The sliding doors of a supermarket open into a dilemma: Though one may find comfort in the grocery store’s order and abundance, its high stakes can also provoke anxiety—after all, this is the place where we trade hard-earned money for sustenance. “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip,” Don DeLillo’s narrator Jack Gladney observes in White Noise, commenting on the structure that supermarkets, with their rows of neatly ordered products, impose on his chaotic life. Thirty years later, Halle Butler’s protagonist in the novel Jillian enters a gourmet grocery store on a whim because “there were delights there.” The prices are so out of her budget that she has to give herself a pep talk before buying anything. “I mean, I work all the time,” she mutters. “This is why I work, isn’t it? I’m a hard worker. I can buy this cheese. It’s just cheese, I guess.” But it’s not just cheese.

In the latest of her books to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel laureate in literature, takes the big-box store as her subject. She trains a careful eye on her local Auchan—a combined supermarket and department store—in Cergy, France, a middle-class suburb about 20 miles outside Paris. From November 2012 to October 2013, she recorded each of her visits to the store in a diary. The finished product, Look at the Lights, My Love, published in France in 2014, is an indictment of modern consumerism and the way it robs the individual of their autonomy.

Through observation and analysis that feel nearly anthropological in their detail, Ernaux argues that our shopping habits are determined not by personal choices, but by factors that are frequently outside our control—our financial situation, our location, what products we have access to. Supermarkets were supposed to be great equalizers, democratizing food access, but they have instead become a microcosm of contemporary consumer malaise. Ernaux’s departure from the intensely intimate relationships that are the focus of much of her previous work might feel unorthodox at first. But as her gloomy portrait of the big-box store begins to form, it becomes clear that this book isn’t so different from her others: Her interest lies less in the store itself than in the way it serves as a site for interpersonal interactions.

[Read: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]

Ernaux begins to find her trips, as a recurring action, overwhelming and dehumanizing. The result of living in a society driven by profit is not abundance; it’s people being sorted into classifiable categories by what kinds of products are within their reach, stripping them of their individuality and depriving them of their dignity. “Here, as nowhere else, our way of life and bank account are exposed,” Ernaux writes in a February 7, 2013, entry:

Your eating habits, most private interests, even your family structure. The goods deposited on the conveyor belt reveal whether a person lives alone, or with a partner, with a baby, young children, animals.

Your body and gestures, alertness or ineptitude, are exposed, as well as your status as a foreigner, if asking for a cashier’s help in counting coins, and consideration for others, demonstrated by setting the divider behind your items in deference to the customer behind, or stacking your empty basket on top of others.

Much of Look at the Lights contemplates the etiquette customers observe while grocery shopping. Simple choices—how many items one takes to the self-checkout, whether one follows the rule against reading in the magazine aisle—are reflective of one’s respect, or lack thereof, for spoken and unspoken conventions. Ernaux’s observations are ruthless. Musing over the spectacle of men “lost and defeated before a row of goods,” she recalls a radio program in which two male journalists in their 30s remarked, almost with pleasure, that their mothers did their shopping for them—“having remained, in some way, infants.” Though she’s not without empathy, Ernaux is brutal in her appraisal of other customers—in particular those who show little regard for their fellow shoppers. In one scene, she watches a woman leave the checkout line slowly to find a replacement shopping bag, moving at a pace “that one suspects is deliberate”:

The atmosphere of disapproval is palpable before this person who takes her time with no concern for that of others. Who flouts the implicit rules of consumer civility, of a code of conduct that alternates between rights—such as refusing an item that turns out to be defective, or double-checking one’s receipt—and duties—not jumping the line at the checkout, always letting a pregnant or disabled person go ahead, being polite to the cashier, etc.

Ernaux keenly observes the way these norms are upheld or tested. On December 5, 2012, the author recounts “the perversity of the self-checkout system,” where the blame normally assigned to slow cashiers is instead directed at customers. Instructions must be followed to a T for fear of a robot-voiced reprimand from the machines and the scorn of other shoppers. On March 14, 2013, Ernaux leaves a copy of Le Monde in her cart and gets an earful from the checkout clerk because she declined to wrap the newspaper in plastic upon entering to identify it as purchased outside of the store. “I have just been put in my place for not having considered hers,” Ernaux muses. “Among the seven million working poor in France, many are cashiers.” The solidarity is striking, though perhaps not surprising in light of Ernaux’s support of the French workers protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the nation’s retirement age earlier this year.

Photograph by Brian Ulrich / Robert Koch Gallery

The guiding principle of a store like Auchan is that everyone can get what they want, whenever they want, quickly. In practice, the supermarket is no freer of class hierarchies than the world outside it. For instance, Auchan’s bulk-sweets aisle is riddled with signs prohibiting on-premises consumption. This wards off theft, theoretically, but to Ernaux this action is inherently classist—“a warning meant for a population assumed dangerous, since it does not appear above the scales in the fruit and vegetable area in the ‘normal’ part of the store.”

Normal, of course, is relative. In fact, Auchan has no typical customer, just typical times of day that different people shop. Early-morning patrons tend to be organized-yet-leisurely retirees; mid-afternoon belongs to the middle-aged, or to young people with children. After 5 p.m. is the province of high-school students and mothers with their school-aged children, and from 8 to 10 p.m. Ernaux encounters university students and “women in long dresses and headscarves, always accompanied by a man. Do these couples choose the evening for reasons of convenience, or because at this later, off-peak hour they feel less as if they’re being stared at?”

