When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”  

Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.

The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

This theory underwrote the whole edifice of Christian contemporary music, which aimed to replace a particularly powerful avenue for negative messages. One of my running jokes for many years has been that all Top 40 music is effectively Christian contemporary music now; American Idol confirmed the hegemony of the “praise band” vocal style. More clear is the fact that all mainstream criticism—especially of film and television—is evangelical in form, if not in content. Every artwork is imagined to have a clear message; the portrayal of a given behavior or belief is an endorsement and a recommendation; consumption of artwork with a given message will directly result in the behaviors or beliefs portrayed. This is one of the few phenomena where the “both sides” cliché is true: Left-wing critics are just as likely to do this as their right-wing opponents. For every video of a right-wing provocateur like Ben Shapiro decrying the woke excesses of Barbie, there is a review praising the Mattel product tie-in as a feminist fable.

Here, however, I am more concerned with the critical practices of my comrades on the left. Among leftist publications, Jacobin stands out for its reductive and moralizing cultural coverage. Addressing the other major movie of this past weekend, for instance, the critic Eileen Jones worried in a recent column, “If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency.” Sadly, instead of an educational presentation on nuclear war, film audiences will instead find a biopic that takes some liberties with its subject’s life and character for the sake of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Jones finds more to like in Barbie, despite “the familiar, toothless, you-go-girl pseudo-feminist pieties that Mattel has been monetizing for decades, alongside the nostalgic how-can-our-consumer-products-be-bad affirmations of Barbie as some sort of magic, wholesomely progressive uniter of generations of mothers and daughters.”

This trend is not limited to one publication. It is pervasive in online culture, above all on social media. For instance, over coffee on the morning after the epic Barbenheimer Friday, I learned some disturbing facts about Oppenheimer on Twitter. At least one viewer was worried that the film about the man who created the nuclear bomb did not include any Japanese characters. Indeed, it did not even directly portray his invention’s horrific consequences. Surely this aesthetic choice was meant to minimize his actions by rendering his victims invisible. (An article in New York magazine drew attention to the same absence.) I also learned that the area surrounding Los Alamos was actually cleared of Indigenous and Hispanic residents, another bit of history that is effectively erased by the film.

[John Hendrickson: Oppenheimer nightmares? You’re not alone. ]

Let’s imagine, though, that those complaints had been anticipated and addressed. Let’s imagine an entire subplot of a family going about their business in Hiroshima. We get to know and like them, to relate to them as our fellow human beings. Then, shockingly, they are incinerated by a nuclear blast. One can already hear the complaints. If the family were portrayed as too morally upstanding, it would be a dehumanizing portrayal that idealizes them as perfect victims. If they had moral flaws, the film would be subtly suggesting that they deserved their fate. And either way, the film would be attacked for offering up their suffering as a spectacle for our enjoyment. The same would go for the displaced population of Los Alamos—by portraying them as passive victims with no agency, critics would surely complain, the film would be reinscribing white authority.

Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content.  And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism. During that dark era of Soviet history, writers and artists were expected to subscribe to the standards of socialist realism—which, instead of portraying the sordid and brutal reality of the present, anticipated the future reality of socialism by showing heroic workers building a utopian society. Those who fell short of those ideological expectations could expect a personal phone call from Comrade Stalin, if not worse. By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.

To be clear, I don’t want to defend Oppenheimer in any way. I have not actually seen the film. Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting. Like most film and TV viewers, I read reviews because I want to decide whether or not to see a given movie or show, or else to think it through from a fresh perspective. For example, I note that Oppenheimer is very long—how is the pacing? Does it maintain a clear focus throughout, or does it indulge the common vice of biopics by trying to cram too much in? The type of critical literature that concerns me does not address such basic aesthetic questions, or does so only incidentally.

Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences than that they are somehow reading their politics off Succession, for example (“Welp, I guess rich people are good now. Better vote Republican!”). Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.

This story was adapted from a post on Adam Kotsko's blog, An Und Für Sich.

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

[Read: Eat, pray, pander]

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

[Read: The companies that are killing creativity]

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly dimmed and been replaced by an existential hangover of the first order.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

The most gutting stretch of Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer biopic occurs when the great scientist, played by Cillian Murphy, begins to experience the disenchantment that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As he watches two bombs rumble away on trucks from his desert lab toward Japan, any illusion that their terrible power is under his control is punctured. Hiroshima was bombed three weeks after the Trinity test. In the film, a sickened Oppenheimer averts his gaze from photos of its disfigured victims. Like Nolan’s camera, he cannot bear to look.

Oppenheimer would later say that through the bomb, physicists had come to know sin. Having plucked a dangerous fruit from the tree of knowledge, they consigned themselves—and all of humanity—to a fallen world, tormented by the constant possibility of self-extinction. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Oppenheimer consoled, or perhaps deceived, himself that his invention’s apocalyptic potential could and would be contained, in part through his efforts.

Oppenheimer had reason to believe in his influence. The public had embraced his personal legend: Inflamed by a fear of a nuclear-armed Hitler, he had ventured into the invisible realm of atoms and returned with a tremendous power, capable of stopping a war cold and returning sons to their mothers. Honors were heaped upon him. In Nolan’s film, we watch as Oppenheimer is courted for a plush role: director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the academic home of Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer also chaired the committee tasked with advising the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. During the latter half of the 1940s, his pronouncements on matters of science had a singular gravitas. “Certainly he knows as much about the potential of atomic energy as any living American,” reads an editor’s note atop his essay for The Atlantic.

What did he do with this outsize voice? He opposed the development of a much more powerful, second-generation atom weapon—the hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the “super”—in part because he was concerned it would accelerate an arms race with the Soviet Union. He also lent his prestige and credibility to ongoing efforts to avoid that arms race altogether. He helped draft the proposals that evolved into the Baruch Plan, an arms-control regime that the United States put before the United Nations. Under the latter’s direction, all countries would forfeit their atomic-weapons programs, and atomic energy would be a global collective good, administered by a centralized regulatory body at the UN, over which no country would enjoy a veto.

