Europe

The trouble with Florence, says Ricardo, a local journalist, is that we’re just living off our past glories. “Aren’t we all?” I reply. Florence could perhaps be forgiven when it has accumulated such vast cultural and physical capital, built up over centuries. Signs remind you that it’s 700 years since the death of its most famous son, Dante, father of the Italian language. I must admit I’ve always been too intimidated to read his epic, The Divine Comedy, which T.S. Eliot said was “as great as poetry ever gets.” To prepare for my assault on the summit, I have been reading about Dante himself. I hadn’t known he had no more than a passing acquaintance with his great love, Beatrice.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again making the West nervous. And unlike his previous display of military might near the border with Ukraine last spring, Washington is concerned enough that it's sent CIA director (and former US ambassador to Russia) William Burns to Moscow for talks earlier this month. If Burns’s trip was meant to scare the Kremlin into halting additional military formations near the Russia-Ukraine border, then the confab didn’t work as planned. The Ukrainian government estimates that up to 100,000 Russian forces are now camped out in the area. American and European officials are sharing information with one another about various scenarios the Russians could be contemplating, the most dramatic being a second invasion of Ukraine in seven years.

Belarus, the former Soviet satellite state, isn’t exactly a global heavyweight. Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s authoritarian president, is an international pariah who is better at concocting conspiracy theories than he is at running a country. At $60 billion, the Belarusian economy is about the size of Rhode Island’s. Other than petroleum, cheese and dump trucks, Belarus doesn’t offer much in the way of exports. A once promising information technology sector is now gutted, as Lukashenko’s crackdown on dissent forces highly educated talent to flee the country for the Baltics. Lukashenko, however, is smarter than he looks.

Ah, the French. Is there any other people Americans so love to antagonize? Recall that after France (rightly) decided to abstain from the Iraq war in 2003, we didn't just express our discontent; we introduced the term "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" into the Kissingerian lexicon. We then canceled French fries, which are Belgian. Call it a sibling rivalry between children of the Enlightenment; call it a clash between social democracy and rugged individualism. Whatever you call it, just don't go canceling a submarine agreement at the last minute for the love of God. That's what Joe Biden did last month when Australia suddenly nixed a plan to purchase subs from the French in favor of American and British vessels. And stop the presses! A conspiracy of the Anglophones was afoot!

If one was to look up the dictionary definition of "brass neck," it should come with a picture of the Grand Old Duke of York, grinning inanely and posing in his regimental finery. Obstinacy has been a steady feature of his life, but one only brought into full public view since his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew seems incapable of listening to anyone who is neither extremely wealthy nor a member of the British royal family — and judging by his recent antics, both of those sectors of society are given short shrift, too.

Is Queen Elizabeth II unwell? Rumors have been circulating through the British and American media for over two weeks, and the British public are worried. First came the ninety-five-year-old’s unprecedented use of a walking stick public. Then came an overnight hospital stay, which royal retainers tried to cover up. And now she has canceled her appearance at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on her doctors’ orders, and will be sending a recorded video message instead. Buckingham Palace has released a photograph showing the queen in her usual good spirits. Yet the frailty of the recently-widowed queen and her Glasgow no-show send a worrying message. Queen Elizabeth is dedicated to her duty.

Traveling internationally these days is a bit like how Dicky Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, describes aging: being punished for a crime one hasn’t committed. After taking my pre-departure COVID test, alerting the British government to my whereabouts for the next week (no small undertaking given I’d be in a different bed every night), and proving all this plus my vaccination status to the British Airways check-in desk at JFK, I finally settled in my seat and supplemented my mandatory mouth-muzzle with an eye mask as though bound for Gitmo, not Heathrow. An hour into the flight, the woman in front of me started bawling: a panic attack brought on by mild turbulence.

Greta Thunberg is back in business. Previously slowed down by European pandemic restrictions, the Fridays For Future movement has now hit the streets, starting in Berlin. 'We must not give up, there is no going back now,' Thunberg told thousands of local protesters. The appeals and influence of her movement have translated, at least somewhat, into a stronger climate-focused youth vote in last month's German elections. The Green party has made significant advances in Parliament, becoming one of the kingmakers in upcoming coalition talks. Yet Germany’s environmentalists aren’t the only ones who outperformed their previous results. The liberal-democrat FDP scored 23 percent of Germany’s first-time voters, the same amount as the Greens.

In December 2020, in the aftermath of the presidential election, Jake Sullivan, President-elect Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged European officials to delay a European Union vote on a proposed economic agreement with China, called the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Sullivan, communicating with French and German officials, explained that the incoming Biden administration wanted to have 'early consultation' with the Europeans on China, and urged them to hold off until Biden took office to devise a common approach toward Beijing. Resisting the pressure from Biden, the European Commission announced that the agreement was concluded in principle, pending approval by the European Parliament.

Cockburn slummed it on Friday night at an elegantly appointed penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The host was Martin Peretz, a singularly influential intellectual entrepreneur for decades, notably as the publisher of the New Republic when it was worth reading. Peretz threw the party to celebrate the publication of From Odessa With Love, a new collection of political and literary essays by Vladislav Davidzon. A European cultural critic for Tablet, Davidzon, who moved to Ukraine in 2015 to found the Odessa Review, was in his element as Peretz’s protégé. Like Oscar Wilde’s, Davidzon’s credo appears to be that you can never be too overdressed or overeducated.