Everyone has a place in the store, so long as they know their place in the store. Ernaux spotlights the considerations that people—especially those on the margins—make when engaging in the mundane, necessary action of grocery shopping. Those with less money, of course, must be more judicious in their choices. “This is a form of economic labor, uncounted and obsessive, that fully occupies thousands of women and men,” she writes.

Ernaux is greatly concerned with “the humiliation inflicted by commercial goods: they are too expensive, so I’m worth nothing.” But what makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux’s language. This is not to be confused with sensuality—which the author is renowned for—but is rather the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument this slim work makes. Reading it, one can almost hear the crunch of fresh ice hitting the fishmonger’s stall, or imagine the apologetic smile and eye roll of a woman telling Ernaux that “sardines with hot peppers are not for me!”

[Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things]

Experiences such as these are, for Ernaux, the only redeeming quality of the one-stop shop; by describing them, she reanimates a shared humanity that consumerism has flattened out. Contrasting a stray shopping list left in a cart with one’s own, as Ernaux does, might strike some simply as nosiness; but seeing oneself in another’s choices is radical in its quiet way. In one scene near the end, Ernaux cuts up an Auchan rewards card, incensed at the condition that self-checkout users must present it or be subject to random inspections by store workers to make sure they’ve paid for everything. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this might come across as vapid or performative. In Ernaux’s telling, the gesture feels reasonable and justified.

Given the relentless critique that Ernaux sustains for most of the book, the last few pages take a surprising turn, reading as something of an elegy for these same big-box stores. Though places like Auchan emphasize class divisions, they at least have the effect of bringing different kinds of people into one shared space. As the world embraces online shopping, curbside pickup, and apps that ferry out personal shoppers to buy groceries, we’ll lose out, in yet another way, on the sorts of human, serendipitous encounters that Ernaux describes. Meanwhile, inequality, as rampant as ever, will now be hidden behind screens.

Novak Djokovic's political message about Kosovo at the French Open was "not appropriate", says France's sports minister.

France prop Mohamed Haouas is sentenced to one year in jail for domestic abuse.

At a G7 summit, Yasuhiro Nakasone took the lead and helped to heal a growing rift between France and the United States.

“The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States.

The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations. The president has said, repeatedly and in public, that the U.S. will provide Ukraine “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” The president wants the political benefits of heroically assisting the good of Ukraine against the evil of Russia, but his administration’s policy is much more hesitant than its bold declarations would suggest.

I spoke to Ukrainians both in and outside of government during a recent trip to Kyiv with the Renew Democracy Initiative. Those I met were keenly aware that Ukraine relies on U.S. weapons, U.S. financial assistance, and U.S. leadership to pull together international support, and they expressed gratitude for all that the United States is doing. Most know very well that Ukraine would have lost the war without the U.S. rallying support to keep its economy from collapsing, arm its soldiers, and provide essential intelligence to protect its leaders and blunt Russian attacks. Ukrainian government officials are careful to speak only of the United States as a whole, without singling out the Biden administration or delving into U.S. domestic politics.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Biden just destroyed Ukraine’s last hope]

Yet Ukraine’s foreign and defense ministers acknowledged that “the first answer the U.S. gives to any request is no.” That was America’s answer across the past three presidential administrations: no to javelin missiles, no to stinger missiles, no to NATO membership, no to F-16s, no to weapons that can reach Russian territory, no to tanks, no to Patriot air defenses, no to HIMARs, no to ATACMs, and—until this week—again no to F-16s, even if they aren’t U.S. F-16s.  

The Biden administration has made three arguments against Ukrainian requests. The first and most condescending was, to quote the president, that “Ukraine doesn’t need F-16s now.” This came at a time when Russia’s strategy had shifted to long-range missile strikes on civilian populations and infrastructure that air dominance could better resist. Kyiv may now be well protected, but Kharkiv and other major cities continue to be at greater risk.

The Pentagon has further insisted that mastering the desired weapons systems would be prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. That argument weakened when Ukrainians, on a wartime footing, blew through the training curricula in a fraction of the time it took to train U.S. soldiers who had been in regular rotations on other systems. The Ukrainians have successfully sustained battlefield operability of an extensive array of internationally donated weapons systems.

The administration does make one argument against Ukrainian requests that should carry greater weight. Despite the president’s claims of unlimited assistance for as long as it takes, U.S. assistance isn’t endless, and Ukraine is asking for expensive items that are often in short supply. For example, having provided Ukraine with 20 HIMARs, the U.S. has only 410 remaining and 220 M270 MLRS (a tracked variant). That number may seem large, but not when you consider the intensity of fighting and the size of the U.S. forces that a war against China would entail. Nor are the costs inconsequential, even for the United States: An F-16 of the model Kyiv seeks costs about $15 million, and Ukraine wants 120 to protect its airspace. One reason the F-16 is Ukraine’s fighter of choice is that it exists in large supply in allied arsenals, not solely in the U.S. inventory.

The sweeping declaration that Washington will give Ukraine what it needs for as long as it takes is part of a pattern of presidential rhetorical largesse. It’s of a piece with committing U.S. troops to fight for Taiwan without providing the military budget to produce a war-winning military for that fight, or designing a national-security strategy that commits to allied solidarity while producing exclusionary economic policies that allies resent.