[Read: We have no nuclear strategy]

After the final failure of these proposals at the UN, in 1948, Oppenheimer turned, as one does, to The Atlantic. His essay is a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief. Titled “The Open Mind,” it lays out Oppenheimer’s account of the back-and-forth over arms-control proposals. Soviet leaders had voted against them, but their response had not been wholly negative. They agreed that all countries should dismantle their atomic-weapons programs and that atomic energy should fall under international oversight. But they objected, perhaps understandably, to America’s insistence on keeping its weapons program running until the new system was functional. They wanted President Harry Truman to disarm first, a condition that he could not abide.

During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s powers of foresight had failed him. However accurate his calculations concerning the innards of the atom, he’d misjudged what would happen geopolitically after he and his colleagues wrenched it apart. Out of naivete, or the expedient blindness of ambition, or some combination of the two, he may have believed that he could stop its further use after the Nazis had been defeated, or that the terrifying spectacle of the bomb would eventually lead to a renunciation of ever larger weapons and wars.

In 1949, he understood that no such renunciation was in store. “We see no clear course before us that would persuade the governments of the world to join with us” in atomic disarmament, he wrote. This time, the implications were obvious, and they implicated America, which, as Oppenheimer laments, “responded by adopting some of the very measures that we had hoped might be universally renounced.” The mass manufacture of the atomic bomb was under way and American scientists had clear orders to put the new physics in service of even more destructive weapons.

Oppenheimer saw a cosmically bleak arms race taking shape, and this time his  foresight proved accurate. Within months, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and only three years later, in 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb roughly 500 times as powerful as the one that had largely destroyed Nagasaki. The Soviets followed suit a few years later, and by the time of Oppenheimer’s death, in 1967, the two countries had nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons between them, many of them set on a hair trigger.

[Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]

Oppenheimer knew that he’d helped to conjure this world into existence. He sought to prepare our readers for its horrors. In the main, his advice was to not lose hope, and to remember that our imagination of the future is limited. Oppenheimer was perhaps heartened by the quantum world, shot through as it is with uncertainty, that had captivated him in his youth. He seemed to draw strength from a belief that the macro world of human affairs is likewise contingent, such that nothing about our fate is ever settled.

Oppenheimer quotes from a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave in Baltimore three years into the Civil War. At the beginning of that conflict, few expected that “domestic slavery would be much affected,” Lincoln said, and yet it had been. Reality is unpredictable; it will surprise you. Lincoln reminded Oppenheimer that surprises swing both ways. A world that appears to be fallen can sometimes veer toward moral progress.

We have seen such swerves before, even in the nuclear realm. By the 1980s, enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons appeared to be a fact of life on planet Earth. In 1986, the Soviet Union’s stockpile reached an all-time high of about 40,000 warheads, and the United States had more than 20,000. Very few people imagined that the end of the Cold War was imminent. Nor could many have guessed that in 1991, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in an extraordinary sequence of agreements that shrank the two countries’ arsenals to less than a quarter of their previous size.

Bush and Gorbachev were wise to seize the day, because that era’s peace—and its clean two-party strategic symmetry—proved ephemeral. The specter of nuclear annihilation has since returned with force to the global collective psyche. Vladimir Putin has invoked it in speeches about his invasion of Ukraine. China has built up an arsenal that may be large enough to destroy every major American city.

[Read: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

As Oppenheimer well understood, there is no technological reason that world-threatening stockpiles of nuclear weapons will not be with us for hundreds of thousands of years. To keep large numbers of them in place for that long, in a strategic setting where any small exchange could very easily become a large one, is to play a fool’s game. No one should feel safe because seven decades have passed without another incident of nuclear warfare; that sample size is too small.

Beyond advising hope, Oppenheimer didn’t offer much guidance as to how we might dismantle the sword of Damocles that he helped to string up above human civilization. A notorious dandy and eloquent impromptu speaker, he was always drawn to style; in his Atlantic essay, he invokes it in a higher form. “It is style,” he wrote, “which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light.”

The problem Oppenheimer had in mind was arms control. He asked that those who negotiate on America’s behalf carry out their work in a spirit of openness. He asked that they appeal to the reasoning minds of those who sit across the table. He appears to have believed—or to have wanted to believe—that a widespread adoption of this style might be enough to set into motion a new evolutionary step in geopolitics, through which the world’s major powers might come to a shared understanding that peace is the highest wisdom. To this end, he counseled patience. Time and nature must be allowed to do their work, he noted. Seven decades on, it looks to be slow work indeed.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment. On assignment for The New York Times, I’d agreed to stay in a hotel room for seven days (leaving only for a brief daily swim) while watching Russian state television. Three monitors were arrayed in front of my bed constantly blasting the state-owned Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 networks, as well as the Gazprom-owned NTV. By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality.

Now, slightly more than eight years later, I have decided to replicate this experiment. On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic. But in some way, Russians were preparing for the bloodshed of innocent Ukrainians as far back as 2014, if not earlier. The images of Ukrainians as a bunch of Nazis hoodwinked by the West were readily presented on Russian television. Back then, I did not want to believe they could lead to the massacres of Bucha and Irpin. Today, I know better.

Day 1

I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey. But I am not here to look out on the World Trade Center tower or the New Museum right below the hotel. I am here to suffer and learn. I flick on each monitor in turn: Channel 1, Rossiya 1 (broadcast outside Russia as RTR-Planeta), and NTV. I settle into my large, comfortable bed; order a pisco sour to be sent to my room (the hotel’s restaurant is Peruvian); and rub my eyes in anticipation. It begins.

The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.

[Read: Putin is caught in his own trap]

A lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News. But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well—or, at least, he was back in April. On tonight’s Kto Protiv, Sweden and Finland are presented as having been coerced into joining NATO. A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. No evidence is cited for any of this; it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.”  

On NTV, another staple of Russian television appears: the dysfunctional-family showcase. “They beat me, tied up my hands, starved me,” a woman from Volgograd cries. “My grandmother beat my face with a metal stick.” The beaten woman, now in late-middle age, is the daughter of a mother of five, who rejected all or most of her children after giving birth to them. The elderly mother who abandoned her children is presented. A woman with a piece of jewelry around her neck resembling a thick chain screams from the audience: “Why did you give birth to so many children if you didn’t have a husband or money? So that they would be orphans?”

