The Cosmopolicast

Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She now lives in Brussels and writes, on Substack, about foreign influence operations:

I’ve spent the last several years screaming from the rooftops about the corrosive effects of foreign influence operations on democratic societies. Now, I’ve decided to put all that information into a newsletter so that maybe you will start screaming from the rooftops, too. The more we understand how these influence operations tie into national security and corruption, the better we can arm ourselves against them.

I thought it would be interesting to have her on the podcast to discuss what we’re seeing.

How Russia captured a slice of the American mind

America’s response to Trump’s so-called peace plan proves just how successful Russia’s influence operations in America have been.

The KGB’s” active measures” system, refined in the late Soviet period and later adapted into the FSB/GRU playbook, rests on three principles: 1) Exploit existing divisions; don’t create fissures; widen them; 2) Use truth, half-truth, and lies interchangeably, whatever advances the psychological objective; 3) Obscure the source: The greatest triumph is when the target population spreads your messaging for you. Russian intelligence thinks in terms of cognitive openings: Any weakness—cultural, emotional, political, historical—becomes an entry point. America has a lot of entry points.

August 1968

The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach,The Ogre cannot master Speech:About a subjugated plain,Among its desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.

—WH Auden

Belgium has suddenly gone wobbly about seizing Russia’s frozen assets, spooked by the thought of Russian lawyers. Pokrovst will fall imminently. The Kremlin is dismantling Ukraine’s electrical grid as the winter arrives. A sprawling corruption scandal is engulfing Zelensky’s closest allies, demoralizing soldiers on the frontlines, and handing Russia a matchless propaganda gift. Vladislav Davidzon joins me to discuss what this means for Ukraine and the war.

From Vladislav’s daybook:

(Note: This is not Critical Conditions with Dan Perry. I just can’t figure out how to get rid of that logo.)

Recently, I had an exchange with our subscriber Josh Rosenberg—who on Substack goes by the name Josh of Arc, and writes at Sic Semper Tyrannis—about the use of violence in resisting authoritarianism. You’ll remember his essay, Force and Freedom: Contemplating the Unthinkable, in which he argues that those opposing Trump have become dangerously alienated from the fundamental fact of political life: It rests upon force.

Democrats may be capable of winning the most votes in the 2028 election, he writes. But this doesn’t mean they’ll retake the presidency, he continues, because they’re unprepared for Trump’s refusal to relinquish power:

… Whether the GOP puts Donald Trump on the ballot as a final insult to the Constitution, nominates JD Vance, or props up another Medvedev-style supplicant, Trump’s power, freedom, and reputation will again be on the line. Do we really expect him to relinquish power peacefully? Will his rogues’ gallery of cabinet members, chosen above all for their servility, suddenly discover they are patriots willing to imperil themselves to defend the Constitution? Will other administration officials tell the truth now that Trump has signed executive orders targeting people like Chris Krebs—the DHS official who refused to fabricate evidence to support Trump’s election theft lies in 2020?

He therefore offers the following advice:

The opposition’s strategy should become two-fold. A peaceful resistance movement should organize aggressively, with a scrupulous commitment to non-violence. But concurrently, we must assemble a network of private militias to serve as an insurgency-in-waiting. Like any deterrent force, its purpose would be to ensure that it is never needed. And it’s mission would be to convince anyone in a position of public trust who might enable a full transition to an American dictatorship, that such a world would not be an oasis in which they would prosper, but a hellscape in which they’ll be hunted.

I replied to this argument here in an essay titled Do Americans need an insurgency-in-waiting? Violence, non-violence, and getting rid of authoritarians. I am sympathetic to his moral point: I agree that if a usurper can’t be dislodged by peaceful and Constitutional means, force is permissible, and under some circumstances, morally obligatory.

But I argue that we have by no means exhausted the peaceful means available to us. Not even close. Not even close to close. What’s more, if it’s true that we have a moral obligation to confront a usurper, it follows that we have an obligation to do so in the way that is most likely to be effective. The empirical evidence about this is surprisingly clear. Historically, those who employ disciplined non-violence are far more likely to succeed than those who use physical force—even when confronting the most brutal authoritarians.

The benchmark study is Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Studying an aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, they found that campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as likely to achieve their political goals. This was true even under even the most brutal and repressive regimes. The findings were neither subtle nor ambiguous: If you’re in any doubt about whether nonviolence is an effective way to confront a lawless regime, this should settle it.

There is a reason for this. Nonviolent movements are generally viewed as legitimate, both domestically and internationally. This allows a nonviolent campaign to attract broad public support and participation. Violent campaigns tend to be repulsive to the public. It’s extremely hard to convince a significant number to take up arms against the regime, even if it’s justified. All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Because the public recoils from violence, violent campaigns rarely achieve the numbers required to overwhelm an authoritarian government. Instead, they discredit their cause and offer the tyrant a justification for armed counterattack.

Nonviolent protest can, when sustained and focused, attract a very high level of public participation. It’s the rare regime that can ignore sustained civic disruption. The key to success, usually, is shifting the loyalty of core supporters, especially the military. But violent campaigns serve the opposite purpose, bonding the regime, its supporters, and the military together.

What’s more, successful nonviolent movements are more likely to lead to stable, durable outcomes. Compared to regimes that emerge from violent conflict, democracies that emerge from non-violent campaigns are less likely to regress to civil war. This is a particularly interesting finding: It seems that once people acquire a taste for settling their differences violently, they never fully lose it. Violent insurgency, Chenoweth and Stephan conclude, is therefore rarely justifiable on strategic grounds, never mind the moral arguments. Whether confronting a democratic or an authoritarian regime, a nonviolent campaign is far more likely to yield desirable outcomes.

Josh wrote another essay recently titled The Weak: Freedom’s Undertakers. He observes what he describes as a “collective malaise and paralysis among liberals in the West,” and suggests that this collective paralysis lies “at the heart of our present crisis.”

Western liberal elites continue to demonstrate an almost congenital inability to resist identity-inflected guilt trips, moral blackmail, character assassination, and other weapons of the weak—often wielded by low-level staffers. It’s as if, sometime around 2014, the editors of Teen Vogue stormed every newsroom in America, said “Alright, if nobody resists, nobody will get hurt”, and everyone just immediately surrendered.

