Ukraine war

Few moments are less promising to reach a bipartisan deal than the months before a presidential election. And few issues present greater obstacles than limiting illegal immigration. Even the word “illegal” is contested. Progressives say it is too harsh. Conservatives say it is simply truthful. It is no surprise, then, that the compromise “border-security bill” gasped its final breath this week. The Senate bill, negotiated by a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent, met a hostile reception as soon as the text was released. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly brought it up for a procedural vote, where it went down in flames. Why such stiff opposition?

F.H. Bradley, perhaps the most self-aware philosopher who ever lived, once dismissed metaphysics as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.” Bradley (whose favorite pastime was using pictures of Gladstone for target practice with his revolver in his rooms at Merton College, Oxford) qualified his negative assessment of the intellectual life by pointing out that philosophy was itself one of those irrepressible instincts — a nicely circular way of putting it. This is more or less how I feel about journalism. I don’t expect anything from readers except the occasional quiet chuckle and a general sense of not having wasted their time. I am certainly not in the business of changing hearts and minds.

July 27 marks the seventieth anniversary of the armistice that ended major hostilities on the Korean Peninsula. Sometimes referred to as the Forgotten War, the last thing the Korean War should be is forgotten. First and foremost because tens of thousands of US and allied soldiers and millions of Koreans died, but also because of the lessons the war offers for policymakers today as the world enters an era not unlike the budding Cold War in 1950.  The first lesson is on the importance of messaging. The world pays attention to what the US says, and Washington’s adversaries pay particularly close attention. In January 1950, secretary of state Dean Acheson spoke to the National Press Club about a perimeter that the US would defend against communist aggression.

An unlikely political star has risen in Germany. Boris Pistorius, a 63-year-old father of two is a career politician and, as of January, defence minister, an office that has proved a dead end for many of his predecessors. On the face of it, Germany’s Boris has little by way of stardust. Yet he is the country’s most popular politician by a country mile and his department is set to increase its budget at a time when overall government spending is being sharply cut. It seems for the first time in decades, Germany is serious about security and defence – but how long will that seriousness last?