Meanwhile, on Channel 1, a black-and-white documentary shows Khrushchev greeting a group of cosmonauts. The glories of the Soviet past on one screen are contrasted with the realities of the present on another. You may ask why a government obsessed with propaganda would be showing programs about broken families. One reason is that audiences of all nations enjoy watching their fellow citizens in pain. Another is to remind the people that life in the lower depths is a time-honored tradition. The show is presented by two dapper male hosts who are part of a well-trod Russian-TV theme: Provincials in distress are interviewed by stylish urban hosts, as if they are Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times. Subconsciously, shows like these teach poorer and older Russians (the kind of people who regularly watch state television) that they should be ashamed before their betters and that they cannot expect much from life or their immediate families.  

“My husband drank,” the elderly negligent mother explains on NTV. She was a tram driver. Her husband worked in a factory. “He went to prison for three years for stealing a coat. Then he divorced me.” Whereas the manned space flight on Channel 1 was a great accomplishment, NTV is presenting the eternal Russia, which will remain when the glories of the past are left to the history books.

The old woman crawls on the floor. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cries to her children. Now we have left the pages of Chekhov and arrived in Dostoyevsky Land. Some of the audience is in tears. “My fate has been so difficult!” the old mother cries out to them, and to her many abandoned children.

On Rossiya 1, the topics of Finland and American transgender people are not yet exhausted. On one screen, men are screaming about geopolitics, while on another women are screaming about their destroyed personal lives.

The show about the dysfunctional family cuts to a commercial for a fast-food chain that has replaced McDonald’s after the sanctions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were imposed. The copycat McDonald’s is offering an unconvincing-looking “beeeeg speshal roast beef,” as an announcer describes it.

On Rossiya 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is giving one of his usual bombastic speeches: “They want to cancel our country, as they like to say. They’re trying to cancel our country for pursuing its own politics. The West has long groomed Ukraine … Just like Germany invaded Russia.” The television shows another Nazi parade, a long sea of swastikas and chanting in German.  

Later on the channel, we see images of Russian President Vladimir Putin striding through gilded Kremlin halls, while U.S. President Joe Biden is shown tripping on the stairs of Air Force One. It’s an advertisement for a show titled Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.

It’s only 9 p.m., but I am exhausted. I have drained two glasses of pisco sour and eaten my ceviche from the hotel’s restaurant, and am blindly watching a movie called Razplata (“Payback”), which seems to be about a drunken man who beats his wife. My vision is getting hazy and my eyes can barely see what’s happening on the three monitors, but I can sense that it is a triptych of a nation that has no idea what it is supposed to be.

Day 2

“Not my King!” The day’s news begins with anti-monarchist demonstrations in the U.K. “At least no one is throwing eggs at him like last time,” the NTV announcer intones as King Charles III is booed. In addition to the constant footage of anti-war and pro-Russian demonstrations in Germany, Russian TV is obsessed with the perfidy of the “Anglo-Saxons.” Here the Royal Family is criticized for a variety of sins, such as colonialism in Africa and the 3 million pounds King Charles supposedly received from a Qatari sheikh. Although Russian propaganda normally skews far right, its producers are able to pivot quickly from feigning horror at transgendered people to promoting a kind of Soviet-flavored anti-colonialism. Surely something will appeal to Misha from Murmansk or Vanya from Vladivostok, or any of the more than 100 million viewers who spend an average of almost four hours a day digesting this spicy gruel.

After the booing of King Charles, the national weather forecast features temperatures in Donetsk and Melitopol in addition to Yalta, all cities stolen from Ukraine. I note that the city of Kherson, liberated by the Ukrainian army, does not make an appearance.

It’s the weekend, and Channel 1 is showing an endless run of old Soviet movies and army choirs singing about glory. But NTV is skewing younger with a show about women being stalked by ex-lovers. “He’s a professional boxer and he punched me several times,” a woman says of her former boyfriend. “He has a very aggressive nature.” A model is being blackmailed over sex videos by her ex. “Smartphones have made stalking easy,” the announcer intones. “He threatened to knock my teeth out,” another woman says, and we are treated to an array of horrifying bruises. The program notes that stalking of exes by spurned lovers is a problem in the U.S. and Germany as well.

This may be true, but after watching Russian television for less than 24 hours, I am starting to see a through line here, which is the consistent presence of violence in Russian shows, usually committed against women and children. The verb meaning “to hit” comes up constantly, which makes sense in a country where men encounter horrific hazing in the military as well as a cruel and violent penal system. In 2017 the Duma even passed a law decriminalizing domestic abuse that does not result in the victim being treated in a hospital.

There’s an ad break for a male anti-impotence drug called “the Emperor’s Secret,” supposedly made in China out of various fungi. “The Emperor’s Secret can be mixed with alcohol,” the announcer helpfully advises the Russian male.

Next up, NTV introduces an American named John McIntyre who fought with the Ukrainians but then fled to Russia. He has been described as mentally unstable by fellow soldiers and commanders and was allegedly pushed out of the Ukrainian army for incompetence, but in Russia he is a prized asset, proudly wearing his Che Guevara baseball cap and T-shirt. The program intimates that it was a right-wing Ukrainian battalion that caused the well-known massacres in Bucha and Irpin, and not the Russian soldiers whose campaign of rape, execution, and terror was well documented.

“Are there people like you in the States?” the interviewer asks McIntyre. “There are many pro-Russian Americans,” the young man replies. “American intelligence, they own the media machines. Most people watch CNN, but Fox has the most objective positions.”

“Their voices are getting louder!” an announcer on a Rossiya 1 newscast booms as older Germans are shown marching in a pro-Russia demonstration. “NATO out of Ukraine!” they chant. “U.S. and CIA out of Ukraine!” Afterward, an attractive young female correspondent brings cakes to Russian soldiers at the front. The war may be brutal, but, for Misha from Murmansk, it can also be sexy and exciting.