Theories differ as to how this happened. But it appears that the introduction of viral social media combined with the already risk-averse, legalistic culture of many of these institutions produced a supernova of neuroticism, pettiness, and crippling fear. Leadership positions increasingly involved putting out (or avoiding) fires, minimizing negative publicity, and avoiding being sued. This tended to attract and produce risk-averse, rule-following bureaucrats who live in a perpetually defensive posture; small, unserious people consumed with trivialities. Is it any wonder that such “leaders” cannot recognize when defining moments arrive—when half measures must be abandoned in favor of giant historical leaps?

Consider the spectacle of the last few DNC meetings: In the midst of budding fascism they begin events with land acknowledgements, and meticulously document their compliance with official party quotas on the number of people from each marginalized identity group who must be appointed to leadership positions. A party that regards itself as the last bulwark against fascism turns the selection of its leaders into farcical public group therapy sessions that confirm every negative stereotype about Democrats and “the Left.” Can dingbats like this who cower in the face of the gender identity lobby rise to the challenge of reversing a process of authoritarian consolidation that is now well past its preliminary stages? Can people who flinch at the prospect of enforcing their own immigration laws or keeping violent criminals off the streets really summon the resolve to compel other people’s children to fight and die? This, I believe, gets to the heart of the crisis of modern liberalism. It has no answer to the following question: What’s worth dying for?

What does his argument entail?

What it means is selecting certain rules that tie Democrat’s hands in their ability to fight back in defense of their most basic rights, and setting them aside. …

While Congress reduces itself to a useless appendage and the six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court beclown themselves in order to sanction a ludicrous interpretation of executive power that would even make Aileen Cannon do a double take, Trump now largely governs around the Constitution by declaring phony national emergencies. The military is selectively redeployed to blue cities for domestic law enforcement purposes based on a so-called “crime emergency.” Trade policy is dictated from the oval office, upended on a whim, and altered in exchange for personal bribes that nobody is even bothering to conceal at this point—all predicated on the idea that it’s an “emergency.” The regime’s rationale for their ongoing unconstitutional crackdown on free speech—which they’re now escalating dramatically in the wake of the Kirk killing—is again justified on the basis of a so-called “national emergency.” There’s a name for this form of government, and it isn’t democracy—regardless of what the credulous Mr. Fetterman may believe.

Remarkably—starting with the outrageous immunity decision—the six monarchists on the court have sanctioned this anti-constitutional farce, and in so doing, have unleashed a bloodthirsty predator on the nation, completely unbound by law and empowered to use the military, the FBI, and every other part of the federal government to pursue his revenge fantasies against domestic enemies—be they individuals, corporations, or entire states. The monarchist majority has over the last 18 months, in effect, cancelled the Constitution in service to Donald Trump’s will to power and told those seeking their relief that their rights no longer apply when they collide with his royal prerogatives. Under these extraordinary circumstances that the court has created, it is time for Democrats to reject the cautious half-measures favored by unconditional liberals, accept that the monarchist majority has breached the social contract in abandoning their oaths, and embrace a bold new doctrine: There are no limits to how far blue state governors and legislatures can go to protect their citizens and their elections from the autocrat in the White House.

What does “no limits” mean? It can mean many things depending on how far the regime chooses to go themselves. Currently, officials in Chicago have arranged to have ICE officials followed and monitored to ensure they do not violate the rights of citizens. This is a good start. But it leaves a lot of open questions such as: What happens when federal officials cross the line? The monarchist majority on the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that they’re worse than useless, and that they now view their jobs not as interpreting the law, but rather as serving as six glorified notaries who rubber stamp Donald Trump’s anti-Constitutional revenge presidency. So when such a confrontation occurs—and it will—whichever Democratic governor or mayor is in charge will have a critical decision to make: cave or escalate? Should they hang their citizens out to dry in deference to a Court that has shredded the social contract, doesn’t even respect itself, and can’t even be bothered to come to the defense of lower court judges who’ve been under siege and subjected to constant violent threats as a result of the regime’s rhetoric and behavior? If “no limits” is to have any meaning, then the answer has to be no. And if you’re thinking that this sounds a lot like Supreme Court nullification, then you thought right.

We discuss this—and more—in the podcast. Listen, read his essays, and tell us what you think in the comments.

Who wants to come on the podcast next?

It’s a special mostly-Africa edition of the podcast. We wonder why Trump has suddenly decided to put boots on the ground in Nigeria—which we’d fully support, by the way—except we think sending troops to Sudan is even more urgent. Also, Tanzania’s elections didn’t go so well; Iran is planning to nuke up post haste; and while we’re renouncing isolationism and invading everything in sight, we need to send troops to Lebanon, stat.

From Dan’s notes:

In today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire and I discussed what may be the most terrifying decision of the Trump presidency: his plan to resume nuclear testing. We’ve seen recklessness before—the gutting of USAID, the tariff tantrums against allies—but this one feels like a threshold moment. As Claire said at the start, “This is life or death.”

She began by recalling that the United States signed, though never ratified, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty back in 1996. To make detonations unnecessary, Washington built what became one of the most ambitious scientific programs in modern history—the Stockpile Stewardship and Management program. Its mission was to guarantee the safety and reliability of America’s nuclear deterrent without live tests.

Claire described the staggering scale of that effort: the National Ignition Facility near San Francisco, where hundreds of lasers recreate the pressure and temperature of a thermonuclear blast; the subcritical experiments in Nevada that stop short of chain reaction; and the supercomputers that model detonations down to trillionths of a second. After three decades of such work, she noted, every expert—from the lab directors to the heads of Strategic Command—has said the same thing: our confidence in the stockpile is higher than ever. “Testing again,” she said, “would yield no new information, only instability.” That instability, she argued, is not just technical but psychological. For Russia, China, and North Korea, Trump’s erratic behavior, his public confusion and his obsession with imagined slights will make America look unhinged. “You deter your enemies not by appearing insane but by convincing them you can absorb a shock and respond,” she said. If the man with sole launch authority cannot tell theater from reality, the danger is stumbling into a nuclear war.

My response was simpler, in a way. Trump wants to look like a tough guy, angry that Putin just announced a new missile test and desperate to match it. I don’t think Trump—a man who loves tariffs but doesn’t understand them—can comprehend anything Claire said.

We wondered aloud whether anything could stop it. I noted that Congress technically controls the funding, but that process would take time, and the courts are unlikely to intervene given the treaty’s unratified status. The agencies that might have imposed restraint have been hollowed out—the National Nuclear Security Administration, for instance, is barely functioning after being DOGEd.

From there, the conversation widened, as it always does, to the larger culture that made such madness possible: I said America’s disdain for expertise was becoming a strategic liability.

