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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

A week and a half ago, CPAC, an American organization, held one of its regular jamborees in Hungary. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, is a seat of the “postliberal” Right. Many such rightists have visited Hungary in recent days, boosting Orbán for a sixth term in office.

Marine Le Pen of France was there. So was Matteo Salvini of Italy. So was Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.

Both the Kremlin and the White House are going all-out for Orbán’s reelection. I wrote about this two weeks ago, here (“Putin and Trump for Orbán”).

President Trump did not attend the recent CPAC conclave in Hungary, but he sent a video. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was scheduled to attend in person, but the war with Iran kept him at home, and he, too, sent a video. For good measure, his son Yair spoke to the gathering.

Prime Minister Netanyahu told the CPAC-ers, “I want to thank you for standing up for Western civilization.” Then, speaking about his Hungarian counterpart personally, he said:

“I want to thank my friend Viktor Orbán. He has been like a rock. … I know many world leaders, and I can tell you he is right there at the top. Viktor Orbán means stability, safety, security.”

As a rule, a country is the ally of another country, regardless of who is in office. In democracies, leaders come and go. But things have gotten very personal lately.

Standing alongside Orbán in February, and addressing him, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “Especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful.”

Ponder this business of “Western civilization” for a second. It is an article of faith among Orbán fans that he is a champion and protector of that civilization. Here is a tweet from Steve King, an Iowa Republican who was in Congress from 2003 to 2021: “History will record PM Orban the Winston Churchill of Western Civilization.”

(My comment was, “Personally, I would accord that honor to Churchill.”)

To some of us, Western civilization includes liberal democracy: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, independent media, etc. In 2018, Prime Minister Orbán declared, “The era of liberal democracy is over.”

Also, does Orbán’s alliance with Putin square with Western civilization? How about his hostility to Ukraine and its cause? Does that speak to you of Western civilization?

Orbán supporters point out that he is staunch against immigration, particularly of the Muslim kind. I must say, I agree that countries should retain their national character. There was a slogan, and a song, in the 1970s and ’80s: “Let Poland Be Poland.” Yes, and let Hungary be Hungary, let France be France, and so on.

It’s up to immigrants to assimilate to the countries they go to; it’s not up to countries to assimilate to the immigrants.

But here is what I deny: that it takes authoritarianism to have a sensible immigration policy; that it takes a partnership with Putin to have a sensible immigration policy.

Back, now, to Benjamin Netanyahu, who is my main subject today.

I have been a Netanyahu admirer for a long time. You could even have called me a Bibi fanboy. At a young age, I was drawn to the Israeli Right. I regard Menachem Begin as one of the outstanding political figures of the second half of the twentieth century.

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The survival and flourishing of Israel is very important to me. I wrote about this in 2015, in a piece called “Hung Up on Israel.”

I think I first became aware of Netanyahu in the early 1980s, when he was deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Then he was Israel’s ambassador to the UN.

In my opinion, there was no better spokesman for Israel and its cause. He articulated principles and ideals—and facts—that were important.

Then, too, there was a mystique surrounding his family, as his valiant brother Jonathan was the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid on Entebbe. (This was the operation to rescue Israeli hostages in Uganda.) The raid took place on July 4, 1976, America’s Bicentennial Day.

Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996. His spokesman was David Bar-Illan, a pianist, whom I knew. Pianists as politicos—Israel is an unusual country.

In a later government, Netanyahu was finance minister. He was a liberalizer. Critics accused him of being “Thatcherite”—which was fine with me.

He returned to the office of prime minister in 2009 and has been there almost continuously since. Over and over, he clashed with President Obama—on Iran and other matters. I sided with Netanyahu. Did that make me unpatriotic? “America First!”

Well, tough. I thought Netanyahu was right.

In those years, I referred to him as the “Leader of the West.” (I applied the same designation to Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada.) In a forum once, I asked Paul Johnson, the British historian, “Whom do you regard as a major and impressive statesman today?” He named Netanyahu. “A man of destiny,” he said.

That sounded right to me.

As Netanyahu’s years in office wore on, my doubts set in. For one thing, I thought he was staying too long. He was not letting others in his party rise. Also, it seemed to me he was equating Israel’s security with his hold on power. But if the survival of a country depends on one man, who is mortal, it has no chance.

David Ben-Gurion, too, had a hard time exiting the scene. Frankly, I think my beloved Margaret Thatcher stayed too long. Speaking of beloved British prime ministers: Did Churchill really need that extra premiership in the 1950s? Did it do anything to burnish his record?

There was a touch of megalomania about Netanyahu. At his rallies, they chanted, “Bibi, King of Israel!” The democrat in me balked at that.

We should then note the charges of corruption. “But it’s the Left, it’s the media!” some of my friends say. That is reflexive in conservatives. “The Left, the media!” I understand this well.

Let me tell you something. I admired Reagan, and maybe over-admired him. I defended him at every turn: Iran-contra, Bitburg … Yes, I liked him, even loved him. But perhaps even more, I hated his enemies.

And you cannot let the “other side” win, ever.

In the summer of 2019, I was walking in Tel Aviv and saw the biggest campaign poster I had ever seen. It was on a skyscraper. I’m not sure how many storeys high it was, but—many. It showed Netanyahu and Putin in a chummy pose. The words read: “Netanyahu: In a league of his own.”

I was revolted—because I know who and what Putin is. I realize that nations must pursue their interests, and that the world is grubby, but I also know that there was a moral component to the founding of modern Israel.

Is Israel merely “another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe,” to borrow Bush 41’s words?

At the end of 2022, Netanyahu formed another government—not especially conservative. It includes such figures as Itamar Ben-Gvir, a bona fide extremist. In Israel, my conservative friends were disquieted. In America? Not so much. They knew less. And the watchword had always been, “Bibi good, his critics bad.”

So too, the conservative or right-leaning media in Israel published robust debate about Netanyahu. Our own conservative or right-leaning media were less robust in this respect.

I also thought it was not especially good for Israel to be closely tied to the Republican Party—or any single party in America. The US-Israel relationship must be bigger than Trump and Netanyahu.

Here is a typical headline, from last month: “Trump demands immediate pardon for Netanyahu to focus on Iran.” (The article is here.)

Above, I mentioned Churchill and also Paul Johnson. In the 1930s, Johnson’s father had a negative view of Churchill. And he referred to him as “Churchill.” When the war came, the elder Johnson said something like, “We’d better get Winston.”

Paul Johnson, who was about twelve, noticed this: it had gone from “Churchill” to “Winston.”

I caught myself starting to say “Netanyahu” instead of “Bibi.” When I’m feeling warm toward the man, it’s “Bibi.” When I’m not, it’s “Netanyahu.”

About October 7, I will be brief: How could the government let Israel be naked unto its enemies, especially on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War? I figured that the ensuing commission would make the Agranat Commission—the one that investigated the failures in 1973—look like a picnic.

But there was a war to fight, and Israeli and pro-Israel wagons circled, more or less.

Now the Iran war is upon us. Netanyahu realizes that Putin is an ally of Iran, right? And that Orbán has had cozy relations with Tehran, too?

In October 2022, Netanyahu published an autobiography: Bibi: My Story. This was eight months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the book, Netanyahu describes Putin as “smart, sophisticated and focused on one goal—returning Russia to its historical greatness.” We all have different ideas of “greatness.”

Putin has re-Sovietized Russia, abolishing civil society and independent media. There are more political prisoners in Russia today than in the last stage of the Soviet Union. Putin exiles, imprisons, maims, or kills his critics. He is committing war crime after war crime in Ukraine, as he seeks to subdue that nation and re-subjugate it.

If this is “greatness,” then to hell with greatness.

February 24, 2025, marked the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion. In the UN, Ukraine offered a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution passed 93 to 18.

Voting against the resolution were Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Nicaragua. And Hungary (of course). And the United States. And Israel.

Of course?

Personally, I was sickened to see my country on that side of the vote—on the same side as Russia, North Korea, and the rest. Though it’s not my country, I was sickened to see Israel on that side too.

A question for you: If Benjamin Netanyahu puts paid to the Islamist regime in Iran and its tentacle Hamas—and maybe its tentacle Hezbollah, to boot—will anything that can be said against him pale in comparison?

Here at the end, I should “pull the trigger.” That’s what the late, great Norman Podhoretz instructed writers to do, especially in an opinion piece. You have to pull the trigger. You have to say what you believe, take a stand. Don’t leave the reader wondering.

The truth is, I’m ambivalent about Netanyahu. About “Bibi”! My only comfort is that others of my acquaintance are in the same boat.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Earlier this month, a Fox News host was talking with President Trump about the Iran war. The host said, “You think Putin is helping them?” (meaning the Iranians). Trump answered, “I think he might be helping them a little bit, yeah, I guess. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right?”

Further on, Trump said, “It’s like, hey, they do it and we do it, in all fairness.”

First, it would be news if the United States were still helping Ukraine. Second, Trump’s instinct—on every occasion—is to defend or excuse Putin. Third, many of us will not accept a moral equivalence between helping Ukraine and helping the ayatollahs’ regime.

The Ukrainians are trying to save themselves from annihilation and subjugation by Russia. Russia’s ally, the ayatollahs’ regime, is as monstrous as the Kremlin.

We American conservatives always complained about “moral equivalence,” by which we meant a false moral equivalence, a false equating. The Soviets do it, we do it—there are no “good guys” and “bad guys” here.

Sometimes that was dressed up as realism. But it was always flawed, if not plain wrong.

One brief example, from 1978. The Kremlin was putting dissidents through show trials. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, gave an interview to a French newspaper, saying, “In our prisons, too, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whom I would describe as political prisoners.”

Young was, and is, a good and decent man. But what he said was both cuckoo and offensive.

President Carter, at a press conference, said, “I know that Andy regrets having made that statement, which was embarrassing to me. I don’t believe he will do it again.”

William F. Buckley Jr. had a line about moral equivalence. He worded it slightly differently each time, but here is one version: “The man who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming truck, and the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of an oncoming truck, are not to be denounced evenhandedly as men who push old ladies around.”

He should have lived to see Donald Trump and his administration. (But that would have done WFB no favors.)

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A sign of things to come came in December 2015, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination. On television, Joe Scarborough asked him about Putin. Scarborough made the simple point that Putin is the type to murder his critics and invade foreign countries. “Obviously, that would be a concern, would it not?” asked Scarborough.

Trump answered, “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Not giving up, Scarborough said, “But again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”

Trump answered, “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

That should have been enough for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. We had always decried such a mindset. But the Right was changing, dramatically.

Trump won the nomination with ease. In the summer of 2016, the New York Times asked him about civil liberties in Turkey. The strongman, Erdoğan, had cracked down on the country viciously.

“I think right now, when it comes to civil liberties,” said Trump, “our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country.”

Trump continued, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

Again, Republicans and conservatives would once have thrown a fit, rightly.

Trump was elected in November. Shortly after being sworn in, he had a conversation with Bill O’Reilly like the one he had had with Joe Scarborough. (This was another television interview.)

O’Reilly said, “Putin is a killer.” Trump answered, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

This was not a campus radical, mind you. This was the president of the United States.

In June 2018, Trump flew to Helsinki to meet Putin. Before the summit began, Trump wrote, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” The Russian foreign ministry answered, “We agree.”

How cozy.

American relations with Russia were indeed rocky. That was because of the Kremlin’s behavior, many of us thought: violating borders, murdering dissidents, interfering in foreign elections—all that.

Bless the name of Jeff Mason, a reporter for Reuters, who had a question for Trump at the summit press conference. Mason cited the president’s earlier statement about “many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” etc. The question: “Do you hold Russia at all accountable, for anything in particular?”

“Yes, I do,” Trump answered. “I hold both countries responsible. I think the United States has been foolish. I think we have all been foolish.”

At least our president had graduated from blaming America alone to moral equivalence.

In the summer of 2020, the Afghan War was still on, and there were reports that Russia was supplying the Taliban with weapons—to use against our troops, of course. Asked about these reports, Trump said, “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.” (Trump was apparently referring to the Soviet war in Afghanistan.)

The pattern never changes. You might credit Trump with consistency.

In the summer of 2023, Trump was out of office and under indictment. He faced four criminal indictments: two at the state level, two at the federal level. Needless to say, he had abundant legal help.

On August 4, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote, “The United States strongly condemns Russia’s conviction of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny on politically motivated charges. The Kremlin cannot silence the truth. Navalny should be released.”

A Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, had a response: “Regimes that prosecute opposition leaders on politically motivated charges deserve strong condemnation.”

We can have a debate over the indictments of Trump—whether they were just or not. But this is undebatable: in America, Trump was reelected president, and in Russia, Navalny was murdered.

