The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.

The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.

Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.

However, the worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive. And even people who highly value diversity and inclusion should feel queasy about the DEI gold rush that began in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations, as if billions in outlays, mostly among relatively privileged corporate workers, was an apt and equitable response. A radical course correction is warranted––but first, let’s reflect on how we got here.

On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[Conor Friedersdorf: “They learn to parrot what they know they’re supposed to say” ]

Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.  

In what, exactly?

It is often hard to say. What has one been trained to do after hearing Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author and social-justice educator, lecture on what she calls “white fragility,” or after pondering a slide deck with cartoons meant to illustrate the difference between equality and equity as critical theorists understand it?

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty / Interaction Institute for Social Change

Or after absorbing the racial-equity consultant Tema Okun’s widely circulated claims that attributes including “sense of urgency” and beliefs including “individualism” are traits of “white supremacy culture”? (Okun made these claims in a 1999 article that even she regards as widely misused. She once told an interviewer about the article, “It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me.” She has launched a website that explains her views in far more detail and with more nuance.)

Consider a specific PR pitch from a DEI consultant in 2021, chosen for how typical it is. It leads by invoking Floyd’s death as the impetus to “take bolder actions.” It promises expertise in “best practices” to corporate leaders. Then it pivots to naming a specific training on offer, “Microaggressions in the Workplace,” which, along with other offerings, will help “create a culture where employees feel valued and are encouraged to be their true selves, celebrating each individual’s uniqueness.” The pitch claims that this training “enables talent acquisition, retention, and career advancement.” Is it not inappropriate to use an unemployed Black man’s murder by police to justify expenditures on reducing unintentional micro-slights at work so the bosses can retain more talent?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?]

Of course, setting aside unseemly invocations of Floyd’s name, an initiative needn’t be a coherent response to his death to be defensible or worthwhile. All companies should invest in being equal-opportunity employers, including affirmative steps to ensure, for example, that managers haven’t unwittingly introduced unjust pay disparities or culturally biased dress codes. Beyond that, if DEI consultants made life better for marginalized groups or people of color or any other identifiable cohort within a given corporation or organization, or boosted corporate profits so that their fees paid for themselves, the industry could be justified on different terms.

But most DEI consulting fails those tests.

Harvard Business Review published an article in 2012 called “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” which drew heavily on research published in 2007 by  the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly. “A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace,’” the article reported. “Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing.” In 2018, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”

Portending the 2020 explosion of DEI, they continued, “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors.”

And no wonder that DEI consultants struggle to be effective: In a 2021 article in the Annual Review of Psychology, a team of scholars concluded that the underlying research on how to intervene to reduce prejudice is itself flawed and underwhelming while regularly oversold.

A paper published in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology concluded, “In examining hundreds of articles on the topic, we discovered that the literature is amorphous and complex and does not allow us to reach decisive conclusions regarding best practices in diversity training.” The authors continued, “We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.”

Those outside the industry are hardly alone in levying harsh critiques. Many industry insiders are scathing as well. Last year in Harvard Business Review, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker, posited that the DEI industrial complex has a “big, poorly kept secret”: “The actual efficacy” of most trainings and interventions is “lower than many practitioners make it out to be.” In Zheng’s telling, the industry’s problems flow in large part from “the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.”

Zheng was even more blunt in comments to New York in 2021:

When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.

And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.

What if instead of burning the money, we simply redirected it to the poor?

Yes, I understand that it isn’t as if that money would have gone to the neediest among us but for the DEI initiatives of the past few years. Still, I am being serious when I propose that alternative. (I should note that The Atlantic, like many media companies, holds DEI trainings for new hires. These trainings include discussions of Okun’s critique of “sense of urgency” and an updated version of the equity/equality cartoon.)

[Conor Friedersdorf: Professors need the power to fire diversity bureaucrats]

The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.

In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.  

It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.

But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

“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.

There might be some Americans who, a year-plus into the Ukraine war, might be growing numb to it. Some of those Americans might include me, the new host of Radio Atlantic. In my first episode, I confess this to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, who have just returned from a trip to Ukraine. We talk about their interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, why continued American support is necessary, and why my flagging attention doesn’t matter.