By the end, the conversation veered toward the other global tremors of the week.

At the APEC meeting—which oddly represents most global trade and basically is a middle finger aimed at Europe—Trump’s false boasts about trade with South Korea fascinated Claire. I focused on the non-deal deal with China.

I also praised Rand Paul and the handful of Senate Republicans who voted down Trump’s tantrumesque Canada tariff addition. It won’t matter much, because the Republican caucus in the House is 100 percent lemmings—but it offered a glimmer of hope. Claire did not dispute me on the lemmings.

Reaching to find a measure of agreement with Trump, I argued that while his hatred of all imports is infantile, the monumental trade deficit with China is actually dire, since the West has created a dangerous dependence.

We ended on something less apocalyptic: the Dutch elections where the far right underperformed. And we resolved that next Monday, we would endeavor to produce a positive, uplifting podcast! Surely there is more good news in the world.

Claire—while we were discussing this, JD Vance blithely remarked to the press that testing the US nuclear arsenal would ensure it actually “functions properly.”

God help us. He’s cheerfully denying all of modern weapons science. He either believes we don’t, in fact, know whether our arsenal “functions properly”—unforgiveable ignorance about the weapons with the power to end organized human existence, ones that could very plausibly, and soon, be under his command—or he’s willing to lie about this, even this, to please the President. But this isn’t a lie about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. Suggesting that we don’t know whether our nuclear weapons work is intolerable.

The reason the US hasn’t conducted a live nuclear test since 1992 isn’t that we’ve become cavalier about our deterrent. It’s because we no longer need to. We have complete confidence in the reliability and the deadliness of every weapon in our arsenal. We can model every physical process that takes place in a nuclear explosion with far greater precision than the full-scale tests of the Cold War ever allowed. Our weapons are not only reliable, they are known to be so, and known within margins of error that the Manhattan Project scientists could have scarcely imagined. Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, the Nevada complex, and their contractor and academic partners run facilities that model the physics of an imploding plutonium pit, the chemistry of high explosives, the behavior of metals under decades of stress, and a thousand subsidiary processes that scientists in the pre-computer era could only feel in the dark. The confidence we have in our warheads is the product of a deliberate, expensive, and empirically rigorous scientific program that has, for three decades, served precisely the purpose Vice-President Vance claims can only be achieved by exploding bombs.

Testing means breaking the global moratorium that’s held since the early 1990s, effectively ending the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. It means inviting Russia, China, North Korea, India, and Pakistan to follow suit. Within months, the world would once again be awash in radioactive fallout and nuclear brinksmanship.

But by far the most dangerous thing is the way this would raise the temperature of nuclear alert systems. It would do so dramatically. At a moment of heightened tension, a sudden detonation, even if it’s announced in advance, may be misinterpreted by an adversary’s early-warning systems, triggering a launch-on-warning posture and reducing the decision time for nuclear response from minutes to seconds. This means judgment—Donald Trump’s judgment—will be displaced by reflex—Donald Trump’s reflex.

Strategic stability requires predictability. It requres clear channels of communication. It requires the public appearance of credible restraint. Testing undercuts all three. The Comprehensive Test Ban Organization’s global monitoring network exists precisely to detect the moment any state flips the switch. An American detonation would undo decades of progress, give Moscow and Beijing a pretext for parity in provocative behavior, and hand smaller nuclear-armed and aspirant states a glorious permission slip. Moscow and Beijing have more to gain from it than we do—they would learn something by testing; we would not. But none of us have a thing to gain by bringing this world into being.

A nuclear detonation does something no conventional weapon does. In an instant, it converts a sliver of mass into a fireball and radiation pulse, creating a supersonic shock front that collapses buildings and ruptures organs. The mushroom cloud rains radioactive particulates that contaminate land, water, and food for years. The thermal radiation immolates even at a distance; the ionizing radiation will kill you, swiftly; the fallout will kill you, slowly. Electromagnetic pulses from high-altitude pulses can collapse communications and critical infrastructure. The damage is both immediate and persistent: biospheres and the built environment are affected in ways that are qualitatively different from the effects of any other human creation. To treat such an event as “testing”—why, it’s just like routine car maintenance!—is moral flippancy so repulsive it makes me vomit.

The consequences would cascade. A US test would increase the incentive for adversaries to accelerate new delivery systems and adopt operational postures that shorten decision times. It would increase proliferation pressures in volatile regions. It would produce a cascade of policy responses that are not amenable to surgical control: more tests, more radiological insult, more exposure of civilians and soldiers to risks that can’t be remedied with platitudes about “strength.”

On 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud rose over the Trinity site in the Jornada del Muerto desert, the name itself an epitaph. Ralph Carlisle Smith, watching from Compania Hill, wrote:

I was staring straight ahead with my open left eye covered by a welder’s glass and my right eye remaining open and uncovered. Suddenly, my right eye was blinded by a light which appeared instantaneously all about without any build up of intensity.

The flash was so bright that observers standing 10,000 yards away were temporarily blinded. It melted sand into trinitite—light green glass, the color of desolation, still faintly radioactive after eighty years. It lies there yet, wind-scoured and silent.

A nuclear explosion is a wholly different category of violence. In the first fractions of a second the weapon converts a tiny fraction of matter into energy and, in doing so, releases more energy in an instant than any chemical combustion ever could. A self-sustaining chain reaction produces an avalanche of energetic particles and photons, and microseconds after ignition, a luminous fireball blooms. Within that sphere, the temperature and radiation density is such that matter is briefly in exotic states: plasmas of stripped atoms, torrents of gamma rays and neutrons that irradiate everything nearby. Milliseconds later the fireball’s expansion drives a supersonic shock front that smashes buildings; it wets and twists the human body in ways ordinary blasts don’t: lungs hemorrhage, eardrums rupture, low-lying structures are lifted and then crushed by reflected overpressures. Thermal radiation, emitted almost instantaneously, ignites combustible material at many kilometers’ distance. People not killed by blast will be immolated by a heat pulse that chars their flesh.

In the desert, witnessing the world’s first manufactured sun, Oppenheimer reached for scripture. He found in the Bhagavad-Gita the only words adequate to express the horror: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. A nuclear explosion is Genesis played backward. The moment permanently altered our moral imagination. Ever since, every serious statesman who has contemplated the Bomb has grasped that he faces one task more important—far more important—than all the others: ensuring that sun never rises.