The escalation concern that looms largest for the Biden administration in Ukraine, understandably, is Russian nuclear use. Ukrainians remain admirably stalwart about this prospect, suggesting that a nuclear battlefield strike would not serve Russian objectives. To be more concerned about nuclear use than the likely victims of it are—or to push Ukraine toward untenable outcomes in the name of avoiding that risk—is to actually encourage nuclear threats. The United States can strengthen deterrence instead by publicly committing that if we see any sign that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon, we’ll share the intelligence widely and provide Ukraine with weapons to preempt the attack. We can put Russia on notice that if it uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, we will send NATO radiological teams—NATO forces—there to assist Ukraine’s recovery, and we will ensure that any Russian involved in the decision or its execution ends up dead or in the Hague.

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

The true cost of the Biden administration’s focus on escalation may be one of prolonging the war. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has assessed that F-16s are “a decision that could have been made six months ago. Truth is, if they had begun training pilots on F-16s six months ago, then those pilots would be able to get into those airplanes this spring.” Our hesitance telegraphs to Russia that by continuing to assault Ukraine, it can wait us out—a lesson consistent with the course of the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the leader of the free world to be more worried than the leaders of Poland, Denmark, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom is not a great look. Those countries are already considering offering fighters or training to Ukraine—and are at greater risk of Russian retaliation than the United States is.

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Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction, and what it takes to actively participate in a community.

Hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado, and engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Build community with us! … via email. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Gavin Luke (“Nadir”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Dust Follows (“Willet”), Auxjack (“Mellow Soul”).

Click here to listen to additional seasons in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Host Julie Beck: I think what I’ve observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and bustle. And people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They’re sort of on a mission.

Eric Klinenberg: Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Kellie Carter Jackson: You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I don’t think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company; it requires kinship. It requires community. So that you are not isolated in your pain.

Klinenberg: What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

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Beck: I’m Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Rashid: Though I normally am not making a friend at the café, recently there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was, too. We started chittin’ and chattin’, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the café, she finally—slightly awkwardly—asked yesterday, “Hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink?” Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward.

Beck: I’m so impressed! Of course, people do connect at cafés like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day. But I think the connection that’s happening in those spaces, like, that’s not the purpose of the space; that’s a byproduct. Perhaps a welcome byproduct, but like the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

Rashid: It’s a business.

Beck: They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something. And I get why they’re doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don’t want people taking up tables all day when they could get a fresh paying customer in there.

That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?

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Beck: Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who is really into all of these questions that we’ve been talking about. He’s a professor of sociology at New York University, and he’s an expert on city infrastructure and urban life.

He wrote this book called Palaces for the People in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

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Klinenberg: If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance, There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. They can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.

When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you’re older, if you’re more frail, if you’re very young, you might spend more time sitting on the stoop in front of your home. You might have a bench that you spend time on, that’s on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day.

And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in those public places on a regular basis. And when it’s dangerous outside, someone might notice that you’re not there. And they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They’re used to seeing each other in the public realm.

I grew up in Chicago. And in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, there was a heat wave that hit my hometown and lasted just a couple of days. But the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there’s a heat wave: It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go. And the power grid got overwhelmed. And very soon the, you know, electricity went out for thousands of homes.

At the end of this week, in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre-pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn’t gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened, and the first thing I did was I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the historically segregated Black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

Beck: Right. Chicago’s extremely segregated.

Klinenberg: And when there’s a disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen—which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

Beck: So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes?

Klinenberg: Matching neighborhoods. Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street—same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal. But they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That’s the kind of puzzle that you live for when you’re a social scientist.

Klinenberg: And so, what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost an enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well-maintained.

And across the street in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn’t have abandoned homes. They didn’t have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, places that anchored public life.

In those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door, and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood across the street, the depleted neighborhood—they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

Beck: So you said when we talk about regular infrastructure, we’re talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

Klinenberg: Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is a playground. All kinds of socializing happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to.

Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench or maybe to a picnic and then a playdate, and then two families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different.

We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, “Today I give you the playground and the library,” and it’s our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. These are human inventions.

We built giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public spaces. There’s no history of this idea that is complete if it doesn’t pay attention to how racial segregation works and how racial violence works and how gender excluded some people from some public realms. All of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we’ve kind of come to take all these places for granted.

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Beck: What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

Klinenberg: Well, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don’t get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure—they’re a necessary condition for having some sense that we’re in it together, and we have some kind of common purpose. But they’re by no means sufficient. And so that has to do with programming; that has to do with design; that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling, and others really don’t.

Beck: Yeah. I’m curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I feel a bit of a divide, where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is bustling—people are engaging in commerce, or they’re just walking from here to there, and there are no opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don’t know that we would. Does that make sense?

Klinenberg: Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense, because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.

And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around: the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

Beck: Oh, yeah, the five-hour dinners in France. Like, you can’t find that waiter to get your check. You know?

Klinenberg: (Laughing.)

Beck: He’s gone.

Klinenberg: Because the point is not to pay the check. The point is to be there. And it’s hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

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​​Rashid: It’s interesting that you see the no Wi-Fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the café or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship-building.

Beck: Oh. I guess I’m just more cynical than you. But I think it’s because they need to make money. I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi-regular puzzle swap that they do. Oh, and my partner and I, we’re very cool.

