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 But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly dimmed and been replaced by an existential hangover of the first order.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.

Three important things occurred at NATO’s Vilnius summit: a breakthrough, a little-noticed but hugely consequential success, and a disappointment. The breakthrough was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally consenting to Sweden’s membership. The success—the most important outcome of the summit—was approval of more than 4,000 pages of military plans for the actual defense of NATO countries. The disappointment was that Ukraine was not given a path to NATO membership.  

The breakthrough made early headlines from the meeting. President Erdoğan had been blocking Swedish accession for months, demanding that Sweden extradite about 120 alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) activists and Gülenists (something the U.S. also locks horns with Turkey over); lift its embargo of arms to Turkey; and adopt friendlier legislation on terrorism, “mechanisms to prevent provocations,” and even changes to its constitution. Turkey got commitments on most of these measures. But then, on the eve of the summit, Erdoğan added yet another precondition: Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, Erdoğan assented to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bargain, which evidently included a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden, U.S. delivery of F-16 fighter planes to Turkey, and the creation of a NATO “special coordinator for counterterrorism.”  

But with Erdoğan, nothing is ever over, and we may yet see another round of negotiations, because Swedish courts have now (after the agreement was announced) blocked extraditions and the Turkish Parliament won’t be in session for another two months, so there is time for more demands.   

The great success in Vilnius was the adoption of a comprehensive plan for meeting NATO’s fundamental responsibility—defending its members’ territory. The alliance has had no such program since 1991. Attempting to allay Russian concern about extending the security of NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact and then to former Soviet Union countries, NATO professed to have no reason to station either nuclear weapons or substantial combat forces in the new member countries. That commitment was contingent on the security environment, which has changed dramatically with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

[Anne Applebaum: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized]

The new plans adopted in Vilnius run to 4,000 pages—a testament to their seriousness—and the governments of NATO countries have agreed to them. They allow NATO military commanders to task different national forces with specific obligations, facilitating an effective common defense should a NATO ally be attacked. And the arrangement locks in a sharing of responsibilities between the United States and its European allies, which will need to reduce their reliance on Washington by increasing their military spending and providing space and cyber assets of their own.  

Coalition warfare is a delicate and difficult undertaking. Understanding in advance what allies are willing to do, and where their forces’ strengths can best be matched to need, will reassure those allies most exposed to potential Russian aggression and improve the ability of all of the allies to act effectively together. Just the fact that NATO has designed, agreed to, and set aside resources for these plans should help deter attacks on its frontline states.

The Vilnius meeting did not conclude, however, without a disappointment. More than 500 days have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Although they have supplied Ukraine with weapons and cooperation, the United States and the United Kingdom have failed to fully honor the commitment they made to ensure Ukraine’s security, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal, under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. All the while, Kyiv has been agitating for a clear path to joining NATO. Ukraine acknowledged that membership wasn’t possible while the country was still at war (although NATO has in the past found creative solutions to that problem), but hoped for a pledge that once the war was over, it would become a member. Instead, President Biden said ahead of the Vilnius meeting that Ukraine wasn’t ready for NATO membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was incensed. He posted an enraged tweet in the face of rebuffs from both National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace; the latter suggested that Ukraine ought to show gratitude for all the support it’s been given.

NATO countries have indeed strongly backed Ukraine, but for people in safety to tell those under attack that they should be grateful is unbecoming. The Biden administration unfairly wants to benefit from its expansive rhetoric—the U.S. president has promised to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” for Ukraine to win the war—without facing criticism for the timorousness of its decisions regarding the weapons Ukraine desperately needs. Washington is still holding back long-range munitions such as Army Tactical Missile Systems, for example, under a policy driven by what The Washington Post describes as the “conviction that a U.S. misstep in Ukraine could start World War III.”  

President Biden isn’t wrong to be concerned about the risk of direct involvement in the war, nor is he wrong to be stingy about extending NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee to a country at war with Russia. But the administration is wrong, both morally and practically, to defend those choices by effectively disparaging all that Ukraine is doing. Casually dismissing Ukraine’s readiness for NATO membership feels of a piece with President Biden blaming the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Afghan security forces instead of on our own policies.