Applebaum, who has covered the war from start, clarifies the confusing but potentially critical recent developments. Anti-Putin forces conducted a raid inside Russia. And after months of a bloody battle, Bakhmut, Ukraine, is for the moment under Russian control, while Ukrainian forces push at the flanks of the city. We analyze whether this is the start of the much-discussed spring offensive, and where the war might be headed.

The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. My colleagues, Atlantic staff, writer Anne Applebaum and editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg just got back from Ukraine. They returned with a sense that something big was going to happen, and now it seems to be starting. This week, it looks like Russia has taken Bakhmut, a city where the fighting has been vicious and sustained, although the Ukrainians haven't surrendered yet. At the same time, there’s been a raid inside Russia by anti-Putin forces. Now, I have to admit: I’ve become a little numb to this war. I’m just not following it as closely as I used to. So, I got Anne in the studio to bring this moment into focus.

Rosin: All right, I think maybe let’s start with the attacks behind the Russian border. What do we know about what happened?

Anne Applebaum: We know that a small group of people describing themselves as “Free Russian” forces crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia near a city called Belgorod and occupied several villages. They seemed to have frightened people enough to cause a major evacuation.

They stayed for some period of time, so it wasn’t just that they crossed over for an hour and came back. And they described themselves as wanting to use this as a way to provoke Putin or unseat Putin.

Rosin: It’s really hard for me to tell how big a deal this is in the context of the war, because partly you’re describing it as almost like a political stunt.

Applebaum: It’s a political move. My guess—and I’m just guessing; I can’t prove it—is that part of the point is to show that Putin is weaker than people think he is. It’s also clearly designed to show ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they think they are, and that the war isn’t going as well as the Kremlin says it is going. Maybe it also has greater military significance, but that we can’t know right now.

Rosin: It feels like a piece with the generally unconventional nature of tactics that the Ukrainians have been trying.

Applebaum: It’s part of a series of events and random explosions and actions that are designed to unnerve the Russians, unsettle Putin, unsettle the Russian elite, and convince ordinary Russians eventually that the war isn’t worth it, that they aren’t safe, and that the war is coming toward them.

Rosin: Got it. So the point is not necessarily “We are invading Russia.” The point is “This war is not worth your time.”

Applebaum: Yes.

Rosin: Like, it’s a psychological move.

Applebaum: Yes,remember, the Ukrainians do not have to occupy Moscow. They do not have to occupy any Russian territory. They don’t have to conquer anything.

All they have to do in order to win is get the Russians to go home.

Rosin: So this was happening at the same time that Bakhmut seems to be falling under Russian control.

Applebaum: But the Ukrainians haven’t surrendered Bakhmut. So it’s not the end of that piece of the conflict.

Rosin: These two things happened this week. Is this the beginning of what they’ve been talking about—the spring offensive?

Applebaum: It’s not gonna be like, there’s a moment when, you know, someone puts up a big banner and says, right, “Spring offensive has now begun.”

It just isn’t gonna look like that. Somebody quite senior in the U.S. military said to me a few days ago that what you’re likely to see over the next few weeks is lots of small things.

Rosin: This could be like a successful, isolated incident, or it could be the beginning—

Applebaum: —Or it could be the beginning of a different phase of the war. Yes.

So that's an update on where we are in this war. Now, I want to bring you a conversation I had with Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum when they were fresh from visiting Ukraine because they had a real point of view on how we should think about this war..and I didn't. And it really helped me see what they see.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I wanted to see if Ukraine could win without the more concentrated help of the United States. That answer is abundantly clear. The United States in this conflict is the indispensable nation. Ukraine can’t lose because of their own moxie and spirit and fighting ingenuity, and the help that they’ve been getting from NATO and the United States so far. But Ukraine can’t win without a much more concerted U.S. and NATO effort to provide the Ukrainians with weapons on the highest level of complexity and effectiveness and scale.

Rosin: Okay. So your question is: How necessary is American help?

Goldberg: Yeah. And the cloud hovering over all of this is the possibility that Donald Trump could become president once again. We know he will take the United States from the Ukrainian side over to the Russian side. So I want to understand what the Biden administration has to do in the next year and a half in order to guarantee a Ukrainian victory, because I’m extremely worried about what happens if Donald Trump becomes president again. And, by the way, I’m not saying that I believe that Donald Trump is going to win right now. But Donald Trump has a very good chance of being the Republican Party nominee. And anyone who says that Donald Trump can’t win the presidency obviously doesn’t remember what happened in November 2016.

