Before his stump speeches in his reelection campaign last year, Ron DeSantis liked to play a video montage that showed him being gratuitously rude to reporters at press conferences. It was petty, graceless—and warmly received by the Florida governor’s base. At a DeSantis rally in Melbourne, Florida, last fall, I watched the video from an elevated press pen alongside a gaggle of local reporters. The disconnect between the unflagging politeness that DeSantis’s young volunteers showed the press corps and the ostentatious douchebaggery of the candidate was stark.

Last night, though, Dunking Ron was replaced, briefly, by Conciliatory Ron. His decision to grant CNN’s Jake Tapper a sit-down interview in South Carolina was a reflection of how far behind Donald Trump he is trailing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But more than that, the interview was a rejection of one of the Florida governor’s most cherished principles: Mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt. DeSantis’s problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil. Now, belatedly, the Florida governor appears to have decided that the only way to save his campaign is to execute a pivot from peevishness.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

DeSantis played that montage in Melbourne, I think, because he had seen Trump railing against “fake news media” and leading his supporters in Two Minutes Hate sessions at his rallies, and he had drawn an entirely wrong conclusion. Despite being a smart guy, DeSantis apparently had not grasped that Trump’s routine was all for show. An act. All his life, Trump has phoned reporters to gossip. After leaving office, he welcomed multiple authors to Mar-a-Lago to spill his guts for their various books about his White House. Trump doesn’t hate the press; if anything, he likes it too much. This is a man who once pointed at the reporter Maggie Haberman and said, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.”

DeSantis, by contrast, seems to genuinely hate the media, with their intrusion and attention and awkward questions. He has an unfortunate habit of waggling his head like a doll on a dashboard when receiving an inquiry he considers beneath him; he did it on a visit to Japan just before he formally announced his presidential campaign, when someone had the temerity to ask whether he was running, which he obviously was. The move creates an odd effect where his eyeballs seem to stay in the same place as the rest of his head oscillates around them. It’s a startling tell that he’s irritated or uncomfortable. Please let me play poker against this man.

Facing Tapper, though, DeSantis kept the wobble in check, offering instead a performance of earnest dullness. He stonewalled over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and whether the ex-president should face criminal charges, claiming that he preferred to “focus on looking forward.” He admitted that many people who attack “wokeness” can’t even define the term. And he dodged a question on whether he would extend Florida’s new six-week abortion restrictions countrywide by asserting broadly that he would be a “pro-life president” and claiming that, in any case, a Democratic Congress would try to “nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth” and even permit “post-birth abortions.” (Tapper did not challenge this at the time but later clarified the meaning with the campaign, which said it was referring to medical care being denied to any fetus that survived the abortion procedure.) The governor’s only gaffe was claiming that “the proof was in the pudding” when it came to suggestions that his campaign was failing, which brought to mind an unkind story, denied by the candidate, that he once ate a chocolate dessert with three fingers straight from the tub.

Let’s not go as far as the CNN pundit Bakari Sellers, who claimed that in the interview, DeSantis “started to give the vibe that he could be president of the United States.” But this was a far more emollient version of the Florida governor than any journalist an inch to the left of Fox News has ever encountered before. That’s because he now needs establishment media to treat him as a credible threat to Trump: The polls are bad, the vibes are shifting, and his campaign laid off several staff members last week. Added to that, although DeSantis raised an impressive $20 million from mid-May to June, his reliance on high rollers has become a problem. “More than two-thirds of DeSantis’ money—nearly $14 million—came from donors who gave the legal maximum and cannot donate again,” an analysis by NBC found. Those rich backers are also more likely to act strategically than grassroots true believers; they don’t have any interest in backing a loser because they admire his principles. In a similar vein, the formerly supportive Murdoch empire’s ardor for the Florida governor has noticeably cooled in recent weeks.