Day 3

Channel 1 is stepping up its game in the propaganda Olympics with a “documentary” series called The Age of the USSR, which blends animation and old footage. The Russian language, the announcer tells us, has no word for “loser,” but instead has neudachnik, literally “unlucky person.” “The loser is guilty for what he hasn’t achieved,” the announcer explains. “The neudachnik is not guilty of a lack of achievement, just a lack of fortune, and he deserves sympathy.” Hence, Russia, a country of poor roads, decaying houses, and abysmal life expectancy, is not a nation of losers who lack achievement, but simply those upon whom fortune has not smiled. In other words: Don’t blame Putin for the mess we live in.

The program then pivots to Ukraine. “The history of Ukraine begins with the Slavs,” the announcer says. “The territory of Ukraine passed between Catholic and Orthodox hands. ‘Ukraina’ means ‘the edge of.’ The word first appears in the 12th century.” The program takes the view, per Putin’s own “academic work” on the subject, that Ukraine has no history of its own, only the common history of the Slavs. “Their national character is Russian, only in the south [meaning Ukraine] it comes with increased aggression … ability for betrayal, and infantilism.”

And then the genocidal rhetoric is amped up with an animation showing a half-naked drunk Ukrainian in a pigsty (the actual pig is snorting nearby). The Ukrainian is shown with a haircut featuring a long lock of hair. This hair symbolism refers to the khokhol, a slur that Russians use against Ukrainians. It is equivalent to the worst kind of anti-Semitic and racist slurs. The image of the drunken Ukrainian with his khokhol haircut is no less eliminationist than the “hook-nosed Jew controlling the world” imagery of the Third Reich.

Meanwhile on NTV, more German grannies are chanting “for peace” in a pro-Russia march, participating, whether they realize it or not, in what amounts to their own Nuremberg rally.

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

As the day continues, NTV presents a documentary entitled I Was Zelensky’s Filth. A young imprisoned woman is accused of trying to bomb Mariupol’s city hall, after the battered city held a sham election in favor of joining Russia. “Mariupol is a place of glory for Russian forces and shame for the Kiev führer,” the announcer declares. That führer, of course, is none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, a Jew whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. The show visits the apartment of the supposed terrorist, which is hilariously staged with an American flag and Nazi memorabilia. Can Sasha from Samara possibly believe this nonsense?

The program breaks for a commercial for Prostricum 100, another erectile-dysfunction supplement. The bottle seems to feature the drawing of a prostate. Meanwhile, on Rossiya 1 news, we learn that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz has “fully committed himself to America. Germany can’t deal with the rising price of energy. The Greens are to blame. Germany will be turned into Kenya soon.”

Geopolitics takes up an inordinate amount of airtime on Russian TV. Russian viewers are probably subjected to more images of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen than their American or European counterparts. The anger at the West is palpable and, as with everything in Russia, deeply misogynist. An NTV host calls Von der Leyen “Macron’s girlfriend” and notes that she has dry skin.

Meanwhile, Russia’s new Best Friend Forever is Xi Jinping of China. He is presented as a virile and well-armed world leader. Many programs feature Chinese jets seemingly headed for Taiwan. Perhaps to make up for Russia’s increasing vassal status in relation to China, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is presented as Russia’s own pet vassal and Putin’s funny sidekick. “Belarus comes to us so many times,” a presenter jokes, “they painted a red carpet on the airport tarmac instead of rolling one out.” (Since June, Lukashenko has gotten a spring back in his step after supposedly mediating the end to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted putsch.)

Rossiya 1 is broadcasting Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. In today’s episode, Putin visits a train factory! The workers at the factory are shown losing their ability to speak in front of their leader, quaking before the “boss,” as the presenters call him. “Don’t hurry,” Putin says kindly to a worker who looks like he has soiled his pants. “We’re just talking.”

Day 4

There is a sadness to watching this much Russian television. I have started drinking earlier and have switched from pisco sours to vodka martinis. A part of me wants to die.

But not before I catch Maria Butina’s new show on Channel 1. Butina is famous for being arrested and jailed as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the United States. Once she was deported from the U.S., she became a member of Russia’s parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program. (“Today’s program is brought to you by Erecton Activ. Every woman wants to be near a strong man, strong in every way. Only 2,999 rubles.”)

Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do.

Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed “hysterically” when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. “What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?” Butina asks. A “psychiatrist” appears and says, “Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.”

Donald Trump, whom Russian television adores, is shown calling her “unstable.” “What an awful woman,” the former U.S. president says.

“Hillary Clinton,” the chyron reads. “A shark floating belly up?”

A so-called expert on America is produced to diagnose Hillary’s early years: “She wore big glasses, she had terrible teeth, and then she threw herself at Bill Clinton.” But Hillary is just the appetizer to the entrée of evil that really controls the strings of world government. That man is of course George Soros. “He helped the Gestapo arrest his own co-religionists and then take away their own possessions,” an announcer says to chilling background music. “George Soros. The spider.”

Of course, the image of Jew as vermin or as a spider holding the world in its web is typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda. But as I watch Butina’s show, I remember that my own grandfather was a Jew born in Ukraine who died fighting Germany’s fascist armies during the siege of Leningrad. A decade after his death, another fascist named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in the city my grandfather died defending. Watching Butina and her garden-variety anti-Semitism feels like a terrible desecration of his memory.

Meanwhile, on NTV’s news program, Elon Musk declares in a clip, “All news is propaganda. People have to decide for themselves.” Russian state television could not have said it better.

Day 5

I can almost taste my freedom. The weather is improving, spring is finally here, and all of New York seems to be beckoning me to escape my luxurious prison cell. But I also feel overwhelming disgust, as if there’s a thick layer of dirt behind my shirt collar.

I watch a show called For Men / For Women, in which a woman is attacked on the street by her ex-husband, who, with the aid of his relatives, also kidnaps her little son. “I fell on the asphalt, and he is holding me down and beating me,” the woman says. “I lost my breast milk. I went to the police. The police didn’t do anything.”

“Nikolai drank a lot and still drinks a lot,” the woman continues. “He gets aggressive and he takes it out on people. I was his victim and had to obey him.”