We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don’t feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places, or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don’t want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know.

Rashid: Yeah. And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And it’s interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re closer.

Beck: Yeah, just because you go to the café doesn’t mean you’re going to look up from your phone.

—

Beck: Do you think that to some degree we’ve replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

Klinenberg: I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It’s a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end.

Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic, because we were all in our homes cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time, right? But we were physically isolated, and we were miserable. So that’s life where social media is social infrastructure.

Beck: I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

Klinenberg: I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the U.S. It’s more common in Japan. It’s more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth, and Germany is higher than the United States.

And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state, and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with.

Beck: Do you think, then, that solo livers rely on social infrastructure more?

Klinenberg: They do. They’re more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafés and to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Leigh, and we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic.

We talked to them about their experiences. And it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation, and they didn’t complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely; they felt physically isolated.

And they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood who just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt [an] acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

__

Klinenberg: One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There’s neighborhood libraries. The building is there. And the buildings are generally not updated there. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone new books.

Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there’s all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically, because we’ve underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net.

Klinenberg: If you wake up in the morning in an American city and you don’t have a home, you’re told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you’re suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They’ll send you to a library.

If you need to use a bathroom, you’ll go to a library. If you don’t have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you’re old and you’re alone, you might go to the library. We’ve used the library to try to solve all of these problems that deserve actual treatment.  

And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it’s basically a homeless shelter. What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

Beck: It’s really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community-building, because I think on some level I’ve always felt like if I don’t have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it’s my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there’s not much we can do besides, like, pestering aldermen.

Klinenberg: I think it’s on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So, one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood.

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn’t already have it. It’s like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public-park system, the public schools, like: We built all these things.

The reason so many of us feel like it’s so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we’re freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It’s at the $22 cocktail bar. It’s at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice-cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure.

And I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like and how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st-century version of the 20th-century library. What are the kinds of places we’d like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

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Beck: Another important piece—back to actually finding community in these spaces—is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It’s hard if I’m going to the puzzle swap, and no one’s talking to each other. I mean, I’m guilty of going in and grabbing my puzzles and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

And it’s hard to feel like you’re just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It’s also: Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation? Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

Rashid: Right. Like, the friend I made at the café is kind of a rare occurrence, because normally people in the café are working, reading, or, as you’ve said before, with people they already know.

Beck: And the social norms of a café are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or a local sports team or a church. In a café, everyone kind of has different agendas, like Becca’s out there making a friend. But, like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one-on-one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like generally speaking, there’s a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values, and we’re here to connect.

Jackson: My church has been everything to me, because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight of my life, although like the church, my church has been there for me.

Beck: Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College, and we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she’s found that places like the church and her kids’ school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support, because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming.

—

Beck: Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you’ve moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

Jackson: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind. And, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a mommy-and-me group, and those became fast friendships.

When my husband was going through extensive training, he was in Memphis. He was out of town for like three months. And I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought—I hate cooking! [Laughter.] And so my church small group was like, “Hey, how can we take off some of the burdens since Nathaniel’s gone? What can we do?” And so, just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you’re really taxed is huge.

Beck: Yeah. I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

Jackson: I think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor regardless of my neighbors’ religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me hospitality. We always had people over at our house all the time. We have a big family; I’m one of seven. So it’s like, what’s one more? What’s six more? What’s 10 more?

(Laughter.)

Beck: Just bring ’em on in.

Jackson: Bring them on in. That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like, when I think of neighbors, I think that extends even into my kids’ school. So my six-year-old had a real hard time because not only had my mother-in-law passed away, but her great-grandmother had died as well. So we had like two big losses—a mother and a grandmother—in about a three-month period.

Jojo is my middle child’s name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like, she cried for 30 minutes, and I couldn’t calm her down. I sent her teacher an email, and I said, “Hey, Jojo’s having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmothers. She might keep it in her backpack; she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what’s going on.”

Beck: Yeah.

Jackson: And her teacher did something—gosh, sorry I’m getting emotional …

Beck: Aw.

Jackson: Her teacher saw her with the picture … and she said, “Jojo, do you want to share that with the classroom?” And so she got up in front of the classroom, and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were. And the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that—it just meant, like, I don’t know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves my kid. And I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. I am always overwhelmed by just the goodness of neighbors, and people’s capacity to provide comfort during hard times.

Beck: I mean, I think there’s so much go-it-alone-ness, um, in our culture a lot of the time. And like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but like, you can do it, and—

Jackson: Can, but should you?

Beck: Yeah. But when you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very clear that you can’t.

Jackson: You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I mean,If I hear one more person say “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I will want to punch them. But I think that we have these clichés that are so empty. You know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. You know, most people just want to be heard.

You know, I think in the Black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship. This idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other’s humanity, that we show up for each other. There is something about that familiarity of Blackness that connects people, that is both spiritual and cultural. And so, if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

Beck: I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

Jackson: I think it’s tough.

Beck: It is tough.

Jackson: I think it’s not impossible. I mean, there is something about a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church, that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier. But if you don’t have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I’ve had to let people know who are outside of my faith: You can depend on me; you can trust me. I’m not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone, of all backgrounds.

Because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that.

