China hopes the C919 will end the dominance of Airbus and Boeing - but it relies on Western components.

For months, the West has fretted over the prospect of paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Russia’s war has inflicted an estimated $400 billion in rebuilding costs, a tally that rises every day. Western leaders, already alarmed by inflation and the threat of recession, have understandably blanched over the bill.

But many of them are disregarding a solution that would cover most of Ukraine’s costs and help deter future aggression not only from Russia but from dictatorships around the world. A year ago, Western governments froze some $300 billion in state assets from Russia’s central bank. Now they could seize the funds and give them to Ukraine.

The biggest question is whether this would be legal. As critics have noted, a seizure of this magnitude has never been attempted. Moreover, little precedent exists for the United States to confiscate the assets of a nation with whom (despite the Kremlin’s claims to the contrary) it isn’t at war.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

But Russia has unleashed a kind of rank imperialism the world has rarely seen since the Cold War, committing war crimes and—as manifold evidence suggests—genocide, all against a harmless neighbor. Because of its unjustifiable aggression and atrocities, Moscow has forfeited any moral right to funds stashed abroad.

The reasons to seize them are legion. Confiscating the Russian funds—which are spread across various Western economies—would serve a crucial role in ending the fighting, beating back Russian imperialism, and ensuring a viable economic future for Ukraine. And it would send a clear threat to regimes that might otherwise be willing to breach international law and destabilize continents for their own gain, as Moscow has.

Seizing these assets would also help fix an overlooked issue facing Ukraine: investor hesitancy. Investors remain wary of bankrolling projects that could be targeted by Russian drones and artillery. But the frozen funds could cover nearly 75 percent of Ukraine’s costs and significantly reduce the burden on potential financiers, making the country a more appealing investment destination.

In the U.S., much of the legal debate has focused on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that defines the president’s abilities to regulate international commerce during national emergencies. Although the IEEPA has historically been used to authorize more conventional sanctions—including in Iran, the Central African Republic, and China—some scholars have argued that it could also be used to seize the tens of billions of dollars in Russian assets currently in U.S. reserves.

That proposal has generated legal pushback, although advocates are undeterred. The nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative told me that it plans to examine the “legal foundations for seizing frozen Russian assets and transferring them to Ukraine” and expects to publish its findings in the coming months. (The initiative is chaired by Garry Kasparov, who also chairs the Human Rights Foundation, where I direct a program on combating kleptocracy.)

Even if U.S. law offered clear justification, though, it couldn’t be used to touch any of Russia’s assets frozen in Europe, which are far more valuable than those in the U.S. Fortunately, international law appears to offer such justification.

As Philip Zelikow and Simon Johnson wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, Russia’s obvious culpability for the war entitles Ukraine to claim compensation from Russia. Because “the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a wrongful, unprovoked war of aggression that violates the United Nations Charter,” Zelikow and Johnson argue, any state (not just Ukraine) can “invoke Russia’s responsibility to compensate Ukraine, and they can take countermeasures against Moscow—including transferring its frozen foreign assets to ensure Ukraine gets paid.”

Despite many policy makers’ impression that Russian assets are untouchable, Anton Moiseienko, an international-law expert at the Australian National University, recently showed that they aren’t immune from seizure. “To extend protection from any governmental interferences to central bank assets would equate to affording them inviolability,” Moiseienko wrote, which is reserved only for property belonging to foreign diplomatic missions. The protection afforded central-bank assets “is not as absolute as is often thought.”

That is, in the eyes of international law, Russian assets aren’t inviolate. In fact, the only real remaining obstacles to seizing them are debates surrounding domestic laws and domestic politics. As Moiseienko wrote, “Political and economic circumspection, rather than legal constraints, are the last defense against [the assets’] confiscation.”

This is particularly true in the U.S., where plenty of hesitancy remains even after more than a year of war. As The New York Times reported in March, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen believes that seizing Russian assets could reduce faith in the American economy and the U.S. dollar. Other critics think it would threaten U.S. assets and investments in other countries.

[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

These points all have a certain merit. And so, too, do concerns about such a move prompting the Kremlin to escalate. In all likelihood, though, Putin’s regime has already written off these funds, not least because they’ll almost certainly never be returned while he’s in power. Moreover, seizing them is hardly as escalatory as, say, the West sending Ukraine F-16s or long-range precision rockets.

But at a broader level, these criticisms misunderstand the significance of the war and what it may lead to.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an assault on the geopolitical order. A nuclear power launched a militarized annexation, entirely unprovoked, against a neighbor that had long ago given up its arsenal. In the months following the invasion, the Kremlin has been accused of torture, beheadings, and manifold crimes against humanity. And it has been responsible for more bloodshed than any conflict in Europe has exacted since World War II. It is led by a dictator wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court, and who is driven solely by a deranged, messianic imperialism. And it is setting a precedent for other autocrats, who are eager to see whether Putin’s revanchism will work—and eager to emulate any success he finds, especially if his crimes go unpunished.

If this war doesn’t justify seizing a nation’s assets, I’m not sure what would. Repairing the damage it has caused is well worth the risks that have occupied Washington.

