the same countries that messed up the climate in the first place. And those that are wronged are unlikely to simply suffer in silence.

The loss-and-damage fund would be separate from what is currently the dominant form of climate funding that flows to the global South: money to help low-income nations reduce their emissions. And it would also be separate from “adaptation,” money to help areas prepare for disasters or avoid the harms of warming. Instead, the new fund would be provided by rich countries to compensate poor countries that have already suffered losses. In a word, it would be reparations.

The agreement to establish a fund for this purpose was initially opposed by some rich countries. The U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in the fall that helping the developing world cope with climate change is “a moral obligation”—but he wanted that help to flow through existing funds and institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Developing countries, however, demanded a new, dedicated fund, and they ultimately prevailed. Almost all the details were left to be finalized at COP28 in Dubai, after the committee has worked to iron out specifics. But by agreeing that a loss-and-damage fund should exist, countries seem to be reluctantly acknowledging that they bear some moral accountability for climate change. “It is very clear that developed countries have a historical responsibility,” says Liane Schalatek, a climate-finance expert at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C., who is also in Luxor this week.

Funds are especially needed for the “day after” problems—the ongoing work of rebuilding and recovering after a flood or a heat wave is over and the emergency foreign aid has dried up, Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s delegate to this week’s meeting, told me. People don’t just need tarp tents and bowls of rice. They need “social support, a way to return livelihoods,” Nasr said.

But how much is enough? One analysis suggests that the true scale of the financial losses due to climate change outside of the West may be as much as $580 billion a year by 2030, and some groups are considering a figure in that ballpark to be the minimum acceptable amount. Another analysis estimated that America owed $20 billion for global climate losses in 2022, a number that would rise to about $117 billion annually by 2030. Nasr demurred on naming specific amounts, suggesting that the workings of the fund be negotiated first. The needs are enormous, and mentioning figures at this point would only “scare people,” he said. “If you put a number on at the beginning, the focus will only be on the number,” he told me. But he did add that “it will be in the billions.”

Given that the standing UN goal for all types of climate funding from rich countries to poorer ones—$100 billion—has never been met, filling the loss-and-damage fund with hundreds of billions of dollars feels like an almost impossible lift. “It will be a huge challenge to get countries to agree on the amount that is needed,” says Leia Achampong of the European Network on Debt and Development. For many delegates from the global South, a key demand is that the fund not come in the form of loans. Many poor countries, including Pakistan, are already dealing with debt, which is affecting their ability to provide for their own citizens. More loans would just add to this debt burden. “If a country is in debt, you have the World Bank and the IMF calling for austerity, and the first thing that usually goes is the social safety net,” Schalatek told me.

A central issue going into the meeting in Egypt is that, despite broad agreement that rich countries responsible for the most emissions should pay in and that poor countries feeling the brunt of the effects should receive the funds, the globe cannot be neatly divided into just two categories—“developed” and “developing.” The trickiest case is undoubtedly China. Historically classified as a developing country, China is getting richer by the month and has emitted 11 percent of historical emissions, second only to the United States. At COP27, a coalition of developing countries rallied around China’s claim that it should be a recipient rather than a donor, to the consternation of the European negotiators. The U.S. will likely be loath to lavish money on a fund that China can draw from. Another outstanding question is whether contributions to the fund will be legal obligations rather than just voluntary donations. Anything with legal teeth would require congressional approval in the U.S., which would not be easy. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the loss-and-damage negotiations.)

If the loss-and-damage fund are skimpy, communities and nations will likely seek restitution for their losses through national and international courts. An early test case began in 2015, when a Peruvian farmer sued the German energy giant RWE. The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, says his home is at risk of being washed away by meltwater from a glacier, and he wants the company to pay 0.47 percent of his adaptation costs, on the basis of a study that attributes that fraction of emissions to the company’s activities. RWE has denied culpability, and the case is ongoing. In an example of targeting nations rather than companies, Indigenous people from four low-lying Australian islands—Boigu, Poruma, Warraber and Masig—submitted a petition to the UN Human Rights Committee arguing that the country had done little to stop the climate change threatening their homes. In September, the committee agreed, ordering Australia to compensate the islanders for their losses.

But legal action might actually be a best-case scenario for the West. Poor, debt-ridden countries struggling with a climate crisis do not make for a stable globe. In 2021, a U.S. Department of Defense report on climate change warned that “the physical and social impacts of climate change transcend political boundaries, increasing the risk that crises cascade beyond any one country or region.” People who lose homes and livelihoods to climate-caused disasters will do what they can to improve their situation. As far back as 1995, the Bangladeshi dignitary Atiq Rahman warned, “if climate change makes our country uninhabitable, we will march with our wet feet into your living rooms.” Hundreds of millions of people may be displaced by 2050.

Mass migrations, resource scarcity, and poverty can lead to global conflicts. No country, no matter how rich, can build a seawall high enough to keep out that kind of chaos. If rich countries cannot be moved to lavishly fund the loss-and-damage bucket by appeals to justice, perhaps they will be moved by what has long been a more reliable motivating force: fear.

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