Rosin: Okay. The clock is ticking. We have to figure this out now. And this might actually be a critical year. You know what question just popped into my head?

Goldberg: No.

Rosin: Why do you care?

Goldberg: Me?

Rosin: Yeah. Like I’m asking that sincerely. Like, you’re an American guy sitting over here in this lovely office. Why do you care? There’s a lot of atrocities, and a lot of people living outside freedom. So, yeah.

Goldberg: If [Russia’s] allowed to win, it’s a signal victory for the forces of cruelty, barbarism, and authoritarianism. Authoritarians are on the march. It’s a little bit on the nose that Russia is buying drones from Iran. Russia is at the center of a global authoritarian movement that murders, tortures, uses poison gas, rapes, commits genocide. And the United States, at its best, is the country that leads the forces of progressivism and liberalism and humanism against those darker forces.

Rosin: Anne? What do you think?

Applebaum: I would add something to that: namely that it’s pretty clear that Russia launched the war not only to conquer Ukraine, but also as a kind of “screw you” to the international system. We don’t care about your stupid borders; we don’t care about human rights. We’re not bothered about your rules, about the treatment of children. We’re fine kidnapping and deporting children. We’re not interested in the Geneva Convention and the laws on war. And we’re going to prove it to you and show it to you every single day.

Rosin: So was there any reason you guys decided to go now? Like, is this a critical moment when you thought, Okay, we’ve got to be there now?

Applebaum: Yes. This is a critical moment. Neither side is advancing very far. If the Ukrainians are going to win the war, that needs to change. And so the question is: What are the Ukrainians doing to change the way they fight in the next phase of the war? So, we’re actually at a real turning point.

Rosin: What did you think you’d see when you got there? Did you drive around? Was it easy to get around?

Applebaum: We went together with a colonel: a former colonel from the Ukrainian Special Services, who took us to see a group of drone operators.

Goldberg: Wait, explain to me something. So we’re—this is just an abandoned house.

Translator: [Ukrainian speech.]

Goldberg: A civilian house. And you move from house to house for safety?

Speaker 4: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we change our position.

Translator: Yeah. So people allowed them to be here.

Goldberg: You ask permission?

Translator: Yes. They ask permission. Yes, that’s the thing.

Rosin: And this was the drone workshop?

Applebaum: We actually saw two drone workshops. And what they’re doing is reconfiguring commercial drones. I mean, you can buy them on the Internet. The defense minister described them as wedding-ceremony drones, because in Ukraine, lots of people have them at their weddings.

Goldberg: What do you call them?

Oleksii Reznikov: Wedding-ceremony drones.

Goldberg: Why?

Reznikov: Because you use small drones to making footage of your wedding. Or, your daughter or son. So for wedding ceremony, you will use that camera? Yeah.

Applebaum: You know, you also have to imagine in Ukraine, it’s as if all the clever engineers from Silicon Valley have come to work at the Pentagon to save the country. And that’s something like what’s happening in these drone workshops—of which I should say there are probably dozens.

Goldberg: Dozens, if not hundreds. A drone workshop ... three people in a village can decide that they’re going to invent a better drone and then go do it.

Applebaum: You know, you think of [the] “defense industry” as being billion-dollar companies, and, you know, you think of the military having this kind of strict chain of command. In fact, in Ukraine, what you have is these almost volunteer units, so people of their own volition decide they’re going to create a drone workshop. It’s actually this kind of grassroots, networked, half–civil society, half-military effort that is fighting in different ways.

Rosin: All right. Let’s move on to the Zelensky interview.

Rosin: Was there a moment in the room with Zelensky when you felt something, or were genuinely moved? I mean, like an unexpected moment where you really felt the urgency that he feels.

Applebaum: When Zelensky talks about the civilizational differences between Ukraine and Russia—and by “civilization,” he means Ukraine is a modern democracy. It’s a networked, grassroots society. It’s fighting a brutal autocracy. And when he talks about that, he becomes unusually animated.

Goldberg: So the goal is to teach Russia to behave just like everybody else. Not better or worse, just like everybody.