Some Western leaders still hold out hope for a negotiated peace and argue that we should keep Russia’s assets frozen to be used later as a bargaining chip. But Putin cannot be negotiated with. And given the alternative—that these funds remain frozen in perpetuity as Russian munitions continue demolishing Ukrainian cities—the argument against seizing these assets gets weaker by the day.

The unprecedented nature of Putin’s crimes, the allowances of international law, and Ukraine’s growing need all point in one, clear direction. Russia’s frozen assets are not spoils of war; they are rightfully Ukraine’s. It’s time for the Biden administration and the rest of the West to put them to use.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.”

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Do you want Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to win or lose his Republican primary race against Donald Trump? Why? How does he compare, in your estimation, to Joe Biden?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

Back in 2021, I argued that backing Ron DeSantis early was the best bet for Never Trumpers who wanted to deny Donald Trump another GOP nomination. I still think so. And this week, DeSantis launched his campaign, though as my colleague David Graham notes in an article that is bearish on DeSantis’s chances at victory, Trump’s strong numbers in the polls are undeniable.

Still, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, argues in The New York Times that it is far too early to count DeSantis out:

He’ll be lavishly funded, his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans, he can draw a crowd, he’ll finally actually be in the race, and perhaps most important, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Mr. Trump …

Mr. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Mr. Trump as unfit to serve that Never Trump Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is. Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump blew a winnable race in 2020—Mr. DeSantis will need to say he really did lose—and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterms last year. In all likelihood, Mr. DeSantis would have a much easier time beating President Biden than Mr. Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument.

Mr. Trump is competitive with Mr. Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified very conservative primary voters Mr. DeSantis needs to pry from Mr. Trump. The risk to Mr. DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner—lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message—when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States. To counter that, Mr. DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues.

I’ll share my own thoughts about how DeSantis might run against Trump soon.

A Gen Z Teen’s Diagnosis of His Generation

Zach Gottlieb grew up with a therapist mom who taught him that discomfort is part of life, but that the world keeps turning even when you’re sad, a message that helps him to stay resilient.

In the Los Angeles Times, he argues that parents who take the opposite approach are creating depressed kids:

Parents and educators have been trying to figure out how to help teens in my generation who are struggling amid rising rates of depression and anxiety. That’s an understandable goal. What worries me, though, is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort, to the point that the term “mental health” is becoming so diluted that it’s starting to lose meaning.

Social media play a large role in this, promoting pseudo-technical and pathologizing language—often leading to cancellation—as the antidote to emotional discomfort.

Someone disagrees with you? They’re “gaslighting” you! Someone has the “wrong” point of view or perspective? They’re “toxic”! Someone declines to do what you ask? They have “no boundaries”! Instead of talking through these situations or trying to understand another perspective better, we run away to the supposed comfort of not having to deal with them. Click—they’re blocked.

Colleges have disinvited speakers who might be triggering to some students or created “safe spaces” where students can go instead; students in high schools and middle schools can choose not to attend assemblies that might be triggering; TV shows and podcasts tell us in advance that we might be triggered by a certain topic discussed, so we should skip that episode in case it makes us uncomfortable. We strive to make everyone comfortable, all the time and in every way—an impossible goal.

All of the warnings are well-intentioned and supposedly in service of our mental health. And of course, many people my age face mental health stressors that go far beyond the disappointments and conflicts of daily life. Anxiety and depression are serious concerns that need to be addressed, and treatment should be encouraged and accessible.

But I wonder if, more broadly, we’re normalizing an almost hyper-vigilant avoidance of anything uncomfortable. By insisting that the mere mention of something difficult is bad for our mental health, are we protecting ourselves from emotional damage—or damaging ourselves emotionally?

Silicon Valley Woo

The writer Tara Isabella Burton argues in The New Atlantis that the zeitgeist has shifted in the following way:

You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively “normie” and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology—that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so—is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits—political, cultural, and social alike—of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost—a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent—must be restored.

What could go wrong?

The Tax Code and Swedish Feminism

In a fascinating essay on Sweden’s approach to the state and individualism, the Swedish history professor Lars Trägårdh spends a few paragraphs on the country’s unique tax code and the effect it has had on women:

In 1971, joint taxation was eliminated in favour of strict individual taxation. The idea was that at a time when women began to flock to the labour market, joint taxation presented an obstacle in the form of a negative incentive. If a woman began to earn money, her income would be added to that of the husband, and in an era of progressive taxation that meant the woman’s income effectively would be subject to a higher tax. Add to this that before the 1970s there was no universal, tax-financed childcare yet in Sweden, meaning that such care—without which it would be impossible for both husband and wife to work—had to be paid for privately, a costly proposition.

The introduction of strict individual taxation—there was no option to select joint taxation—and, over time, universal daycare, created the conditions for women to enter the workforce en masse. This in turn gave them the economic independence without which talk of gender equality would only amount to rhetoric. These reforms, to which can be added the world’s first law criminalising the spanking of children, even at home, and the legalising of gender-neutral marriage, meant that the family became more and more of a voluntary society, rather than the old-fashioned traditional family characterised by patriarchal power relations. To be sure, these reforms, which one perceptive writer has referred to as a ‘bloodless revolution’, created opposition. One group called the Family Campaign collected some 60,000 signatures from irate housewives and religious conservatives to protest the new tax law. But, generally, support far exceeded opposition and the days of the Swedish housewife were indeed numbered.

