The FSB arrested a 46-year-old Russian man in Crimea for allegedly acting as an accomplice, Russian state media reports.

Today, only a few Westerners are still attending President Vladimir Putin’s showcase events, such as the Valdai conference in Sochi, which, before the war, was Russia’s most prestigious international gathering. This year, one of those foreign guests was a journalist from a German far-left newspaper, who asked Putin to explain a seeming contradiction: If Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, as Putin claims, why is the Kremlin maintaining high-level contacts with the far-right Alternative for Germany party?

The question had particular saliency because the AfD is growing in power and popularity across Germany. Earlier this month, it achieved historically good results in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, two traditionally centrist states. Nationally, the AfD is polling at a record 21 percent, making it the second-most-popular party in Germany. After next year’s regional elections, it could even become the leading party of several states in its eastern-German stronghold.

Putin’s response was revealing. He questioned the notion that the AfD is far-right and defended his contacts with the group. He went on to suggest that the AfD was the victim of “Nazi methods” rather than a party “using them.” As evidence, he pointed to rumors of an assassination attempt on one of the party’s leaders during a recent campaign event. The German authorities have not confirmed that any such attempt took place, but the AfD tried to exploit the rumor in the days before this month’s regional elections. Putin’s surprisingly detailed knowledge of a little-known conspiracy theory involving the AfD points to the special interest that the Kremlin is taking in Germany’s far right.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Putin’s connection to Germany is personal. A country that he thought he understood, from his posting to East Germany as a young KGB officer, has turned its back on him. “I still have friends in Germany,” Putin said at Valdai. “And it may seem strange, but their number is growing.” The implication, when taken with his remarks about the AfD, was that he’s finding new friends among Germany’s right.

Putin seems to hope he can make an ally of Germany’s far right in an effort to sow discord in German society. This would meet an important goal in his broader campaign to dissolve Western unity and reduce support for Ukraine.

Living and serving in East Germany in the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge influence on Putin’s life and political priorities. Throughout his career, he has shown a consistent preoccupation with Russia’s relationship with Germany. “Russia has always had special sentiments for Germany,” he said in a speech—delivered in fluent German—to the Bundestag in 2001. Many times, he has tapped into German guilt over its World War II history and harped on the debt of gratitude Germany owes the Russian people for the country’s reunification. Putin’s tactics have been very effective, and Germany has long put its relationship with Russia before that with any of its Eastern European neighbors.

In 2014, Putin extended his arm-twisting by drawing a parallel between Germany’s reunification and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as the Russian people had supported the “desire of the Germans for national unity,” he said in a public address, so he expected Germany to “also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.”

Although Germany joined the widespread European and American condemnation of the annexation of Crimea, the country’s dependence on natural gas, and Russian supplies of it, was growing. That vulnerability bolstered Putin’s confidence that Germany’s business-driven political system would not dare cutting ties, regardless of Russia’s aggressive actions elsewhere.

That belief was affirmed by his close relationship with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Putin has attended Schröder’s birthday parties, and once took Schröder on a Christmas sleigh ride in Moscow). After Schröder left office in 2005, he was appointed chairman of the boards of both Nord Stream AG and Rosneft, two major Russian-controlled energy companies. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Schröder fell into disgrace, and the Nord Stream 2 gas-pipeline project between Russia and Germany that he championed has been abandoned. Yet Putin continues to defend his friend as a “true son of his people.”

[David French: Hatred makes fools of us all]

The German response to Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine suggests that Putin did not know Germany as well as he thought. Even when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Germany—a move that many countries, including the United States, long feared would sway German decision making—Germany continued to support Ukraine. In fact, Berlin became Kyiv’s second-biggest military supplier after Washington. Although Germany has hesitated to step into a leading role in Europe—delaying the delivery of tanks and still debating whether to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine—the era of a special relationship between Russia and Germany is over.