I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away, and I remember reaching out to her, sending her food or a gift card—like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here’s some literature that helped me, because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think. Because she said, you know, I grew up in a community of atheists. She said, we just don’t have a practice or tradition. That the idea of bringing food or, you know, sort of like ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition.

So regardless of people’s faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight, so you don’t have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why when I meet new people, “Oh, man! Okay, give me more capacity!”

__

Rashid: So, Julie, where do you go to build community, or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?  

Beck: I don’t feel like just sitting out on my front porch, if I had one, or going to a café or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me.

I feel like talking with both Eric and Kellie kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space.

The sort of post-college secular world particularly doesn’t feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. If you just have an impeccably designed space where people don’t want to connect, then, like, I guess what you have is the Apple store. And if people really want to connect, and they don’t have anywhere to go to do that, then they’re going to struggle as well.

And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that’s built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit—and find a way to make it for yourself.

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This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Managing Editor Andrea Valdez. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak.

Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.

From the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that Woodrow Wilson was the one public figure whom Freud felt compelled to put on the couch. But that’s because the current prevailing image of the early-20th-century president—an enforcer of white supremacy, an enemy of civil liberties, a man preserved in sepia photographs as an unsmiling prig wearing a pair of pince-nez—is so remote from the near-messianic character that he cut in his day.

When Wilson arrived in France at the end of 1918, one month after the armistice that ended the Great War, he was greeted by adoring crowds hanging out of windows, crowding sidewalks, and chanting his name. “An immense cry of love,” read the six-column headline in Le Petit Parisien. That tableau followed him to every European city he visited. What he represented was, in fact, redemption: the promise of eternal peace and the dawn of a new world order.

Of all the politicians of his day, Wilson most clearly envisioned the better world that could emerge from war, built on values of self-determination and democracy. He not only had the best plan for realizing his high ideals, but he also possessed an acute understanding of what might go wrong if the Allies allowed their sense of grievance to drive them to impose harsh terms on the vanquished. Wilson’s failure to make good on these bloated expectations was the source of Freud’s fascination and fury, as it was for a generation of intellectuals.

[Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson]

Some of the animosity that Freud and other critics aimed at Wilson was unfair: After dinging him for negotiating a treaty they regarded as dangerously misguided, they turned around and chided him for his inability to shepherd it through the U.S Senate, an institution he had carefully studied during his long, celebrated career as a professor. That failure was further evidence, they argued, of Wilson’s abominable statesmanship. He refused to make concessions to his critics, even when that was clearly his only viable choice. And in the end, unable to achieve the purest form of his plans, he bizarrely instructed the Senate to reject a modified version of the treaty altogether. More than any of his enemies, he was responsible for shattering his own dreams. The Senate’s failure to ratify the treaty was one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of the presidency.

Wilson’s inexplicable choices, his extreme stubbornness, demanded a psychological explanation, perhaps one that scrutinized childhood traumas. This was Freud’s business, and he couldn’t resist. Eleven years after the Senate rejected Wilson’s treaty, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst began writing a long study of Wilson’s mind, in collaboration with the American diplomat William C. Bullitt, who had been one of Wilson’s aides. At Freud’s urging, Bullitt went back and interviewed a slew of Wilson’s closest friends and advisers so that the pair could devise their own intimate theory of Wilson’s failures. What emerged was a scathing indictment of Wilson, whom they depicted as neurotic and self-sabotaging, in what was a polemic masquerading as dispassionate biography.

Their book, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, has a life and afterlife nearly as complicated and fascinating as its subject. The manuscript sat unpublished for nearly 35 years. When it finally appeared—in 1966, long after Freud’s death in 1939—the doctor’s daughter Anna, a fanatical guardian of her father’s reputation, worked to discredit the final product. (She even managed to tweak a draft of a review panning the work that ran in The New York Times—and succeeded in persuading the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to nix a preface to the book written by one of Freud’s disciples.) The controversy over the book was such that The New York Review of Books covered it with vituperative essays from mid-century powerhouse intellectuals such as Erik Erikson and Richard Hofstadter. Many of the critics doubted that Freud played a meaningful role in the production of the manuscript, because some of its interpretations deviated from Freudian orthodoxies, and the prose was clunkier and more repetitive than in his masterworks. The doubts stoked in those reviews have hovered over the book ever since.

Patrick Weil, a researcher at both Yale Law School and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has written a lively book about the book, The Madman in the White House—a work of archival digging that digressively caroms across subjects, from Paris in 1919 to interwar Vienna to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Washington. Even if his attempt to defend the lasting value of Freud’s book isn’t entirely convincing, he has written a vivid shaggy-dog story about a curio that illuminates the possibilities (and perils) of studying the psychological soundness of presidents—a discipline as relevant as ever.

What makes Weil’s book most compelling is that he has a charming, somewhat caddish central character in Freud’s co-writer, William C. Bullitt: a swashbuckling diplomat, a successful novelist, and a bullheaded political operator who habitually provoked controversy.