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

The standards for NATO membership have always been subjective. They were subjective when Greece and Turkey had military coups after being admitted in 1952; when a divided Germany’s western half was admitted in 1955; when a democratizing Spain was admitted in 1982. More demanding standards have been set and relaxed depending on the geostrategic circumstances, and those geostrategic circumstances argue for having given Ukraine a more morale-boosting prospect of eventual membership.

Losing his composure was one of Zelensky’s few diplomatic missteps in the course of  this war, and he quickly corrected it. The Ukrainian president’s subsequent spin was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s after the 1941 meeting at which Britain wanted but did not get American commitments to fight Nazi Germany: closer than ever, not whether but when.  

At the same time as the NATO summit, the G7 released a statement that the members would begin negotiating bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. It was intended to be less than a NATO commitment but more than nothing. But the group’s promise was only to begin discussions—about commitments from the very countries that have been unwilling to make security commitments through NATO, and, in the case of the U.S. and the U.K., those that failed to carry out the commitments they made to Ukraine in 1994.

The best possible gloss to put on Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO is that the Biden White House moved next year’s 75th-anniversary NATO summit four months past the actual anniversary and closer to the 2024 presidential election in order to make a big political splash welcoming Ukraine into the NATO family at a time of maximal political value to the president. Here’s hoping the political operatives in the White House prove less timid than the national-security team.

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.

At the Vilnius summit, the United States and Germany have led the coalition of the squeamish in opposition to announcing a timetable for Ukrainian membership in NATO. They have some modestly plausible reasons, including fear of an automatic commitment to immediate war with Russia and reluctance to bring in a country whose territory is still partially occupied and whose institutions are not fully reformed.

Other arguments suggest a less thoughtful view. Ukraine has to show that it can handle modern military technology, or that it is a thriving democracy? Compare it with militarily negligible and politically contemptible Hungary, and the absurdity of these kinds of requirements becomes clear. One might infer from some official pronouncements that NATO membership is like joining a snooty club to which only those with good pedigree, clean shirt collars, and immaculately shined shoes need apply. It is not. NATO membership for Ukraine is a guarantee of Western (and not only Ukrainian) security and stability. It is not a favor to Ukraine but a move to avert another big European war.

The notion that NATO membership cannot be given to a country at war means that Russia has every incentive to keep the war simmering, no matter the cost. Similarly, the idea that a country that is partly occupied and whose borders are not universally recognized cannot be admitted will cause Russia to cling desperately to any piece of Ukrainian territory it can hold. Let it be noted that Germany joined NATO while under occupation by both the Soviet Union and the Western allies, and before it had acceded to its post-1945 borders.

[Ivo Daalder: Let Ukraine in]

The alternative advanced by President Joe Biden in a CNN interview is the so-called Israel model, in which the West, led by the United States, arms Ukraine to the teeth, guaranteeing the country, as an act of Congress put it with respect to Israel in 2008, “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors.”

Making strategy by dubious analogy is a bad idea. The historical differences are both illuminating and cautionary.

America extended its guarantee of a “qualitative military edge” to Israel in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In other words, it came after Israel had defeated its Arab enemies in four major conflicts (1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973), in part by taking the war into their territories. Israel staged bombing raids against targets deep in Syria and Egypt, including their capitals, from the 1960s forward, and unlike the Ukrainian drones flying to Moscow, these were not mere symbolic strikes. The Six Day War, in 1967, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, which involved the annihilation of its neighbors’ air forces and the advance of Israeli armor and infantry across the de facto 1949 border. The 1973 war similarly ended with Israeli forces within artillery range of Damascus and on the verge of destroying half the Egyptian force that had crossed the Suez Canal. Is maintaining that kind of capability and superiority what Washington and Berlin intend for Ukraine? Do they understand what it would require?

Ukraine, at present, has no comparable edge over the Russian military. It is struggling to expel the Russian invaders from territory they seized in 2022, let alone 2014. Ukraine undoubtedly has an edge over Russia in motivation, skill, and determination, but nothing like what Israel had already demonstrated in 1967 and would do again in 1973 and 1982 against Syria.