Putin’s reaction to this has been to turn his false narrative about neo-Nazis in Ukraine back on Germany. “It’s unbelievable but true,” he said at an event earlier this year commemorating Soviet sacrifices during World War II. “We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks.” (Germany had “panther” and “tiger” tanks in World War II, but no “leopards,” in fact.) Germans, however, thought of a different wartime analogy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939. “Acting as an imperial power, Russia now seeks to redraw borders by force,” wrote Olaf Scholz, Germany’s current chancellor, and “my country’s history gives it a special responsibility to fight the forces of fascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism.”

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Putin appears to hope that a return to Russia’s pre-2022 relationship with Germany is possible. Because “one line of Nord Stream 2 has survived” (the other line was blown up last year), “tomorrow we open the valve,” he has offered—if Germany asks to resume its Russian gas supply. But this is something, he complained, that Germany’s “bosses in Washington” will not allow the country to do. (The idea that the U.S. dictates policy to Berlin is a favorite trope of his: The Americans “continue to occupy Germany,” he said on Russian TV earlier this year.)

Rebuffed by Germany’s centrist politicians, Putin has been forced to look for allies on the more extreme margins of German politics. A supposed lack of national sovereignty and independence is a popular narrative among far-right parties and conspiracist movements in Germany. For example, AfD is calling for emancipation from the United States and rapprochement with Russia in its platform for the candidates it’s running in next year’s European parliamentary elections. The rhetoric of Germany’s continued “occupation” is also echoed by the ultra-reactionary Reichsbürger movement, whose members do not accept the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic and wish for the restitution of the “German Reich” that ended with the defeat of the Nazis.

[Anne Applebaum: Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable]

AfD politicians have repeatedly argued that Germany should move away from the European Union’s sanctions and reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As well as calling for an end to support for Ukraine, they have also blamed NATO expansion for provoking Russia. For its part, Moscow has cultivated relations with the AfD, including a 2020 meeting between senior party members and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The Kremlin has also brought AfD members on all-expenses-paid trips to Russia and invited them to act as “election observers” in Crimea. In August, an investigation by Der Spiegel found that an AfD staffer in the Bundestag who was preparing a lawsuit against the German government over its arms supplies to Ukraine had taken multiple trips to Russia, returning with large sums of cash and suspected contacts to Russian intelligence.

The attitudes of the AfD and movements like Reichsbürger conveniently align with some of Putin’s views about Germany. Reichsbürger is growing in strength, and now has more than 20,000 members. A regional branch of Germany’s domestic-intelligence service last year warned that Russia is actively encouraging the movement in online disinformation campaigns.

The likely reasons for Putin’s interest in his new friends are not hard to discern. The rise of Germany’s far right makes it easier for Russia to undermine social cohesion and public consensus. The political center in Germany is growing weaker: The three parties in the governing coalition—the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the Free Democrats—are not performing well. No major party has given any indication of being willing to include the AfD in a coalition. That makes it very unlikely that the AfD will gain power at the federal level. But its strength in local and regional elections is eroding the firewall that Germany’s political center has tried to build between itself and the far right.

[David Frum: Can Germany resist the Trump disease?]

To make things worse, a new nationalist left-wing party just launched by the charismatic politician Sahra Wagenknecht echoes some of the AfD’s positions on Russia. In the past, the Kremlin has also targeted Germany’s far left with hopes of establishing an anti-war coalition between the far left and the far right. Wagenknecht’s party may draw votes away from the AfD, but even if it succeeds in doing so, the presence of two populist antiestablishment and pro-Russian parties threatens to further destabilize the political center.   

By backing the AfD and other extreme actors in German politics, Putin is betting not only on diminishing support for Ukraine in Germany, but also on European and American fatigue with the war effort. As major elections approach in Western countries in 2024 and 2025, Russian interference and disinformation efforts are bound to increase. Its support for far-right groups in the West is not just about weakening democratic societies; it is part of a geopolitical strategy. At a time when the world faces political turmoil on several fronts, the success of Putin’s tactics will be decided at ballot boxes across Europe and in the United States.

The Black Sea, which Ukraine needs to export its grain, has been a key battleground in the ongoing war.