Volodymyr Zelensky: To show everybody else, including Russia, that to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity. To respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take which is not yours.

Applebaum: And, you know, even when we asked him some questions about technology, he also clearly really liked talking about the tech university that he hopes to build one day. The achievements of Ukraine’s digital ministry, which has created this amazing app that every Ukrainian has: all their documents in their phone. Which has been, you know, hugely important for refugees and for people moving around the country. He becomes kind of expansive and enthusiastic.

And I think the reason for that is that those are the things that will make Ukraine this, you know, networked democracy that he wants it to be. So he has a very clear vision of what kind of country it is, and where it’s going. In order to achieve those things, he has to win the war. So it’s not so much that, you know, he becomes excited saying, I need this kind of weapon and that kind of weapon. He becomes excited when he’s talking about what he wants to build: you know, his dreams for the Ukraine of the future.

Rosin: And why does that matter to you?

Applebaum: Because it echoes with what so many other people I know in so many other parts of the world want also. Right before I went to Ukraine, I had a conversation with an Iranian friend of mine.

And he said to me, “We in Iran are waiting for the results of this war, because it will be so inspiring to us if a society like Ukraine can defeat a society like Russia. Because that’s what the Iranian human-rights movement, the Iranian democracy movement wants to do, too.”

And the conversations I’ve had with Venezuelans, with Belarusians, even with Poles—all of them find this war unbelievably inspiring. And it’s because it’s a war for a civilization that they also aspire to. So, there is a universal aspect of it.

Rosin: It’s really very basic. It’s: What kind of world are we gonna live in?

Applebaum: Yes. Are we going to live in a world, you know, where we talk about tech universities and new ways of making people’s lives better?

Or are we going to live in the kind of world that Russia wants to create, where the powerful can rape and murder and kidnap the weak? And those really are two choices in front of us.

Goldberg: [Zelensky] has this domino theory that goes like this: If the West allows Ukraine to fall, or to come under even partial permanent control of Russia, Russia does not stop. Russia goes into Moldova.

Zelensky: If they will occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they will occupy Moldova through Belarus, they will occupy Baltic countries, which are members of NATO. Of course they are brave people and they will fight—but they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapon. And when they will occupy NATO countries, the question is, will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

Rosin: Like, do we think Russia is going to invade Estonia?

Applebaum: Yes. I think Russia would invade Estonia. Putin, the interesting thing about him is, he always says what he’s going to do. He and others around him have made comments about Poland, you know, and the Baltic states as well. So I’m not as much in doubt of that. Remember, we just got through an American presidency during which, you know, Trump made it very clear several times on the record and multiple times off the record that he doesn’t like NATO. And the Russians heard that. And so I think this was the beginning of a kind of test. You know, if everybody caves on Ukraine, if they’re not going to defend Ukraine, why would they defend Poland?

Rosin: So the fact that it lands in my head like “foreign-policy chess game” is just because [of] a failure of imagination?

Applebaum: It’s a failure of imagination. And also, you’re not listening to Putin. I mean, he’s telling us all the time what he’s going to do. He’s telling us how he thinks.

Goldberg: That’s a failure of moral imagination. Because if somebody were being rounded up on the next street over to you and shot behind their houses and buried in a grave 100 feet from your house, you would be appalled, and you would rise up and fight them, even to your death. So there’s no difference between that and what’s happening in eastern Ukraine, except distance. Just keeps it just out of sight, out of mind. And that, by the way, I am being very, very careful and explicit to say that neither Anne or I or really anyone we know [is] advocating for the use of American troops in any combat situation. I mean, I think if there’s something that we’ve learned from previous American adventures—from Vietnam to Iraq and so on—is that if the people who are seeking liberation can’t do the physical fighting themselves, it’s not worth getting involved in that conflict. But here, you have a conflict that’s tailor-made for the U.S.’s strength. I don't think that Americans are anti-war. Americans are anti–“wars that you don’t win quickly.”

Rosin: I guess it’s that we have been, in the past, romanced by overseas narratives of freedom and democracy: gotten involved, spent a lot of money. And for what? Now you’re saying this is not one of those cases.