Resume testing and you will have weakened non-proliferation, offered license to our rivals, given rise to a rush to build new delivery systems, increased the chance of miscalculation, and produced a strategic environment in which accidents happen, not just possibly, but probably. The century will be governed by reflex and terror.

It is unforgivable. It is unforgivable to support or enable anyone who would do this. At stake is the whole human race, the whole natural world.

Trump’s insistence that our weapons be tested may appear to those who don’t know enough to object to be just one more act of lunacy in an endless procession of them, but it is not. This is different. That it’s come to this is a sign of how profoundly betrayed we’ve been by our Congress, by our Supreme Court, by our fellow citizens, and by every other American institution with the affirmative duty to prevent a madman like this from acquiring a power like that.

Trump now exhibits unmistakable signs of cognitive decline. His public appearances are a miasma of morbid megalomania and confusion. It’s possible that faced with his own mortality, he has resolved to take us all down with us. Yes, he is that insane—and obviously so. Everyone in the world, save for a now-diminishing segment of the American public, can see it. That is precisely the problem. That Trump is the one issuing such an order will only be understood as further evidence that the United States is both dangerously unstable and completely divorced from the deterrence doctrines that allowed us to survive the Cold War.

Our adversaries see a country that is no longer capable of strategic restraint. Our allies see a partner too erratic to trust. In Moscow, Beijing, and even Pyongyang, analysts will interpret this as proof that the American nuclear command chain is hostage to the impulses of a disordered mind. This is precisely the nightmare scenario every serious nuclear strategist since Thomas Schelling has feared.

Trump and those who enable him—and if you are one of them, I mean these words for you—are putting the world at grave risk. That is not hyperbole. To those in Congress who have so far refused to lift a finger to stop this: the time is now. This isn’t a joke. You’ve had your fun. You’ve owned the libs. But this is the abyss. You must stop him. Now.

If you don’t, you stand a good chance of burning in hell. I mean that both literally and figuratively.

For the love of God, stop him.

Declassified nuclear test footage:

From Dan’s notes:

In this week’s episode, Claire and I turned our gaze westward—from the familiar storms in Europe and the Middle East to the gathering tempests across the Americas. What we found was an unsettling picture: saber-rattling, delusion, and a mounting sense that reality itself has become an expendable tool of power.

We began in the Caribbean,

Chris Alexander, whose Substack I recommend with the highest enthusiasm, joined the Canadian foreign service in 1991. He spent six years at the Canadian embassy in Moscow: He was the deputy head of mission during the first three years of Putin’s presidency. He’s also the former Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, a former Parliamentary Secretary for National Defense, a former Canadian Conservative MP, and the former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan and Deputy Head of UNAMA.

You’ll remember him from our conversation about what went wrong in Afghanistan:

For those of you who prefer audio-only, here’s a podcast version:

This was another blockbuster conversation. I’ve annotated the transcript below with links, comments, and examples.

Claire: Hi, this is Claire Berlinski, and you’re listening to the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. And we have with us, again, Chris Alexander, former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan—but much, much more. Chris, among other things, you spent much time when you were in the foreign service studying Russia. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background there?

Chris: Sure. Thanks for the chance to chat again, Claire. First, I went to university—I studied history and political science. I had learned some languages, but actually, in university, I never studied Russia directly. I really didn’t want to take international relations, because even then, I thought a lot of what was being taught was dogmatic and not very interesting. And this was end of the Cold War period and then edging into End of History time—the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so forth, when you and I were together [at Balliol College], but my experience of Russia, my learning about Russia, my knowledge of Russia is that of a practitioner.

I was there starting in 1993, learned Russian in the Canadian Foreign Service before going. Worked on the desk literally weeks after I joined the Department of External Affairs. There was the coup, attempted coup, against Gorbachev. People needed to watch CNN all night and stay in touch with our embassy for updates to ministers and so forth. That was the kind of thing I was doing from day one. So my life as a diplomat was totally swamped with Russia, post-Soviet dynamics, transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, and then from Soviet institutions to Russian institutions through that difficult period that gets forgotten in 1993, when Yeltsin shot up the White House.

I saw a lot of that firsthand. And because I had learned Russian, I was talking to everyone in that period of 10 or 15 years when Russians would talk to us frankly, because they weren’t afraid of the KGB, which was gone, or Putin and his repressive machinery of government, which hadn’t yet been put in place.

So it was a really interesting time. A time of insight, a time of building new relationships with Russians, a time of hope. But to be honest, I never had that much hope for what was happening in Russia in the 1990s. Moscow was a city awash in organized crime. Privatization had been done in the dirtiest of ways across the country—“Sale of the Century,” Chrystia Freeland’s book has that hard- hitting title.

Standards of living were in free fall for Russians. And so this democratic moment, when they actually had the chance to vote, to choose different candidates, was associated with economic disaster in the minds of Russians—which as we now know set the stage for Putin, and set the stage for Russians actually to like his strong man, anti-democratic approach right from the beginning.

There was hope, but it was false hope in the 90s. But there was a drama playing out that has come to affect us all, because even if we didn’t believe in the end of history, a lot of people believed Russia was out of a central role in history, actually, in the 90s. And they weren’t.

I just looked at this photo of Putin with his KGB buddies, in 1999, I think, when he’s Prime Minister, about to become president—acting president. Just a couple of months after all the apartment buildings had blown up in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, with their involvement, I would say. And they’re looking pleased as punch. On the march. They’re gonna get Russia back to where they needed it to be. And they didn’t go to war in Georgia or Ukraine for another 10, 14 years.

But even then, they were plotting to build influence in our countries that would help them influence decision-making in European capitals and in Washington, and if they could, pull the rug out from under democracy in our countries, which they’re now trying to do. So they were out of history. They didn’t have a lot of formal, obvious influence in those years. But they never stopped having these grand ambitions, which are the Putin version of Marxism. They really think that if they engage in enough subversion, disinformation, enough political corruption, that the whole house of cards of US society, the US Constitution, will come crashing down. And similarly in France, Germany, the UK. And in the late 90s, early 2000s, you and I would’ve laughed at that idea. Now, we’re actually involved in trying to defend our institutions against an attack that has proven to be much more formidable than we ever imagined it could be.

Claire: Yeah. I’d like to talk about—first, I want to talk about why you put “Putin” in quotation marks. Let’s just start with that. Whenever I cross-post one of your posts, my readers must be wondering, “Why does he always put Putin in quotation marks?”