A Defense of Battle Rap

If you’re horrified by the genre––or a bit unsure of what exactly it is––Jay Caspian Kang’s interesting essay in The New Yorker may provoke more complicated thoughts about its value.

He writes:

​​Battle rap offers a kind of representation politics for the unwoke, a space where there’s some separation between the craft and the respect that the combatants have for one another. In this way, it is both a reflection of a certain reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity. There’s something compelling, and even democratic, about battle rap’s premise that identity can always be at the forefront, but will never determine who actually wins.

Conversations of Note

Marking the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s death, Richard Reeves, who wrote a 2007 book about the great liberal philosopher, revisits his arguments for a culture of free speech:

Mill believed that the pursuit of truth required the collation and combination of ideas and propositions, even those that seem to be in opposition to each other. He urged us to allow others to speak—and then to listen to them—for three main reasons, most crisply articulated in Chapter 2 of On Liberty.

First, the other person’s idea, however controversial it seems today, might turn out to be right. (“The opinion … may possibly be true.”) Second, even if our opinion is largely correct, we hold it more rationally and securely as a result of being challenged. (“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”) Third, and in Mill’s view most likely, opposing views may each contain a portion of the truth, which need to be combined. (“Conflicting doctrines … share the truth between them.”)

For Mill, as for us, this is not primarily a legal issue. His main concern was not government censorship. It was the stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer pressure and the fear of ostracism. “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” he wrote. “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”

Mill never pretended that this would be easy, either at a personal or political level. The humility and openness that is required is hard-won. Our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time. Otherwise, when those ideas are criticized, we are likely to experience the criticism as an attack upon our self, rather than as an opportunity to think about something more deeply and to grow intellectually. That’s why education is so important. Liberals are not born; we have to be made.  

The article goes on to defend Mill from his detractors on the post-liberal right.

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Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

The common names of almost 150 North American birds are eponyms—that is, they derive from people. A disproportionate number of these names were assigned in the early 19th century by the soldier-scientists who traveled westward across the U.S. Bestowing eponyms to honor commanders, benefactors, family members, and one another, they turned the continent’s avifauna into tributes to “conquest and colonization,” as Hampton wrote. Many birders are now pushing to remove these eponyms, arguing that too many of them tie nature’s beauty and the pure joy of seeing a new species to humanity’s worst grotesqueries. “I didn’t ask for any of this information; I was just trying to bird,” Tykee James, the president of D.C. Audubon Society, told me. But now “we should do better because we know better—that’s the scientific process.”

Similar sentiments have spread in other countries and animal groups. Many animals whose names had included ethnic and racial slurs now have new names, including a moth in North America and several birds in Sweden and South Africa. In the U.S., at least one bird with an eponym has been renamed, and the American Ornithological Society is developing a process for renaming more.

These discussions have pushed many biologists and wildlife enthusiasts to reconsider the very act of naming—the people who get to do it, and the responsibilities they ought to shoulder. Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things. But names are also value-laden, reflecting the worldviews of the people who choose them. And some have come to believe that honoring any person, no matter their sins or virtues, reflects the wrong values. In this view, the practice of affixing an entire life-form with the name of a single individual must end entirely.

When the ornithologist Robert Driver petitioned the American Ornithological Society in 2018 to rebrand McCown’s longspur, his proposal was rejected. This species was named after an Army officer who accidentally shot one of the birds, and who also waged campaigns against Indigenous tribes before joining the Confederacy; members of an AOS committee, which maintains an official list of common names for North American birds, variously said that “judging historical figures by current moral standards is problematic,” and that they were “concerned about where we would draw the line.”

But the tide of opinion turned in May 2020. On the same day that a police officer murdered George Floyd, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park falsely told the cops that she was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a Black birder who had asked that she leash her dog. A video of that incident went viral, drawing the birding world into the debates over race and justice that were sweeping America. As Confederate statues and monuments fell nationwide, many birders argued that problematic eponyms also needed to be toppled. In June that year, Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley founded Bird Names for Birds, a campaign to rename all American birds that have eponyms. In July, the AOS reconsidered Driver’s proposal because of “heightened awareness of racial issues,” and the following month announced that the newly christened thick-billed longspur would be McCown’s no longer.