There is no moral equivalence.

Trump is now about 14 months into his second term, and he and his administration have always drawn a moral equivalence—at best—between Ukraine and Russia: between invaded and invader.

February 24, 2025, marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. At the United Nations, Ukraine offered a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution passed 93 to 18.

Opposing it was Russia, of course. And the United States. Of course?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We didn’t feel it was conducive, frankly, to have something out there at the UN that’s antagonistic to either side.”

In December 2025, President Trump was standing next to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. A reporter asked Trump about Russia’s unceasing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Did this not show Putin wasn’t serious about peace?

“No, he’s very serious,” Trump answered. “I believe Ukraine has made some very strong attacks also.” In what may pass for graciousness or sympathy, Trump then turned to Zelenskyy and said, “I don’t say that negatively.”

About a week later, Trump was again talking about Ukraine and Russia, and he said, “They both have done some pretty bad things. Look, that’s Biden’s war. That’s not my war.”

Actually, it is Putin’s war—and that of his allies: China, Iran, North Korea, and so on down the blood-drenched line.

A false moral equivalence is not only illogical, it is also stomach-turning, even abhorrent. On this, as on so many other things, conservatives and Republicans were right the first time.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

When Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Budapest in 2017, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, said, “We all sense—it’s in the air—that the world is in the process of a substantial realignment.” Yes. But the extent and shape of that realignment, few could foresee.

Orbán has been in office for five terms. He’s going for a sixth. And both Russia and the United States—both the Kremlin and the US administration—have endorsed him. In their own ways, they are campaigning for him.

Hungarian voters will go to the polls on April 12.

If you don’t count Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Orbán is Putin’s closest ally in Europe. And he is a beau idéal of the nationalist-populist Right in America: a rock star at CPAC, the Heritage Foundation, and so on.

George F. Will wrote something pointed in a column last month: “Putin’s only sympathizer in the European Union, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, might now have firmer support among American authoritarians (‘national conservatives’) than among Hungarians.”

Some Americans and other foreign enthusiasts have gone to Budapest to work for Orbán. That is, they are on his payroll. Still others go to visit, to sit at Orbán’s feet. They are pilgrims, in a way.

In 1981, Paul Hollander wrote a book called Political Pilgrims. It’s about leftists who traveled to the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, etc. Hollander was an American scholar who had been born in Budapest. He fled in 1956 when Moscow crushed the Hungarian uprising.

Given the stream of visitors to Budapest today—and to Moscow as well—there could be an update of Political Pilgrims.

The story of what Orbán has done to Hungary need not be detailed here, in this brief article. In 2018, Arch Puddington, of Freedom House, wrote, “Hungary has become a model for the dismantling of a European democracy by a democratically elected government.”

(That article appeared in The Weekly Standard under the title “Are Conservatives Giving Up on Democracy?”)

Patrick J. Buchanan is a very different man from Puddington. In that same year, he wrote that Hungarians “have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian nation first.”

The following month, Prime Minister Orbán declared, “The era of liberal democracy is over.” The British historian Simon Schama could not help tweeting a response:

“Well, no, Orbán, liberal democracy will see you and your nativists off because liberal democracy has John Milton, John Locke and J. S. Mill and you have Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon.”

I can assure you that, on the American right, those last three have a lot more fans than the first three do.

In Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump has found a kindred spirit. During a 2019 meeting at the White House, Trump said to him, “It’s like we’re twins.”

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It is unusual for a US president to endorse a candidate in a foreign election—in an election held in an allied country. The country is our ally, not an individual. But Trump is an unusual president.

“Viktor Orbán is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary,” Trump wrote last month.

Three days later, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was in Budapest, standing by Orbán’s side. Said Rubio, “Especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful.”

Rubio gave, in effect, a campaign speech for Orbán. To say that this is unusual for a secretary of state would be an almost comical understatement.

And Vladimir Putin? What is he doing? How’s he helping out? A headline from the Financial Times (March 11) tells part of the tale: “Kremlin backs covert campaign to keep Viktor Orbán in power.” The subheading reads, “Vladimir Putin endorses plan drawn up by Russian consultancy that is under western sanctions.”

That report is here.

Another report, from Bloomberg (March 14), is headed “Orban’s Election Campaign Turns to Russia for Help in Final Stretch.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial (March 13) is related: “Viktor Orbán Carries Putin’s Water.” The Journal’s editors explain that Orbán is “blocking an EU loan that Ukraine needs to keep fighting Russia.”

In previous campaigns, Orbán has used George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier, as his primary bogeyman. (Never mind that Orbán went to Oxford on a Soros scholarship.) This year, the bogeyman is Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

On the campaign trail, Orbán said, “This election is about whether Zelenskyy gets to form a government or I do.” Will Hungarian voters actually fall for that? Orbán would know better than you or I. His party has a campaign poster that shows the Ukrainian president in a jolly mood and says, “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.”

In a tweet, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, claimed that the European Union “continues to make decisions according to the demands of @ZelenskyyUa.”

Szijjártó is a frequent visitor to Moscow, especially for the purpose of making energy deals. In November 2021, as Russian troops massed along the Ukrainian border, he received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship. He has certainly earned it.

March 1, 2024, was the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral. (Navalny was the Russian opposition leader killed in prison.) On that day, Szijjártó met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and photos showed the two of them laughing it up together. This was revolting, to some of us.

I can imagine a poster—different from Orbán’s, but borrowing from it: “Don’t let them have the last laugh.”

Maybe I could tell you something personal. I was once on a cruise that had Foreign Minister Szijjártó as a guest speaker. The ship was docked in Budapest. In a private gesture of protest—against the politics that Orbán’s government represents—I took a walk around town, while Szijjártó was aboard.

President Trump and his team never miss an opportunity to mock and scorn Zelenskyy—a man leading a country that is fighting for its survival against a Russian onslaught. A few days after the Iran war began, Trump wrote, “Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time, and our Country’s money, GIVING everything to P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!) of Ukraine.”

More recently, Trump said, as he always has, that Zelenskyy is the obstacle to peace in Ukraine, not the invader, Putin. “Zelenskyy is far more difficult to make a deal with.”

If that is so, maybe it’s because the deal Trump has in mind is Putin’s fondest wish, at the moment?

Linger over something: We Americans are at war with Iran. Russia is aiding Iran, as usual. Russia is helping Iran target our troops. Ukraine is helping us, in combating Iranian drones. Trump has eased sanctions on Russia. And is dumping all over Zelenskyy.

In Hungary, the United States and Russia—Trump and Putin—are backing the same guy: Viktor Orbán, whose bête noire, whose bogeyman, is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. If Orbán loses, there will be tears in the White House and the Kremlin, both. You recall Orbán’s words in 2017: “a substantial realignment.”

An old saying goes, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” The current alliance for Orbán tells us a lot about our times, and what it has to say is bad, bad news for freedom and democracy.

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There’s an old expression: “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” In recent years, some of us have been meeting at the Ukrainian Institute of America, understandably. I was there last week. And last month.

UIA was founded in 1948 and is housed in a Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I first visited the institute in 1999, when William F. Buckley Jr. took me to hear a talk by Robert Conquest.

It was a mark of Bill’s esteem for Bob that he attended that night. Bill was not doing that kind of thing very often in those years, especially at night.

Conquest was an invaluable historian and man of letters. He had just published his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century. (This was on the eve of the millennium, remember.) In 1986, he had published The Harvest of Sorrow, about the terror-famine in Ukraine. That same year, Bill Buckley hosted Conquest and others on television, to discuss the subject.

To watch the program—which I watched with wide eyes, back then—go here.

The terror-famine was inflicted by the Kremlin on the Ukrainians in the early 1930s. It is also known as the “Holodomor.” For decades, this monstrous crime was suppressed in academic and other circles. Bob Conquest meant a lot to Ukrainians, and still does.

I first saw him, and heard him, right before The Harvest of Sorrow was published, I think. I was in graduate school, and he came to campus to speak. It was from him that I first heard the name “Ukraine,” without a preceding “the.” I had grown up with the expression “the Ukraine”—a region of Russia, or the Soviet Union. But millions of people regarded it as a nation, with its own identity.

That’s what Conquest was saying.

It was a lucky stroke that I became a friend of his in later years. When he died in 2015, I wrote an appreciation of him, here.

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In 1999, when Bob spoke at the Ukrainian Institute of America, Ukraine was in its eighth year of independence. It seemed that this country could get on with life. But the incoming president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, would have other ideas.

That UIA event was co-sponsored by Freedom House, of which Adrian Karatnycky was president. It was not until 25 years later—in 2024—that I was again at the institute. I did a Q&A with Karatnycky about his just-out book, Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia.

In attendance that night was Mykola Melnyk, a Ukrainian military officer. He had joined up in 2014, after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine. A lawyer, he simply left everything to fight. In 2023, Melnyk was badly wounded, losing a leg.

It was inspiring, and humbling, to see him and converse with him. To me, he seemed to embody the spirit of a people fighting to remain free.

Last month, our Renew Democracy Initiative co-sponsored an event at the UIA. Our chairman, Garry Kasparov, spoke, and so did our CEO, Uriel Epshtein. In his opening remarks, Kasparov said, “Moral relativism didn’t defeat Nazism and communism. A steadfast belief in freedom did. We forgot that”—forgot it after the Cold War, somehow.

When I entered the UIA last week, I saw a sign that said “Unbreakable Ukraine.” I thought, once more, of Robert Conquest. One of his books is Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Putin, today, is trying to break Ukraine.

Stalin had many, many supporters and apologists in the Free World, and so did the Soviet Union at large. Today, so does Putin, and so does his Russia (re-Sovietized).

I did a Q&A with Kimberly Kagan, the military historian who founded the Institute for the Study of War. It is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization, and she is its president. Every day, ISW studies the Ukraine war, keeping track of the details.

There is a myth, said Kagan, that Russian victory is inevitable. The Kremlin peddles this line, and gullible Westerners echo it. But the facts contradict the line, said Kagan.

Reporters who cover the war know this as well. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal said, “As War Enters Fifth Year, Ukraine Shows Russian Victory Is Anything but Inevitable.”

Last December, the American president, Donald Trump, said, “Russia has the upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense.” Yes, the Ukrainians have put up a fight, “but you know, at some point, size will win, generally.”

Wars are not like that, Kim Kagan pointed out. If they were, history would look a lot different.

I asked a big and painful question: Can Ukraine survive without the support of the United States? Gradually, Ukraine has reduced its dependence on the United States, Kagan said.

Which is good news.

At the same time, Ukraine could use the help of the United States, obviously. And Ukraine is important to us Americans too, whether we know it or not.

What the Ukrainians are doing right now, said Kagan, is defending both Europe and the United States against aggression—aggression not only from Russia but also from its partners: Iran, North Korea, and China. Ukraine is providing a “security buffer” against these aggressors, said Kagan.

Moreover, the Ukrainians are doing a lot of “discovery,” she said. Day by day, they are learning what can be done in modern warfare. Ukraine is no less than a “laboratory” in this respect, Kagan said.

Like Israelis, Ukrainians may not have wanted to become expert warriors. But life has forced them to.

In recent days, Ukrainians have been helping us Americans defend ourselves against Iranian drones—with which Ukrainians have had to cope for several years now.

Last year, the American vice president, JD Vance, said to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “Have you said thank you once?” (Yes, Zelensky had thanked the United States for its support many, many times.) Well, I hope that we remember to say thank you to Ukraine.

My visits to the Ukrainian Institute of America have been moving. The Ukrainian people are setting an all-time example in patriotism, courage, self-sacrifice, and determination.

UIA’s website says, “The Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the art, music, and literature of Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora.” That is a lovely purpose. To dwell among art, music, and literature is practically heaven.

The institute can get back to concentrating on that someday. In the meantime, Ukraine is fighting for its life, and it is the central arena of the broader, momentous struggle between freedom and tyranny.

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An update on the Renew Democracy Initiative’s work in Ukraine

Since 2022, the Renew Democracy Initiative (publisher of The Next Move) has delivered roughly $15 million in humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. That includes bulletproof vests, food, medical supplies, and sleeping bags, among other essentials. It won’t win the war by itself, but it keeps people warm, well-fed, and, most importantly, alive.

We recently ordered 70,000 meals ready-to-eats (MREs, an acronym familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the military), mostly for the Kharkiv region. Kharkiv is located on the Russian border and is the target of relentless bombardment. The first tranche—21,504 MREs to be precise—were delivered at the end of last month. Roughly half will go to civilians, and another half for the Ukrainian soldiers bravely defending their homeland.

