Europe

There is a phrase that circulates in émigré chats and comment sections with the smooth confidence of a proverb: scratch any Russian, and underneath you will find an imperialist. It is offered as hard-won wisdom, the kind of thing only the war taught us to see clearly. I want to argue that it is wrong — not sentimentally wrong, not impolitely wrong, but wrong in a way that matters, because the mistake it makes is the same mistake the Nuremberg Laws made. I say this as someone who holds Russia fully responsible for this war, who wants Russia to lose it, and who feels the same instinctive recoil you feel when a Russian liberal starts explaining himself. The recoil is honest. The conclusion drawn from it is not. Russians are indeed an imperial people. But imperialism is a disease, and diseases can be cured. What it is not, and has never been, is a gene. ...

There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds whenever the people who call themselves the leaders of the Russian opposition are handed a microphone in a European institution. They are well dressed, they speak fluently about human rights and political prisoners, they have suffered real imprisonment, and yet, the moment a sharp question is put to them, something gives way. They cannot answer it. Not because they lack the words, but because answering honestly would force them to stand on one side of a line they have spent years refusing to acknowledge exists. I want to describe that line, and why the inability to step across it tells us almost everything we need to know about the state of the Russian emigration today. ...

Every few weeks a fresh wave of optimism washes over the commentary class. Sanctions are about to bite. The oil price is about to crack. The defence budget is about to run dry. Soon, we are told, the Kremlin simply will not be able to keep fighting, and the war will grind to a halt of its own accord, like a machine that has run out of fuel. I understand the appeal of this hope. I do not share it. The whole prediction rests on a hidden assumption: that the war is draining some finite resource which must, sooner or later, be exhausted. But the resource that actually sustains this war is not finite, and the men who run Russia have, by now, far stronger reasons to continue the slaughter than to end it. The uncomfortable truth is that peace has become more dangerous to the regime than war. Until we grasp that, we will keep mistaking our own wishes for forecasts. ...

When people search the map for the force that will ultimately stop Vladimir Putin, their eyes drift to the obvious places. To Washington, where the most powerful military on earth could in theory end the war with a stroke of the pen. To Beijing, the rising giant some imagine might one day inherit America’s role. To the negotiating tables in Istanbul and the choreographed summits where diplomats perform the rituals of peace. I want to argue that all of these are the wrong places to look. The real growth-point of resistance — the place where the future is actually being decided, quietly and unglamorously — is Europe. Not the flashy Europe of communiqués and photo opportunities, but the Europe that is, brick by brick, building an iron hedgehog against which the Putin regime will eventually break itself. ...

There is a word that historians reach for whenever a great power decides it would rather feed an aggressor than fight one, and the word is Munich. In 1938 the leaders of Britain and France handed a slice of a sovereign country to a dictator in exchange for a promise of peace that was worthless before the ink had dried, and they came home waving paper and calling it triumph. We learned, supposedly, what that paper cost. And yet I find myself watching the present moment and reaching for the same word, with one unsettling difference. What is happening to Ukraine is not a single conference, not one signature on one afternoon. It is a betrayal in slow motion. It arrives not as an event but as a fact, accumulating quietly while everyone insists that nothing of the kind is taking place. This is a creeping Munich, and the most important thing to understand about it is that it cannot be finished. ...

Every few weeks a reader writes to me with some version of the same hopeful question. Tell us, they say, what does the ideal electoral system look like? Which country has solved the problem of government? Sketch us the perfect constitution and we will fight for it. I understand the impulse completely. After living under a regime that is lawless to its marrow, you crave a blueprint — a finished design you could lift off the shelf and bolt onto your own ruined country once the tyrant is gone. But I have come to believe this craving rests on a mistake, and a dangerous one, because the search for a universally perfect system is structurally identical to the search for a perpetual-motion machine. Both promise something the world does not permit. There is no ideal electoral system, no ideal state structure, no ideal model of government, for one stubborn reason: none of these things can be separated from the society it is supposed to serve. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

Watch any single round of the so-called peace talks and you will recognize it as the next showing of a film you have already seen. The same delegations file into the same hall. The same demands are read from the same pages. The same word, “negotiations,” is pronounced with the same gravity, and at the end nothing has moved an inch closer to peace. It is Groundhog Day staged with cameras and translators. The Turkish hosts pronounce a meeting “not negative,” which seems to mean only that there was no fistfight, and the world is invited to take this as progress. I want to argue something blunter than the diplomatic vocabulary allows: these talks are not a road to peace that keeps hitting potholes. They are a fraud by design. You cannot negotiate an end to a war while you are busy waging it, and you cannot find a compromise with a party whose only real demand is that the other party cease to exist. ...