The poor woman’s lament reminds me of the show I watched a few days prior (it now seems like a lifetime ago) about women being stalked and beaten by their ex-lovers. “He has a very aggressive nature,” a woman said of her former lover, the professional boxer. As does Russia in 2023. So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the “very aggressive nature” taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world. Whether on the airwaves or, perhaps someday, at the Hague, the evidence has been clearly presented.

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.

In 1978, Bohdan Klymchak walked out of the Soviet Union and asked for political asylum in Iran. Klymchak was Ukrainian, born near Lviv. In 1949, his family had been deported to Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, after the arrest of his brother as a “Ukrainian nationalist.” In 1957, Klymchak himself was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation”; even after his release, he remained under constant surveillance. After he escaped across the border, and after the Iranians sent him back, Klymchak wound up in a camp called Perm-36, one of the last large political prisons in the Soviet Union. He remained there until 1990, as one of the last Soviet political prisoners.

In the three decades since Klymchak was freed, a lot has happened. Perm-36 became a thriving museum and site of remembrance, receiving tens of thousands of visitors, including groups of schoolchildren, every year. Then, in 2014, it was shut down again. Russian ex-prisoners and historians published memoirs and histories of the Gulag, held conferences, created exhibitions, made documentaries. Then, over the past several years, their organizations were banned, and their leaders were exiled or ignored.

[Read: War and consequences]

Today, a new version of that same Gulag system is being reconstructed, especially for Ukrainians. Journalists, war-crimes investigators, and specialized groups such as the Reckoning Project have already documented arrests, murders, prisons, and torture chambers in Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. Slowly, it is becoming clear that these are not just ad hoc responses to Ukrainian resistance. They are part of a long-term plan: the construction of a sprawling system of camps and punishment colonies—a new Gulag. The Associated Press reported yesterday that it has evidence of at least 40 prison camps in Russia and Belarus, as well as 63 formal and informal prisons in occupied Ukraine, containing perhaps 10,000 Ukrainians. A few are prisoners of war: Gulagu.net, a Russian prison-monitoring group, has evidence of Ukrainian soldiers in Russian prisons who arrive without proper papers or POW status. But most of the Ukrainian prisoners are civilians who have been arrested or abducted in occupied territory.

As in the Gulag during its heyday, slave labor is one purpose of these camps. Some Ukrainians in captivity are being forced to dig trenches and build fortifications for Russian soldiers, and to dig mass graves. The Gulag was also designed to instill terror in the broader population, and the new camp system works that way too. Civilians are imprisoned and tortured for minor offenses—AP cites, as one example, the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle—or sometimes for no reason at all. The Reckoning Project has collected many examples of Russian soldiers becoming paranoid and interrogating ordinary people, many of them volunteers for civic organizations, about their connections to the Ukrainian security services, the CIA, or even George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. The AP describes one civilian captive from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region who was pulled from her cell, driven around town, and told to identify people with pro-Ukrainian sympathies. In 1937–38, during the era of the Great Purges, Soviet secret police were equally paranoid and equally terrified, not only of ordinary people but also of one another. Recent infighting suggests that Russian military forces may reach that stage in occupied Ukraine too.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

Like the Soviet Gulag, the new Russian camp network is not temporary, and unless the Ukrainians can take back their territory, it will expand. AP has obtained a Russian document, dated this past January, that describes plans to build 25 new prison colonies and six detention centers in occupied Ukrainian territory by 2026. Like the Soviet Gulag, this system is chaotic and lawless. People have been condemned without trial. Their documents have been lost. Sometimes they are kept for no reason, or released for no reason. Their relatives receive no information about them and cannot find or contact them. Eventually, they may also be forced to the front lines. That is certainly the fate of Russian prisoners in Russia, many of whom are now told to sign mobilization papers, and beaten and tortured if they refuse. As in the old days, it seems as if Russian prison directors have been given quotas, numbers of prisoners they need to supply in order to fulfill some central plan.

The historical echoes can’t be an accident. The KGB once taught new recruits to study the institution’s history, and the Russian security services clearly do the same: They are carrying out repressive policies that “worked” in the Soviet days, that kept people like Bohdan Klymchak and his brother behind bars. But that history also explains Ukraine’s response. Anyone who wonders why the Ukrainians keep fighting, why they keep asking for more weapons, why they become frustrated by slow-moving transatlantic diplomacy, why they seem angry or “unreasonable,” should remember this: The Gulag was supposed to belong to the past. Now it belongs to the present. If Ukrainians don’t want it to be part of their future, they will have to physically remove these camps—and the people who run them—from Ukrainian land. Until they have succeeded, no help will ever be enough.

In the further reaches of my town of Cavendish, in southeastern Vermont, is a byway—you can hardly call it a road—charismatically named Chaos Turnpike. Right now, it is washed out by the storm that just hit New England. Because other, more traveled dirt roads in the district are also washed out, a section of the town’s inhabitants is currently cut off.

Not a few rural New Englanders face the same situation. In fact, some of the more “metropolitan” folk have fared far worse: Within a 20-mile circumference of where I live, houses and cars have been entirely inundated in the medium-size towns of Ludlow, Weston, and Londonderry.

Cavendish—best-known for Phineas Gage, a railway worker who survived an extraordinary brain injury here in 1848, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who moved here as an exiled dissident Soviet writer in 1977—has endured several such incidents. Heavy rains over the Green Mountains run eastward toward the Connecticut Valley, and Cavendish is in the way. Chaos Turnpike, in my imperfect following of local lore as a relative newcomer, was bulldozed by the National Guard during the floods of 1973 to create a new passage to the same homesteads that are again stranded now. I like to think that its naming involved a certain dry Vermonter wit, but I have no idea.

[Read: Boston is losing snow wicked fast]

That year, 1973, was when my New York–emigrant in-laws bought the house up a dirt road where my wife and I now live. She recalls visiting her parents then, after the deluge, and driving her VW Beetle across the Guardsmen’s precarious, improvised wooden bridge to get over the usually mild trickle of a brook that had been transformed into a torrent. Yesterday afternoon, it was a torrent once again, cresting the crossroad and threatening to wash out the culvert—as it had done in 2011 during Storm Irene.