On top of that, the Renew Democracy Initiative recently secured 31,000 warm meals for the capital city of Kyiv, where residents are enduring freezing nights and blackouts. We hope our Ukrainian friends like soup!

You can support RDI’s work by upgrading to join our premium subscriber community. RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein will also be leading a delegation to visit our partners on the ground in Ukraine later this month, so stay tuned for firsthand updates from the front here at The Next Move!

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A note from Garry Kasparov: If you enjoy what you read here, might I humbly suggest that you put that money toward supporting mission-driven media like The Next Move? I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the work of The Next Move’s parent organization, the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on Substack.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

We have lived with Khomeini’s Iran for a long time. I should be careful about saying “we.” The Iranian people have borne the brunt of it, obviously. But that regime has been a curse on the world at large.

It was in 1979 that this regime took over. I was 15 at the time. As I noted in an essay earlier this week, that period is vivid in one’s life. We are learning about the world, becoming engrossed in its affairs, often tumultuous.

In recent days, I have been thinking about the almost half-century of the Islamist regime, especially the dissidents I have met and interviewed. I have been in touch with some of them, too.

I think of Manuchehr Honarmand, a journalist, whom I interviewed in 2010. He was born in Tehran in 1946. He went to a French primary school in Isfahan, and then to a university in the capital. When the revolution came, he told me, “they arrested anybody who looked respectable.” One was Honarmand.

He was able to leave the country, and then his real travails began, you might say. He was tossed from country to country, enduring hardship after hardship. He spent two years in a Venezuelan prison—Hugo Chávez was a close friend of the regime in Tehran.

“Before the revolution, I was a normal guy,” said Honarmand. But then the world—his world—got cracked. “I had gone to a French school, remember, and I had a free and liberal spirit. Under the Iranian revolution, I could not fit in for even one hour.”

In 2003, an Iranian woman won the Nobel Peace Prize. She was Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer. The regime retaliated in various ways. For example, they stole Ebadi’s Nobel medal. (She got it back, she told me.)

I have written about Ebadi, and a host of other laureates, in a history of the prize, Peace, They Say.

Twenty years after Ebadi, another Iranian woman won the prize: Narges Mohammadi, who had worked closely with Ebadi. Mohammadi was a political prisoner when she was honored by the Nobel committee. She is a political prisoner today.

On February 11, the committee sent out something that sounded like an SOS: Narges Mohammadi had been beaten and tortured almost to death.

Marina Nemat, born in 1965, was arrested when she was 16. She spent more than two years in Evin Prison, one of the worst, most notorious places on earth. She was raped, tortured—all of it. She survived and went into exile, landing in Canada. She has dedicated her life to remembering the victims, past and present.

Sardar Pashaei comes from a family of dissidents. “I remember when I was five years old,” he said to me. “Members of the Revolutionary Guard came to our house at 2 in the morning and arrested my dad. I have never forgotten that scene.”

Sardar has lived in the United States since 2010. His siblings back home have been in and out of prison. A year ago, his sister Leila was arrested after giving a speech on International Women’s Day (March 8). In her speech, she denounced child marriage, mandatory hijab, and the execution of female prisoners.

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They are incredibly brave, these dissidents, these activists.

Among them is Masih Alinejad, well known to The Next Move and to the Renew Democracy Initiative. She is one of our Frontlines of Freedom Fellows. I first interviewed her in 2021, writing a piece called “A Free Spirit.”

She certainly is—but one who has to look over her shoulder, here in America. The regime back home has tried to kidnap and kill her repeatedly. She and her husband jump from safehouse to safehouse, but Masih keeps calling for freedom, using every platform available to her.

On Monday, I asked her, basically, “How do you feel?” She answered, “I feel a storm of emotions.” So do the other dissidents I have spoken with, and so must Iranians in general—those in Iran and those in the sprawling diaspora.

Sardar Pashaei is worried about his loved ones, obviously. The Internet in Iran has been shut down, and communication has been difficult. Some political prisoners, he understands, have been moved to “undisclosed locations.” What will happen to them?

As he and others point out, American and Israeli bombs can fall on innocent and guilty alike—prisoners and their interrogators, for example.

Sardar has heard talk of installing a king, and this concerns him. “After a century of tyranny, the Iranian people deserve democracy,” he says. This includes the protection of minority rights. (The Pashaeis are Kurdish Iranians.)

Marina Nemat, like many, has mixed emotions. She sees dancing in the streets, and she understands it. (How could she not?) At the same time, she remembers the dancing in the streets when the Shah went into exile. She has an awareness that things can always be worse.

The “Supreme Leader,” Khamenei, is dead, and so are other leading killers. But there are always people to replace them, Marina notes. The Revolutionary Guard is still in place. They are the “enforcers” of the regime, she says, its merciless agents. When the current war ceases, they may carry out ghastly reprisals.

Iranians are a talented and resourceful people, Marina says, but there is also a lot of psychological damage after decades of brutality. Can Iranians “pull a rabbit out of a hat” and build a better government, somehow? If not a democracy, then something less brutal?

These are early days yet.

Masih Alinejad details her “storm of emotions” as follows: “relief, grief, and responsibility.”

Relief because Khamenei “was the symbol and architect of decades of oppression. He ordered my killing directly when I compared compulsory hijab to the Berlin Wall and called on Iranian women to tear the wall down.”

Grief because his death “does not bring back the lives he stole.” In the latest uprising alone, some 32,000 people have been murdered.

And responsibility because “what matters now is protecting people and pushing toward real freedom, a better future without the Islamic regime.”

She sees that Americans are having their usual partisan fights (as is natural in a democracy, to be sure). She wishes they could be united in staunch opposition to the Iranian dictatorship, which is an American security problem, in addition to a problem for the victimized Iranian people.

When Khomeini and his movement took over in 1979, much evil resulted. From the downfall of that regime, much good can flow. Who can fail to root for it? While at the same time wondering, “After them, what?”

Will there be an “after” at all, and, if so, when?

For all these years, I have been in awe of Iranian dissidents—as I have been in awe of those from China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. Pardon the cliché, but I hope there are monuments to them someday. And if not, they can know that they have the admiration and gratitude of many of us.

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A note from Garry Kasparov: The Trump administration could soon launch a war with Iran without oversight or accountability. To navigate the crisis, we will need a deep understanding of America’s place in the world rather than allow ourselves to get distracted by the outrage du jour. That’s why I’m inviting our premium subscriber community to a Zoom conversation on the last half-century of American foreign policy with Ed Luce, Financial Times US editor and author of Zbig: The Life And Times of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, America’s Great Power Prophet, taking place on Wednesday, March 4 at 5pm ET/2pm PT. You can find registration details here.

To make this opportunity more accessible, we’re offering 30% off a premium subscription, now through March 4. I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on The Next Move.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

The recruitment ads of ICE, our immigration agency, merit a long article unto themselves. Some of them belong to the category of agitprop. Here in this column, I would like to concentrate on one particular pitch.

“Defend your culture!” says one ad. “For our country, for our culture, for our way of life,” says another. I will cite one more: “Protect your homeland. Defend your culture.”

Jeh Johnson, a former secretary of homeland security, said, “The recruitment rhetoric is ‘Defend your culture.’ What does that mean?” We might ask the same question.

Another question has entered the chat in recent days: What is “white culture” or “white identity”? A Trump State Department nominee has talked a lot about “white culture” and “white identity.” He worries about their “erasure.”

Questioned about this by a senator, the nominee mentioned, among other things, “foodways.” Insert your Velveeta joke here. Also, the “French” in “French fries” is not very American, is it? (White though it may be.)

One of the reasons I rejected the Left, long ago, was that they were obsessed with race and ethnicity, and played “identity politics.” (I’m generalizing here.) I was an E pluribus unum guy (as I still am). Today, the Right resembles the Left in myriad ways.

(For a piece of mine on this subject—on its foreign policy aspect in particular—go here.)

In my column today, I will not cover the ground of American culture. There are countless volumes on the subject. You might start with Perry Miller, the great historian who helped to launch American Studies. You might even start with Crèvecœur, who published Letters from an American Farmer in 1782. But I will offer a few thoughts.

When I was a kid, there was a jingle: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” (You pronounced that “Cheverlet.”) The next line went, “They go together in the good ol’ USA.”

Harold Hill cried, “Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock, and the Golden Rule!” Who was he? The titular character in The Music Man, the 1957 hit by Meredith Willson. I wrote about it once, calling it the Great American Musical.

My piece is apparently unfindable on the Internet—but you can have it in a collection, for the low, low price of $13.85.

Speaking of musicals: The Department of Homeland Security put out a video, accompanied by a text that said, “This is our own, our native land.” The video used a song: “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” from The Sound of Music, by Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Both of those fellows were born in New York. But the composer’s parents were Jews from the Russian Empire. (The family name, Rogazinsky, was made into “Rodgers.”) The lyricist was Oscar Hammerstein II. Oscar the First was a Jew from Germany.

Irving Berlin was a Jew from Russia (its empire). He gave us our all-American Christmas carol: “White Christmas.” He also gave us “God Bless America.” Dimitri Tiomkin was another Jew from the Russian Empire. He helped forge the sound of the American West—cowboys and Indians and all that—with his theme to Rawhide.

Aaron Copland helped forge that sound too (with his ballet Rodeo, for example). He was born in Brooklyn—but his parents were Jews from that same empire.

The Gershwins, too, were of that background. They wrote Porgy and Bess, which is arguably our national opera. The story is about black people in Charleston, S.C. Is the opera part of white culture or black culture?

It is part of American culture, and the musical culture of the world.

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On Easter Sunday 1939, Marian Anderson sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The great black contralto—“The Lady from Philadelphia”—had been denied use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, those “Heritage Americans” (in recent parlance).

She opened with “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Then she sang a Donizetti aria, a Schubert song, and several spirituals.

Black culture? White culture? American culture? Culture culture?

We are a diverse nation, with multifarious cultural pockets. The daughter of a lobsterman in New England will not have a quinceañera. (Will she?) But no American should really be spooked by either a lobster or a quinceañera.

Still, there is a common culture, and every nation needs ties that bind, or “mystic chords of memory,” as an American once said.

Our common culture includes the higher and the lower—Walt Whitman, sure, but also his fellow New Yorkers the Bunkers, of All in the Family.

For poets, we have, in addition to Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens … For novels, we have The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird …

(Some of us think that Stoner, by John Williams, published in 1958, deserves a place in the canon. This is an ongoing campaign, and frustration.)

When I was growing up, there was a painting by Winslow Homer on my wall. (Not the real thing, alas—a poster.) It was Breezing Up. You’ve seen American Gothic a time or two. And several Norman Rockwells. And Jackson Pollock’s creative drips.

Charles Ives stocked his Symphony No. 2 with popular tunes. Time was, most Americans would have recognized them. Does anyone know “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” today? Maybe not, but it still belongs to our “mystic chords.”

The choreographies of Martha Graham are part of our patrimony. (Matrimony?) She teamed with Copland for Appalachian Spring. That is as American as high school football on Friday nights, and vice versa.

About Hollywood, we could go on and on. Hollywood has shown America to itself, and America to the world. In its golden age—there’s another phrase in current parlance—Hollywood was stocked with immigrants and refugees.

Do you know this anecdote? Otto Preminger passes a table of men speaking Hungarian. He stops to reproach them: “You’re in America now. Speak German!”

I have offered a few thoughts about the arts and sports and whatnot. But very important is our political culture. Our democracy. In one of those recruitment ads, ICE speaks of “our way of life.”

Well, what about the Constitution? What about our long-established norms? When you lose an election, you concede it. If you’re president, you attend your successor’s inauguration.

Those rioters on January 6 halted a constitutional process. They threatened the vice president, the speaker of the House, and others, with death. The president called them “patriots” and pardoned them all.

Immigration is part and parcel of our national story. The 2024 presidential campaign featured Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Three of their four parents were immigrants, and the fourth was the son of immigrants.

Repeatedly in that campaign, Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Immigration must be lawful, for without the law, we are lost. The adjective in “ordered liberty” is as important as the noun. But “poisoning the blood of our country”? Really?

A welcome of refugees is also part of our story, our culture. With shameful exceptions, we have provided a haven for the terrorized and persecuted.

Today, our door is shut to refugees—except, curiously, to white South Africans. Surely we can do better, be more ourselves?

In this country, you don’t put your name on someone else’s memorial. You don’t hang a giant banner of yourself on the Justice Department. This is not North Korea.

Presumably, fights over American culture and the American way—fights over “Who are we?”—will go on for as long as our country exists. I am not the last word. Neither are you, neither is ICE.

