Russia

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose the country the minute our troops began to pull out. How much will it realistically cost, then, to beat Russia in Ukraine? Will the next $100 or $200 billion do the trick? This is not a question that supporters of war-spending ask themselves. As in Afghanistan, spending is a way to defer thinking about actually winning — or facing the serious possibility of losing. Our aid buys delay, not results. Ironically, while the specter of World War Two is invoked every time there’s a conflict, our experience then teaches the same lesson as recent attempts to purchase victory.

Americans are used to exercising influence through international entities such as NATO, the World Trade Organization or the World Bank. Each of these groups was set up with American leadership or at its instigation; all have been used to advance Washington’s vision of global liberal-democratic capitalism. No comparable international organization or collection of nations has been influential since the Soviet Union’s collapse. That may be changing. The so-called BRICS alliance (its founding countries were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) recently added new members Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

The death of Alexei Navalny, announced a week after Vladimir Putin's sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson and reported as senior officials gather for a security summit in Germany, is an expression of the ruthlessness of the Russian authoritarian. Add Navalny to the list of foes Putin's regime has assassinated — the most prominent since Boris Nemtsov was shot to death while crossing a bridge — and know that so long as the current regime is in power, it will continue to assassinate anyone who rises up against it. Whether they die by poison or bullet or walking in a prison yard north of the Arctic Circle, it's all the same to him. Navalny's defiant stand in opposition to the corrupt Putin regime is the definition of courage.

Tucker Carlson has been radicalized by a Russian supermarket. There’s a sentence you never expected to read. As part of his tour of Moscow, the week before Putin critic Alexei Navalny “died in prison,” the firebrand commentator visited a grocery store and was stunned by the low prices. “That’s when you start to realize,” Carlson marveled: …that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought… Corruption… If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country.