Applebaum: Well, we’re also not sending American soldiers there. You know, on the contrary, by investing in Ukrainians, you know, we might be saving American soldiers down the line. Again: The occupation of Ukraine, the presence of Russia on the borders of Poland or the Baltic states, these would then begin to be direct threats to people whom our treaties say we need to defend, ourselves. It would be very nice never to have to face that problem.

Rosin: I just want to end this episode sort of speaking to people who, you know, have stopped reading, basically. Like I’m a stand-in for those people.

Goldberg: You know what? We’ve been in Korea since 1950. The thing that allows us to stay in Korea that did not allow us to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan is that American soldiers aren’t dying. If the bullied, if the oppressed, if the invaded can defend themselves—if we provide them with some guns—isn’t that a better formula? And, by the way, it’s also a formula that Americans can live with, because Americans themselves are not in harm’s way.

Rosin: This is actually the perfect and correct kind of engagement for an age of limited attention span. Who cares if people don’t care? Who cares if people aren’t reading? Like, my question is not that relevant a question , because we’ve actually designed a form of engagement that’s effective, necessary…

Applebaum: But, you know, the point of this war isn’t to entertain Americans. The point of the war is to win. I actually have a Ukrainian friend who’s often outside the country, and she appears often on panels in conferences. And she says the most irritating question to her as a Ukrainian is, you know, “What will happen if everyone gets bored of the war?” And she’s like, well, “You know, I can’t afford to get bored of the war.”

The war is not there to entertain you. The point isn’t to be exciting.This is the moment when we’re making a principled stand in favor of Ukraine, but also in favor of a kind of world order and a set of rules that we believe in. Right now, there is political consensus.

Rosin: Mm hmm. That’s the T-shirt. Our war is not here to entertain you.

Goldberg: That actually is sort of an amazing statement.

The life and death of a man who served as Iraqi prime minister 14 times between 1930 and 1958.

Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin

Paolo Pellegrin has been covering conflict zones for the past two decades, in places including Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. As he leaves on each assignment, Pellegrin’s thoughts turn to familiar concerns: Did I forget to turn out the lights? Did I leave the oven on? But then, unlike the rest of us, Pellegrin begins to consider what he describes as “putting yourself on the edge of an abyss.” He goes because he’s driven by a sense of responsibility. “There’s a relationship to image-making and history,” Pellegrin told me. A photograph “creates a record. It holds a memory.”

Pellegrin told himself that the battle to retake Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 would be his last trip: He now had young kids he needed to think about. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he reconsidered. “How this ends will shape not only Ukraine but also large parts of the world,” Pellegrin said.

Pellegrin has been to Ukraine four times since the conflict began, making pictures of the front lines, the offensives, the retreats, and the evacuations. His photographs, selections from which accompany Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story about the stakes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, make a distant war more tangible. The war, in its physicality, feels of another era, filled with human waves, tanks, trenches, and scattered pieces of twisted metal.

In the photographs below, Pellegrin focuses his lens on another aspect of the war: how the conflict reverberates off the battlefield. On the front lines, Pellegrin feels, there is an order to the fighting—one side shoots, and the other shoots back. But in civilian spaces, the shells still fall. Soldiers recovering in a clinic in Kharkiv, civilians trying to survive and maintain some semblance of a normal life, the duties of war: Pellegrin captures moments that reveal how brutality lingers.

In an undisclosed location in the Kharkiv region, soldiers undergo trauma therapy before returning to the front lines. An elderly resident walks to a food-distribution center in Chasiv Yar, Donbas. Left: An elderly couple sell their possessions along the roadside in Kostyantynivka, Donbas. Right: People stand in line waiting for bread in Kostyantynivka, Donbas. An elderly woman in Lyman. She lives with her family in a semi-destroyed apartment building with no heat. On March 14, 2023, an apartment building in Kramatorsk was devastated by a Russian air strike. Top: Men walk through a shelled apartment in Kramatorsk. Bottom: Natalya, 74, in her home in the village of Oleksandrivka. The village was occupied by Russian forces at the beginning of the war and then liberated by the Ukrainian army. A soldier and his girlfriend embrace in a trauma-treatment center in Kharkiv. Medics from Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, an organization made up of civilian health-care workers, spend the night in a safe house. They wait for a call to go evacuate wounded soldiers from the front lines. Top: A soldier with a Ukrainian mortar team outside Bakhmut. Bottom: One of several deposits of Russian shells in Kharkiv, on March 16, 2023. The Kharkiv office of the prosecutor collects Russian shells as evidence of war crimes.