But, dammit, I agree: “Defend your culture.” Defend our constitutional republicanism and our civil society. Or, as we say at the organization whose publication this is: renew democracy.

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A note from Garry Kasparov: The Trump administration could soon launch a war with Iran without oversight or accountability. To navigate the crisis, we will need a deep understanding of America’s place in the world rather than allow ourselves to get distracted by the outrage du jour. That’s why I’m inviting our premium subscriber community to a Zoom conversation on the last half-century of American foreign policy with Edward Luce, Financial Times US editor and author of Zbig: The Life And Times of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, America’s Great Power Prophet, taking place on Wednesday, March 4 at 5pm ET/2pm PT. You can find registration details here.

To make this opportunity more accessible, we’re offering 30% off a premium subscription, now through March 4. I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on The Next Move.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

News out of Seoul, as related by the Associated Press: “South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers on Thursday that it believes the teenage daughter of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is close to being designated the country’s future leader as he moves to extend the family dynasty to a fourth generation.”

That daughter is Kim Ju-ae, who is 13. But hang on: her name may be something else, and her age may be 12 or 14. Such details—such elementary facts—are closely guarded in North Korea, the “Hermit Kingdom.”

It was from Dennis Rodman that the world heard the name “Ju-ae,” back in 2013. But he may have gotten it wrong. There are different theories on the matter. The truth is, no one knows, outside a tight circle.

Rodman is a former professional basketball star, and Kim Jong-un is crazy about basketball, as was his father, Kim Jong-il, before him. In fact, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Kim Jong-il in 2000, she brought along a basketball signed by Michael Jordan.

Jordan’s onetime teammate, Rodman, has gone to North Korea several times, and on that one occasion, in 2013, he apparently met the dictator’s daughter.

There is speculation that the dictator has three children: one born in 2010, a boy; Kim Ju-ae (let’s call her), born in 2013 (let’s say); and another child born in 2017. That third child is of unknown sex. Then again, that child may not exist, and neither may the first.

If Kim Jong-un has a son—indeed, an eldest child who is a son—why is he not the successor? Why has he never been seen in public?

Kim Ju-ae was first seen by the public on November 18, 2022. She and the dictator had a typical daddy-daughter date: they attended a missile launch. Later, the state produced postage stamps commemorating the occasion.

In subsequent years, Kim Ju-ae has often been seen at her father’s side. She even traveled with him abroad, to Beijing, in September 2025.

If Kim Ju-ae does indeed succeed her father, she would be the first female dictator ever. Seriously, there has never been one.

You may wish to count bad queens. “Bloody Mary” acquired that nickname for a reason. A Chinese empress named Wu Zetian was a piece of work. But I am not counting queens as dictators, in the modern understanding.

Nor can you count Indira Gandhi, who ruled by emergency decree for 21 months. That was a Jeffersonian paradise, compared with the regimes we’re talking about.

Hold on a second: what about Delcy Rodríguez, whom the United States basically installed as jefe in Venezuela last month, after seizing and extracting Nicolás Maduro? We might consider her on another day…

I wrote about the Kim family, and other families, in a book called Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators (2015). Kim Il-sung, the founding North Korean, created the first communist dynasty. His counterpart in Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, wanted to do the same, but his regime ended—along with the dictator himself—before he could pass on power to his monstrous son Nicu.

In all likelihood, Kim Il-sung did not have his heart set on a dynasty. But he saw what happened to the cult of Stalin in the Soviet Union. It was brought low. (It has since been revived.) He did not want the same to happen to his own cult. And he figured that the best way to ensure continuation of the cult was to be succeeded by a son.

Kim Jong-il was the eldest, yes. But he was not the automatic successor. He had to compete for it—against a half-brother named Pyong-il, in particular—and he was good at it.

Jong-il himself had six children, give or take. One was a daughter named Sol-song, meaning “snow pine.” The name was bestowed on her by her grandfather, Kim Il-sung.

By all accounts, Kim Jong-il was very fond of this daughter. He liked having her work alongside him. She was capable and beautiful. But she was female, and how could the next dictator be anything but a son?

Kim Jong-il passed over older sons to anoint his youngest, Kim Jong-un. This is an interesting story (and I relate it in my book). But suffice it to say, here and now, that Jong-un was really a chip off the old block: a natural, ruthless, ghastly dictator.

In Syria, Hafez al-Assad had a daughter—his eldest child, Bushra. He adored her, and she adored him, and power. She had an appetite for politics and dictatorship. Hafez included her in governmental councils, and she accompanied her father on foreign trips—as Kim Ju-ae already has.

But Bushra was … well, a girl. And Hafez had plenty of sons.

His eldest, Bassel, was a natural successor. He was a golden boy: handsome, talented, personable. His nickname was the “Golden Knight.” But Bassel was killed in a car crash in 1994, when he was 31.

That very day, Hafez summoned the next son, Bashar, home from London, where he had been practicing ophthalmology. There would be no more of that. Bashar would be groomed for dictatorship.

And he wound up killing many more than Hafez—no slouch in the killing department—ever dreamed of.

Would there have been a third Assad, had that regime not fallen in December 2024? Yes, probably. Bashar’s firstborn—named Hafez, after Dictator No. 1—was widely seen as the next in line.

In Haiti, François Duvalier—“Papa Doc”—had three daughters and then a son. The first daughter, Marie-Denise, was much like Bushra al-Assad. But she went even farther in government than Bushra.

When the dictator was ailing, Marie-Denise served as his lieutenant, even his proxy. The old man was known to say, “Clear it with Denise” (as he called her). “She’s in charge now.”

But, like Bushra, Marie-Denise was a girl, and Duvalier had that one son, Jean-Claude—nicknamed (not kindly) “Baby Doc.” Jean-Claude could not have been less suited to politics and dictatorship. He himself said that Marie-Denise should take over.

But it had to be Jean-Claude, who held power for 15 years, before being chased to France in an uprising.

The Soviet Union lasted about 70 years. Already, Communist China has lasted longer than that. Communist Cuba, which began on January 1, 1959, is nearing that mark. North Korea, like Communist China, has passed it.

In Children of Monsters, I wrote, “Whether Jong-un will be the last dictator from his family, no one can know. It seems unlikely the dynasty can continue. Then again, it seemed unlikely that it could endure, strangling North Korea, for as long as it has.”

Last year, I interviewed, and wrote about, Kim Yumi, a North Korean defector. One of the things that motivated her defection relates to this business of dynasty.

“A key moment for Kim Yumi came in November 2022,” I wrote, “when Kim Jong-un presented his daughter to the public for the first time.” Kim Yumi noticed a couple of things. And I will keep quoting from my article:

“Kim Ju-ae had Western-style clothes and a haircut to match. This was reflective of her immense privilege. Also, military officials—senior men—were bowing to her. Evidently, the dictatorship would continue, unto the fourth generation. There was no end in sight.”

This was tremendously demoralizing to Kim Yumi.

Yes, there is no end in sight. But how many really and truly saw the end of the Soviet Union coming? Paul Nitze, the great diplomat who knew as much about the Soviet Union as anybody, did not. (He told me so.)

I grew up with countries called “East Germany” and “West Germany.” Günther Herbig, for example, was an “East German conductor.” Young people may marvel at this, but when we started saying “Germany” and “German,” in 1990, the words felt very strange in my mouth.

We can hope that the Koreas will reunite someday—on democratic terms.

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A note from Garry Kasparov: Perhaps you recently canceled a subscription to an oligarch-owned newspaper. Might I humbly suggest that you put that money toward supporting mission-driven media like The Next Move? I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the work of The Next Move’s parent organization, the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on Substack. To help make the decision easier, we’re offering 30% off an annual subscription, now through March 4.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

In 1993, Commentary magazine published an article with an arresting headline: “If Bosnians Were Dolphins.” The article was by Edward N. Luttwak, the scholar of grand strategy, born in Romania in 1942 (a very dark time).

“If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottle-nosed dolphins,” Luttwak began, “would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands?”

A further question: “If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire?”

The answers, said Luttwak, were “too obvious,” and the questions “merely rhetorical.”

I have thought of Luttwak’s article in recent days and weeks when absorbing the news from Ukraine. Russia’s war crimes continue unabated. In fact, they have intensified. Putin acts as though no one cares and no one will stop him.

Is he wrong?

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Russian forces have again attacked a maternity hospital. “Again”? Yes. I will quote the Kyiv Independent: “Throughout the full-scale war, Russia has multiple times targeted maternity hospitals, alongside attacks on other civilian infrastructure.”

In 2022, for example, “Russian forces struck a maternity ward in Vilniansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, killing a two-day-old boy.”

This most recent time, they did not kill anybody, apparently, but they injured at least six.

They did manage to kill 16 coalminers in a bus, returning the miners from their shift.

This is daily life in Ukraine. Ho-hum. Not even the bombing of maternity hospitals can shake the world’s lethargy, can pierce the general numbness.

And the bombing of maternity hospitals is almost comic in its evil, isn’t it? (Not that coalminers’ lives are worth less than those of mothers, their newborns, the nurses, et al.)

After the latest attack, a regional official in Ukraine said, “The strike on the maternity hospital is yet another proof of a war waged against life.”

That is well worded: “a war waged against life.”

Ask yourself: What if the recent attacks had been the other way around? What if Ukrainian forces had struck a maternity hospital in Russia and killed 16 Russian coalminers returning from their shift? Wouldn’t the world have been up in arms? Wouldn’t there have been fulminations from the White House?

But it seems that Ukrainians were born to be attacked and Russians to attack them. That is the “natural” order of things.

A few days before the maternity hospital and the coalminers, Russia attacked a passenger train, killing at least five people. This was “terrorism,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Of course it is.

In Ukraine, there is daily heroism, because daily heroism is required. Maryan Kushnir performed a little (though he rejects the term “hero”). Kushnir is a reporter for RFE/RL, America’s combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

His neighbors’ apartment was struck with a drone. In the apartment lived a young couple with children. The apartment was rapidly disintegrating in flames. Kushnir went in and saw a little girl on a couch, screaming for her mother. He pulled her out but could not save the others.

Watch his testimony here.

Day after day, Ukrainians take to social media to describe—to try to convey to the world—the atmosphere in which they are forced to live. Maria Avdeeva, a security expert, tweeted, “Kyiv under attack. Residential buildings are burning. Multiple Russian missiles entering Ukrainian airspace.” And so on.

It is very cold in Ukraine now. I was there just once, when I visited Kyiv in December 2019. It was cold. But the capital was brilliantly lit and the buildings were well heated.

“Freezing and in the dark, Kyiv residents are stranded in tower blocks as Russia targets power system.” That is a headline from the Associated Press (over this article).

Families are sleeping in subway stations, seeking protection against both cold and Russian bombs. Here is a video from Kyiv. (I may well have been in that subway station myself, those years ago.)

Oleksandra Matviichuk spoke of a woman named Zhenya, “who froze to death in her apartment in Kyiv.” This woman, elderly, “survived the Holocaust, but did not survive this winter.”

Matviichuk, a human rights lawyer, is the executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties, in Kyiv. In 2022, the center shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

“We will remember this winter,” wrote Matviichuk. “When an entire nation froze in the cold right on the border with the European Union, fought against the Russian army’s advance, but did not give up.”

Should not these people be admired and celebrated, if not … you know: helped?

The Wall Street Journal published a report by Anastasiia Malenko (text) and Emanuele Satolli (photos). The heading: “Here in One Kyiv Apartment Building, They Are Freezing—but Not Giving Up.” The subheading: “Russian attacks on energy infrastructure have plunged much of Ukraine into darkness and cold but haven’t broken its resilience.”

Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Journal. Circulating his colleagues’ work, he said, “Read this, about how ordinary Ukrainians cope with Putin’s genocidal effort to make Kyiv unlivable. And imagine what would you do.”

I will tell you something. In New York, I live in a building with old-fashioned steam heat. Wonderful heat, in abundance. In the dead of winter, we have to crack open our windows, to balance the heat.

In the daily stream of news, I try to take note of names and faces—else the maimed and the dead become mere abstractions. Here is Mykhailo Protsenko, whose job was to rescue people from rubble after bombings. He was killed on February 7. Protsenko was 30 years old and “left behind his wife and two small kids.”

There’s a difference—a big difference—between those Bosnians, who were not dolphins, and the Ukrainians, who are also not dolphins. No one hailed the killers of the Bosnians as defenders of Western civilization, or not many did. No one cooed over the manliness of Slobodan Milošević.

He wound up at The Hague, where he belonged.

And the US president did not display a portrait of Milošević, or any of the other killers, in a place of honor at the White House.