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

The rest of the planet does not pause while Washington sorts out its internal food fights. Republicans—and other Americans—need to put aside their childish squabbles.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Kamala Harris problem Israel’s two reckonings “We’re going to die here.”

Childish Squabbles

Two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, in which I worried that the United States was “no longer a serious country.”

Of course, we’re still a powerful country … But when it comes to seriousness—the invaluable discipline and maturity that allows us to discern matters that should transcend self-interest, to set aside churlish ego and emotionalism, and to act with prudence and self-restraint—we’re a weak, impoverished backwater.

When I wrote those words, the world was emerging from a pandemic, but many Americans were still refusing vaccines; Congress was bickering over infrastructure; Russia was occupying Crimea. Joe Biden had been elected president, but as I said at the time, “one president can’t sober up an entire nation.” I was, to say the least, pessimistic about the American future.

Today, the situation is even more dire. The Russians continue an all-out war of conquest in the middle of Europe, a conflict that could engulf the planet if the cowards in the Kremlin remain mired in their imperial delusions. Thousands are dying in Armenia and Sudan. And now Israel is at war, after suffering its worst surprise attack since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago and with more Israeli citizens killed in a single day than ever in its history.

And yet much of America, and especially the remnants of the Republican Party (a party whose leaders during the Cold War defined themselves as the responsible stewards of U.S. foreign policy), remains in the grip of childish, even inane, politics. The international community in this difficult time needs a United States that is sane, tough, and principled; worthy of the title of leader of the free world; and determined, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Instead of Kennedy’s inspiring vision, America has the ignorant and incoherent Donald Trump as an apparent lock to capture the eventual GOP presidential nomination, the House of Representatives without a speaker, and a public that cannot find Ukraine or Iran on a map.

“I look at the world and all the threats that are out there,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Sunday. “And what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern? When we’re dysfunctional? When we don’t even have a speaker of the House?”

An excellent question, especially when the People’s House lacks a speaker because of a motion from Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida—an utterly unserious man who is despised even by other House Republicans. Backed by seven right-wing GOP extremists, Gaetz and this “chaos caucus” (to use Mike Pence’s description) notched a historical first by enabling the vote that tossed Representative Kevin McCarthy of California out of the job. (For some reason, the CBS show Face the Nation felt the need to interview one of the anti-McCarthy group, Nancy Mace, the day after war erupted in Israel—thus providing Mace with exactly the sort of attention she was likely hoping to garner.) At this point, the two main contenders for the post are Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The idea that someone as ridiculous as Jim Jordan could be in contention to lead the House should make every American pause and wonder how the United States has come to such a moment. Jordan is among Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters—Trump has already endorsed him for the speaker’s job—and one of the most cynical and huckstering members of Congress from either party. Jordan, on many issues (and especially when backing Trump’s preposterous claims about presidential power), is merely an annoying, gish-galloping gadfly.

But on the central issue of American democracy, he is much more dangerous.

Jordan was a consistent and vocal supporter of Trump’s claims of a stolen election. He usually couched this support in a “just asking questions” ploy, but occasionally the mask would slip and he would charge the Democrats with attempting to steal the election. As Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the House’s January 6–committee report, told CNN: “Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” Jordan refused to cooperate with the committee and defied its subpoena.

Jordan yesterday threatened another attempt to shut down the government (this time over immigration policies). But more to the point, how can the United States respond as one nation to the various crises around the world when the speaker of the House is an election denier spewing conspiracy theories about the current president? This is the man who could be wielding the speaker’s gavel when Congress receives the electoral votes in the 2024 election?

Scalise, the current majority leader, is as close to a “normal” candidate as the Republicans can produce, and he is likely in the lead for the job. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “normal” in this context means that Scalise is just another mainstream GOP figure calling for defunding “87,000 new IRS agents,” establishing “a committee on the weaponization of the federal government against citizens,” and holding “woke prosecutors accountable.”