Many other eponyms present similar cases for change, although none have been altered yet. John Kirk Townsend, whose name still graces two birds and almost a dozen mammals, dug up the graves of Native Americans and sent their skulls to the physician Samuel George Morton, who wanted to prove that Caucasians had bigger brains than other people; those remains are still undergoing a lengthy process toward burial or repatriation. John Bachman was a practitioner and defender of slavery, reasoning that Black people, whom he compared to domesticated animals, were so intellectually inferior to Caucasians as to be “incapable of self-government”; Bachman’s sparrow was named by his friend, John James Audubon. And Audubon, the most renowned—and, more recently, notorious—figure in American ornithology and the namesake of an oriole, a warbler, and a shearwater, also robbed Native American graves for Morton’s skull studies, while casually buying and selling slaves. “People have been singing his praises for 150 years, but in the last 15 years, he has turned out to be quite a monster,” says Matthew Halley, an ornithologist and historian, who has also found evidence that Audubon committed scientific fraud by fabricating a fake species of eagle that helped launch his career. In light of Audubon’s actions, several local chapters of the National Audubon Society have renamed themselves, as has the society’s union. In March, though, the national society’s board of directors voted to keep the name, on the grounds that it would allow the organization to “direct key resources and focus towards enacting the organization’s mission.”

The drive to change these eponyms has faced the same now-familiar criticisms as the push to remove Confederate monuments. Proponents have been charged with erasing history but counter that they are clarifying it: People tend to assume that an eponym represents the individual who actually described the species, when it’s usually an honorific, sometimes exalting people with no connection to birds at all. (Anna’s hummingbird, for instance, was named after Anna Masséna, a French courtier and naturalist’s wife.) Halley also rejects the AOS’s original argument that modern birders are inappropriately judging the past using today’s standards. Townsend, for example, who came from a Quaker family and had an abolitionist for a sister, “was going against the moral teachings of his own community,” Halley told me. Meanwhile, Black people have always rejected slavery, just as Natives have always opposed ethnic cleansing, Hampton said. What’s changed is their presence in communities that typically decide what animals are called.

Critics have also argued that names are meant to be stable, and changing them sows confusion. But there’s precedent in the bird world for updating them: In 1957, the AOS revised 188 common bird names to achieve better trans-Atlantic consistency, and it has changed dozens more since 1998. Names change all the time, for scientific and cultural reasons, and given a choice between stability and respect for people whose ancestors were harmed by early ornithologists, “I come down on the side of respect,” David Allen Sibley, a renowned author and illustrator of bird field guides, said in 2021.

For some scientists, the eponym problem is about more than the egregious misdeeds of a few individuals. As Europeans spread to other continents, they brought not only invasive species that displaced native ones but also invasive nomenclature that ousted long-standing native terms for plants and animals. In Africa, the scientific names of a quarter of local birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are eponyms, mostly from Europe. On the biodiverse Pacific island of New Caledonia, more than 60 percent of plant eponyms honor French citizens. Countless species around the world have been named after European scientists whose travels were made possible by imperial ventures aimed at expanding territories or extracting natural resources. “We have romantic ideas of these explorers going around the world, seeing beautiful things, and naming them, and we forgot how they got there to begin with,” Natalia Piland, an ecologist at Florida International University, told me.

Such naming patterns still continue. Piland and her colleagues found that since 1950, 183 newly identified birds have been given eponyms, and although 96 percent of these species live in the global South, 68 percent of their names honor people from the global North. In 2018, the Rainforest Trust, an American conservation nonprofit, auctioned off the rights to name 12 newly discovered South American species, leading to a frog named after Greta Thunberg and a caecilian named after Donald Trump. (A similar auction in 2005 landed a Bolivian monkey with the name of the internet casino GoldenPalace.com.) The beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has more than 50 species named after him, most of which live in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. That is not to begrudge Attenborough, Thunberg, or Trump; having a species named after you is widely considered a great honor, but globally, such honorees are still disproportionately people of European descent—a perpetuation of colonialism through taxonomy.

Some scientists have proposed reinstating Indigenous names for animals wherever possible. But many species live across the territories of different Indigenous groups, or migrate across national or continental divides, making it hard to know whose names to prioritize. And if native names are applied without native consultation, the result can smack of cultural appropriation. Emma Carroll from the University of Auckland took on both challenges in naming a recently identified species of beaked whale. Carroll spent a year consulting Indigenous groups in countries where the new whale’s specimens had been found. In South Africa, the Khoisan Council suggested using the word //eu//’eu, which means “big fish” and is now immortalized in the scientific name Mesoplodon eueu. For the common name, Carroll asked a Māori cultural expert in New Zealand to draw up a shortlist, which she then ran past a local council. She eventually named the creature “Ramari’s beaked whale” after Ramari Stewart—a Māori whale expert whose work was pivotal in identifying the new species, and who has been “working to bridge Western science and mātauranga [Maori knowledge] for decades,” Carroll told me. Fittingly, ramari also means “a rare event” in the Māori language, and beaked whales are famously elusive.  

Inspired by Carroll’s example, Eric Archer of the NOAA used a similar approach when describing a new species of bottlenose dolphin. He initially wanted to name it after Jim Mead—a respected scientist to whom Archer owes his career. But after feeling that this pattern of honoring close colleagues was too insular, he consulted the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, whose ancestors lived in the lands where the first specimen of the dolphin was found. Eventually, he named it Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin after an iconic 17th-century chief.