A few years ago, I attended a local amateur-dramatics production staged in the gorgeous barn of Glimmerstone, the village’s mansion of faced local stone and gingerbread wood trim that once belonged to the mill owner. The play was, it must be said, of mainly documentary interest—recalling the human drama of the 1927 Great Flood. These disasters are promised as once-in-a-century events. Yet here we are: 1927, 1973, 2011, 2023 … which suggests a progression, not a random 100-year distribution.

Everyone here knows this. On Monday, that same mill building on the river—a rare prosperous postindustrial survivor—was evacuated because of rising water and imminent flooding. Whatever one’s personal politics, there’s no climate denial here. The winters are warmer; the summers are wetter and more humid. The median age of Vermonters is among the highest in the U.S. Yes, humans are unreliable witnesses to incremental change, but this change is not all that gradual—and living memory tells people everything they need to know.

Today, UTVs—utility task vehicles: ugly bugs, smaller than cars, with all-wheel drive, raised suspension, and smelly emissions—were racing around our roads. I don’t love them as recreational vehicles, but right now I can see their usefulness. The one belonging to my local fire department took off yesterday morning with a couple of chain saws and some forestry implements, followed by our assistant chief in his own tractor with a backhoe, to try to reopen Chaos Turnpike. You cannot but admire the Yankee can-do spirit: Who needs the state or federal government when you have the problem in front of you and the tools in your hands? But Chaos Turnpike may need the National Guard after all.

Or the Army Corps of Engineers. Yesterday, our governor, Phil Scott, declared the state’s predicament “historic and catastrophic.” And he warned us that the crisis is “nowhere near over.” I’ll say. He meant, of course, that the ground is saturated and more rain is on the way. But on Monday I watched as the Black River in full spate washed at the expensively repaired blacktop of Route 131. Before the whole roadway eastward along the river to the aptly named Downers junction was resurfaced this past year, you could still identify the fresh sections—hundreds of feet long—that had been entirely relaid after the dire damage of Irene.

[John Hendrickson: Boiling the ocean]

Vermont is a beautiful state; that’s why people come to visit. A few weeks ago, the rest stops on Route 131 were occupied by the pickup trucks of fly-fishers here to catch trout—generously stocked by the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department for that purpose. But down by the river is also commonly where the cheap land is, and where the trailer parks are. The second-homers’ houses generally are the ones with a view; the year-rounders’ ones are those that get washed off their foundations. If you were close enough to the river on Monday, above the roar of millions of gallons of raging brown murk, you could hear the uncanny kerthunk of huge rocks being smashed into one another, like a terrifying subaquatic game of pinball played by angry rain gods.

A road destroyed by heavy rain and flood in Cavendish, Vermont (Matt Seaton)

After pumping out my basement on Monday, I lent my trash pump to a gentleman who lives backing onto the Black River in town. He’s a military veteran who wore a T-shirt saying he now worked for his grandchildren, and nothing on his feet. I wondered about that, but then I realized he was probably sick of wet footwear. Up until this weekend, he’d had a beautiful vegetable garden. Now he had a sandy beach. Evidently, this was not the riviera retirement he’d had in mind when he bought the property.

Now, as far as I know, my little gas-powered pump is doing the rounds, going next to the postmaster’s house just along the road, and then to an elderly neighbor of my friend the Baptist pastor’s, right in the village. Last night, I told my wife that of all my tools—and I like my tools: chain saws, axes, scythes, you name it—this humble trash pump is now my favorite, the one I am most grateful for, the one I most appreciate. Because today, we all live on Chaos Turnpike.

Francis Curzon, born in 1884 and later named the fifth Earl Howe, loved a souped-up Bugatti. And he loved to drive fast. He was famous for his “great skill and daring” on the racetrack, and also, eventually, for crashing into pedestrians—knocking down a boy in Belfast, Northern Ireland; slamming into a horse-drawn cart and killing a peasant in Pesaro, Italy.

These incidents (and 10 more) were recounted in a 1947 polemic by J. S. Dean, chair of the Pedestrians’ Association in England. Dean took particular issue with an assertion the earl had once made that the “recklessness” of pedestrians was the main safety problem on Britain’s roads. People who drive cars, Dean pointed out, do consider themselves to be “pedestrians” in other situations—that is, when they themselves are walking—and they agree that safety laws are important. Still, no matter what they may say, they continue to do whatever they want. Dean asked: “What are we to do with these people with their split minds?”

If the term had been available to him, he might have used the pejorative car brain to describe the conundrum he was observing. In the past five years or so, the term has become a common joke in left-leaning online spaces devoted to public transportation and urban planning, including the Facebook group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens.” Car brain also appears daily in the even more explicit Reddit forum r/fuckcars (404,000 members). It describes both a state of mind (“you’re car-brained”) and a type of person (“she is a car brain”). Obviously, the term is rude and very smug—in the same vein as the guys who wear One Less Car T-shirts while riding their bike. But there is also something true about it: Reason is failing in the face of the majestic automobile. People make excuses for cars and remain devoted to them, despite the incontrovertible evidence that they’re extremely dangerous.

This is an unresolvable tension of life in the United States. It’s been that way as long as there have been cars to drive and crash, and it’s especially notable now. An estimated 46,270 people were killed by cars last year. In 2019, deaths numbered 39,107. Car deaths drastically started to spike in 2020, a phenomenon that at first some ascribed to one of the many riddling consequences of the pandemic. Americans were driving much less than usual in the early days of COVID, but those who did take their cars out were found to be driving more recklessly and even faster than they were before, perhaps because everyone was simply more anxious, or perhaps because the roads were more open and people felt free to speed, or perhaps the threat of a deadly virus made other threats seem less consequential. Those explanations became less convincing, however, as pandemic restrictions faded yet car fatalities continued to rise. The number of people killed by cars in 2022 is 9 percent higher than in 2020.

[Read: We should all be more afraid of driving]

Of course, one problem with these numbers is the simple fact that cars are necessary. Americans have to get places, and in much of the country there is no other way to do that. Sometimes, becoming “car-brained” is just what you have to do to get through the day without constant dread. I grew up in a rural area, and was happily car-brained as I commuted to my job at the mall. Now I’ve been living in New York City for the better part of a decade and am rarely in a car. I find myself acutely terrified by the idea; I feel sharp, pit-in-the-stomach anxiety whenever a phone call to a family member produces the knowledge that they will soon be driving somewhere. Yet I still love cars. I plan imaginary road trips as I fall asleep. I sigh with envy when I see someone pull into a Wegmans parking lot. I used to have a red Hyundai Elantra; when I say Hyundai Elantra, I say it like I am saying the name of the one who got away.  