The situation is no better over in the usually more staid and thoughtful U.S. Senate. As conflicts erupt around the world, hundreds of military promotions, including the chief of naval operations and many other senior appointments, remain frozen. They are being held up by Tommy Tuberville, a former Alabama college football coach who thinks U.S. servicepeople should be denied access to abortion and decries what he thinks is too much “wokeness” in the military. (Woke is now Republican speak for anyone who isn’t an obvious bigot.)

Meanwhile, the United States has been unable to send ambassadors to several nations, in part because of irresponsible holds placed by irresponsible senators. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, like Tuberville, appears to have held up posts over “wokeness,” while Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has blocked appointments over his unhinged insistence on seeing what he thinks are nefarious U.S. government documents regarding the coronavirus’s origins.

And in a juvenile attempt to turn the war in Israel into yet another GOP weapon against U.S. support for Ukraine, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri yesterday tweeted: “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” Hawley, like Vance and others, is a smart man who disrespects his voters by pretending to be stupid. He almost certainly knows—one would hope, anyway—that pitting Israel against Ukraine is a false choice. (It also fudges the two situations: Israel has regained some control of the situation, for now, while Ukraine remains mired in a huge conventional war against a giant, nuclear-armed enemy.)

The old saw about partisanship ending at the water’s edge was never completely true. The right and the left in the United States have argued plenty about foreign policy, but they once did so with a seriousness of purpose and an understanding that millions of lives, the security of the nation—and in the final analysis, the survival of humanity—were at risk. If any adults remain in the GOP, they need to get control of their party and get to work.

President Biden’s foreign-policy leadership, especially with a Russian war so close to NATO’s borders, has been admirable and successful. But he cannot, and should not, do it alone. The world needs America—and that means all of us.

Related:

Biden will be guided by his Zionism. This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars.

Today’s News

Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal weekend attack by launching fierce air strikes on the Gaza Strip. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will run as an independent in the 2024 presidential election, abandoning his Democratic bid. A person who crashed a car into the Chinese consulate in San Francisco was shot and killed by police.

More From The Atlantic

Your sweaters are garbage. Hiking needs new rules. Lizzo was a new kind of diva. Now she’s in a new kind of scandal.

Culture Break

Read. In Madonna: A Rebel Life, the author Mary Gabriel argues that Madonna’s entire life is an exercise in reinventing female power.

Watch. The Royal Hotel (in theaters now) taps into every female traveler’s fears.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m not the kind of guy to say “I told you so,” but … oh, who am I kidding, of course I am. Back in 2022, I wrote about the James Bond film franchise, and I said that all the talk of casting a Black or female 007 was just silly. Bond, created by Ian Fleming, is forever frozen in time as an aspiring white male elitist of the old British establishment. In the books and the better entries in the films, he’s a hero you can admire only with serious reservations.

With the exception of Skyfall, I didn’t much care for the Daniel Craig movies; they were too emotional and introspective. (I won’t ruin Spectre for you, but when the movie revealed a twist involving the iconic villain Blofeld, I nearly walked out.) And so I’m gloating a bit now: The Bond rumor mill says that Christopher Nolan is in talks with EON Productions and Amazon to direct two Bond films. But he reportedly wants them to be period pieces that stay close to Fleming’s source materials, which would be pretty daring. (If you think the 1973 Live and Let Die movie was racist and offensive, wait’ll you read the 1954 novel—if you can find one that hasn’t been bowdlerized yet.)

If the rumors are true, then good for you, Mr. Nolan. Bond doesn’t need to be drinking beer and sharing his feelings. He needs to be saving England, the Empire, and the world, probably in that order. The last few Bond films were just British-accented Bourne movies. Let Bond be Bond—including the parts we don’t like in 2023.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Ukrainian officials say that the sea battlefront line has been pushed back at least 185 km from Ukraine’s coast since Russia's full-scale invasion began.

The United States is finally getting around to supplying Ukraine with some of the long-range weaponry that the Ukrainians have been requesting for months. For far too long, Ukraine’s Western allies have largely been arming that country to fight a caricature of modern war, not the real thing.  