But these names, too, sit uneasily with Steve Hampton, the birder and Cherokee Nation citizen, who told me that many Indigenous communities would see them as recapitulating “colonizer practices.” If the intent is to symbolize a connection between the animals and the people who share its land, “then take the apostrophe-s off,” Hampton said. Those two characters invoke ownership, as if an individual could lay claim to an entire species—a fundamentally colonial way of thinking, no matter whether the honoree is an Indigenous woman or a European man. By that logic, the issue with eponyms isn’t that some of them honor people who did vile things. It’s that animals shouldn’t be named after people at all.

Doing away with all eponyms avoids, if nothing else, the problem of judging who, exactly, is objectionable enough to have their name stripped away from a species. Kevin Thiele, a botanist and director of Taxonomy Australia, argues, for instance, that the scientific community can easily expunge eponyms that honor “history’s monsters” without jettisoning the practice altogether; he told me that “a good cutoff might be if a person had influence, and thus has an eponym, as a result of egregious acts.” For example, the Australian flowers that he studies—Hibbertia—are named after George Hibbert, an 18th-century Englishman and amateur botanist whose fortunes and status derived almost entirely from the transatlantic slave trade. By contrast, hundreds of species are named after Charles Darwin, who certainly had racist views and benefited from colonialism, but who is honored because he profoundly shaped our understanding of nature. (Darwin also staunchly opposed slavery.) Hibbertia should go, but Darwin’s eponyms can stay, Thiele says.

But Halley, the historian, suspects that people “who want to go in with a scalpel don’t know the full extent of the improprieties in the historical records,” he told me, and a clean slate would be preferable. Carlos Daniel Cadena, a Colombian ornithologist, agrees. “There’s a lot of potential to make these discussions ugly if we start going name by name and trying to decide which person was good or bad,” he told me. “And in 200 years, will we all be despicable because we trashed the planet or ate meat?”

Others argue that, more importantly, the act of honoring a person through an organism’s name dishonors the organism itself. It treats animals and plants as inanimate objects like buildings or streets, constructed and owned by humans, instead of beings with their own lives and histories. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think of an individual human becoming the signifier of an entire species,” Piland said. A more descriptive name, meanwhile, is a chance to tell a creature’s story. Joseph Pitawanakwat, an Anishinaabe educator, notes that many of his people’s bird names are layered with meaning—onomatopoeias that mimic calls, and descriptions of habitat and behavior, all embedded in a single word that could have been coined only through a deep understanding of the animals. English names could be similarly descriptive: Thick-billed longspur tells you something about the bird that might help you recognize it in a way that McCown’s longspur does not.

These arguments are gaining traction. This March, Patrícia Guedes from the University of Porto and an international group of 10 colleagues published a commentary saying that “naming a biological species after a human was and is never right—regardless of good intentions.” But even if the scientific community as a whole agreed with this principle, the logistics of changing or banning eponyms are not simple. Many people who have animals named after them are still alive; changing those names would effectively strip them of an honor. And Cadena said that many Latin American researchers bristle when they’re told that they shouldn’t name animals after their colleagues. “North Americans and Europeans have named things after themselves for centuries, and now we cannot do it?” Cadena told me.

Changing the scientific names of animals is especially tricky because such names are formally governed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)—a group of 26 scientists who volunteer time outside their main jobs. They simply lack the person-power to oversee changes to even a fraction of the tens of thousands of scientific eponyms, Thomas Pape, the ICZN president, told me—and it’s not in their remit to change even one. Consider Anophthalmus hitleri, a rare Slovenian beetle that was named after Adolf Hitler in 1933 and is now threatened by enthusiastic Nazi-memorabilia hunters. The ICZN still won’t change its name, because “we stand absolutely firm on not regulating based on ethics,” Pape told me. “It’s not our mandate.”

But, though he argues that set names are important for allowing scientists to unambiguously communicate about the organisms they study, Pape also admits that “it’s strange that we keep talking about stability when we keep changing names.” Scientific names change frequently, when a species is reclassified or split into several new ones. They can also change because scientists uncover an alternative name that was assigned first and then forgotten, or because they violate Latin grammar. There are also routes for changing scientific names through societal force of will. Pape cites the case of Raymond Hoser, an Australian amateur herpetologist who has assigned hundreds of new names to questionably defined species and genera of reptiles—often on shaky scientific grounds, usually in his own self-published journal, and in many cases honoring his family members and pets. Other taxonomists are simply refusing to use his names; if that continues, “it might be possible for the ICZN to rule that those names should not be used,” Pape told me.

Common names are even easier to shift, because there’s typically no formal process for doing so. In 1993, a zoologist decided to name a predatory marine worm with scissorlike jaws the “Bobbit worm,” referencing the incident in which Lorena Gallo (then Bobbitt) cut off her husband’s penis. Other biologists, who noted that the name mocks a woman who survived repeated domestic and sexual abuse, have just started calling the worm “sand striker” instead. In this vein, common names that are deemed offensive enough could change organically as people stop using them, Eric Archer, the NOAA biologist, told me. “I don’t think it’s necessarily something that should be done by fiat,” he said.