Hence DeSantis’s venture out of the warm shallows of Fox News and weirdo partisan sites and into the shark-filled ocean of journalists who might actually ask him difficult questions such as “Who won the 2020 election?” He needs to prove he is more than just the most popular of the also-rans, yet the whole race still revolves around the former president. “Team DeSantis refuses to see the race for what it is,” the Washington Monthly’s politics editor, Bill Scher, tweeted recently. “The race is not about who has the best tax plan. The race is: Trump, yes or no.” Even the airing of the CNN interview offered further evidence of the problem: It was pushed later in the hour by a potential third Trump indictment. It also competed with news of the Michigan attorney general charging 16 people accused of filing false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

For DeSantis to recover, he must overcome four factors—three within his control and one outside it. The first is his squeamishness about criticizing Trump directly; you can’t defeat a bully if you look scared. The second is his decision to run to the right of Trump on several big cultural issues, including COVID policy, LBGTQ rights, and abortion. That strategy could be poison in the general election, but it’s not even paying off in the primary. The third is that DeSantis still looks lightweight on foreign and economic policy; he briefly minimized the importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, apparently to curry favor with Tucker Carlson, before revising his view. His book The Courage to Be Free and his campaign speeches are heavy on his pandemic policies and his fight against Disney, and notably light on pocketbook issues.

[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]

Granted, Trump has taken wildly inconsistent positions on any number of subjects and probably couldn’t identify Ukraine on a map. But that brings us to DeSantis’s fourth problem, the one he can’t seem to control: his personality. He is not naturally funny, entertaining, or charming. Just as he doesn’t understand the pro-wrestling-style kayfabe involved in Trump’s ostensible hatred of media outlets, he doesn’t understand that Trump’s regular flirtations with bigotry are softened with a knowing wink.

In recent days, the DeSantis team shared a video made by a Twitter user who goes by “Proud Elephant,” which attacked Trump for saying in a 2016 speech that he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The clip was nakedly homophobic, and I mean that literally—rippling male abs featured prominently, between approving citations of headlines about DeSantis passing “anti-trans” bills. In response, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, offered an even sharper verdict: “This is actually very gay.” Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing LGBTQ members of the party, tweeted: “Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory.” Take away the clownishness and the cartoonishness of Trump, and what is left is overtly, obviously repellent—even to many within the GOP.

Last night, DeSantis told Tapper that he had been consistently written off, whether in his first race to be governor or in his battle against Disney. He pointed out his proven fundraising abilities. He did not need to say, because everybody knows, that Trump might be in deep legal jeopardy by the time the election comes around. The race is still open. But by granting the interview at all, DeSantis conceded that his biggest problem is not that the establishment media hate him—as he regularly claims—but that his reluctance to confront Trump directly makes him all too easy to ignore.

Once known for calling others "the sick man of Europe", today's Russia has decidedly found itself in a military, economic, political, demographic, and even conceptual dead end, Aleksandar Đokić writes.

Attacks on Black Sea ports destroy 60,000 tonnes of grain and damage infrastructure, officials say.

One of the biggest challenges that a superpower faces is figuring out what it can and cannot do. When you are a global hegemon, you might believe that you can micromanage wars, orchestrate foreign countries’ diplomatic relations and internal politics, and precisely calibrate how others perceive you. That tendency is evident in the American approach to Ukraine. Although the U.S. has provided Ukraine some strong diplomatic support and a significant amount of modern weaponry, it has done so with a catch. To avoid provoking Russia too much, it seems, the Biden administration has been very restrained in offering additional types of weaponry—and therefore additional military capabilities—to Ukraine. Until recently, the U.S. has given noticeably mixed signals about when or even whether NATO, the West’s preeminent military alliance, might accept Ukraine into its ranks.

The overall presumption seems to be that the U.S. can give Ukraine just enough help—without going too far. Lesser powers than the United States tend to make simpler calculations: Pick a side and do whatever you can to help it win.

The twists and turns at last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, revealed American strategy making at its worst and best. The opening day could have been disastrous. The alliance’s official communiqué—which the U.S. presumably played a major role in shaping—said up front that Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” Yet the statement included a word salad of qualifications and obfuscations about whether Ukraine—the country now actually at war with Russia, and thus protecting many NATO states—would be allowed into the alliance. Though the statement said “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” it offered only the vaguest idea of when even the process bringing about that future might start. The key paragraph puzzlingly concluded that NATO “will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.” So Ukraine seemed to be being offered a deeply conditional chance to receive an invitation to possibly join NATO sometime in the unknown future. The implication was: We view Ukraine as a partner, but only up to a point.

[Read: In Vilnius, NATO got two wins and one big loss]

Ukrainian leaders were not happy. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is usually extremely complimentary of the U.S. and NATO, publicly blasted the statement after its wording became known. Describing its language as “unprecedented” and “absurd,” he expressed the reasonable fear that NATO was leaving open a “window of opportunity” to bargain away Ukraine’s membership in future negotiations with Russia. The hostility and intensity of the Ukrainian reaction seemed (strangely) to take the Biden administration by surprise—so much so that, according to The Washington Post, U.S. officials considered striking back by further watering down the statement’s support for Ukraine. This would have been a catastrophic blunder.