The results of that decision are evident on maps that, more than 500 days after Russia’s invasion, show only small, incremental changes in the front line. The Ukrainians started a much anticipated counteroffensive almost four months ago and have pushed the Russians back in a few places in the Zaporizhzhia region but have not achieved a full-scale armored breakthrough. By contrast, Ukrainian missile strikes behind enemy lines have produced noteworthy successes in recent months—most notably in forcing Russia to withdraw major elements of the Black Sea Fleet from its base in the port of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea.

When Russia prepared to invade Ukraine in February 2022, many military analysts imagined tank-led columns advancing rapidly and overwhelming the Ukrainian army—a vision of war that has continued to shape Western policy now that Ukraine is trying to reclaim territory. The U.S. and other NATO countries have provided armored vehicles and combined-arms-warfare training, mainly to help Ukraine make direct attacks on Russian front lines. But making a decisive breakthrough at the front, always difficult, has become extremely challenging. The Russians, for their part, spent five months attacking the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, taking a tiny parcel of ground at an enormous cost in casualties. Defensive weaponry has made even the best tanks and vehicles vulnerable to damage from a variety of cheaper, more numerous types of equipment. If vehicles mass together in preparation for an attack, they can be destroyed or at least slowed down in many different ways—with mines, artillery, handheld rocket launchers, or, in more and more cases, drones.

[Daniel Block: The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet]

The one successful breakthrough exploitation of the past 16 months happened when Ukraine was able to attack a very lightly defended part of the Russian line in the Kharkiv region. This underscores how forward advance is possible only if Ukraine can identify weak points—or create them by striking military installations and logistics deep behind the front, so that Russia cannot move personnel, weaponry, and supplies to the front. This is why Ukrainian officials have been so insistent on obtaining the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS (pronounced “attack-ems”). This ammunition, which can be fired from the vehicle-mounted High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, has a much longer range—up to about 190 miles—than conventional artillery and even the Western-supplied Multiple Launch Rocket System that Ukrainian forces used to great effect in the first year of the war. Unfortunately, the U.S. has offered Ukraine only a limited diet of long-range weapons. As I argued earlier this year, the West’s approach to military aid was preparing Ukrainian forces to fight the hardest possible campaign.

Only when the United Kingdom supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which typically are fired from aircraft and have a range of more than 150 miles, and France followed with SCALP missiles (its version of the same weapons system) could Ukraine begin hitting high-value targets—bridges, supply depots, anti-aircraft systems—deep in Russian-occupied areas, including Crimea. The most consequential attacks have been on the Russian navy base in Sevastopol. Using just a handful of the British and French missiles, the Ukrainians have destroyed two major Russian warships, including a new Kilo-class submarine that the Russians have used to fire on Ukraine, and seriously damaged the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet itself. Yet the U.K. and France have a modest supply of the missiles. Ukraine has already fired approximately 100 of them, by some estimates, and needs to be very particular about when and where it uses any others.

In retrospect, Russia’s most successful campaign of the war has been what could be called its “great escalation bluff.” Perhaps because the Russians realize how vulnerable they are to long-range fire, they have always implied that giving Ukraine greater reach could lead to a broadening of hostilities, even a nuclear response. As the muted reaction to the attacks on Sevastopol in September has shown, this rhetoric was empty—a desperate ploy to dissuade the West from properly arming Ukraine.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The West must give Ukraine the weapons it needs to win]

That this ploy succeeded is a shame, and Western nations should stop falling for it.

Although Ukraine will now get ATACMS ammunition, the system—along with the F-16 fighters that Ukrainian pilots will likely be flying sometime in the first half of 2024—will arrive too late for the summer counteroffensive. Having missed a major opportunity to help Ukraine make more significant advances, the Biden administration should not make the same mistake again. The U.S. has many other potentially useful kinds of equipment in stock, such as the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, which is relatively difficult for enemy forces to detect. The U.S. has thousands of early-generation JASSMs in stock and should provide them if requested. Germany has the well-designed Taurus missile system. Taken together, all of these weapons would have given Ukraine a formidable arsenal to take apart Russia’s entire logistics system in occupied territory in Ukraine, devastate the Sevastopol base, and isolate Crimea as a supply route. That would have weakened the Russians at the front far more than any direct assaults at prepared positions with armored vehicles.