When the naturalist Georges Buffon accepted his honors, he offered a sentence that has outlived almost everything else he ever wrote: the style is the man. He meant that the way a mind arranges the world is more native to it than any single thing it happens to believe. Two centuries later, a dissident sentenced to exile in the Soviet camps refined the thought into something colder and more useful. He said that his quarrel with Soviet power was not political but stylistic — and that this made it deeper and more irreconcilable than any disagreement over programs could ever be. I have come to think those two remarks, taken together, are the sharpest diagnostic instrument we possess for the present moment. They tell us to stop reading the platforms and start reading the style. And when you do that with the two men who currently hold the levers of global politics in their hands, something uncomfortable comes into focus: beneath their genuine frictions, Trump and Putin are stylistic brothers, and that shared style is the living substance of neo-fascism. ...

There is a kind of test in grammar that students of Russian learn early: when you cannot remember how to spell an unstressed vowel, you find a related word in which that vowel falls under stress, and the doubt dissolves. The right answer was always there; you simply needed to put the word into a position where it could no longer hide. I have come to believe that wars have control questions too, and that the war against Ukraine has one so clean, so decisive, that anyone who keeps it in mind can never again be confused about what is happening or about where the pressure must be applied. The control question is this: which side can end the war by itself, today, without asking permission from anyone? Pose it, and the whole fog of “complexity” that diplomats and dealmakers love to summon burns off in an instant. ...

Every administration leaves behind a signature product. Some leave laws, some leave wars, some leave a reshaped economy or a redrawn map. The current American administration leaves something stranger and harder to name, because it is not a policy at all. Its product is chaos. The tariffs that appear at fifty percent on Monday and thirty on Tuesday, the ceasefire demanded one day and abandoned the next, the deadlines that never arrive, the loyal allies turned overnight into traitors and back again into friends: these are not the debris of a plan that has not yet matured. They are the plan, if a thing this incoherent can be called one. The man stirs up the turbulence and then goes off to play golf, and within that turbulence everything else of consequence quietly proceeds. To understand the present moment, you have to stop looking for the strategy hidden behind the chaos and accept that the chaos is the strategy’s stand-in. There is nothing behind the curtain except the curtain. ...

There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...

There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor. ...

There is a question I keep hearing from thoughtful, frightened people, and it always arrives in roughly the same shape. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, is constitutionally too soft. It grants a platform to every voice, including the voices openly committed to its destruction. It plays by rules its enemies cheerfully ignore. We now live in a post-truth world where authoritarian regimes flood the public square with so much falsehood that the truth cannot keep pace. So how can such a permissive, slow-moving system possibly survive the onslaught? Surely, the despairing conclusion runs, the West is writing its own death sentence, and the only honest thing left to say is farewell to it. I want to answer that question directly, because I think the despair behind it, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how history actually moves. ...

When a French court found Marine Le Pen guilty of misusing European Union funds and barred her from running for office for five years, the most revealing thing was not the verdict. It was the reaction. Within hours, a chorus rose across half a dozen countries, all singing the same note. Viktor Orbán posted the old Solidarity slogan, refitted for the occasion: “I am Marine.” Matteo Salvini sneered that those who fear the voters’ verdict reach for the courts instead, and told her to march forward. Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy echoed the sentiment. Geert Wilders chimed in from the Netherlands, Santiago Abascal from Spain, Nigel Farage from Britain, George Simion from Romania. From across the Atlantic came Elon Musk, blaming the radical left for jailing its opponents when it cannot beat them at the ballot box, and Jair Bolsonaro, who diagnosed “leftist judicial activism.” A single court ruling in Paris had set off a continent-wide reflex of mutual defense. That reflex has a name worth using plainly: the Brown International. ...

There is a lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free. ...

There is a piece of advice that has become so common it now passes for sophistication. You hear it from supporters and critics alike, from people who agree with me on almost everything and from people who agree with me on nothing: “Don’t listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.” It is offered as the worldly counsel of someone who has seen through the noise, who refuses to be fooled by speeches and knows that only actions count. And every time I hear it, I object — not mildly, but flatly. The advice is not wisdom. It is a mistake, and a harmful one, because it asks us to disarm ourselves in precisely the domain where the most powerful people on earth do their most consequential work. We live in a world of words and of information. Ignoring what leaders say is not realism. It is a refusal to look at half of reality, and the more powerful the speaker, the larger that half becomes. ...

There is a story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full. ...