For North American birds, there is a standardized list of common names, maintained by the AOS. It has no legal standing but is widely followed by birders, conservationists, and, notably, the federal government. Name changes would carry far more clout if the AOS ratified them. It has traditionally been unwilling to, but after the events of 2020, it formed a committee to develop a process for identifying and changing “harmful or exclusionary English bird names.” Hampton and James are part of that 11-person committee, which Cadena co-chairs. They wouldn’t reveal specifics of their recommendations, which they’re set to present on June 15, but at least some of them have come around to the idea that all eponyms should go. And they stressed that they wanted to unite the birding world rather than divide it.

Any changes, they imagine, would mean that rookie and veteran birders alike would have something new to learn, while the entire community could be involved in concocting new monikers—a practice that could generate more excitement about birds at a time when many species desperately need to be protected. Hampton acknowledged that community involvement can be risky—“we have talked about ‘Birdy McBirdface’ many times,” he said, referencing the crowdsourced boat-naming campaign from 2016 that yielded Boaty McBoatface—but he and other committee members think it’d be worth it to open up the right to name nature to a much broader swath of society than the one that has long held it. Wildlife doesn’t belong to it, or to anyone, and shouldn’t be named as if it does.

That’s the view of every birder under 40 whom Hampton talks to, and every person of color—demographics that will have a growing say over our custodianship of the natural world. “Everyone in our committee knows that 20 or 30 years from now, the next generation will be changing all of these names if we don’t,” Hampton said. To him, it feels inevitable. Perhaps future generations will also look upon this moment and see our own historical foibles embedded in the names we now choose. Or perhaps they’ll see a turning point when people stopped seeing animals as vessels for human legacies but as entities with their own worth and stories, reflected in their very names.

When Elon Musk tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” he drew international condemnation. Musk’s outburst was “not just distressing,” but “dangerous,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, said on Twitter. “It will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” Later that day, Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted, “The phrase ‘The Jews’ spiked today on the list of topics trending on Twitter following a tweet with antisemitic overtones by none other than the owner and CEO of the social network, Elon Musk.”

But soon after, that statement was deleted and disavowed by Israel’s foreign minister, who promised, “There will be no tweets like this again.” The next day, Amichai Chikli, the country’s minister of diaspora affairs, went further. A hard-right politician who first entered Israel’s parliament in 2021, Chikli broke with his own party when it joined the country’s recent anti–Benjamin Netanyahu government, and was later rewarded with a parliamentary seat in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Last Thursday on Twitter, he publicly praised Musk as an entrepreneur and “role model,” and declared that “criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” Chikli subsequently doubled down on this position, citing an op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz that states, “No sin­gle per­son has done more to dam­age Is­rael’s stand­ing in the world, es­pe­cially among so-called pro­gres­sives, than George Soros.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-semites]

I’ve reported critically on the activities of Soros’s foundation, and I certainly don’t think scrutiny of him is bigoted. But having covered anti-Semitism for more than a decade, I also found Musk’s remarks about Soros to be demonstrably anti-Semitic, and was confused by how some people, like Chikli, seemed willing to excuse such rhetoric out of distaste for Soros’s politics. So I spoke with Chikli yesterday in an attempt to understand his perspective. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity, but there was not much to be found, in part because even after we spoke it was unclear to me whether Chikli had read Musk’s tweets in the first place.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Yair Rosenberg: Let’s start with the tweet that kicked off the whole controversy. Last week, Musk goes on Twitter and writes, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” What did you think of this comparison when you saw it?

Amichai Chikli: First of all, I hadn’t seen it at the beginning. I just saw the waves of reaction. I listened to what was being said in the media. I saw Soros becoming the victim. I saw Elon Musk becoming the vicious anti-Semite. And it sounded ridiculous to me.

Rosenberg: So you didn’t see the specific thing that he wrote.

Chikli: I was responding to the trend and not directly to the tweet. Obviously, before I wrote something, I learned about the tweet. But I was responding to the trend. What added to my motivation to respond was that a lower-level foreign ministry employee, who is not the minister, was saying that [Israel is] standing up to protect Soros.

Rosenberg: So I assume you saw Musk’s second tweet, where he explained what he meant in the first one. He wrote that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” What did you think of that?

Chikli: But I wasn’t responding to his tweets. I was reacting to the reaction to the tweets, and in particular the reaction of nonelected officials in the foreign ministry, who spoke in the name of the state of Israel, and joined the trend that portrayed Elon Musk as an anti-Semite.

Rosenberg: Okay. So let me read what you said. You wrote, “As Israel’s minister who’s entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model. Criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” So you made a case there, and I suspect you could make a longer case here, that George Soros is anti-Israel.

Chikli: One hundred percent. This is one of the most hostile individuals, who funds dozens of organizations that are all into delegitimizing the state of Israel. It’s not just because of his opinion. It’s very systematic.

Rosenberg: But here is my question. This whole thing happens because of Musk’s tweets. And he didn’t say he didn’t like Soros because of his positions. He said that Soros wants to end civilization because he hates humanity. Aren’t these two very different things? If Musk had just said, “I don’t like Soros, because he doesn’t like Israel,” do you think anyone would have called him anti-Semitic? Didn’t that only happen because Musk accused a rich Jew of wanting to ruin the world, which is what anti-Semites have said about Jews for centuries, whether it’s “Zionists” or the Rothschilds or whoever?