A new study attempts to model the confusion I’m feeling. Co-authored by Ian Walker, an environmental-psychology professor at Swansea University, in Wales, the preprint is titled “Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard.” It was based on survey data collected in the U.K., but nonetheless has some relevance: Walker and his team created pairs of questions designed to suss out the existence of a pro-car bias in society. The questions range from clever to somewhat chin-scratching. For instance, should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.

Walker did not attempt to hide his bias. He was already familiar with the idea of car brain, he told me, and the term motonormativity was his “technical attempt” at expressing the same idea. “The harms of motoring are very much just seen as an aspect of life,” he said. “We’ve lost the ability to look at it objectively.” When I reasoned that some people in the U.S. have to drive, he suggested they could move—it’s not “as if we’re in Soviet Russia and the government allocates us to houses,” he protested. I pushed him on the survey questions; it makes more sense to leave a car in the street than it does $50. He countered that I was only proving his point. “That’s what streets are being used for at the moment, but I don’t think they’re intended to store property,” he said. “The paper is essentially suggesting that we make special pleading.” And that’s what I was doing: treating cars as an exceptional category.

Walker’s perspective may seem extreme, but there has been resistance to the “pro-car narrative” from the very beginning. In the first decades of the mass-produced automobile, but before the Eisenhower era of rapid-fire highway construction, screeds against cars were somewhat common. In 1931, The Atlantic published “Our Delightful Man Killer,” an impassioned essay about pending motor-safety regulations that emphasized the absurdity of the 33,000 fatalities counted the year before. (This number is even worse than it sounds, because the country’s population was about 123 million at the time, compared with 335 million today.) “The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving,” the essay concluded. “It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.” A similar, gorier essay appeared in Reader’s Digest a few years later—this one suggesting that “if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass.”

[Read: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs]

Almost 100 years later, the cognitive dissonance has become, if anything, more pronounced. Motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. They’re in the top 10 for all age groups from 1 to 54 years old, Matthew Raifman, a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, pointed out when I reached him for comment. Many other top causes of death—cancer, heart disease—are talked about all the time as serious public-health problems that need radical solutions. “Why are we not doing that for motor vehicles?” Raifman asked. “It’s weird to me that we’re okay with this top-10 cause of death that’s sitting there year after year.”  

Some believe that new technology will help solve this problem. But as the first self-driving vehicles arrive on our roads, they’ve only underscored the hubris of car culture. Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Christopher Cox interviewed Tesla owners who had been in accidents caused directly by malfunctions of Tesla’s $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature, and found that many were willing to explain the car’s dramatic errors away. They weren’t skittish about getting back (as human observers) behind the (autonomous) wheel. One man was still using “Mad Max mode,” in which his Tesla would aggressively pass slower moving cars on the highway. Tesla did not respond to my requests for comment.

More recently, The Washington Post reported that Tesla’s autopilot features had been involved in at least 736 crashes since 2019, far more than had been previously known. While the meaning of the number is still obscured by some missing information about how Tesla’s software was being used and how it might have failed, what’s obvious is a surprising level of comfort with danger: In one crash described in the report, the driver had affixed small weights to his steering wheel to get around the system’s requirement that a human always be hands-on, ready to take over for the robot.

The strangeness of “car brain” will persist well into the future. Driving is dangerous. Driving is terrifying. Still, I want to be going 80 miles an hour through a desert. I want to turn a radio dial! I want to keep personal items in a glove compartment and hit the open road with a huge fountain soda. (Can I have next week off?) I’m lucky to be healthy and young—if suddenly I were to die, it’s statistically most likely that it would be because I was in a car crash. I know this. My car brain doesn’t.

Nostalgia is usually an unproductive emotion. Our memories can deceive us, especially as we get older. But every so often, nostalgia can remind us of something important. As we celebrate another Fourth of July, I find myself wistful about the patriotism that was once common in America—and keenly aware of how much I miss it.

This realization struck me unexpectedly as I was driving to the beach near my home. I am a New Englander to my bones. I was born and raised near the Berkshires, and educated in Boston. I have lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now I have settled in Rhode Island, on the shores of the Atlantic. Despite a career that took me to New York and Washington, D.C., I am, I admit, a living stereotype of regional loyalty—and, perhaps, of more than a little provincialism.

I was awash in thoughts of lobster rolls and salt water as I neared the dunes. And then that damn tearjerker of a John Denver song about West Virginia came on my car radio.

The song isn’t even really about the Mountain State; it was inspired by locales in Maryland and Massachusetts. But I have been to West Virginia, and I know that it is a beautiful place. I have never wanted to live anywhere but New England, yet every time I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” I understand, even if only for a few minutes, why no one would ever want to live anywhere but West Virginia, too

That’s when I experienced the jolt of a feeling we used to think of as patriotism: the joyful love of country. Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence; nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred. Instead, I was taking in the New England shoreline but seeing in my mind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt moved with wonder—and gratitude—for the miracle that is the United States.

[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]

How I miss that feeling. Because usually when I think of West Virginia these days, my first thought tends to be: red state. I now see many voters there, and in other states, as my civic opponents. I know that many of them likely hear “Boston” and they, too, think of a place filled with their blue-state enemies. I feel that I’m at a great distance from so many of my fellow citizens, as do they, I’m sure, from people like me. And I hate it.

Later, as I headed home to prepare for the holiday weekend, my mind kept returning to another summer, 40 years ago, in a different America and a different world.

I spent the summer of 1983, right after college graduation, in the Soviet Union studying Russian. I was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a beautiful city shrouded in a palpable sense of evil. KGB goons were everywhere. (They weren’t hard to spot, because they wanted visiting Americans like me, and the Soviet citizens who might speak with us, to see them.) I saw firsthand what oppression looks like, when people are afraid to speak in public, to associate, to move about, and to worship as they wish. I saw, as well, the power of propaganda: So many times, I was asked by Soviet citizens why the United States was determined to embark on a nuclear war, as if the smell of gunpowder was in the air and it was only a matter of time until Armageddon.