Donald Trump has renovated the Palm Room. He has hung pictures as well. On top is a picture of him and Putin in Alaska last summer. You will recall the greeting that Putin received. Let me quote from a previous column of mine:

“President Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin—literally. There was a military flyover in Putin’s honor. And Trump invited Putin to ride with him in his limo. As a report in the Associated Press put it, the two men were ‘casually chatting like reunited friends.’”

Contrast this with Zelenskyy’s greeting in Florida, about four months later. No US official was there to greet him. None.

In the Palm Room at the White House, the picture of Putin and Trump is first—on top—and below it is a picture of Trump with one of his grandchildren.

Do you think that people in Ukraine know about this, hear about it? They do. Imagine what that can do to morale. The United States is supposed to be the Leader of the Free World, “the last best hope of earth,” as Lincoln said.

Oleksandra Matviichuk had a question: “Why has Trump’s year of negotiations with Putin become the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022?”

She answered her own question: “Because the human dimension in this war doesn’t matter to the US negotiators. So, Putin decided he could do whatever he wanted.”

Can anyone really, if only in the secrecy of his heart, deny it?

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Join us in New York: The Renew Democracy Initiative and the Ukrainian Institute of America invite you to a forward-looking conversation with RDI Chairman Garry Kasparov and CEO Uriel Epshtein, moderated by CNN’s Bianna Golodryga. We will discuss Ukraine and how we can defend freedom at home and abroad in the face of mounting geopolitical threats. Next Tuesday, February 10 in NYC. Register here.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” So said Socrates, or Confucius. You will find attributions to both. In any case, great minds think alike.

Nick Cohen, the British journalist, began a column last week with a quotation from Camus: “To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.” That, too, is right—a wise observation.

President Trump is a namer and renamer of things. There is a long tradition of this, from heads of state. But not in democracies such as ours.

On the first day of his second term, Trump declared that, henceforward, the Gulf of Mexico would be known as the “Gulf of America.” Never mind that this body of water had been called the “Gulf of Mexico” for almost 500 years. Trump had spoken.

The Associated Press balked. It refused to change its stylebook to comply with Trump. The White House retaliated by banning the AP from news conferences and similar events.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said, “If we feel there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.” (She must have meant the tellers of those “lies.”)

Last December, the National Press Club honored the AP with its press freedom award. Mike Balsamo, the club’s president, said, “The Associated Press stood its ground for a simple reason: journalism must be independent to be free. A newsroom that lets the government decide its words gives up its voice.”

The AP, said Balsamo, had chosen “principle over permission.”

Back in May, the US House passed a bill codifying Trump’s declaration that the Gulf of Mexico would be the “Gulf of America.” That bill has not yet cleared the Senate. In the House, only one Republican voted against it: Don Bacon of Nebraska (who is retiring at the end of the current term).

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“It just seems juvenile,” Bacon said. “We’re the United States of America. We’re not Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany or Napoleon’s France. We’re better than this. It just sounds like a sophomore thing to do.”

Has “Gulf of America” caught on in the broad American public? I have heard it used only once unironically. A young man who works in shipping said “Gulf of America,” just as naturally as he would have said “Lake Erie” or the “Mississippi River.”

The rise and fall of names is a fascinating topic, and often political. I wrote an essay about it in 2015, here. But let us return to that gulf for a moment longer.

Two weeks ago, President Trump made a disclosure that was completely unsurprising: he had thought about naming the Gulf of Mexico after himself. “ ‘The Gulf of Trump,’ that does have a good ring,” he said. “Maybe we could do that. It’s not too late.”

People said he was joking. But “Trump-Kennedy Center” began as a “joke” too, didn’t it? More on this in due course …

Early last year, the administration gutted the US Institute of Peace, as it was gutting USAID, Radio Free Asia, etc. But then, whaddaya know? They renamed it the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

The State Department announced that the name had been changed in order “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history,” i.e., Trump. Ordinarily, that’s the kind of statement you get from a campaign office, not the US State Department.

Caesaristic types like to name things after themselves. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the Nobel peace laureate, was not such a man. He was practically the only person who called the Marshall Plan by its formal name: the “European Recovery Program.” Most people didn’t even know the formal name.

Rafael Trujillo was a caesar: the dictator of the Dominican Republic. In 1936, he renamed the capital city after himself. “Ciudad Trujillo,” he called it. For a full 440 years, the city had been called “Santo Domingo.” After Trujillo died in 1961, it was “Santo Domingo” once again.

I will tell you something—something personal. Apart from Nancy, Ronald Reagan probably had no greater admirer than I was. I’ll be a Reaganite till the end. But I didn’t like it when, in 1998, a Republican Congress changed the name of National Airport outside Washington, DC, to “Reagan.”

For one thing, it seemed too early—Reagan had been out of office for less than ten years. It also seemed too … partisan. How would I have liked “Bill Clinton Airport”? What’s more, “National Airport” is a perfect name for an airport serving our nation’s capital.

But at least Reagan didn’t name the airport after himself, you know? His admirers in Congress did (and President Clinton signed their bill).

President Kennedy did not name the performing arts center in Washington after himself. Congress did, after that president was murdered. It was to be his “living memorial” in DC.

Two and a half weeks after being sworn in the second time, Trump fired the Kennedy Center’s existing board and named his own—which named him chairman. In July, Republican congressmen moved to rename the opera house at the Kennedy Center the “Melania Trump Opera House.” (This has not occurred.) In December, Trump himself hosted the Kennedy Center Honors, which had been going on since 1978.

And a week and a half after that, Trump renamed the center, calling it “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” He put his name first. On the building itself, he literally put his name over Kennedy’s name.

What kind of man puts his own name on another man’s memorial? And puts it first, and above? For that matter, what kind of man accepts another person’s Nobel medal? What kind of man essentially coerces a Nobel medal from a woman?

When Trump is out of office, many, many things will be named after him, no doubt. He is one of the most popular political figures in our history. The Republican Party has nominated him for president three times in a row. Never before had the GOP nominated anyone for president three times in a row. That distinction belongs to Trump, and Trump alone.

And, of course, the people as a whole elected him twice.

Trump has tens of millions of admirers, some of whom all but worship him. Never has an American politician had such a hold on his “base.” In a free society, people have the right to honor their heroes, with statues and the like. Of course Trump will be honored.

Why does he have to plaster his name on things—including other people’s memorials—now?

Earlier this week, Trump announced that he would close the Kennedy Center for two years for “renovation.” In other news—related—he is building an arch: a triumphal arch, to be placed near the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. People are calling this the “Arc de Trump” (get it?)

In October, Ed O’Keefe of CBS News asked the president, “Who’s it for?” Trump pointed to himself and answered, “Me.”

This is not the American way—unless the American people want it to be so. May the republican spirit (note the small “r”) make a comeback.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic published a piece by Gal Beckerman called “The Silence of the Left on Iran.” Its subheading read, “As the Islamic Republic massacres protesters, exiles are dismayed by the lack of sympathy from the American left.”

Right.

In general—but only in general—the Left doesn’t “do” Iran. And the Right doesn’t “do” other countries.

Rare is the individual—to say nothing of a political camp—who “does” human rights in all countries. Selectivity is the rule.

When I was coming of age, the Left was concerned about human rights in three countries, primarily: Chile, ruled by Augusto Pinochet; the Philippines, ruled by Ferdinand Marcos; and South Africa, ruled by the imposers of apartheid.

Those were good countries to be concerned about. But there were lots of other countries in the world: the Soviet Union, with its 15 “republics”; the “Eastern bloc” (Poland, Romania, etc.); China; North Korea; Cuba ...

“My party has a blind spot on Cuba,” Eliot Engel once told me. He was a congressman from New York—a Democrat—from 1989 to 2021. “And the Republican Party has its own blind spots,” he added.

One of them was South Africa, in my judgment—and I’m sure in Engel’s.

There were Cold War considerations, no doubt—not just in South Africa but also in Chile, the Philippines, and elsewhere. But US foreign policy is not genuinely American, some of us think, without at least a touch of concern for the basic rights of all human beings.

Engel was consistent on human rights, throughout his career. So was another Democratic congressman, Tom Lantos (the only Holocaust survivor ever to be elected to Congress). The same is true of Chris Smith, a Republican, who entered Congress in 1981—the same year as Lantos—and is still there today.

Fashion in human rights is a big topic, one fit for a book, not so much for a column. But let me linger on South Africa for a moment.

Apartheid South Africa was an international pariah. That country was banned from the Olympic Games from 1964 to 1992. But you know who participated, all the while? Kim Il-sung’s North Korea. Enver Hoxha’s Albania. And on and on.

In 1980, the Games were held in the Soviet Union.

Twice since then, the Games have been held in China, a police state that is committing genocide against the Uyghur people.

Is the Uyghur issue fashionable? Not fashionable enough.

Twenty-five years ago, I asked Jeane Kirkpatrick something like this: “Why are the heroics of Cuban dissidents ignored in our country? Cuba is, after all, only 90 miles away.” She said this was “both a puzzling and a profoundly painful phenomenon of our times.”

She went on to note the “extreme selectivity of concern over terrible, terrible suffering, the deprivation of all rights.”

The dictator, Fidel Castro, was supported by glittering personalities from all over the world. Gabriel García Márquez, the great Colombian novelist, adored him, and lent his cultural authority to him.

In 1975, García Márquez hailed Castro’s “genius as a reporter.” Castro was always talking to people, you know, giving speeches for hours on end, delivering the news. “Thanks to those spoken reports,” said García Márquez, “the Cuban people are some of the best informed in the world about their own reality.”

As well informed as people in the Soviet Union, China, and other such utopias.

In a steady stream, American celebrities trooped down to Cuba, to sit at the dictator’s feet: Robert Redford, Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Naomi Campbell, Chevy Chase, Kevin Costner ...

Carole King sang one of her songs, right to Castro: “You’ve Got a Friend.” He sure did, too many of them.

In about 2000, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, the Cuban-American congressman, made a remark to me that remains lodged in my memory: “For the life of me, I just don’t know how Castro can seem cute after 40 years of torturing people.”

Dissidents such as Óscar Elías Biscet and Juan Carlos González Leiva ought to be famous. Biscet is an Afro-Cuban physician and former political prisoner. He has modeled his activism on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others. González Leiva is a lawyer and also a former political prisoner. He is blind.

These men are brave almost beyond belief. Does anyone know who they are? (For interviews I have done with them, go here and here.)

The Ukrainian people at large have provided an example of heroism. In September 2022, I began a piece called “Ukraine and the Right” as follows:

Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free, independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror. The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.

So, here is a classic case of a free and independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old. Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.

This would have been a natural cause of conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other counterparts). Is it? Hardly.

Instead, there is excuse after excuse for Vladimir Putin, and considerable admiration. “He is a defender of Christian civilization,” many say. That defames both Christianity and civilization.

Let me try something out on you—see what you think. Today, the peoples of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are lucky in one respect, and one respect only: they live in dictatorships opposed by the Trump administration.

Is that still true in the Venezuelan case? The former dictator, Nicolás Maduro, sits in a New York jail—but he has been replaced in Caracas by an equally fervent chavista, Delcy Rodríguez. On January 14, President Trump called her “a terrific person.”

Frankly, Maduro should have flattered Trump—perhaps nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. If I were Miguel Díaz-Canel, the current head of Cuba’s dictatorship, I might offer the Trump family some casinos and hotels in Havana. And why aren’t Iran’s ayatollahs making an oil deal?

You may say I’m guilty of cynicism. It could also be that I’ve made a stark observation of reality.

Human-rights fashion can be puzzling (to borrow a word from Jeane Kirkpatrick). In the 2000s, people all over the world were concerned about genocide in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. But for 20 years there had been genocide in southern Sudan—Elie Wiesel called it a “slow-motion genocide.”

Very few cared, outside some evangelical-Christian groups (and the victims themselves, of course).

You cannot keep your eye on every sparrow. Some people watch “sparrows” in Nicaragua but not in El Salvador. And vice versa. Some watch them in Iran but not Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Turkey. And vice versa.

I suppose that all the sparrows get watched, by someone. But the lives of these beings are equally valuable.

When I was in college, I had a class or two with Oscar Büdel, an eminent scholar of Italian literature. An interesting background, he had. Born in Germany in 1923, he served in the Luftwaffe and was a POW in Italy.

One day, during his office hours, we were talking about dictatorships—of left-wing and right-wing varieties. He said, “Who cares whether the boot is red or black?” Yes. The face the boot stamps on doesn’t care about its color.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

When I was coming of age, there was a rule, concerning analysis and argument: Never compare anything to the Nazis. The Nazis are, literally, incomparable. Any comparison to them is disrespectful of their victims, and trivializing.