Military superiority rests on demography and economics. Over the course of its existence, Israel’s population has grown (1.3 million in 1950, 3.1 million in 1970, nearly 10 million today). Its economy, which was just under a third the size of Egypt’s in 1960, is now substantially larger. Ukraine has been, in essence, bankrupted by the war, and has had a quarter to a third of its population displaced—this on top of a declining birth rate. One projection has Ukraine’s population shrinking (and aging) from 41 million in 2020 to 35 million in 20 years. In short, it cannot tap the demographic and economic vitality that helped make Israel a going military concern.

A series of conventional victories brought a cold peace to Israel’s frontiers after the 1973 war, just as the societal and economic forces that underlay Israel’s military edge were beginning to open the gap with its Arab neighbors. Ukraine’s advantages over Russia are proportionally much less.

Israel’s relatively peaceful accommodation with its neighboring states had one other large element: its nuclear arsenal. By most accounts, Israel developed nuclear weapons as early as 1973. Indeed, during the most intense period of that war, it may have signaled its preparedness to deploy, if not use, them. Even by that year, neither Egypt nor Syria believed, as they had in 1967, that the destruction of the Israeli state by conventional means was possible; their territorial ambitions were strictly limited.

A Ukraine that has no allies pledged to come to its aid in the event of war, whose demographic prospects are poor, whose economy has been devastated not only by brutal battles but by deliberate and massive Russian sabotage and destruction, would be foolish not to pursue nuclear weapons. It has the technical skills not only to build the bombs but to construct delivery systems for them.

That is an outcome no one should want. The Russians might very well be tempted to strike at such a program preemptively, and if the Ukrainians were to get the jump on them, Kyiv might very well detonate a nuclear weapon as a warning against proceeding further.

Ukraine is a large country with few natural borders and a powerful enemy that is likely to attack it again absent NATO membership. The immensity of Russian oil and gas reserves means that Russia can eventually rearm; the stubbornness of the Russian elite’s belief in an imperial state and its rejection of Ukrainian sovereignty suggest its intent to do so. The position, in short, is entirely different from that of Israel versus its immediate opponents in the 1970s and ’80s.

The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states, like Ukraine, that were once subject to rule from Moscow.

At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declared that it supported Ukraine’s application to join the alliance. We know what good that did. Regrettably, the 2023 Vilnius summit has simply reaffirmed the same in language of comparable mushiness, removing only one bureaucratic hurdle for Ukraine without solidifying its prospects for joining the alliance.  A firm invitation to join NATO and a deadline by which that will occur would have been infinitely preferable, and would deny Russia indefinite time and latitude to prolong this war.

Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty declares that an attack against one member is an attack against all, a fundamental premise of the alliance. But it only commits the alliance and its members to undertake “individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” It does not, in other words, cause an automatic declaration of war against Russia—but it is a high and demanding commitment to Ukraine’s security. It will thereby be a far more effective deterrent against future Russian aggression, which otherwise is a virtual certainty in the years to come, with all the risks that adhere to that probability.

[Anne Applebaum: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized]

Has NATO membership for Ukraine been excluded for good by the Vilnius summit? No more than the supply of vital weapons to Ukraine was by Washington’s reluctance to provide HIMARS or tanks or Patriot missiles or F-16s, or by Berlin’s initial belief in February 2022 that providing 5,000 surplus helmets to Ukraine was enough of a contribution for it to make. Time and again NATO’s largest members have been pulled—hesitantly, sometimes morosely and resentfully—into doing the right thing by allies closer to the front or with stronger spines and clearer vision. In this case Poland, the Baltic nations, and other frontline states have been joined by Britain, France, and other NATO members in arguing for moving on Ukraine’s membership firmly and quickly.

There is another moment ahead: the 75th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which will be held in Washington in 2024. On that occasion President Biden can be the statesmanlike leader NATO needs in ensuring European security for decades to come by admitting Kyiv to the alliance.

Unless, of course, he prefers to be the father of the Ukrainian atom bomb.

In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance. “Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, meaning victory over Hitler abroad and over Jim Crow at home.

The seeds of what would eventually become the civil-rights movement included not only mass protest and political mobilization but a wide array of cultural and artistic expressions. Some of them—Frank Sinatra’s song and short film The House I Live In; a Superman radio serial pitting the Man of Steel against a thinly veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan—sought nothing less than a redefinition of American identity that would embrace racial and religious minorities. In his 1945 film, Sinatra came to the defense of a Jewish boy menaced by a gentile mob. On the radio serial a year later, Superman protected a Chinese American teenager from the lethal assault of the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” The lyrics of The House I Live In captured the new ethos: “The faces that I see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.”

Alongside these sunnier affirmations of inclusion, there appeared a withering critique of American bigotry in the form of a very specific subset of books. All of them, whether fictional or factual, employed the identical device of a writer going undercover to discover and expose the bigoted netherworld of white Christian America. Within the finite period of six years beginning in 1943, these books became both commercial phenomena and effective goads to the national soul. They explicitly sought a mass audience by employing devices borrowed from detective novels, espionage fiction, and muckraking journalism: the secret search, the near-escape from being found out, the shocking revelation of the rot hiding just below the surface of normal life. Whatever these books may have lacked in sentence-to-sentence literary elegance, they made up for with page-turning drama.

Unfortunately, for the most part, they have since been forgotten, or simply overwhelmed by the volume of World War II self-congratulation, however well deserved. But in their own time period, when these books were reaching millions of readers, a victorious America was by no means presumed to be an innocent America. Within a year of V-J Day, the investigative journalist John Roy Carlson released his exposé of domestic right-wing extremism, The Plotters, and laid out the stakes starkly:

We’ve won the military war abroad but we’ve got to win the democratic peace at home. Hitlerism is dead, but incipient Hitlerism in America has taken on a completely new star-spangled face. It follows a ‘Made in America’ pattern which is infinitely subtler and more difficult to guard against than the crude product of the [pro-fascist German American] Bundists. It is found everywhere at work in our nation. It’s as if the living embers had flown over the ocean and started new hate fires here while the old ones were dying in Europe.

Carlson did not need Nazi Germany to alert him to the perils of mass bigotry. His real name was Avedis Derounian, and as a boy, he had fled the Turkish genocide against Armenians. Having mastered English as a high-school student on Long Island and an undergraduate at New York University, Derounian found his way during the late 1930s into Friends of Democracy, an anti-fascist organization led by a Unitarian minister. With the title of chief investigator and a salary of $50 a week, Derounian developed a cover as the publisher of a pro-fascist newspaper, the Christian Defender, and soon found situations where he could immerse himself in the purpose of exposing the purveyors of hate: a pro-Nazi summer camp on Long Island, the “Christian Mobilizers” militia formed by the right-wing radio priest Charles Coughlin, and also a Bund rally in Madison Square Garden that flanked a portrait of George Washington with a pair of swastikas.     

[Read: The new anarchy]

Derounian inhabited his doppelgänger so deftly that sometimes he even joined in the shouting. His Christian Defender newspaper looked so genuine that the U.S. State Department launched an investigation of it and Derounian hurriedly stopped publishing. All this derring-do led to some trenchant and disturbing conclusions. “My experience convinced me,” Derounian wrote, “that under the slogans of ‘patriotism’ they were inoculating innocent Americans with the virus of hate, undermining confidence in our leaders, promoting hate and suspicion.”

When his book Under Cover landed—all 521 pages, not counting index, illustrated with dozens of reproduced extremist documents—it was impossible to ignore. According to a compilation by Andrew Immerwahr, a historian of ideas, Under Cover was the best-selling nonfiction book in America in 1943, ultimately going through 20 printings. The Army Air Forces had Derounian speak to enlisted men on the theme “The Enemy Within.”

At the book’s end, Derounian promised readers (and himself), “I am going back to the world I left behind … to live in the sunshine again.” He did no such thing. Instead, he cloaked himself in the character of Robert Thompson, a disgruntled war veteran, and extended his stealthy inquiry from America’s wartime traitors to its peacetime demagogues. Most prominent among them was Gerald L. K. Smith, the minister who founded the America First political party (the name an homage to the isolationist movement that featured the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh) as the electoral vehicle for his virulent racism and anti-Semitism. But Derounian also found extremism in women’s groups with such anodyne names as “United Mothers.”        

“The conclusion is inescapable,” Derounian wrote, “that while we have won a war of democracy over fascist evil abroad, we have allowed hate and prejudice to gain a firm foothold at home.” A page later, he continued, “The grim fact is that they have infiltrated into the warp and woof of American life.”        