I was with a group of American students, and we were eager to meet Soviet people. The city is so far north that in the summer the sun never truly sets, and we had many warm conversations with young Leningraders—glares from the KGB notwithstanding—along the banks of the Neva River during the strange, half-lit gloom of these “White Nights.” Among ourselves, of course, our relations were as one might expect of college kids: Some friendships formed, some conflicts simmered, some romances bloomed, and some frostiness settled in among cliques.

If, however, we ran into anyone else from the United States, perhaps during a tour or in the hotel, most of us reacted as if we were all long-lost friends. The distances in the U.S. shrank to nothing. Boston and Jackson, Chicago and Dallas, Sacramento and Charlotte—all of us at that point were next-door neighbors meeting in a harsh and hostile land. It is difficult today to explain to a globalized and mobile generation the sense of fellowship evoked by encountering Americans overseas in the days when international travel was a rarer luxury than it is now. But to meet other Americans in a place such as the Soviet Union was often like a family reunion despite all of us being complete strangers.

[Read: What if America had lost the revolutionary war?]

Some years later, I returned to a more liberalized U.S.S.R. under the then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was part of an American delegation to a workshop on arms control with members of the Soviet diplomatic and military establishments. We all stayed together on a riverboat, where we also held our meetings. (A sad note: The boat traveled the Dnipro River in what was still Soviet Ukraine, and I walked through towns and cities, including Zaporizhzhya, that have since been reduced to rubble.) One day, our Soviet hosts woke us by piping the song “The City of New Orleans” to our staterooms, with its refrain of Good morning, America. How are ya? It was like a warm call from home, even if I’d never been to any of the locations (New Orleans, Memphis … Kankakee?) mentioned in the lyrics.

Today, many Americans regard one another as foreigners in their own country. Montgomery and Burlington? Charleston and Seattle? We might as well be measuring interstellar distances. We talk about “blue” and “red,” and we call one another communists and fascists, tossing off facile labels that once, among more serious people, were fighting words.

I am not going to both-sides this: I have no patience with people who casually refer to anyone with whom they disagree as “fascists,” but such people are a small and annoying minority. The reality is that the Americans who have taught us all to hate one another instantly at the sight of a license plate or at the first intonation of a regional accent are the vanguard of the new American right, and they have found fame and money in promoting division and even sedition.

These are the people, on our radios and televisions and even in the halls of Congress, who encourage us to fly Gadsden and Confederate flags and to deface our cars with obscene and stupid bumper stickers; they subject us to inane prattle about national divorce as they watch the purchases and ratings and donations roll in. Such people have made it hard for any of us to be patriotic; they pollute the incense of patriotism with the stink of nationalism so that they can issue their shrill call to arms for Americans to oppose Americans.

[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev’s fatal trap]

Their appeals demean every voter, even those of us who resist their propaganda, because all of us who hear them find ourselves drawing lines and taking sides. When I think of Ohio, for example, I no longer think (as I did for most of my life) of a heartland state and the birthplace of presidents. Instead, I wonder how my fellow American citizens there could have sent to Congress such disgraceful poltroons as Jim Jordan and J. D. Vance—men, in my view, whose fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to personal ambition, and whose love of country I will, without reservation, call into question. Likewise, when I think of Florida, I envision a natural wonderland turned into a political wasteland by some of the most ridiculous and reprehensible characters in American politics.

I struggle, especially, with the shocking fact that many of my fellow Americans, led by cynical right-wing-media charlatans, are now supporting Russia while Moscow conducts a criminal war. These voters have been taught to fear their own government—and other Americans who disagree with them—more than a foreign regime that seeks the destruction of their nation. I remember the old leftists of the Cold War era: Some of them were very bad indeed, but few of them were this bad, and their half-baked anti-Americanism found little support among the broad mass of the American public. Now, thanks to the new rightists, an even worse and more enduring anti-Americanism has become the foundational belief of millions of American citizens.

I know that such thoughts make me part of the problem. And yes, I will always believe that voting for someone such as Jordan (or, for that matter, Donald Trump) is, on some level, a moral failing. But that has nothing to do with whether Ohio and Florida are part of the America I love, a nation full of good people whose politics are less important than their shared citizenship with me in this republic. I might hate the way most Floridians vote, but I would defend every square inch of the state from anyone who would want to take it from us and subjugate any of its people.

When I returned from that first Soviet excursion back in 1983, we landed at JFK on July 4—the finest day there could be to return to America after a grim sojourn in the Land of the Soviets. By the time my short connecting hop to Hartford took off, it was dark. We flew low across Long Island and Connecticut, and I could see the Fourth of July fireworks in towns below us. I was a young man and so, naturally, I was too tough to cry, but I felt my eyes welling as I watched town after town celebrate our national holiday. I was exhausted, not only from the trip but from a summer in an imprisoned nation. I was so glad to be home, to be free, to be safe again among other Americans.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Independence Day in a divided America]

I want us all to experience that feeling. And so, for one day, on this Fourth, I am going to think of my fellow citizens as if I’d just met them in Soviet Leningrad. Just for the day, I won’t care where their votes went in the past few elections—or if they voted at all. I won’t care where they stand on Roe v. Wade or student-debt forgiveness. I won’t care if any of them think America is a capitalist hellhole. I won’t bother about their loves and hates. They’re Americans, and like it or not, we are bound to one another in one of the greatest and most noble experiments in human history. Our destiny together, stand or fall, is inescapable.

Tomorrow, we can go back to bickering. But just for this Fourth, I hope we can all try, with an open spirit, to think of our fellow Americans as friends and family, brothers and sisters, and people whose hands we would gratefully clasp if we met in a faraway and dangerous place.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it.

“I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.”

It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him.

In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point.

But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.)

[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]

He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans.

Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen.

Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so.

But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well.

Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too.      

But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.”

For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.”

[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]

This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.”

Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all.

But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.”

Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened.