Russia

People die at random, of course, but it seems poignant that Madeleine Albright has died at the very moment the liberal post-Soviet world has met its own, more violent, end. Her term as Bill Clinton’s secretary of state coincided with the moment America, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, sat, unknowingly, at its own apogee. The Soviet Union was newly gone. America stood peerless and unchallenged. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the twenty years of War on Terror that followed, were still unthinkable. China’s GDP rivaled Italy’s, not America’s. Even offhand, Albright could describe America as the “indispensable nation.” Charles Krauthammer had called it early — this was the “unipolar moment.

President Joe Biden has lashed out at fossil fuel companies, accusing them of using high gas prices to “pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” These are the same fossil fuel companies, by the way, that two years ago were charging a measly average of $1.84 a gallon. They’re also the same fossil fuel companies that in 2020 donated $1.6 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. But no matter. If nothing else, Biden’s inveighing against Big Oil takes me back to my more youthful days when progressives were less afraid to run hard against what they called “the polluters.” Back then, every oil derrick was a seething Deepwater Horizon just waiting to explode and blackface the local terns and herons.