Given the massive attention that Derounian’s books received, it seems entirely possible, even probable, that the novelist Laura Z. Hobson took note of his methodology. Though her married surname obscured the fact, Hobson was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants of socialist leanings, and the Z stood for her family patronymic of Zametkin. Her novel Gentleman’s Agreement—excerpted in Cosmopolitan magazine in late 1946 and published in early 1947—inverted Derounian’s tactic of pretending to be an extremist by having a gentile journalist, Philip Green, purport to be Jewish in order to write a magazine exposé about anti-Semitism. And whereas Derounian had revealed the bellicose, violent style of Jew-hating embodied by Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and their ilk, Hobson used the fictive Green to unveil the polite, socially acceptable anti-Semitism of the country club and exclusive hotels and neighborhoods. Eventually Green’s own fiancée shows herself to be one of those refined bigots, or at least an apologist for them, and the revelation ruptures the couple’s engagement.

“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who aren’t [anti-Semites] are their unknowing helpers and connivers,” Green lectures his fiancée. “People who’d never beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about this whole business.”

Hobson’s message clearly struck a chord. Gentleman’s Agreement went through three printings before its official publication date and ultimately sold 1.6 million copies. As a manual of moral instruction, Gentleman’s Agreement was released in a special Armed Services Edition for the American military. Magnifying the novel’s impact, a film adaptation written by Moss Hart, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Gregory Peck as Philip Green received eight Oscar nominations in 1948 and won three, including for Best Picture and Best Director. A straight line can easily be drawn from Peck playing one version of the ethical role model in Gentleman’s Agreement and another 15 years later as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

[Read: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?]

In the same year when the fictive Philip Green loomed so large in American popular culture, an award-winning journalist was undertaking a real-life version of passing. Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had already won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. For another investigative scoop, Sprigle had disguised himself as a psychiatric patient in order to expose an abusive state hospital. But to similarly report on racism in the South, Sprigle, who was white, needed to fake his way across the color line. He failed in several attempts to chemically dye his skin, because the substances could cause illness or even death if he kept using them, before settling on shaving his scalp to leave no telltale straight hairs and then tanning for three weeks in Florida. His success at the deception depended on the “one-drop rule” of racial identity, in which any American with the slightest fraction of African ancestry, regardless of pigment, was categorized as Black. In a way, Sprigle was reversing the passing formula deployed by Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP, who used his fair skin and hair to pretend to be white while courageously researching racist attacks, many of them against Black war veterans returning to the South.

With the pseudonym of James R. Crawford and a backstory about being “a light-skinned Negro from Pittsburgh,” Sprigle crossed the Mason-Dixon line—the “Smith and Wesson line to us black folk”—in one of the all-Black railroad carriages known as a “Jim Crow car.” During four “fear-filled weeks,” Sprigle embedded himself in the very heart of the former Confederacy: Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He bore witness to the financial exploitation of the sharecropping system, the miserly funding for Black schools, the refusal of white hospitals to admit a Black woman needing an emergency Cesarean section, who ultimately died untreated. Sprigle also paid sympathetic attention to the echelon of Black professionals—dentists, professors, doctors, lawyers, NAACP activists, real-estate developers—who nonetheless found their social status to be relegated below the poorest, least-educated white person.

“These whites … were a people entirely alien to me, a people set far apart from me and my world,” Sprigle wrote in his Black persona. “The law of this new land I had entered decreed that I had to eat apart from these pale-skinned men and women—behind that symbolic curtain.” At the same time, he added perceptively, “Not that I wanted to ride with these whites or eat with them. What I resented was their impudent assumption that I wanted to mingle with them, their arrogant and conceited pretense that no matter how depraved and degenerate some of them might be, they [were] … of a superior breed.”

Sprigle produced a 21-part series for the Post-Gazette, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” which began running in August 1948. Newspapers as wide-ranging as the Pittsburgh Courier, The Seattle Times, and the New York Herald Tribune reprinted the series, providing national exposure. Then, in 1949, Simon & Schuster collected the articles in book form under the title In the Land of Jim Crow.