Chris: This is a hard issue to share with anyone because it’s a judgment that I’ve come to—I’m certainly not alone: Many Russians have come to this judgment. Many other Russia watchers have come to this conclusion. But it stems from my personal experience with Putin. In Canada, I think I’m one of the only people who actually spent quite a lot of time with Putin, speaking Russian to Putin, in person, both before he became Prime Minister and then as President.

Claire: How many hours in total do you think you spent with him?

Chris: I would say a couple of days. Like, in the same rooms, in the same talks. The longest time I ever spent with him was at the Kananaskis G8 Summit, 2002, just after 9/11, in Alberta—where the G7 just met again, but obviously without Putin, thankfully, replaced by Zelensky, in that case.

And he was not involved in all the meetings because it was the G8, but there were still G7 meetings of leaders on financial and other issues in which Russia was not included. So he had downtime, hours of it, in fact, and he didn’t really want to talk to his own people, which was amazing.

I think his real friends are that old crew from St. Petersburg, the KGB officers he came up with that have stayed with him. But they weren’t on that trip. This was the Foreign Ministry types, the G7 Sherpa types, G8 Sherpa types. He wasn’t interested in them. So we walked around in the forest in Kananaskis, literally for hours, talking about nothing in particular. I think he thought he was recruiting me; I was obviously squeezing him for everything I could. But he asked about, “Where are we on the map of Alberta? Where are the Indians, Chris?” he said, meaning First Nations. And I had to get a map and show him these things.

Claire: So it was just the two of you? No translator?

Chris: No, I was speaking Russian to him.

Claire: Yeah. So just the two of you.

Chris: Just the two of us. There were security people around. We weren’t alone, but we had long, meandering discussions about lots of things. And he sounded to me pretty dumb. Like he was asking very simple questions.

Obviously, he’s not dumb. People later said to me, “Oh, he’s playing that way, Chris. That’s a KGB thing that they do.” I think the truth is somewhere in between. But suffice to say, from that occasion, from seeing him in talks and translating for our prime minister, Jean Chrétien, on a couple of occasions, doing this big Team Canada visit to Russia, where we played a hockey game, reenacting the 1972 Summit Series—which kind of influenced Putin to want to learn to play hockey, which he later did. We bonded in a way that few other international players did. Canada was there a lot. A few of us, as diplomats, were there a lot.

We got to know each other in those early years. So I had a strong sense of his physical presence, how he talks, how he is in conversation. And fast forward to the pandemic—maybe even a little before the pandemic, but especially the pandemic, I haven’t seen Putin in person since 2014, when I was a Canadian minister at a commemoration of the Armenian genocide in Yerevan. So by Covid, he’s looking a bit different. He’s obviously older. Lots has happened, especially with their first invasion of Ukraine.

But it becomes obvious to me that sometimes, when you see these videos and photographs that are put up by the Kremlin, it’s not Putin. It’s somebody else. And, sure enough, you start to see articles, including by authoritative journalists, saying, “The Kremlin is using a double. Maybe more than one. For security reasons.” Stalin did it. Other Russian leaders have done it. Gorbachev apparently did it. Castro did it, for security reasons and so forth. But in Putin’s case, there was an additional reason, because he seems to have been, of all world leaders, one of the most paranoid about infection, germs—Covid in particular.

I’m so sorry: I meant to post this last night, but fell asleep while writing the show notes. (I don’t know why everyone goes on about the importance of not looking at screens before bedtime: I fall asleep in front of mine all the time.)

Here’s the article Dan wrote for The Forward:

There was no sign that the US understands what it will actually take to bring Hamas to heel.

Vance, Witkoff and Kushner’s rhetoric was managerial, not martial. It conveyed commitment without urgency. The measured tones implicit in the warnings that “time” and “hard work” are needed betrayed a deeper failure to grasp what the moment demands. Because words will not disarm Hamas—the single step most necessary to any effort to create a lasting peace.

Now is not the moment for carefully explaining how complex disarmament would be. It’s the moment for applying all possible pressure to get that disarmament done. If this does not occur soon, President Donald Trump’s peace plan will not just fall apart but become a joke. The best-case scenario would be the embarrassment of a prematurely declared victory. The worst would be an echo of Neville Chamberlain proclaiming “peace in our time” amid the failed effort to appease Hitler in the run-up to World War II.

If the US is serious about ending this war on terms that deny Hamas any path back to power, it must respond to Hamas by replacing rhetoric with leverage. What is needed now is not patience but a dramatic and public escalation of pressure—a demonstration that Washington is prepared to wield the world’s biggest baseball bat until Hamas yields.

The US should start by declaring, publicly and unequivocally, that no reconstruction money or aid will enter Gaza while any part of it remains under Hamas control. That is the red line, and it must be enforced, not implied. It’s essential to take every step possible to show Hamas that the material and political costs of them keeping their guns substantially outweigh any benefits. …

And for more about Hungary’s economic, demographic, and political decline, consult the most recent edition of GLOBAL EYES. (That link will take you to the right section.) Here’s the key part, but there’s more; I recommend the whole article, which is by Attila Juhász and Bulcsú Hunyadi. (You’ll notice I didn’t even try to pronounce their names in the podcast. I know my limits.) They published this article on VSquare—the name comes from “V4,” for Visegrád Four—which was founded with a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy:

Today, the network consists of the top non-profit investigative journalism centers in the region: Fundacja Reporterow and its Polish-language outlet Frontstory.pl; Investigace.cz from the Czech Republic; Átlátszó.hu and Direkt36.hu from Hungary; and The Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak from Slovakia. In 2022, VSquare set up its core team and extended into collaboration with the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Belarus. Our aim is to be Central Europe’s leading English language investigative platform.

I hope they survive the death of the NED, because they’re outstanding. They’re also one of the few places left where you can read truly independent reporting about Hungary. In any case, Attila Juhász and Bulcsú Hunyadi write:

Viktor Orbán is facing political challenges the likes of which he has not seen in 20 years. His system is cracking on the levels that matter most: stability, economic performance, and governance. Consequently, the “Orbán model,” considered successful in recent years, is looking less appealing around the world. The 2026 parliamentary elections will have implications beyond Hungary. National leaders with similar political systems will likely be watching closely to see if Orbán, who has established a unique information autocracy within the European Union, will remain in power.