Chikli: But if you’d like to have a serious interview, you must understand, and I will say it, I think it’s the third time. I wasn’t—

Rosenberg: —responding to the tweet, you were responding to the reaction. But it’s confusing to me that you would respond to say Elon Musk is not an anti-Semite when you don’t know what he said.

Chikli: I stand behind my words. I don’t think that he’s an anti-Semite. You can also say that George Soros is doing huge damage, not just to the state of Israel, by promoting the deal with Iran, which I think is damaging for humanity.

Soros speaks highly about the “open society” while his foundation has zero transparency about where the money goes. It’s not just anti-Israel, I think it’s anti–freedom of speech. I think he is the No. 1 promoter of what we call today “woke soft tyranny.” And his ideology is a threat to freedom of speech and the core values of the Western civilization. This is far more than the state of Israel.

Rosenberg: Let me try to put this in a different way because maybe I’m not being as clear as I want to be in my question. Here’s an analogy. As you know, many Israelis today think Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to destroy Israel. Many others think former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and the opposition are trying to tear the country apart. But if someone in America says something anti-Semitic about Netanyahu or Lapid, it’s still anti-Semitic, regardless of the target and whether one agrees with them, right? That’s a separate question.

You can have the lowest opinion of Soros, but that still doesn’t give anyone license to say anti-Semitic things about him. So you might not like George Soros at all, but Musk didn’t say Soros is bad on Israel, or he’s bad on freedom of speech. He said Soros hates humanity and wants to destroy civilization.

Chikli: I think we are now on the fourth time, you insist—

Rosenberg: I will print every time that you say this, don’t worry!

Chikli: [Laughs.] You think I was looking with a microscope at every single letter in Musk’s tweets. Again I will say, I was responding first to the trend, and second to the response of unelected officials who took authority from nowhere to speak with the name of the state of Israel on a very serious issue, to protect a man who is super hostile to the state of Israel, and who is maybe the No. 1 promoter of woke anti-Semitism that seeks to delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel.

[Matt Welch: Why the right loves to hate George Soros]

One last thing about the accusation of Elon Musk allowing anti-Semitism to spread on Twitter. The organization that reported this is called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. And guess what? When you go and check them out, there are a few interesting things about them. One is that they are funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. And second, in their methodology, when they are looking for anti-Semitic tweets, they look for the following: Jesus, Hitler, and George Soros. This is also one of the points that I wanted to dispute—suggesting criticism of Soros is anti-Semitism; that is ridiculous.

Rosenberg: Of course. But the question isn’t whether it’s inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Soros. He’s one of the richest and most influential people in the world; obviously, you have to be allowed to criticize him. The issue is that sometimes anti-Semites criticize Soros because he’s Jewish and rich, and it’s not about his positions; it’s about who he is, right? You should be familiar with this problem because the same thing happens to Israel. It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, but some people criticize Israel because they’re anti-Semites and therefore say anti-Semitic things. Isn’t that what’s happening here?

Chikli: I want to give you the professional answer to why I wasn’t putting the focus on those people who, as you said now, might refer to Musk’s quote from an anti-Semitic perspective. Why was it not my focus at all? In the United States, when we researched the trends in the media, the vast majority of anti-Semitism is new anti-Semitism: the anti-Semitism that delegitimizes, demonizes, and sets double standards against the state of Israel.

It’s true that anti-Semitism coming from the far right is often louder and more violent. But that’s a small part of the phenomenon that we see today. It’s not less disturbing, but it’s not the new, main trend. And I was responding to the big picture. I wasn’t interested in how did everyone feel about the following tweet of Elon Musk, dada dada dada. That’s not what I was responding to, as I said—I think this is now time No. 4.

Rosenberg: Five.

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For as long as I have been feeding myself—which, for the record, is several decades now—I have been feeding myself fast. I bite big, in rapid succession; my chews are hasty and few. In the time it takes others to get through a third of their meal, mine is already gone. You could reasonably call my approach to eating pneumatic, reminiscent of a suction-feeding fish or a Roomba run amok.

Where my vacuuming mouth goes, advice to constrain it follows. Internet writers have declared slowness akin to slimness; self-described “foodies” lament that there’s “nothing worse” than watching a guest inhale a painstakingly prepared meal. There are even children’s songs that warn against the perils of eating too fast. My family and friends—most of whom have long since learned to avoid “splitting” entrees with me—often comment on my speed. “Slow down,” one of my aunts fretted at a recent meal. “Don’t you know that eating fast is bad for you?”

I do, or at least I have heard. Over the decades, a multitude of studies have found that people who eat faster are more likely to consume more calories and carry more weight; they’re also more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes. “The data are very robust,” says Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island; the evidence holds up when researchers look across geographies, genders, and age. The findings have even prompted researchers to conduct eating-speed interventions, and design devices—vibrating forks and wearable tech—that they hope will slow diners down.