Residents of Lviv pay respects to a fallen soldier. Such processions have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence since the start of the war.

Trenches in Kramatorsk, Donetsk

Sophie has spent two days in the Iraqi capital to learn about challenges facing Iraqi women and girls.

Early on in Master Gardener, the taciturn, mysterious protagonist sits down and starts writing in a journal, essaying his thoughts in voice-over. I saw the film with a packed audience that immediately let out a knowing chuckle. The director Paul Schrader’s explorations of the inner life of “God’s lonely man” have included a lot of cinematic diaries over the years. Master Gardener completes a trilogy that began with 2018’s First Reformed and 2021’s The Card Counter, tales of men wrestling with chaotic guilt and seeking a modicum of redemption. The series has helped bring new attention and deserved praise to Schrader’s body of work.

Master Gardener focuses on perhaps the touchiest topic yet in Schrader’s challenging filmography: neo-Nazism and white supremacy. It’s also, surprisingly, the most optimistic of his “man in a room” movies. Is Schrader becoming a softie in his advancing age? Maybe, but I think Master Gardener’s sensitivity is provocative in and of itself, daring the audience to forgive a man whose past is steeped in profound evil.

[Read: A film that draws you into a frightening—and compelling—psyche]

The atonement arc largely succeeds, though Schrader is guilty of barreling through some moments of character development and acceptance that might take a lifetime to achieve in reality. Each film in the trilogy takes on themes of staggering weight: In First Reformed, the specter of an apocalypse hangs over the main character. In The Card Counter, the protagonist is haunted by his former identity as a torturer for the U.S. military in Iraq. In Master Gardener, Narvel Roth (played by Joel Edgerton) is a meticulous gardener on a huge estate run by the wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver); only she knows that he was once a violent neo-Nazi, and that his body is covered in white-supremacist tattoos.

The relationship between Norma and Narvel is cloyingly genteel on the surface. She calls him “sweet pea” and completely trusts in his maintenance of her gardens. But she has an unspoken level of control over him, fueled by his shame; he wants his past to remain unknown, and he dresses in long sleeves and pants even on the sunniest days to hide it away. The statuesque Weaver expertly underplays Norma’s frightening WASPiness, letting out the barest hints of her true vindictiveness; meanwhile, Edgerton directs all his intensity inward, taking as much care with every brusque line reading as Narvel does with his beloved plants.

The garden landscape, a hideaway that looks prim and proper but is also a habitat for radical transformation, is a perfect metaphor for the overall story. Much like the time lapses that Schrader layers throughout the film, of flowers growing and blooming under scrupulous care, Narvel’s own progress is aided by his strict schedule and spartan lifestyle (along with, the audience learns, an arrest for violent crimes that led to a plea deal and his placement in witness protection). The final step in that journey arrives with Norma’s grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a disaffected young biracial woman in need of a job and stability that Norma thinks the regimented Narvel can provide.

Narvel and Maya’s eventual bond is the most complicated twist in his metamorphosis. And it’s another thread that’s deeply reminiscent of First Reformed and The Card Counter, whose protagonists open up after more-grounded women enter their lives. There’s something endearing about Schrader repeating the same plot beats again and again; even his famed script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver back in 1976 saw a man writing in a diary and struggling with both his potential for evil and his capacity to forge a romantic bond.

That film ends extremely pessimistically, whereas this recent trilogy equivocates on whether people can genuinely better themselves. Master Gardener needs the audience to buy into Narvel and Maya’s relationship, and if they don’t, the heartfelt finale may come off to some as an unrealistic fairytale. But it worked for me, largely because of the way Edgerton’s wounded, cautious performance bumps up against Swindell’s raw nerviness. Master Gardener is a spiky and often mournful tale, but I appreciated the bits of hope Schrader mixes in to temper the bleaker realities he’s tended to for so long.

Iraq, Syria and Yemen in need of greater help to deal with intensifying climate change effects, aid groups warn.

Hundreds were taken from a prison and executed by the armed group, according to the Iraqi government.

Tehran is not content with how its recent security pact with Baghdad is being implemented.