I have great sympathy for this point of view. Comparisons to the Nazis are often cheap and, indeed, insulting. I would rather have too few comparisons—or even none—than too many.

But, you know? Genocide and savagery are constants of human behavior. Ask the Cambodians, among others.

In 2017, Jerome A. Cohen, the American scholar of China, sounded the alarm about Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs. He told me he thought of his distant relatives—some 40 of them—murdered in the Holocaust.

Then we have the word “fascist” (and its companion noun “fascism”). As early as 1946, Orwell was saying that “fascism” had come to have no meaning “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Many, many times, I have been called a “fascist,” for my conservative views (which are “Reaganite” or “classical liberal,” if you like). I could entertain you, or appall you, with stories.

My views are the opposite of fascist. I favor limited government, separation of powers, individual rights, a free economy, and so on and so forth. And fascism? I call on Mussolini, who said, “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

That is a far cry from Tocquevillean democracy.

But, you know? There are fascists in this world, and communists, and other authoritarian and totalitarian types. That which is fascist and that which is communist have often blended. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a pact made in heaven, or hell. But Hitler double-crossed his partner, Stalin.

Fidel Castro was an interesting blend. As a young man, he was a fascist, educated to admire Primo de Rivera, Mussolini, and Hitler. But this was a little awkward after 1945. So he hitched his wagon to the reds. This did not require much change in thought or character.

How would you define “fascism”? George F. Will has had a go at it in a column or two. In 2020, he wrote, “Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.”

Will quoted Mussolini, who said, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program?” (Il Mondo, or “The World,” was a newspaper, short-lived.) “It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo.”

We are getting to our current environment, as you thought we might.

In the summer of 2016, I wrote a longish article titled “The F-Word.” That word, of course, was “fascist.” A lot of people had concerns about Donald Trump, soon to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Was he or wasn’t he?

I said that I was loath to toss around the F-word, in part because I myself had been on the receiving end of that word. But I agreed that there were “grounds for concern: concern that Trump is something other than an exponent of liberal democracy.” I detailed those grounds. For instance, Trump constantly invoked, and exalted, “strength.”

Let me give you an aside, possibly amusing. Two future MAGA stars—mega-stars—praised my article and found it important. Today, they have about 12 million followers, combined, on X.

Just before the 2016 election, James Kirchick wrote a fascinating and candid essay, modeled on an essay by Dorothy Thompson, published in 1941. “More than any book I’ve read or lecture I’ve attended,” said Kirchick, “the Trump phenomenon has explained the 1930s for me.”

Many of us knew just what he meant.

By February 2021, another conservative writer had seen enough. “Donald Trump’s promise of American strength has involved the betrayal of American identity,” wrote Michael Gerson. “This is a reality that I have resisted naming. The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism.”

Today, there are many people—many young people, in particular—who are ... let’s say, fascism-curious. What did Carl Schmitt believe, anyway? What about the economic theories of Friedrich List? Has the Holocaust been exaggerated? Hasn’t an emphasis on individual rights torn the fabric of our society?

Just asking questions!

During the 2024 presidential-election cycle, a fascist symbol—the Sonnenrad (sun wheel)—made its way into an ad supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis. How the heck did that get in there?

From Trump himself, we could cite countless things. Maybe I could choose just one. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president tweeted early in his second term. Does that sound American?

About two weeks ago, Stephen Miller, the presidential aide, spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper. They discussed, among other things, the administration’s designs on Greenland. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” said Miller. But ours is a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Adding a Spenglerian touch, Miller said, “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Iron laws aside, the word “niceties” rang a bell for me. In October 2016, Trump was refusing to say whether he would accept the result of the presidential election. Patrick J. Buchanan had a comment—duly Buchananite: The “populist-nationalist Right” was “moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love.”

As I remarked in an article last November, “one man’s niceties are another man’s preconditions for a decent national and political life.”

When it comes to fascism—accusations of and concerns about—I would not go overboard. But may I say that I would not go underboard either? I believe in “American exceptionalism,” to a degree. But I also know that we Americans aren’t so exceptional as not to be human beings. We are not superhuman creatures, immune from the ills that haunt mankind.

In recent years, several people of my acquaintance have read or re-read William L. Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They find some things familiar. Are they hysterics? Are they guilty of reductio ad Hitlerum?

I know others who have read or re-read Stefan Zweig’s classic memoirs, The World of Yesterday. I myself read them (for the first time). They are about Europe and World War I. And Europe and the next world war. Zweig inspired an essay from me, here.

Maybe you know a line from Goebbels: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” As Adam Gopnik noted in an article last year, this is “one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not.”

In 2014, the Salzburg Festival staged a new opera, Charlotte Salomon, by Marc-André Dalbavie. It tells a Holocaust story. The stage director was Luc Bondy, son of the liberal anti-communist writer François Bondy.

Here are the concluding lines of my review:

The Nazis were depicted with distorted, grotesque faces. The singers and actors portraying the Nazis were wearing masks of some sort. One can appreciate this decision: the outer is reflecting the inner. Part of the evil of totalitarians, however, is that they look like everyone else.

Yes. A jolting thing about the monsters among us is that they are not just monstrous but human. And other human beings, less monstrous, go along ...

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All of my life, I have burned at, and kicked against, the image of “the ugly American.” The phrase comes from the title of a 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It’s about US diplomats in Southeast Asia. It was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando.

What is, who is, the ugly American? The lout in the floral shirt, thinking that the locals will understand English better if only he yells.

In common with antisemitism, anti-Americanism is amazingly versatile. Writers such as David Pryce-Jones and Paul Hollander have noticed this.

To the antisemite, the Jew can be a capitalist or a socialist, depending on the need of the moment. He can be a top hat–wearing financier or a Bolshevik. He is clannish, not willing to integrate. On the other hand, he infiltrates everything.

And the American? He is insular, blinkered, unwilling to travel. Or, if you like, he is all too present, all over the world, despoiling every café and museum. He is the fat slob: the couch potato. He is also the body-worshipping health fanatic.

For many people, study abroad is formative. So it was for me, when I was in college. I experienced the anti-Americanism of many Europeans. More important, I experienced the anti-Americanism of many of my fellow Americans.

You’ve heard about the American kid who puts a Canadian maple leaf on his backpack. That stereotype is real. On a train from Luxembourg down to Florence, the young American sitting across from me said that she was hoping to pass for German.

German!

Some of the Americans simply didn’t want to be hassled. They wanted to be incognito. Others were ashamed of their country, especially of its role in the world. These were often called “self-hating Americans.” But I did not detect any self-hatred in them. On the contrary, they were self-loving. It was others they hated (e.g., Ronald Reagan).

I had always been a patriotic person—I thought the American founding was a great force for good in the world—but I emerged from my time abroad more patriotic than ever.

When was that time? Well, I was a student in Italy during the summer of 1984. That fall, there was a general election campaign at home. In October, Vice President Bush debated the Democratic nominee, Geraldine Ferraro. At one point, he said, “I’ll be honest with you: it’s a joy to serve with a president who does not apologize for the United States of America.” Ferraro reacted with a quizzical look.

I knew exactly what he meant, and I loved it.

Fast forward almost 20 years to 2003. Bush’s eldest son is president and his secretary of state is Colin Powell. I am present in Davos when George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, asks a question of Powell. The gist of it is: Is not the United States today overly reliant on “hard power” rather than “soft power”?

Powell says that the US deploys “soft power” in myriad ways, and very effectively. But “hard power” is often necessary, he says, adding this:

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last 100 years—and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan—and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.

I thought that was just right.

The next year saw another general election: President Bush vs. John Kerry. In a debate, Kerry spoke of “the global test”—a test that US policy ought to pass. Does the world approve (or at least accept) or not?

“Nonsense,” said the likes of me. “American policies ought to be in the American interest. And our interest, more often than not, coincides with the interest of mankind at large.”

I could go on—and have, in countless articles, plus books—but have I established my bona fides? My credentials as an America-defending, flag-waving conservative?

Chances are, you knew where this was heading—to Donald Trump. He has made “the ugly American” real. And he is not a random tourist; he is the president of the United States, the embodiment of America to millions, or billions.

In his first term—May 2017—there was a small incident, but telling. Leaders at a NATO summit in Brussels were assembling for something like a group photo. Trump shoved one of them, Duško Marković, the prime minister of Montenegro, out of the way, to get to the center.

A video of this incident “went viral,” globally.

Montenegro is a teeny-tiny country, powerless. The US is something very different. Can’t the American president afford to be gracious?

More recently, Trump has been threatening a NATO ally, Denmark, over Greenland. Last week, he said, “We’re going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way.” That is the talk of a mafia boss.

Asked whether there were constraints on his global powers, Trump said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.”

In the early 2000s, many people charged that the United States was waging what we then called the War on Terror for one reason: oil. “No blood for oil!” went the cry. And what has Trump said about Venezuela? “We’re going to be taking oil.” “We’re going to keep the oil.”

He circulated a meme that labeled him—that designated him—the “acting president of Venezuela.”

Last April, I traveled to Denmark to speak to people about the suddenly, dramatically altered relations between Washington and Copenhagen. The people I spoke with were not only indignant, outraged, or appalled. They were “heartbroken,” as at least two of them said.

(For my report from Denmark, go here.)

I’m not talking about Euro-lefties (who would not be at all heartbroken). I’m not talking about Marxists or hippies wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. (Guevara was everywhere when I was a student in Europe, along with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis).

No, these are conservatives and Atlanticists who loved Reagan and have always defended America and our role in the world, especially Europe.

What Lincoln said of Clay, in his eulogy, can be said of many of us:

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity, and glory because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity, and glory of human liberty ...

Another statement is attributed to Tocqueville: “America is great because she is good.” The great Frenchman did not say or write those words, as far as can be determined, but they are worthy nonetheless.

And it’s up to each of us, as citizens, to express America the Beautiful, not America the Ugly.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative.

I first met Per Stig Møller last April. I had gone to Denmark to look into US-Danish relations. This is not usually an explosive subject. But there were new and bizarre threats from Washington against Denmark—of which Greenland is an autonomous territory.

While in Copenhagen and its environs, I met with many leading Danes in the fields of foreign policy and defense. Møller was foreign minister from 2001 to 2010. (He is also a literary scholar, but that’s another story.)

I published a piece titled “America Rattles Denmark: A report from an allied capital in a strange time.”

Though I was there to ask questions of Per Stig Møller, among others, he had a question for me: “Do you think Trump will take Greenland by force?” I replied, “I would like to say, ‘No, of course not. We’re a civilized country.’ But I’m not sure.”

Now it is eight months later, and the administration has renewed its threats against Denmark—intensified them, even. If President Trump does not follow through, will he look “weak,” in his own eyes?

I have now talked with Mr. Møller again, in a podcast. His opening line to me is, “Nice to see you, even if you’re American.”

The new hostility from the U.S. government has bewildered Danes such as Møller. He was born in 1942. He and his peers grew up with a great appreciation, and a great admiration, of the United States. From Truman to Bush 43, says Møller, all the presidents were Atlanticists.

But America is now different, he says. Barely recognizable. We seem to have entered a “post-truth” era, accompanied by “might makes right” and “spheres of influence.” The law of the jungle.

The Trump administration says that the US must take Greenland for the sake of security. This is bunk, as Møller explains. He would prefer honesty: Just say that you have a land-grabbing imperial ambition!

If America did, in fact, invade Greenland, what would that look like? We already have a base there. And if we took military action, would Denmark invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which says, in effect, that an attack on one is an attack on all? How would that work?

“China and Russia must be sitting there laughing,” says Møller. “I’m sure they can’t believe their luck. It used to be ‘The West against the rest.’ Now it is ‘The West against the West.’”

A dark question: Is there some agreement between Trump and Vladimir Putin, along the lines of “You take your ‘near abroad,’ I’ll take mine”? Many people suspect so, including wise heads such as Per Stig Møller.

Russia is now menacing Denmark and other Scandinavian nations with drones. Europe, broadly, is under threat (and in the case of Ukraine, under daily assault). Be careful of world war, says Møller. Humanity has a record of “sleepwalking” into them.

In our podcast, we talk about the meaning of NATO and the future of NATO. We talk about what seems to be a “hinge moment” in modern history. Our subjects are deadly serious—yet Mr. Møller’s warmth and humor shine through.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

In a sense, I would prefer not to write about Ukraine. It’s painful—especially where the stance of my country, the United States, is concerned. But if the war is painful for me, as I sit in my armchair—what’s it like for the Ukrainians?