… In recent years, the Orbán regime has devoted major public resources to promoting its political system as an exportable model and boosting its global influence. … [T]hese efforts have been successful from the regime’s perspective: Viktor Orbán has attracted far more attention than Hungary’s international weight would suggest, becoming the standard-bearer of illiberalism and a star of the global populist and far-right movement. … While this playbook has done little to advance Hungary as a country, it has worked from the regime’s perspective. The strategic goal of exporting illiberalism is to secure the long-term survival of Orbán’s political system by shaping a foreign policy environment favorable to it. With the backing of like-minded populist forces, the regime seeks an “illiberal hegemonic shift”—one in which it no longer faces criticism or sanctions for dismantling the rule of law or for systemic corruption.

… Many pillars of the Orbán model have crumbled. The Hungarian economy has struggled for years, eroding the system’s stability. A cost-of-living crisis—driven by the EU’s highest inflation—has fueled voter frustration. Over the past year and a half, the opposition party TISZA (short for Respect and Freedom—and also the name of a river in Hungary) has emerged as a credible political alternative, channeling public discontent. Hungary’s political system still falls far short of fair competition, so next year’s election remains highly unpredictable. Yet those in power are clearly uneasy about the regime’s future.

… Real wages began falling in late 2022, and by 2023 Hungary had the highest inflation rate in the EU. In the first quarter of 2023, real wages dropped by 15.6 percent, compared to an average 3.8 percent decline in OECD countries—the sharpest fall in Hungary in a decade. This collapse in purchasing power caused consumption to plummet, at times dropping to levels last seen during pandemic lockdowns. As always, the Orbán government deflected blame, pointing to external factors: the war, EU sanctions on Russia, “Brussels,” even the Biden administration. By 2025, the government went as far as claiming that EU funds—suspended years earlier—were blocked because of the opposition TISZA party, founded in 2024. But after 15 years in power, this ever-changing list of enemies and endless finger-pointing have lost credibility with many voters.

… [T]he myth of “political governance”—the idea that professional expertise could be sidelined in favor of one man’s willpower—began to fade in 2023. Dissatisfaction has since grown sharply, especially over healthcare, social policy, public services (child protection, housing subsidies), and public transportation. On these issues, the government has lost the support of much of society. It’s no coincidence that Péter Magyar and his TISZA party have made them central to their political platform since 2024.

Two areas are even more crucial for the declining international appeal of the Orbán model: migration and demographics. The regime has long presented itself as a model in both fields. … The data, however, tell a different story: the Orbán government has neither stopped migration nor reversed population decline. … Demographic policy has fared no better. … In 2024, just 77,500 children were born in Hungary—the lowest number since 1949. [D]ivorce rates are climbing, and emigration—especially among young, educated Hungarians—continues to rise. As a result, Hungary’s population is shrinking rapidly.

… Paradoxically, in today’s political climate, the Orbán regime—so proud of its so-called national sovereignty—appears to be looking abroad for help to stay in power. … Fidesz openly hoped for Donald Trump’s return, expecting that it would deliver salvation: an end to the war in Ukraine, economic recovery, and a “peace budget.” … But almost none of this has happened. … Meanwhile, Trump’s trade war has created a worse environment for Europe’s economy, including Hungary’s, than before. Orbán, despite his reportedly close personal ties to Trump, was unable to point to any concrete achievements in US–Hungarian relations in his annual Băile Tușnad speech. … Instead of the expected “peace budget,” Hungary is implementing crisis measures to cope with US tariffs.

… Hungary’s weakened international position is not just the result of failed diplomacy but also of its economic and military weakness. It is doubtful Hungary can meet the NATO target—agreed at the June summit in The Hague—of raising defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2030, with 3.5 percent for core military expenditures. Orbán himself has warned such spending would damage the economy. Systemic corruption further tarnishes Hungary’s image abroad.

The next part is a bit puzzling:

… It hardly reflects well on a country when its prime minister’s friends and family become inexplicably wealthy in just a few years. This, combined with frozen EU funds, slows economic growth and makes the Orbán model far less appealing compared to its regional peers. According to VSquare, right-wing populists from Eastern Europe—including those facing legal trouble at home—are now looking to Trump’s America for inspiration and protection, not to Hungary.

I’m not sure why they’d turn to the US if they’re looking for a country whose leaders aren’t becoming inexplicably wealthy at a breathtaking pace. Well, whatever—good luck being inspired by Trump, right-wing European populists!

Also on VSquare (and in GLOBAL EYES), by Kamilla Marton and Bence X. Szechenyi:

Not only is Hungary experiencing population decline, it’s losing its most talented citizens to brain drain:

[M]igration within the EU has had a dramatic impact on Hungarian society and its economy, leading to the countries’ increased reliance on foreign “guest workers.” … While the population of Hungarians in Hungary has declined, the population of Hungarians in Europe (excluding Hungary) has increased by nearly 141,997, a growth of more than 60 percent from 2014 to 2024. … Ágnes Hárs, lead researcher at the Kopint-Tárki Economic Research Institute, told Direkt36 that one of the main reasons for emigration is “the lack of prosperity and perspective.” She added that emigration trends could slow significantly in Hungary if politics and the economy offered workers and students similar prospects to those in other European countries.

I wish someone would tell CPAC. But of course no one will.

Dan and I decided to turn parts of our ME201 discussion yesterday into today’s podcast, so you’ll hear a few voices from the class asking questions.

Supposedly, the ceasefire is now back on. Amit Segal is another great journalist to follow; he writes:

It’s Monday, October 20, and the strikes in Gaza have stopped, the ceasefire has been renewed, and humanitarian aid has resumed—and Israel is also preparing to receive a hostage’s body from Hamas tonight. So, does that mean yesterday’s strikes in Gaza wielded the desired results?

On one hand, as I wrote yesterday, just as the IDF did with Hezbollah following its immediate violation of the November 2024 ceasefire, yesterday was an opportunity for the IDF to use overwhelming force to enforce the ceasefire.

Initially, that seemed to be the direction Israel was taking. Hours after the IDF began striking targets in Gaza, Hamas announced that it would hand over the body of a hostage that it had just located “if conditions on the ground allow.” Some two hours later, an Israeli source said that the political echelon instructed COGAT not to allow the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza today. And now, with a hostage’s body expected to be returned tonight, it seems to have worked—at least on face value.

But as he writes—and as Dan and I have both stressed, repeatedly—the real problem is disarming Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza. Segal writes that there are two possibilities. First, as Trump seems (perhaps) to envision, a multinational force will enter Gaza and dismantle Hamas. Israel is dubious. It would prefer option two—sending in the IDF. Trump has said he’ll green light this if Hamas doesn’t disarm.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are back in Israel, reportedly to urge Netanyahu not to take any action that could further endanger the ceasefire:

The pair also met with senior IDF officials to verify progress on the deal, the report says. “Do not act in a way that would endanger the ceasefire. We want to do everything to reach the second phase,” the envoys reportedly told Netanyahu, adding that while “self-defense” is acceptable, “risking the ceasefire” is not.

Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who also attended the meeting, conveyed that Israel remains committed to the ceasefire framework and expects Hamas to uphold its side of the agreement, the Hebrew network adds.

In a highly unusual occurrence, the two Trump envoys also met with two IDF major generals today, Channel 12 says. According to the network, they sat down with the head of the IDF’s Technological Division and the head of Military Intelligence to assess Israel’s efforts to advance Trump framework.

JD Vance, too, is on the way. I’m not sure why. Perhaps to persuade Israelis that any concession would be preferable to having him lurk around and scold them over their ingratitude.

Trump, addressing the media, said that Hamas’s violation of the ceasefire “would be taken care of quickly.”

“They’re going to be nice, and if they’re not ... we’re going to eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated—and they know that.” He added that at this time, he has not told Israel to resume strikes in Gaza and that the US was “taking lots of steps to maintain ceasefire.”

While you’re reading Amit Segal, here’s an interesting account: Behind closed doors: How the deal with Hamas was born—the inside story:

If Israelis had heard how the President of the United States spoke about the hostages, it’s doubtful that he would have received such thunderous cheers at Hostages’ Square last Saturday night. To say they were a secondary concern for him would be an understatement — and even that understates it. Donald Trump favored eliminating Hamas the American way, and 20 living hostages (he was always confused about their number and minimized it — I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have said) seemed to him a marginal matter, collateral damage.

Only belatedly did he perceive how strategic the issue was for the Israelis, and therefore for their government as well. In the United States, presidents have usually not been criticized for meeting hostages’ families too little, but for doing so too often (for details, Google “Ronald Reagan”).

In one of the discussions before Operation Gideon’s Chariots B began, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the scar that would remain in Israeli society if the IDF conquered Gaza City at the cost of the hostages’ lives. Allow me to guess that he never really believed that moment would come. Indeed, in recent months, Netanyahu and Ron Dermer’s assessment was that an operation to conquer Gaza City, if it happens, may well begin, but most certainly would not reach completion. Here is the inside story. …

There’s a line in it that should really attract scrutiny: “Netanyahu called President Trump minutes [before striking Qatar], but the president was groggy after a late night of discussions. It took time to reach him. The strike went ahead.” Groggy? Too groggy to take an urgent call? How often does that happen? Journalists might want to ask.

Here, by the way, is the 60 Minutes interview with Kushner and Witkoff. Lesley Stahl is anything but an incisive interviewer—what a wasted opportunity!—but I still found it interesting. The very end of the interview contains a few surprises: Apparently, Iran has been calling, asking Trump for a deal. True? I have no idea. Witkoff seems so guileless that it’s hard to imagine he’s just making that up out of whole cloth; then again, no member of the Trump Administration could be constitutionally incapable of making something up out of whole cloth. It’s a job requirement.

The Ayatollah Khamenei does not seem to be of the same view. He just told Trump to “keep dreaming” if he think Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed:

Khamenei also rejected Trump’s offer to resume nuclear negotiations that were cut short when Israel struck the Islamic Republic on June 13, leading to 12 days of war during which Trump ordered the unprecedented strikes on Iran. “The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” said Khamenei in comments posted to his website.

Speaking of Witkoff’s guilelessness, an awfully queasy anecdote begins at about 26:40. The exchange was clearly planned in advance, because Stahl’s line of questioning indicates she’s heard this story from them before:

STAHL: So, you get to the meeting in Egypt and you’re in a meeting with the chief Hamas negotiator, right? And you’re meeting him for the first time. This is just a month after the attack in Doha.

WITKOFF: So, we got into the room. The lead negotiator was sitting right next to me.

STAHL: That negotiator was in Doha when the Israelis struck.

WITKOFF: Correct.

STAHL: He survived, but his son was killed. Is that right?

WITKOFF: That’s right. And we expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son—he mentioned it—and I told him that I had lost a son and that we were both members of a really bad club: parents who had buried children. And, um, you know, Jared describes it maybe a little bit better than me—

STAHL: —because you were watching.

KUSHNER: Yeah. What I saw at that moment was very interesting. You had—we go into a room and you have the Qataris, the Turks, and the Egyptians. And then we meet the four representatives of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. And I’m looking at these guys and I’m thinking, “These are hardened guys who have been through two years of war. They’ve obviously, you know, they green lit an assault that raped and murdered and did some of the most barbaric things. They’ve been holding hostages while they’re, they’re, while Gaza’s been, you know, bombed. And they’ve, they’ve withstood all the suffering. But when Steve and him spoke about their sons, it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group to seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other.

Bonding with a blood-soaked monster over the shared experience of losing a son is strange, but perhaps that’s the sort of thing that happens in negotiations like this. Hostage negotiators do, in fact, build rapport with disgusting people; it’s part of the trade.

But they’re presenting this as if they were genuinely moved by it. They’re making a point of doing so.

Why is Witkoff telling us that he and a Hamas negotiator—men separated by a canyon of blood—bonded over their dead sons? In a closed room, sure, that’s a legitimate technique of crisis bargaining; hostage negotiators have long used tactics like this to unlock concessions. But Kushner and Witkoff aren’t presenting this as an account of the artful way they manipulated a terrorist. They seem to think we’ll be moved. We’re evidently supposed to think, “Well, these Hamas fellows may be mass-murdering sadists, torturers, head-choppers, rapists, and disembowelers par excellence, but deep down they’re just loving dads.”

Why would a man turn his own dead son into a prop for a K-mart catharsis on national television? Are the two of them just so deeply stewed in kitsch and Dr. Phil that this seems appropriate to them? Or are they cynically aware that their viewers are so insatiably hungry for this kind of kitsch that even an account of high-level diplomatic negotiations—with Hamas, no less—must be bathed in it?

I suppose the answer is probably both: they inhabit kitsch even as they weaponize it. That bizarre emotional tonality—the syrupy, self-dramatizing “we cried together” sentimentality—is the cultural signature of the Kushner-Trump ecosystem, where vulgar capitalism meets vulgar dramaturgy. They live in a world where emotional exhibition is the only recognized proof of sincerity. They’ve mastered the manipulation of that affective economy for political effect.