The effect that Derounian, Hobson, and Sprigle had on American public opinion and policy cannot be quantified. But it also seems more than accidental that their books—along with Sinatra’s song and film; the Superman radio series; and such works as Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy (1945), and Gunnar Myrdal’s sociological tome, An American Dilemma (1944)—coincided with a surge of activism against racism and anti-Semitism during the 1940s. One need not employ the term woke to suggest that these books, movies, songs, and comics roused many Americans from a complacent moral slumber.

The Democratic Party embraced civil rights for the first time in its platform at the 1948 convention, driving the bloc of southern segregationists to form their Dixiecrat third party. Within weeks of the convention, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and the federal workforce. Also in 1948, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that restrictive covenants, the sort routinely used to keep Black people, Jews, and other minority groups out of certain neighborhoods, were unconstitutional. These efforts amounted to a kind of proto–civil-rights movement, anticipating what we know as the civil-rights movement that launched in the mid-1950s with the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet Ray Sprigle’s book about his time being Black in the South sold only modestly, and that disappointing outcome may well have reflected more than the endemic capriciousness of the publishing industry. The historical moment during and immediately after the war years, when America belatedly began to redress its own deep-seated prejudices, ended as abruptly as one could say the words Cold War. By 1949, the anti-fascist alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had mutated into global ideological and military rivalry. As Derounian had presciently foreseen in The Plotters, the specter (and partial but exaggerated reality) of communism in the United States had supplanted the actually existing presence of American right-wing extremists as public enemy No. 1. To express the belief that America was imperfect, indeed hypocritical, in its claims of equality, was to risk being branded disloyal and caught up in the Red Scare.

[Read: America has had it worse]

None of Hobson’s subsequent novels nearly equaled the sales of Gentleman’s Agreement. Derounian wrote only one more book in the remaining decades of his life, dying in 1991 at the age of 82. Sprigle died in a car accident in 1957. Four years later, the white writer John Howard Griffin basically adopted Sprigle’s idea and method of traversing the Jim Crow South as a Black man. (Unlike Sprigle, Griffin was able to dye his skin dark without medical risks.) With the civil-rights movement compelling America to once again regard itself in the moral mirror, Griffin’s book Black Like Me sold more than 1 million copies and was adapted for a film. More recently, one of Sprigle’s successors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bill Steigerwald, recounted the race series in a 2017 book, 30 Days a Black Man. And Rachel Maddow’s 2022 podcast, Ultra, which focused on the pro-Nazi movement in 1940s America, made reference to Derounian’s work in Under Cover.

Among these authors of the 1940s, Hobson has fared best. But the lingering impact of Gentleman’s Agreement surely owes more to the film adaptation, which neatly pruned away some of the novel’s formulaic subplots, than the book itself. The works of Derounian and Sprigle, so daring in their time, fit very awkwardly within current norms. ABC News lost a federal court case (though the verdict was reversed on appeal) for planting reporters with false résumés as workers in Food Lion supermarkets to expose unsafe practices. The Chicago Sun-Times was denied a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for a series about corrupt city inspectors that involved creating a phony bar, wryly called the Mirage, that was staffed by journalists and equipped with hidden cameras. As for a journalist or nonfiction author pretending to be a Black person, even for the sake of chronicling discrimination, the gambit would assuredly be reviled as cultural appropriation at best and its own form of liberal racism at worst.

And in Trumpian America, the excretions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and on down the list hardly feel the need to hide. Yet, for that very reason, there is immense value in cracking open the books of Derounian and his fellow truth detectives from nearly 80 years ago. They provide a piercing reminder of the deep roots, indeed the nearly identical vocabulary and populist demagoguery, of the hatred on such lurid display today.

When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.

Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.

“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment," White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.

[Read: Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet]

This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.

“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”

But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.

Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”

Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.

That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”

The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.

“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”

In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).

The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.

There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.

Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”

Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.

Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.

But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.

Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.

But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).

Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.  

Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.

[Joel Dodge: My Hometown Is Getting a $100 Billion Dose of Bidenomics]

The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.

The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”

The biggest challenge in the red-state-investment tilt may be whether it impedes Biden’s overarching goal of creating more well-paying jobs for workers without a college degree. As Podhorzer pointed out, average wages in many industries, including manufacturing, are much lower in red states than in blue.

Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last month after the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”

Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.

But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.

Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.

Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”

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.

London sent the Hawker Hurricanes to the Soviet Union to help them fight against Nazi Germany.