I went to Ukraine in December 2019. The war had been on, in the eastern part of Ukraine, for almost six years already. More than 14,000 people had been killed. And Ukrainians were bracing for worse.

Vitaly Portnikov, a leading Ukrainian journalist, remarked to me that “the post-Soviet space” was “pregnant with war.” If the Balkans were once “the powder keg of Europe,” the post-Soviet space threatened to be another.

And in February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale, all-out assault.

Since that time, I have written about Ukraine regularly—almost daily, if social media posts count. If someone like me can do nothing else, he can express horror at Russia’s atrocities and record the names of the victims, some of them.

He can also say that the fate of Ukraine is linked to the broader fate of the world.

In July 2014, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column about Gaza—another one. I sent him an email, saying, “Charles, I find that I can barely write about the Arab–Israeli conflict anymore, so weary am I from doing it, year after year, decade after decade. I’m glad you’re not weary—or that you push through it, to say the necessary, again.”

He answered, “I know exactly of your weariness. My reluctance to write about it once again is enormous. It’s only a sense of duty—and the shocking realization of how few are prepared to say the obvious truth anymore—that makes me do it.”

In October 2015, I wrote an essay called “Hung Up on Israel: An explanation for the sincere.” It was an answer to readers who asked, “Why do you write about Israel so much and care about it so much?”

In September 2023, I felt the need to write a similar piece: “Ukraine: Why the Fuss?”

Back in 2009, I had a long talk with Krauthammer and asked him a stark question: Will Israel survive? The survival of Israel, he answered, depended on two things: the will of its people to survive and the support of the United States.

I have suspected that the same is true of Ukraine. That the Ukrainians are determined to survive, there is no doubt. They have proven it through their sacrifices.

The support of the United States is an entirely different question.

During the Republican presidential primaries of 2024, and then the general election, I had a remarkable thought: The fate of Ukraine—and therefore of much else—might depend heavily on the American voter.

Donald Trump, JD Vance, and others in their party seethed with hostility toward the Ukrainians and made excuse after excuse for the Kremlin.

The new administration was sworn in on January 20, 2025. On February 28, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was in the Oval Office. I will let Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ideologue who is often described as “Putin’s brain,” tell what happened: “Trump and Vance wiped their feet on Zelenskyy like a doormat.”

That day, I was participating in a seminar, which began at about nine and lasted till about six. We had a midday break—during which we absorbed the news out of the White House. During the afternoon session, one colleague of mine was absolutely silent. That evening, I questioned him about this.

“I was rattled by the Oval Office thing,” he said. “I wanted to think and talk only about Ukraine.” I understood him entirely.

Exactly ten months later, on December 28, Zelenskyy flew to Florida, to meet with President Trump and his team. Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, sent a message via X: “Good luck, @ZelenskyyUA.”

When Zelenskyy’s plane landed, no US official was there to greet him. This is practically unheard of for a visiting head of state. And it was greatly contrasting with Vladimir Putin’s visit to Alaska in August.

President Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin—literally. There was a military flyover in Putin’s honor. And Trump invited Putin to ride with him in his limo. As a report in the Associated Press put it, the two men were “casually chatting like reunited friends.”

Out of Florida, video circulated on the Internet, showing the Ukrainian team and Trump’s team, sitting across from each other. Trump’s team included Steve Witkoff, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. Some of us thought as Tusk had: “Good luck, Zelenskyy.”

From Trump, we heard the usual moral equivalence. Asked by a reporter about Russia’s unceasing attacks on Ukraine—its bombing of civilians—our president answered, “I believe Ukraine has made some very strong attacks also.”

Later, talking about Russia and Ukraine, he said, “They both have done some pretty bad things.”

Trump also said, “Russia wants Ukraine to succeed.” His envoy, Witkoff, wrote, “Russia remains fully committed to achieving peace in Ukraine.”

Republicans of my acquaintance like to style themselves “realists,” alleging that the rest of us are fuzzy-minded idealists (at best). Has there ever been a less realistic bunch than the Republicans in charge today?

Further talking about the Ukraine war, Trump said, as he habitually does, “Look, that’s Biden’s war. That’s not my war.” In truth, it is Putin’s war: he invaded Ukraine and is attempting to subjugate it. For the Ukrainians, it is a war of survival.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, “It’s not our war. It’s a war on another continent.” Wars in Europe have affected us in the past, have they not? Moreover, Venezuela, too, is on another continent—and the United States has just intervened militarily there, right?

In Rubio’s remarks, some of us caught a whiff of Neville Chamberlain, that well-meaning man, who spoke of “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Mr. Rubio was a senator. He took it upon himself to disseminate as much information about the invasion as possible, in order to explain “why America should care, why it matters,” as he put it. He said, “I think it’s important just to rally support for Ukraine here in America.”

Yes, it was, and it still is.

Last March, the British historian Andrew Roberts gave a speech in the House of Lords, of which he is a member. He said, “We must not underestimate the gravity of what has happened, which is that during a war against totalitarian dictatorship, the United States has effectively changed sides.”

After this most recent meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy, a Russian newspaper published some noteworthy lines—as spotted and reported by Steve Rosenberg, the Russia editor of BBC News.

“America no longer sees our country as a threat,” said the paper. “The US leader’s philosophy is closer to the values of Russia’s president, not the politicians of the Old World,” and “he sees Europe as a liberal stronghold that must be destroyed.”

Trump represents and speaks for many, many Americans—but not all of us. What can the rest of us do? Speak up! We can show Ukrainians, Russians, and others that the Trump administration is not the whole of America.

On New Year’s Eve, I met a couple in New York. He is a native of the city, she is a native of Ukraine. She said to me, “Thank you for caring about Ukraine.” It is a matter of simple human compassion. Also of cold interest—that of the democratic West.

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In some mouths, “patriotic” means nationalist-populist Right. Consider the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, issued last month. The “growing influence of patriotic European parties,” says the document, “gives cause for great optimism.”

And what are those patriotic parties? Well, consider “Patriots for Europe,” founded in 2024 by Viktor Orbán (the Hungarian prime minister) and his friends. The group is composed of Orbán’s party, Fidesz; Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (in France); Matteo Salvini’s League (Italy); the so-called Freedom Party in Austria; and so on.

When Patriots for Europe was founded, Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s spokesman, tweeted, “!! Historic moment !!”

Salvini, too, was thinking grandly. PfE, he said, would be “decisive in changing the future of this Europe.”

Vladimir Putin is of like mind. At a forum in Sochi this past October, he said, “We see nationally oriented political forces gaining momentum across Europe—in France and in Germany.” An encouraging development, from Putin’s point of view. He further said that “Hungary, of course, under Viktor Orbán, has long championed this stance.”

Some of us believe the following: If you’re looking for patriotism in Europe—or, indeed, a national orientation—look to the Ukrainians, who are fighting to repel an invader that wants to force them back into an empire.

When Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the Austrian parliament in 2023, members of the “Freedom Party” walked out.

These parties—what the Trump administration, Orbán, and the rest call “patriotic” parties—form a movement. A genuine international movement. Indeed, when Steve Bannon founded a nationalist-populist organization in Brussels, back in 2017, he called it “The Movement.”

Bannon is an American activist, but, like others of his stripe, he is internationally minded.

It was he who asked Nigel Farage to campaign in Alabama. What was Farage, the leader of the British nat-pop Right, doing at a rally in Fairhope, Alabama, in 2017? He was campaigning for Roy Moore, a candidate in the Republican senatorial primary of that year. Farage had just been in Germany, campaigning for the AfD.

(“AfD” are the German initials for the Alternative for Germany, that country’s main nationalist-populist party.)

In Fairhope, Farage said that the election of Moore was “important for the whole global movement across the West that we have built up and we have fought for.”

The whole global movement. (Moore was soon nominated by the Republicans but lost the general election.)

Being global, the whole movement has many elements, in many countries. One thing these elements have in common is admiration of Vladimir Putin and his dictatorship in Russia.

Farage is cagier, and smarter, than most. In 2014, he was asked which world leader he most admired. His answer: “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin.”

At the time, Farage was leading the UK Independence Party (UKIP). He has since led the Brexit Party, which has turned into Reform UK. Succeeding him as leader of UKIP, briefly, was Diane James. Asked about her political heroes, she named three: Churchill, Thatcher—and Putin.

(The other two were not available to comment on this spectacular grouping.)

Said James about Putin, “I admire him from the point of view that he’s standing up for his country. He is very nationalist. He is a very strong leader. He is putting Russia first.”

Those words could be a theme song for “the whole global movement.”

Nathan Gill has worked alongside Farage for many years: in UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Reform UK. He was the leader of Reform UK Wales. Last September, he pleaded guilty to accepting money from the Kremlin for making pro-Kremlin statements. He was sentenced to ten and a half years.

Why the Kremlin has to pay people, I have no idea. There are countless people willing to do the work for free—out of affinity. So it was in Soviet times as well.

The story of Marine Le Pen and Putin’s Russia has several angles and chapters. But perhaps a picture will be worth a thousand words—a three-segmented picture, or a triptych, if you like. A pro-Putin “influencer” from Russia, Maria Katasonova, presented Le Pen with an artwork: portraying Putin, Trump, and between them, Le Pen herself.

A trinity?

In her headquarters, Le Pen posed with this work, grinning.

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Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister of Italy, wears his heart on his sleeve, or chest: he has been known to don Putin shirts, showing the Russian dictator in romantic or heroic poses, à la Che Guevara. Salvini has worn such shirts in the European Parliament and in Red Square, Moscow.

In 2014, Salvini and his party established a “Friends of Putin” group in the Italian parliament. Three years later, they signed a “friendship and cooperation” agreement with Putin.

That phrase, “friendship and cooperation,” applies to “the whole global movement.”

About the Alternative for Germany, Thomas Haldenwang made a frank observation. This was in 2023, when Haldenwang was the head of the BfV, which is roughly the German equivalent of the FBI. AfD-ers and other such people push “Russian narratives,” said Haldenwang. They “sing from Putin’s song sheet.”

In Austria, the Freedom Party is a reliable chorus. The party was in government from 2017 to 2019 as part of a nationalist-populist coalition. The chancellor of that government, Sebastian Kurz, went on to work for Thiel Capital. The foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, works for Putin in Russia—at a kind of think tank in St. Petersburg.

After leaving government—Austria’s, that is—she joined the board of Rosneft, the Russian oil giant. She also blogged for RT, the Kremlin propaganda network.

The relationship between Viktor Orbán and Putin merits a book—and more than one such book is likely to appear in the future. For now, maybe a few notes will suffice.

As early as 2017, Orbán said, “We all sense—it’s in the air—that the world is in the process of a substantial realignment.” He made this statement when Putin came to visit him in Budapest. Putin, for his part, hailed Hungary as an “important and reliable partner for Russia in Europe.”

So it has been, under Viktor Orbán.

His longtime foreign minister is Péter Szijjártó—recipient of the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship. Putin conferred this award on him in November 2021, as Russian troops were massing along the Ukrainian border, preparing for an all-out assault.

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was killed in prison on February 16, 2024. A funeral for him was held in Moscow on March 1. On that day, Foreign Minister Szijjártó was meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister. Pictures showed them laughing it up together—which nauseated some of us.

A couple of weeks ago, Orbán made a curious statement about the Ukraine war: “It’s not clear who attacked whom.” This is better—more moderate?—than President Trump, who has repeatedly alleged that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war.

Orbán is a favorite of Trump, Vice President Vance, the whole crowd: MAGA at large, which is to say the GOP at large. They really are a movement—all of these characters, all of these actors, across the globe—just as Bannon, Farage, and others have said.

In 2018, when she was foreign minister, Karin Kneissl got married. She danced with Putin at her wedding. Photos went around the world showing the foreign minister curtsying to Putin in her dirndl, looking up at him adoringly.

A picture may not be worth a thousand words, always—but that posture sums up a lot.

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“Who’s an American?” “What’s an American?” These questions have been hotly debated since the country was founded, and before. Lately, some people have taken to calling themselves “Heritage Americans.”

What do they mean? You will hear some sophisticated glosses—but, on balance, I find it hard to separate the new “Heritage Americanism” from the old, familiar nativism.

Moreover, “Heritage Americanism” is a form of identity politics. Another one. Our country has no shortage of them, alas.

Many of the “Heritage Americans,” I bet, would decry “hyphenated Americanism.” You’re an American or you’re not. But while the term “Heritage American” has no hyphen, it does have a modifier.

Like you, certainly, I know plenty of people from old American families and plenty of people from newer ones. Some people, from whatever family, are lousy Americans (in my judgment). Some are very good ones.

They are all individuals.