There’s an uncanny absence of aesthetic self-consciousness in the way they recount this vignette. They don’t hear how grotesque it sounds to stage-manage a “moment of shared fatherly grief” with a man who organized the slaughter of whole families. To them, emotion itself is redemptive. If you feel deeply (or perform the feeling), you’ve done something moral. It’s like a saccharine inversion of Calvinism, with sincerity replacing sanctity. The whole thing, of course, is the ethos of American televangelism and daytime talk. Confession is absolution. Sentiment is virtue. Every villain must have a sob story; every story must end in healing.

It’s exactly what Milan Kundera meant when he called kitsch “the absolute denial of s**t.” It’s the refusal to acknowledge the irredeemable. They’ve turned horror into pathos because horror without a redemptive moral, I suppose, would be intolerable to them.

And I suppose they belong to the class of Americans for whom the public display of private emotion (weddings staged for Instagram, funerals for prime time, “intimate” philanthropy) has become a natural register. There’s no boundary between PR and interior life. So, yes, I think—they mean it. They feel deeply and they know they’re on camera. They know perfectly well that their audience will lap up this therapeutic emotional pornography. The political culture from which The Apprentice emerged rewards men capable of collapsing the Arab-Israeli conflict into “enemies finding common humanity.” Nothing so dreadful that a little pathos can’t score it in D major. Cue the harpist.

Kitsch isn’t just bad taste. It’s a whole epistemology. It flattens reality into symbols of virtue and redemption. The Kushner doctrine—“issues are simple, people are complicated”—is also the Kitsch doctrine. It denies tragedy, denies insoluble conflict, denies evil that can’t be negotiated away.

Authoritarians and populists love kitsch because it short-circuits irony and thought while flooding the critical faculties with feeling. (Think of Putin’s “mothers of soldiers” photo-ops and Xi’s propaganda vignettes of filial piety: same mechanism.) Kushner and Witkoff are the American iteration—soft-core, techno-capitalist kitsch, not totalitarian, but the same trick. Their narcissism is sentimental rather than sadistic, but it serves the same purpose.

You can almost hear the pitch meeting:

“Leslie, here’s the heart of it. Two fathers. Both lost sons. Both tired of death. The moment peace became possible.”

Cue strings. Fade to flag.

The problem isn’t that Kushner and Witkoff are cynically sentimental; it’s that they no longer know the difference between sentimentality and morality—and neither, I suppose, does their audience.

Jared’s facial expressions are strange. He appears to be perennially tormented by a foul smell. Odd, too, that with all of his money—and especially given the MAGA royalty’s devotion to cosmetic enhancements—he hasn’t had his teeth fixed. A bit of an obvious oversight. His lower teeth, in particular, look almost English.

In any event, had I been in Stahl’s position, I would have asked the following. (Of course, I’d never be in Stahl’s position, because I’d ask the following):

* Under what legal authority were you negotiating with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, on behalf of the United States?

* When you say President Trump “delegated authority,” do you mean he signed a formal directive, or merely told you, verbally, to do what you thought best?

* Was the State Department informed, and did any career diplomats participate or advise you? What about the National Security Council?

* You described the Israeli strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha as a “turning point.” Was the President aware of Israel’s plans to strike beforehand? If not, what’s wrong with our intelligence?

* Israeli journalists have reported that the President was “too groggy” to take Netanyahu’s call ahead of the strike on Qatar. Is this true?

* What intelligence did you have that convinced you Hamas was negotiating in good faith, and who provided it?

* You’ve said your Gulf business connections made this diplomacy possible. Could you specify which sovereign funds, royal courts, or construction conglomerates are your current or recent partners?

* When you say “we call it experience,” do you mean you personally stood to benefit from reconstruction contracts or investment flows tied to these governments?

* You mentioned a “Board of Peace” that will award reconstruction contracts. Who will appoint this board? Under what jurisdiction? Who audits it? Where can the public read its charter?

* Fifty billion dollars is a vast sum. Which governments have pledged it, and on what timetable? What oversight mechanisms will prevent it from vanishing into corruption or clientelism? Will the contracts go to your partners?

* You’ve said repeatedly that “issues are simple.” Which issues? The future of Gaza? Palestinian sovereignty? Refugee return? On what planet are those simple?

* You say Trump’s guarantee amounts to ensuring both sides “keep their word.” What enforcement mechanism does he possess, short of US military action or sanctions?

* If Hamas fails to disarm voluntarily, as seems likely, what precisely will the US do? Who carries the guns then—the “Board of Peace”?

* You speak of creating a Palestinian police force, an interim government, and tariff-free zones. Who are your Palestinian interlocutors? Under whose sovereignty will they serve? You keep saying “we’ll see.” Who exactly are we seeing? Name one Palestinian political figure you’d trust to govern Gaza.

* You claim “everything we do is transparent.” Will you publish the memorandum of understanding for the reconstruction plan, the participants, and the financial backers? How about your meeting notes and donor lists?

* If diplomacy is now a private franchise operated by billionaires with Gulf phone numbers, what exactly is left of the American state?

I don’t mean to be too critical. They did get the hostages out, and they will forever be inscribed in the Book of Life for that. I don’t even discount the possibility that they’ll pull the whole plan off.

We’ll see.

Here are the show notes Dan wrote, which I liked better than mine, so I copied them. Thanks, Dan!

In this installment Claire and I take on a reader’s challenge: surely, the left cannot be blamed for the rise of Donald Trump! Fair question. And yet, as we unpack over the course of this episode, the excesses of the progressive wing did play a role in birthing Trump, if only by driving many in the middle into his camp.

We explore how Democrats miscalculated their supposed national majority, ignoring the social conservatism among minorities who were assumed to be safe allies. We talk about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, identity politics, and the failure to confront Biden’s age. We lament the fact that both parties, in different ways, have let their extremists set the tone—and that this dynamic has left the majority of Americans politically homeless.

From there, the discussion widens: could a centrist “America Party” emerge from the sane remnants of both sides? Is there still hope for reform, or is the US locked into a destructive two-party straitjacket? We debate the costs of Trump’s foreign policy blunders, the dangers of social media run amok, the looming disruptions of artificial intelligence, and the erosion of global trust in American democracy.

It’s not all doom and gloom — we end by considering cycles of history, and whether sanity might yet return after this fever has run its course. But we’re clear-eyed about the stakes: if Americans continue to make catastrophically bad choices, they may not just diminish their own country, but also discredit democracy itself.

Any more questions? Let us know. Enjoy!