Is Prince Andrew a walking advertisement for republicanism? The Grand Old Duke of York is like a gift that keeps on giving, if the gift itself was an especially obnoxious one that nobody particularly wanted. Fresh from the recent revelations that his alleged sexual assault on Virginia Roberts Giuffre has led to her filing a civil case against him in New York, his name continues to be mud on both sides of the Atlantic. With everyone, that is, except his mother. It has repeatedly, and increasingly mystifyingly, been said that Prince Andrew is the Queen’s favorite child. Many would find it hard to comprehend why she continues to support him so publicly. Yet, despite everything, he has not lost her favor.

Uncles have always had a bad press when it comes to princes: ambitious, venal or lecherous, and sometimes all three. That is how Prince Harry must now be regarding his very own embarrassing uncle, Prince Andrew, as the latest round of scandalous allegations about his behavior emerge, thanks to Virginia Roberts Giuffre suing him in Manhattan federal court for historic sexual assault. The claims about Andrew’s behavior have been in the public domain for some time, but Giuffre’s court action, which was filed in New York on Monday, is a 15-page suit that explicitly states that ‘In this country no person, whether president or prince, is above the law, and no person, no matter how powerless or vulnerable, can be deprived of the law’s protection.

Budapest Even supporters of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán acknowledge privately that the Pegasus scandal is a hard blow to the embattled leader. Last month’s news that government spies had employed Israeli software to commandeer the smartphones of journalists, activists and government opponents confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes of Orbán, who will be running for his fourth consecutive term in 2022. These allegations, if true — and many Orbán backers with whom I spoke assume that they are — will likely displace what was Orbán’s greatest liability heading into next year’s vote: that he and his Fidesz party oversee a vast web of public corruption.

A few years ago, in my capacity as editor of the National Interest, I sent out a sonorous query to a variety of contributors asking them to comment for a forum on the direction of American foreign policy now that the Cold War was over. I promptly received a tart reply from Ferdinand Mount: 'Almost every word of the National Interest’s question could itself be questioned: has the Cold War ever definitively ended? Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to think so.’ How right he was! His words came back to me last night with particular force when I attended an event on behalf of Belarusian democratic opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya last night, co-sponsored by the Lithuanian embassy and the Atlantic Council.

Wake up, everyone! Democracy is in peril again. Blasting across Cockburn’s email feed recently was a new piece from Yasmeen Serhan for the Atlantic, titled 'The Autocrat’s Legacy.’ The piece is about the unfathomable wickedness of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. He’s the autocrat. Orbán doesn’t stick his opponents in jail or ban political parties or rig the votes in elections. He’s a much deadlier kind of authoritarian: the kind who wins elections but believes wrong things. Orbán has been the dominant political force in Hungary since 2010, when his Fidesz party dominated elections so thoroughly that they achieved a supermajority capable of passing a new constitution (which they did; replacing Hungary’s Communist-era document). Whoops, that’s 'supermajority’.

The biggest homeless charity in the UK appears to be teaching its staff that white people who live on the street need to check their privilege because they benefit from white supremacy. This is the latest Wokeyleak from a source inside Shelter, which manages some £70 million ($96.3 million) in donations a year. The charity subjected employees to over 12 hours of excruciatingly woke Zoom tutorials on such edifying topics as ‘Mitigating Whiteness at Work’. Extracurricular reading included courses on ‘Learning How To Apologise’. Some of Shelter’s diverse staff objected to this controversial critical race theory training but were told that participation was ‘not optional’. Every single one of Shelter’s executive team, incidentally, is white.

‘Never complain, never explain,’ the Cockburns say. Our family friend Prince Harry has a different motto: carry on moaning and show me the money. Perhaps this time the Prince of Wails has good reason to be crying on the couch. A formal report has found the BBC guilty of deceitful and dishonest behavior in securing its infamous 1995 interview with Princess Diana. There were stinging reactions from Princes William and Harry yesterday, and questions in the UK about whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcaster deserves public funding. Cockburn is an old polo chum of Prince Charles and wonders whether this could finally be the spur for the estranged princes to reunite?  After all, the mood in Buckingham Palace is one of vindication.

A man can cry in public. What can I say, I was raised in a Western-European feminist household in the 1970s. But as a middle-aged guy I did feel deeply uncomfortable the other day with my abundant display of tears. It happened at Schiphol Airport in Holland, holding on tightly to my mother before saying goodbye. She was sobbing just as hard. After the long era of separation we all experienced, I had decided to fly from Los Angeles to Amsterdam on my Dutch passport. Armed with documents proving two Moderna shots and a negative COVID test I felt completely safe to make the trip. The plan was to grab my parents, who are also vaccinated, then fly them home to LA using my American passport. Given their ages and health issues, they would need some help during the trip.

As there’s nothing more annoying than when someone tells you ‘I told you so’, I shall refrain from telling you so for as long as possible. But it will be hard. There I was, lying on the couch one afternoon at work and reading Twitter, when I noticed LitHub appearing in my feed. Now, I am usually as glad to see LitHub in my feed as a prize race horse is to see cat food in his. LitHub is one of those trendy, sort-of academic websites that talks about things like ‘digital humanities’ and does its earnest best to take the fun out of reading and the point out of book-reviewing when, as any-one knows, reading and writing book reviews is a waste of time unless there’s blood and feathers everywhere by the end of the first paragraph.