Helping Ukraine win the war as quickly as possible is imperative. It’s also the best way to limit future destruction and casualties. Yet the combination of Russian nuclear threats and the West’s outdated visions of major tank breakthroughs has put Ukraine in a difficult position. Because frontal assaults are so dangerous and vehicles are so vulnerable to attack, the Ukrainians have been proceeding on foot, undertaking an infantry-based campaign that could continue all autumn and even into the winter. The more that Western allies prioritize long-range weapons, the more Ukraine can wear down Russian resistance and take back its own territory.

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

Republicans averted the self-inflicted wound of a government shutdown this weekend. The main casualty of the process was aid for Ukraine, but foreign aid was always a fig leaf—for both GOP dysfunction and the determination of a small group of Republicans to help Russia.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

California’s math misadventure is about to go national. Artists are losing the war against AI. What Emily Wilson’s Iliad misses

It’s Not About the Money

The Republicans in Congress have delayed a shutdown for another 45 days while they continue their family food fight. They are all very angry with one another, and they seem to agree on only one issue: They hate Matt Gaetz. But don’t blame Gaetz, who is clearly having the time of his life being famous. The Republicans, as the economist Michael Strain noted, have for weeks been careening toward a Seinfeld Shutdown, a budget impasse about … nothing.

Some $6 billion of aid to Ukraine, however, was removed from the budget, a temporary casualty of the near shutdown. (I say “temporary” because I have confidence that sensible members of Congress will act to restore the funds.) Republicans are trying to cloak their opposition to military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine in a lot of codswallop about oversight and budget discipline. But the opposition to aid for Ukraine among Republican extremists on the Hill is not about money.

Most congressional Republicans are in favor of helping Ukraine. The extremists, however, warned Joe Biden last month that they would oppose additional assistance to Kyiv. The list of signatories to a September 21 letter to the Office of Management and Budget is a roster of shame, including the new America Firsters in the Senate (J. D. Vance, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tommy Tuberville among them) and the grotesque caucus-within-a-caucus of some of the most unhinged and weirdest members of the House, including Clay Higgins, Harriet Hageman, Andy Biggs, Anna Paulina Luna, and that titan of probity and prudence, Paul Gosar.

The drumbeat of propaganda from these members and their “amen” chorus in the right-wing media is having an effect: An Economist/YouGov poll released last week found a slight uptick among all voters for reducing military aid to Ukraine, but for the first time found that a majority of Republicans now support such reductions. Fortunately, Americans overall—even many voters in the GOP—are still holding firm in their support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian imperialism.

Nevertheless, GOP hostility to Ukraine on the Hill and among its rank-and-file voters is growing for several reasons—none of them principled.

First, foreign aid is always an easy hot button for the know-nothing right to push. Most Americans have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid, and they grossly overestimate how much goes to such programs. (Most Americans think it’s about 25 percent of the U.S. budget and want it reduced to about 10 percent. Their wish is already granted: It’s actually about 1 percent.) Worse, so many years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine (in Crimea), some two-thirds of Americans still don’t even know where Ukraine is.

They also do not understand that most foreign assistance is not a cash handout: Money is spent to buy weapons, food, and other products made in America, which we then ship to other nations. Instead, many Americans think of assistance—mistakenly—as bags of untraceable money handed to foreigners to do with as they will, which is why opportunists such as Ron DeSantis (who once supported aid to Ukraine) try to exploit provocative terms such as blank check to describe helping Ukraine. DeSantis knows better; so do other Republican leaders.

But the Trumpist right has a more specific beef with Ukraine because of the role Ukraine played in Donald Trump’s impeachment and eventual electoral downfall. Interestingly, Vance has tried to make the opposite argument: “Sorry, this needs to be said,” he tweeted on Saturday, while clearly being not sorry. “A lot of the anti-Russia obsession on the left has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s a revenge fantasy over 2016. They blame Russia for Donald Trump’s election and they’ll bleed Ukraine dry for payback.”