As a 20-something, Bullitt traveled to Paris as part of Wilson’s entourage, sitting by the president’s side as he presided over negotiations that would end the war. Wilson’s alter ego and closest adviser, Colonel Edward House, stocked the American delegation in France with bright young Ivy Leaguers, but Bullitt received the most exciting assignment of the lot. In early 1919, House furtively dispatched him to Moscow to explore a deal with Vladimir Lenin that would establish American diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks. That trip ruptured Bullitt’s relationship with Wilson. Word of his mission to Russia leaked and was blasted in the Daily Mail, which accused Bullitt of working on behalf of Jewish interests seeking to bolster the Communists. The British publicly distanced themselves from his efforts. When Bullitt returned with the outlines of agreement, Wilson kept canceling their appointments. (Wilson claimed he had a headache.) The whole effort awkwardly withered.

Cut off from his access to Wilson, Bullitt resigned from the administration—and wrote a letter listing the many reasons that he considered the president’s peace negotiations a disaster. Anticipating what would be the main lines of criticism from John Maynard Keynes and Walter Lippmann, Bullitt accused Wilson of abandoning his high ideals. He had allowed the other victorious Allied nations to impose unnecessarily harsh terms on the vanquished. The emerging peace settlement transgressed the slogan that Wilson had promised would guide their thinking: “Peace without victory.”  

The resignation of a 28-year-old aide would not have normally grabbed global headlines. But Bullitt, with his flair for spectacle, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and bluntly accused Wilson of lying about what took place at Versailles, dramatically wielding Wilson’s own typewritten notes as evidence. It was a public turn that profoundly wounded the treaty’s prospects of being ratified in the Senate. And in the days that followed Bullitt’s testimony, Wilson complained of more “blinding headaches, breathing difficulties, and exhaustion.” His physical deterioration progressed: drooling and the drooping of the left side of his face, followed by the paralysis of half his body. His stroke was so severe that the aides feared his imminent death and considered how they might replace him. Physically, politically, and perhaps cognitively, Wilson no longer had the capacity to fight for his treaty. He never recovered.

Bullitt’s anger toward Wilson was itself worthy of psychoanalysis—and, in fact, Bullitt found himself in Vienna in 1926, knocking on Freud’s door and asking if he would take him on as a patient. Bullitt’s marriage was crumbling, and he had lost his sense of professional purpose. Apparently, Freud recognized his name and agreed to admit Bullitt to what the diplomat called the “sacred couch.”

The relationship wasn’t a straightforward doctor-patient one, and their long conversations would invariably circle back to their shared animus toward Wilson and their mutual disappointment in his ineffectual leadership. The former president was the unevictable tenant squatting in Bullitt’s mind, and he used his sessions to hash out the contents of a play that he was writing about Wilson. Bullitt dedicated the script, which never made it to the stage, to “my friend Sigmund Freud.”

Four years into their relationship, Bullitt described a book he wanted to write about the leaders who populated the Paris Peace Conference and their personalities. He asked if Freud might want to write the chapter on Wilson. Despite his principled reservations about analyzing public figures, Freud loved the idea. Bullitt sensed an opportunity and suggested that Freud’s chapter become the whole of the book. Freud agreed, on the condition that Bullitt perform the donkey work of compiling the raw material that would allow them to sketch their shared analysis.  

As they began researching and writing the book, Freud told him, “I hope one result of the publication of this work will be your reintroduction to politics.” But it was precisely Bullitt’s reintroduction to politics that scuttled the publication of their work. Just as they finished their collaboration in 1932, Bullitt told Freud that he worried that the book might undermine his chances for a job in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s incoming administration. Publishing a scathing portrait of the previous Democratic president, a president whom FDR revered, might be received as evidence that Bullitt was a loose cannon. His caution was rewarded. Roosevelt named Bullitt the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union.

From his perch in Moscow, Bullitt mentored George Kennan, his deputy, and befriended the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1935, he hosted perhaps the most famous party in American diplomatic history, a spring festival that included an aviary in the embassy’s great hall, white roosters in glass cages, a menagerie that included goats, a banquet table covered in a lawn of emerald-green grass, and a baby bear that sipped champagne. (The bear vomited on a Soviet general.) Bulgakov, who attended, used the party as inspiration for a memorable set piece in The Master and Margarita.

In 1936, after three years of aggravating back-and-forth with Stalin—Bullitt described him as “a wiry Gipsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience”—Roosevelt rescued Bullitt from Moscow and relocated him to Paris, where he remained ambassador until the Nazi invasion. Bullitt styled himself as Roosevelt’s roving emissary in Europe—and made it his mission to serve as Freud’s protector once the continent became a dangerous place for a famous Jewish doctor. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Bullitt pushed German diplomats to let Freud leave—and he dispatched the American chargé d’affaires in Vienna to rescue their manuscript before the Nazis had a chance to rifle through Freud’s study. When the Freud family finally departed on the Orient Express, the State Department supplied a bodyguard to watch over them.

Despite his diplomatic skills, Bullitt frequently said the undiplomatic thing. He began to regard FDR as hopelessly soft on communism and dangerously duped by Stalin. Estranged from the administration, he became a brash freelancer. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in Charles DeGaulle’s Free France army. (He was run over by a vehicle during fighting in Alsace and spent two months in the hospital.) And in the aftermath of the conflict, his commitment to the anti-communist cause took him to Taiwan, where he advised Chiang Kai-shek. Back at home, he adopted Richard Nixon as his foreign-policy protégé.

Only at the very end of his life did Bullitt’s thoughts return to releasing the Wilson book into the world. Weil suggests that Bullitt spent decades dithering over publishing it, because he harbored misgivings about some of its sensational conclusions.