Yet after the U.S. unnecessarily provoked the Ukrainians, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and then considered making things worse by punishing them, the administration pivoted sharply and, on the second day at Vilnius, provided far more reassurance. President Joe Biden himself clarified that he believed that Ukraine could get into NATO quickly once the current fighting was over, and the Ukrainian armed forces received pledges of extensive military support. By the end, not only did the alliance seem far more united about Ukraine’s status but Ukrainian leaders were much happier.

The summit offered an important lesson in what the U.S. should and, more important, should not do. American leaders, like their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War, frequently act as if they are in control of other countries and the course of events. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. did not trust the South Vietnamese to defeat the Communists and progressively took over more and more of the fighting until the war was essentially between North Vietnam and the United States. So when the U.S. lost the desire to sustain the conflict and started withdrawing in the late 1960s, the South Vietnamese state that it had infantilized over the previous decade was incapable of preserving its own independence. Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. made a similar error in Afghanistan.

America’s approach toward the war in Ukraine bespeaks some understanding of the limits of American power. The Biden administration, with seemingly strong bipartisan backing, has studiously avoided Americanizing the war by introducing U.S. combat forces into the fray. It has provided significant support for Ukraine with weapons, training, intelligence, and the like—but the Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying. These limitations on U.S. involvement are a positive development, heralding a less intrusive form of U.S. intervention in future conflicts.  

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The future of American warfare is unfolding in Ukraine]

Still, the United States must also understand that it cannot dictate the course of the war. Some American decisions about which weapons to supply—or not—seem designed to constrain Ukraine’s options, and very much at times seem to be aimed at trying to direct a certain outcome for the war.

The U.S. has been providing Ukraine with systems that are powerful but have limited range: 155 mm howitzers, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System equipment, anti-radar missiles, armored fighting vehicles, and anti-aircraft systems. These are effective in a defensive war but provide little or no capacity to strike deep inside enemy (or enemy-controlled) territory. They would be of little use, for instance, in helping Ukraine liberate Russian-occupied Crimea. In response to Ukrainian requests for longer-range systems, the U.S. has either slow-walked them (as in the case of F-16 fighters) or declined to provide them (as is currently the case with Army Tactical Missile Systems).

This kind of carefully circumscribed support might make sense if the U.S. were also trying to broker a peace deal with Russia. Indeed, it has heightened Ukrainian fears that Washington sees control over Crimea or even other parts of occupied Ukraine as potential bargaining chips in future talks with Russia. In practice, America’s restraint has backfired. Ukraine has been forced to fight a longer and costlier war than it otherwise would have. Because they lacked the option of hitting strategic targets well behind Russian lines, Ukrainian military planners have opted this summer for a slow, deliberate, wastage campaign against entrenched Russian forces, in preparation for a direct counterassault in the future. European countries—particularly the United Kingdom, which has provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles—have been more supportive of extending the Ukrainian military’s range.

The U.S. approach has also backfired on the Biden administration by forcing it earlier this month to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions—something the White House surely wished it never would have had to do. But in its slow, grinding war, Ukraine has used up massive amounts of ammunition faster than anticipated. As stocks have run low, cluster munitions—which break into smaller pieces that heighten the risk of injuring children and other civilians—became perhaps the only ordnance available that could make a difference in the campaign against Russia.

The best thing the U.S. can do to end the war is give Ukrainians the support they need to push the Russian military out of their country. Even if Washington wanted to, it can’t force Ukraine to agree to a specific peace deal (such as handing over Crimea). If the U.S. cut back aid significantly, that would not necessarily make Ukraine give up. More likely it would lead to an even longer and bloodier war, because Ukraine would fight on, with the support of European states that believe more fervently than the U.S. does that Russia must be defeated.

The real choice the U.S. faces is whether to help the Ukrainian military win the war in the quickest, most efficient manner possible, with the smallest number of dead on each side. This would be both the wisest and the most humane outcome. But it would require an American recognition that the Ukrainians are the ones in combat, and that the U.S. cannot always be in control.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend a BRICS nations summit in South Africa in August, the country's presidency said on Wednesday, ending months of speculation.

Air defence systems in Odesa region repelling a Russian air attack and residents have been urged to stay in shelters.