As is so often the case with modern Republicans, every accusation is a confession, and every assertion is projection. The majority of the country—not “the left”—is supporting Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do, not because they hate Russia for electing Trump. Rather, it’s the other way around: The MAGA Republicans are opposing Ukraine because they hate Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for their role in the impeachment drama.

Unlike Vance and his isolationist colleagues, most Americans recognize the immense threat that Russia’s war of conquest poses to our allies, to global peace, and to the security of the United States itself. Republicans once stood at the forefront of opposition to Kremlin aggression—Ronald Reagan’s steadfast opposition to Moscow was one of the reasons I was a young GOP voter in the 1980s—but now the party is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.

Also, we should not look away from a nauseating truth about the extremist caucus within the GOP: Some of them genuinely admire Putin and what he has created in Russia. Tucker Carlson, after all, didn’t get taken off the air for supporting Putin in ways that would have made Cold War Soviet propagandists blush; he got canned after a defamation lawsuit from an election-machine company. These GOP extremists have swallowed the gargantuan lie that Putin is a godly defender of white Christian Europe against the decadent West and its legions of militant drag queens. (They believe this, in part, because they know less than nothing about conditions in Russia or its demography.)

Finally, some Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine because of the more general and bizarre countercultural obsession that has seized the American right: Whatever most of their fellow citizens approve of, they must oppose, or else they risk losing their precious claims to being an embattled minority. If they were to support aid to Ukraine, how would they be different from everyone else, and especially from Biden? How would they mark their tribal loyalty if they crossed party lines to oppose a dictator—while supporting a wannabe dictator of their own?

Some Republican opponents of assistance to Ukraine are merely cynical manipulators who care little about national or international security. Many genuinely admire Putin and hope for Ukraine’s defeat. Others are merely ignorant. But all of them are bound together by the reflexive urge to reject whatever it is that most other Americans accept. As a commenter on social media said to me today, if liberals were opposing aiding the Ukrainian war effort, “the GOP would shut down the government to ensure aid and you’d see Ukrainian flags waving on the back of pickups.”

To adopt a line from Senator Vance: Sorry, but it has to be said.

Related:

Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right. The emptiness of the Ramaswamy doctrine

Today’s News

The civil fraud trial brought against Donald Trump by Attorney General Letitia James began in New York. Representative Matt Gaetz vowed to present a resolution to oust Kevin McCarthy after the House speaker worked with Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Laphonza Butler, the first Black woman to lead the abortion-rights group Emily’s List, will succeed the late Senator Dianne Feinstein in California.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Cooper Neill / Getty; Jeff Kravitz / Getty; David Eulitt / Getty.

Taylor Swift Is Too Famous for This

By Devin Gordon

Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce …

Maybe they’ll fall in love. Maybe they’ll have babies and co-host Saturday Night Live and grow old together.

No, this is going to end badly. Sorry to be a party pooper. But this isn’t really about Travis and Taylor at all. It’s about a sports-media cycle that simply cannot coexist with the gossip-manufacturing industry—two unruly mobs smacking together like 300-pound linemen.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How financial strength weakened American feminism Daniel Clowes is ready to face the truth. New York City is not built for this.

Culture Break

Photograph by Laura El-Tantawy

Read. “Love Is Not Always Song, but the Swelling,” a new poem by Athena Nassar:

“You are waist deep, wading / in what mauls you and also / what loves you.”

Listen. Senior editor Jenisha Watts narrates her October cover story, “I Never Called Her Momma.”

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P.S.

Well, after weeks of being excited about coming to The Atlantic Festival—where I was going to share a stage with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen—I threw out  my back and couldn’t attend. (I couldn’t even stand up for a few days. Back spasms are no joke.) I’m on the mend thanks to my wife, my cat, and modern chemistry, but I had to pass up a terrific festival.

If you missed it live, as I had to, you can join me in watching some of the events here. (And don’t miss this interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) In the meantime, I’m going to start working out so I can be in shape—okay, at least standing upright—for next year’s festival.

— Tom

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