Weil’s speculation is grounded in his sleuthing. He tracked down the long-lost versions of the book, following the scent to a box filled with drafts in an archive at Yale. What he discovered settles some of the old debates about Freud’s authorship. Weil found the good doctor’s signature on each chapter of the manuscript, evidence that he considered himself the book’s intellectual co-owner.

[Read: How Sigmund Freud wanted to die]

But after Freud’s death, Bullitt kept on editing. As he prepared the text for publication, he cut some of its most incendiary claims. He culled passages about Wilson’s teenage masturbatory habits and excised sections implying that Wilson was a latent homosexual. (One of Wilson’s aides would share his bed on the president’s speaking tours, but he also testified that there was never any hint of sex.) In effect, Bullitt was trying to save the book from the embarrassing excesses of Freudianism.

Still, the work remained an unabashed expression of Freudian theory, placing Wilson at the center of an Oedipal drama. The president appears in its pages as a hopeless neurotic trying to best the father he revered and resented. The book argues that Wilson cast his father as God—and himself as Christ, a long-suffering servant. This accounts for Wilson’s tendency to accuse his closest confidants of betrayal, and for his sanctimony.   

Weil struggles to make a compelling case for the interpretative value of Freud and Bullitt’s book. But in describing the manuscript, he also damns it by calling attention to its tenuous claims. For example: Wilson’s overbearing father was a Presbyterian minister—and as a teenager, Wilson idolized British prime ministers, especially William Gladstone, whose speeches he memorized; as an academic, Wilson argued that American presidents should behave more like their counterparts in the U.K. It was a theory he tried to turn into practice: Once he became head of state, he initially styled himself as a parliamentary leader. Freud and Bullitt trumpet this fascination with becoming prime minister as evidence of his desire to be a more important minister than his father, one-upmanship in his Oedipal struggle.

To the extent that Weil has a larger point to make, it’s that the character of political leaders matters. It’s hard to disagree with that. Certainly, recent American history provides a disturbing confirmation of the importance of presidential temperament. But, as Freud and Bullitt’s book illustrates, it can also be a distorting obsession. The focus on presidential character tends to overstate its importance and to encourage what’s been called Green Lanternism, the idea, coined by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan, that a president could accomplish more if only they tried harder.

The psychological approach can flatten the career of a politician. If Wilson had a self-defeating Christ complex, how, then, is it possible to explain the many domestic accomplishments of his first term? More bizarrely, Freud and Bullitt downplay Wilson’s stroke, which clearly incapacitated him at a crucial moment in his presidency and exacerbated his stubbornness. His mental and physical deterioration remained dangerously out of public view, and the constitutional system faltered in its attempts to compensate for his incapacity and limit the damage he inflicted in his deteriorated state—an object lesson in how not to deal with an impaired president.

Even though Weil hints at his own quibbles with the thesis of the Freud-Bullitt collaboration, he doesn’t voice those objections very loudly, because they would diminish his justification for writing this book. But Freud should have never violated his own rule.

Countries including France and Germany have started to chip away at parts of the EU’s so-called Green Deal that have the potential to negatively impact ...

Two months before invading Ukraine, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbor’s border and sent NATO a bill of demands. Moscow’s list—structured as a treaty—required that the alliance close itself off to new members. It declared that NATO states “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States” in Eastern Europe. It insisted that NATO remove all its forces from the 14 countries that joined after the Soviet Union collapsed. And it asserted that the alliance “shall not deploy land-based” missiles in areas “allowing them to reach the territory” of Russia.

Moscow suggested that the treaty was a pathway for lowering tensions with the West. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine months earlier. In reality, the treaty was just a diplomatic pretext for the war: a laundry list of things that Putin hated about NATO, wanted changed, and would kill Ukrainians to protest.

But if Putin thought that invading Russia’s neighbor would get the West to accede to his demands, he was wildly mistaken. Rather than pulling troops from its east, NATO responded to Russia’s aggression by deploying more soldiers in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The alliance did not close its doors; instead, it expanded, adding Finland this April, with Sweden possibly close behind. Ukraine is not part of NATO, but the invasion has pushed the United States and Europe to send remarkable amounts of military assistance to Kyiv, including rockets, tanks, and Soviet-era fighter jets. Most recently, Washington signaled that it will let Europe provide Ukraine with U.S.-made F-16s. The West has effectively flouted all of the draft treaty’s demands.

And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.

Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine

To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”

But to Ukrainians, these concerns are detached from reality. Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.

“People are quite confused,” the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me when I asked what Ukrainians thought about Washington’s reticence. “They just don’t understand.”

They are also tremendously frustrated, because Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.

The United States Army Tactical Missile System is a formidable weapon. Developed in the late Cold War and first used in Operation Desert Storm, ATACMS are launched straight out of the back of vehicles that Washington has already given to Kyiv. (Washington, afraid of escalation, modified the vehicles it sent so that Ukraine couldn’t use them to fire long-range missiles.) Once airborne, the missiles can reach more than three times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to intercept. They can travel up to 186 miles.

These specifications give ATACMS—pronounced “attack-ems”—certain advantages over Britain’s missiles. The latter weapons, although very powerful in their own right, do not move as fast or go quite the same distance as ATACMS. They must be fired out of fighter jets, and Ukraine’s fleet is overtaxed. The radars on Ukrainian jets are also not as powerful as the ones on many Western aircraft, making it tricky for the crew to accurately target each missile. Britain’s provision will become more useful if Kyiv receives F-16s, but Ukrainians won’t be able to fly the U.S. jets for at least several months. And by then, Kyiv may not have many of the missiles left.