But the widespread mantra of go slower probably isn’t as definitive or universal as it at first seems. Fast eaters like me aren’t necessarily doomed to metabolic misfortune; many of us can probably safely and happily keep hoovering our meals. Most studies examining eating speed rely on population-level observations taken at single points in time, rather than extended clinical trials that track people assigned to eat fast or slow; they can speak to associations between pace and certain aspects of health, but not to cause and effect. And not all of them actually agree on whether protracted eating boosts satisfaction or leads people to eat less. Even among experts, “there is no consensus about the benefits of eating slow,” says Tany E. Garcidueñas-Fimbres, a nutrition researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, who has studied eating rates.

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The idea that eating too fast could raise certain health risks absolutely does make sense. The key, experts told me, is the potential mismatch between the rate at which we consume nutrients and the rate at which we perceive and process them. Our brain doesn’t register fullness until it’s received a series of cues from the digestive tract: chewing in the mouth, swallowing down the throat; distension in the stomach, transit into the small intestine. Flood the gastrointestinal tract with a ton of food at once, and those signals might struggle to keep pace—making it easier to wolf down more food than the gut is asking for. Fast eating may also inundate the blood with sugar, risking insulin resistance—a common precursor to diabetes, says Michio Shimabukuro, a metabolism researcher at Fukushima Medical University, in Japan.

The big asterisk here is that a lot of these ideas are still theoretical, says Janine Higgins, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who’s studied eating pace. Research that merely demonstrates an association between fast eating and higher food intake cannot prove which observation led to the other, if there’s a causal link at all. Some other factor—stress, an underlying medical condition, even diet composition—could be driving both. “The good science is just completely lacking,” says Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University.

Scientists don’t even have universal definitions of what “slow” or “fast” eating is, or how to measure it. Studies over the years have used total meal time, chew speed, and other metrics—but all have their drawbacks. Articles sometimes point to a cutoff of 20 minutes per meal, claiming that’s how long the body takes to feel full. But Matthew Hayes, a nutritional neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized that as an oversimplification: Satisfaction signals start trickling into the brain almost immediately when we eat, and fullness thresholds vary among people and circumstances. Studies that ask volunteers to rate their own speeds have issues too: People often compare themselves with friends and family, who won’t represent the population at large. Eating rate can also fluctuate over a lifetime or even a day, depending on hunger, stress, time constraints, the pace of present company, even the tempo of background music.

In an evolutionary sense, all of us humans eat absurdly fast. We eat “orders of magnitude quicker” than our primate relatives, just over one hour a day compared with their almost 12, says Adam van Casteren, a feeding ecologist at the University of Manchester, in England. That’s thanks largely to how we treat our food: Fire, tools such as knives, and, more recently, chemical processing have softened nature’s raw ingredients, liberating us from “the prison of mastication,” as van Casteren puts it. Modern Western diets have taken that pattern to an extreme. They’re chock-full of ultra-processed foods, so soft and sugar- and fat-laden that they can be gulped down with nary a chew—which could be one of the factors that drive faster eating and chronic metabolic ills.

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In plenty of circumstances, slowing down will come with perks, not least because it could curb the risk of choking or excess gas. It could also temper blood-sugar spikes in people with diets heavy in processed foods—which whiz through the digestive tract, Roberts told me, though the healthier move would probably be eating fewer of those foods to begin with. And some studies focused on people with high BMI, including Melanson’s, have shown that eating slower can aid weight loss. But, she cautioned, those results won’t necessarily apply to everyone.

The main impact of leisurely eating may not even be about chewing rates or bite size per se, but about helping people eat more mindfully. “A lot of us are distracted when we eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “And so we are missing our hunger and satiety cues.” In countries such as the United States, people also have to wrestle with the immense pressure “to be done with lunch really fast,” Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Duke University, told me. Couple that with the fast foods we tend to reach for, and maybe it’s no shock that people don’t feel satisfied as they scarf down their meals.

The point here isn’t to demonize slow eating; in the grand scheme of things, it seems a pretty healthful thing to do. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that “eat slow” should be a blanket command. For people already eating a lot of high-fiber foods—which the body naturally processes ploddingly—Roberts doesn’t think sluggish chewing has much to add. The extolling of slow eating is, at best, “a half truth,” Hayes told me, that’s become easy to exploit.

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I do feel self-conscious when I’m the first person at the table to finish by a mile, and I don’t enjoy the stares and the comments about my “big appetite.” Certain super-slow eaters might get teased for making others wait, but they’re generally not getting chastised for ruining their health. When I asked experts if it was harmful to eat too slowly, several of them told me they’d never even considered it—and that the answer was probably no.

Still, for the most part, I’m happy to be the Usain Bolt of chewing. My hot foods stay hot, and my cold foods stay cold. I’ve intermittently tried slow eating over the years, deploying some of the usual tricks: smaller utensils, tinier bites, crunchier foods. I even, once, tried to count my chews. The biggest difference I felt, though, wasn’t fullness or more satisfaction; I just kind of hated the way that my mushy food lingered in my mouth.

Maybe if I’d stuck with slow eating, I would have lost some gassiness, choking risk, or weight—but also, I think, some joy. There’s something to speed-eating that can be plain old fun, akin to the rush of zooming down an empty highway in a red sports car. If I have just an hour-ish (or, knowing me, less) of eating each day, I’d prefer to relish every brisk, indecorous bite.

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