“There is no analogue for ATACMS,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There is no alternative.”

Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.

For Ukrainians, taking Crimea may be essential to ending the war and protecting their country, especially given that the peninsula is now a giant staging ground for Russia’s forces. But for Washington, a campaign to take Crimea would be deeply unsettling. Putin views Crimea as perhaps his most prized asset. After Russia seized it in 2014, his approval ratings soared to record highs. The Biden administration has publicly said that Ukraine has the right to liberate all of its occupied territory, Crimea included, yet senior U.S. officials have repeatedly insinuated that going after the peninsula would be too dangerous. In February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told experts that an operation for Crimea would be a “red line” for the Kremlin.

In theory, the United States could provide ATACMS on the condition that Ukraine not use them to hit the peninsula. But Kyiv is unlikely to accept such an arrangement. “That would set a massive precedent of treating Crimea as a special case, and that’s exactly what the Russians want,” Zagorodnyuk told me. Ukraine could even be tempted to use the missiles to strike Russia proper. According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky privately proposed attacking Russian villages in order to gain leverage over the Kremlin. And on Monday, pro-Ukrainian militias launched an assault across Russia’s border. They appear to have used U.S.-made vehicles in their incursion.

Publicly, Kyiv has assured Washington that it will not hit Russia with U.S. rockets. But no matter the conditions, guaranteeing that the missiles would not cross one of Moscow’s trip wires is impossible.

“The risk is that you think you’re okay and then you hit that red line and then things escalate really fast out of control,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In the worst-case scenario, that spiral could lead to Russia using nuclear weapons. But Kavanagh pointed out that Moscow could escalate in many ways without going nuclear. It could, for instance, carpet-bomb Ukrainian cities. It could also launch cyberattacks on NATO states.

From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive

The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”

The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO was attacking the homeland.

Almost no one knows exactly how many soldiers Ukraine has lost fighting against Russia. But the number is large. According to the classified documents leaked on Discord last month, the U.S. government estimates that Ukraine has suffered somewhere from 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The figure is lower than Russia’s estimated 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, but Ukraine’s population is about a third the size of its adversary’s. If the war turns into a pure battle of attrition, Kyiv will struggle to hold out.

It’s not surprising, then, that Ukrainians have little patience for Washington’s escalation concerns.

“Not providing better weapons would basically throw Ukraine under the bus in slow motion,” said Beliakova. She described the frustration of sitting through meetings where Western policy makers theorized about what a long war would look like, and how they can help sustain Kyiv. “They go, ‘Oh, well the West can easily supplement this, supplement that, provide this, provide that,’” Beliakova said. “I’m like, ‘Ukraine will run out of people!’” The country, she told me, needs more long-range weapons if it is going to overcome Russia’s enormous demographic advantage.

Some analysts went even further, wondering if Washington’s reluctance was designed to stop Ukraine from winning. “If you’ve noticed, the [Department of Defense], the White House, they never talk about victory,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “They’re still talking about an unknown ending to this story. And so the political goal of the Western coalition is unclear.”

Giving long-range missiles to Kyiv, he said, would help eliminate the ambiguity. Doing so would be a boost to Ukrainian morale—one that might be needed if the forthcoming counteroffensive does not succeed. Providing ATACMS would also signal to the rest of the Western alliance that the United States supports going to the max to help Kyiv, possibly easing hesitations in European capitals about supplying other Ukrainian needs.

Ukrainians do not think that Russia would escalate if the United States sent long-range missiles. “I don’t believe the escalation story,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There have been tons of other weapons supplied for tens of billions of dollars. ATACMS is not going to make a big difference.” Even if it did prompt Russian anger, Ukrainians are unsure as to why NATO should care. Moscow has escalated in the past: it responded to Kyiv’s astonishingly successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv by mobilizing 300,000 new troops, and it began indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian cities after an explosion damaged the Crimean-Russian bridge. But these steps hurt Ukrainians, not NATO members. Unless Russia uses a nuclear weapon, breaking a nearly 78-year taboo and endangering the entire planet, the West is unlikely to directly enter the conflict because of Russia’s atrocities. And so long as they believe they can win, Ukrainians appear prepared to endure a whole lot.

The country’s hawks have grown pessimistic about getting the missiles. Yes, they said, Washington and its allies have changed their mind in the past. But with tanks and F-16s, Western claims were as much about technical concerns as they were about the security risks. These weapons, policy makers argued, would take too much time and energy for Ukrainians to receive and learn how to use. There are technical risks with ATACMS too: Many American experts worry about depleting the United States’ limited supply, or that Russia could capture a missile, copy its design, and send China a mock-up.

Still, such hurdles can be overcome. Ukraine’s battlefield performance, and its success in Western training programs, helped convince NATO states that the country could handle more sophisticated weapons. If Ukrainians use Britain’s long-range missiles successfully, and in ways the U.S. approves of, Kyiv could convince Washington that it should get ATACMS as well.

But not if Washington is too afraid of how Russia will respond.

“With ATACMS, I don’t see these coming,” Zagorodnyuk said. Then he paused. “Yet.”

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