If I may adapt a phrase from our British cousins: American is as American does. And thinks and feels. Are you for the rule of law, limited government, individual rights, free enterprise, E pluribus unum, etc.? I know some “Heritage Americans” who could use some serious assimilation.

For most of my life, conservatives frequently said that recent arrivals were often more American than the native-born: more appreciative, more informed, less complacent.

When I was growing up in Michigan, I knew many immigrants and refugees. They tended to be gung-ho American. My fourth-grade teacher was from the Soviet Union—Ukraine, in particular. (It was from him that I first learned that a Ukrainian was not a Russian.)

For about 60 years, Bernard Bailyn taught Harvard kids US colonial and revolutionary history. In his classes were many bluebloods. Professor Bailyn was born into a Jewish family in 1922. Did he qualify as a “Heritage American”? He was certainly an authority on it—our heritage.

Peter Schramm was born in Hungary in 1946. He and his family escaped ten years later in the midst of the uprising (which was crushed by Soviet tanks). His father liked to say, “We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”

(This reminds me of a slogan in Texas: “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.”)

Peter Schramm was a political scientist and an intellectual hero of many conservatives. He often said that it was his mission in life to teach Americans their heritage and make them appreciative of it. For years, he led the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio. The center has a podcast called The American Idea.

What’s that, “the American idea”? Well, in short, it’s freedom. (Richard Brookhiser wrote a book called Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Idea.) It is also a cluster of ideas: principles and ideals embodied in the American founding.

There are people who spit blood on hearing that “America is an idea” or that we are “a creedal nation.” In a podcast a few years ago, I brought this up with Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher.

He was born in Chicago. His father was born in Los Angeles. His mother was born in Kyoto. Some of the family was interned during World War II.

Though Chicago-born, Francis Fukuyama did much of his growing up in New York. He did not know a single other Japanese American. At school, he was taunted as a “Chinaman” and worse. The kids demanded to know, “What are you?”

His father said, “Tell ’em you’re an American.”

Said Fukuyama to me, “If America doesn’t have a creedal identity, then I’m not an American, and I believe I am an American—so I have a big personal stake in this.”

So do millions.

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Immigration is both controversial and normal in America. It is part and parcel of the American story. In 2024, the two major-party presidential nominees were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Three of their four parents were immigrants. And the fourth was the son of an immigrant.

Are Harris and Trump “Heritage Americans”? They are Americans, like it, or them, or not.

On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump said over and over that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” It was the most flagrantly nativist campaign I could remember, including Pat Buchanan’s.

Anyway, I got to thinking about “blood” in presidential oratory—Republican oratory, in particular.

In 1985, Ronald Reagan stood at the United Nations and said, “America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America.” He further said, “The blood of each nation courses through the American vein and feeds the spirit that compels us to involve ourselves in the fate of this good earth.”

Abraham Lincoln was not yet president in 1858. But he would soon be, and he gave a speech in Chicago that laid out important principles.

Immigrants are “our equals in all things,” said Lincoln. They have no connection to the Founders “by blood,” but they certainly have a connection to the truths enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And they can claim these truths “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration.”

Not long ago, a friend of mine was arguing that immigration to America should be based on “merit”—“merit” meaning wealth, education, and the like. I knew about his ancestry (Italian, Slavic, Jewish). Gently, I asked, “What ‘merit’ did your ancestors have? They had grit, determination, courage. A desire to forge a better life.”

One country’s wretched refuse can be another country’s lucky acquisition.

Reagan served eight years as president, and he devoted his last speech to the subject we have been discussing. Clearly, it was important to him.

He said,

Other countries may seek to compete with us, but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on earth comes close. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world, and by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

He went on to say,

Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

Look, I am not a Pollyanna about immigrants, or about people in general, I hate to tell you. I am an immigration restrictionist (as anyone who is not for open borders is). I know full well that immigration brings headaches as well as blessings.

But this “Heritage American” business is a scam.

In every generation, there are people who say, “These guys will never fit in. Nor do they want to—they’re clannish. Their religion is weird, their food is stinky, and they themselves stink.” And then the grandchildren of those stinky newcomers say the same about others.

Many of the people talking up “Heritage Americanism” today are descendants of people who were despised by the “Heritage Americans” of an earlier time.

From unassimilable undesirable to nativist—America, what a country! (And the name of our leading neo-Nazi is “Fuentes.”)

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

The new NSS is interesting, in the sense of the familiar curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

“NSS” stands for “National Security Strategy” (i.e., America’s). The one issued last month includes the now-standard flattery of the president: “President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace.” But there are plenty of other matters to interest the reader.

One of those matters is this:

Middle East partners are demonstrating their commitment to combatting radicalism, a trendline American policy should continue to encourage. But doing so will require dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.

That is a perfectly reasonable statement. But the phrase “traditions and historic forms of government” should be examined. Which I will do in a moment. First, a word about “hectoring.”

One man’s hectoring, I suppose, is another man’s standing up for basic human values: for instance, a critic of the government should not be tortured to death.

Trump’s first trip abroad as president, in 2017, was to Saudi Arabia. On landing in Riyadh, he said, “We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”

What a relief that must have been, to dictators! Because, as they see it, it’s their job to tell other people how to live, what to do, etc.

Early in his second term—in May 2025—Trump again flew to Saudi Arabia. (It would have been his first foreign trip of the term, but he had gone to Rome to attend Pope Francis’s funeral.) Trump again assured officials that the United States would not be giving “lectures on how to live.”

But Trump and his people—his vice president, his cabinet—like to give lectures. Especially to Canada, Denmark, Germany, and other democracies.

Five days after he returned from the Middle East last May, President Trump hosted South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the Oval Office. There, Trump gave a quite stern lecture, accusing the South African government of genocide.

Genocide, no less.

Has he ever accused the Chinese government of genocide—genocide of the Uyghurs? Has he ever accused the Russian government of genocide—genocide of the Ukrainians?

It’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine Trump doing so.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, he has labeled a “dictator.” Is Trump in the habit of so labeling real dictators? Vladimir Putin, for example, or Xi Jinping, or Mohammed bin Salman?

Now to this matter of “traditions and historic forms of government.” When you hear such language, watch out—it can be an excuse for tyranny.

Defenders of dictatorship in Spain and Portugal used to say, “Those countries aren’t made for liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is for the English types. The Iberians respect throne and altar.”

The transitions of Spain and Portugal to democracy in the 1970s were brave, inspired, and inspiring affairs.

When I was growing up, in the ’70s and ’80s, I heard a lot about “Asian values.” Asia had its own values, you see, and they did not include liberal democratic ones, which were for Westerners (including Spaniards and Portuguese, apparently).

Is Japan not Asian? Is Taiwan not Asian—indeed, a Chinese country? You can imagine how Taiwan spooks the autocrats in Beijing: What if people on the mainland get the idea that they, too, can live in democracy?

The Kremlin is similarly spooked. Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian politician, dissident, and former political prisoner, made this point to me back in 2017.

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It’s one thing if democracy takes root in Latvia, say, or Poland. It’s another if democracy takes root in Ukraine—which has long had so much in common with Russia. Maybe people in Russia will get dangerous ideas! Could they rebel against their “historic form of government,” namely dictatorship?

In the 2010s, millions of people in Hong Kong took to the streets, trying to hang on to the democracy they had enjoyed. But what Beijing succeeded in imposing on them was—well, the “historic form of government,” if that’s what Chinese communism (which took power in 1949) is.

The Korean Peninsula is a textbook case. People in North Korea and South Korea speak the same language. They share the same DNA, the same ancestry. They eat the same food (to the extent the North Koreans can eat).

Tell me, is the communism of Kim Il-sung and his heirs the North’s “historic form of government”? (The Soviets set up that government in 1948.)

South Korea, meanwhile, is a liberal democracy, having thrown off military dictatorship in the 1980s (as the Taiwanese were doing in the same period).

Not all soil is equally fertile for democracy. The sands of the Middle East are stubborn. Yet there are many Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and others who long for basic freedoms and rights—freedoms and rights that many of us take for granted.

I recall something that Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East historian, liked to say. It went something like this: “Some people think that Arabs aren’t fit for democracy and can never be. Unlike Westerners, they are born to be ruled.”

Then Professor Lewis would lean forward with a twinkle in his eye and say, “This is known as the ‘pro-Arab view.’”

You could argue, plausibly, that dictatorship is the “historic form of government” for all mankind. But the Enlightenment was a blessed bump in the road.

In 2020, the U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. The vote was 413 to 1—and the 1 was Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican, who said, “When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs.”

I thought of Solzhenitsyn, who said,

On our crowded planet there are no longer any “internal affairs.” The Communist leaders say, “Don’t interfere in our internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet.” But I tell you: Interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.

This is not always possible and it is not always wise. Prudence should be a leading factor in foreign policy. But a democratic and decent government will spare a thought for the dissidents, the political prisoners, the people risking and sacrificing everything for a better national life.

For years, people said to me, “Fidel Castro is popular with his people, you know.” One response was: “Oh? Is he as sure as you are? He bans opposition parties and independent media. He refuses to hold free and fair elections. He imprisons, exiles, or kills his critics. Does that sound like someone confident of his own popularity?”

In the last many years, people have said to me, “Vladimir Putin is popular with his people, you know.” The same response applies.

Yes, there are “traditions and historic forms of government”—and in some cases, they ought to be respected. They should certainly be borne in mind. But “tradition” can simply mean that one family, or one party, has lorded it over everyone else for generations.

There’s nothing on earth more traditional than slavery. But thank heaven for the abolitionists—for the freedom advocates, wherever they live.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move. He is the author of Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World.

For most of this year, Donald Trump waged a campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Never before had there been such an open and brazen campaign for the prize. It went, however, to María Corina Machado, the preeminent leader of the Venezuelan democracy movement.

Many press reports say that Trump was “snubbed” by the relevant Nobel committee. Is that the right word? Is every non-winner “snubbed”? I, personally, have long wanted the Ladies in White (Cuba) to win the prize, or the White Helmets (Syria). Have my favorites been “snubbed”?

In any case, Trump was clearly bruised and piqued by his non-win, and FIFA has now offered him a balm. This organization—which governs soccer worldwide—created the FIFA Peace Prize and awarded it to Trump.

Will it be an annual prize—a regularly occurring prize—or is this just a one-off? An attempt to console and curry favor with the American president? I suppose we’ll see.

FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, is an ardent supporter of Trump’s, and had pushed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Associated Press, Infantino “has been a frequent visitor to the Oval Office” and “had a prime seat at Trump’s January inauguration.” For good measure, “FIFA has established an office at Trump Tower in Manhattan.”

A shrewd play.

According to the New York Times,

Mr. Infantino’s trips to the White House often end with his leaving a gift. During an August visit, he showed off a replica of the men’s World Cup trophy. Mr. Trump praised the “beautiful piece of gold,” then asked to keep it.

I will return to the FIFA Peace Prize in due course. First, I would like to explore some Nobel history (and if you would like a book-length exploration, try my Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World).

The Nazis, irked at the peace committee, created their own prizes. The Soviets, under Stalin, were similarly irked—and created their own peace prize. Chinese Communists did the same.

Let me preempt, if I can, a criticism: Am I comparing this FIFA-Trump thing to the Nazis, the Soviets, or the ChiComs? No. I am saying that it rang some historical bells for me. You may hear them too.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1935 went to a political prisoner of the Nazis: Carl von Ossietzky, a journalist and pacifist. The Nazis were affronted. They forbade German citizens to accept any Nobel prize and created their own prizes—alternative prizes, if you will.

Two of the Nobel committees gave prizes to Germans anyway (scientific prizes). These winners were able to accept those awards after the war, and the downfall of the Third Reich.

Josef Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice—in 1945 and 1948. The committee “snubbed” him. Not used to being snubbed, Stalin created, or approved the creation of, the Stalin Peace Prize, known formally as the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Peoples.

When the Kremlin was de-Stalinizing, the name of the prize was changed to the Lenin Peace Prize (or the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Peoples).

Many luminaries won the prize, whichever ruler it was named after. Among the laureates are Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, Fidel Castro, and Angela Davis.

It was in 1954 that Fast (a popular American novelist) won. The prize was still named after Stalin, though he had died the year before. At the ceremony, Fast lamented that neither the prize nor “the name it bears” was “greatly honored by the men who govern my country.”

He further said, “If I had no other cause for honoring the Soviet Union, I would honor it greatly and profoundly for giving prizes for peace.”

The Kremlin had multitudes of supporters, fellow travelers, and apologists in the Free World then. It does now.

In 2010, the Nobel peace committee gave its prize to a Chinese political prisoner: Liu Xiabo, one of the noblest men of our age. The Chinese government blew a gasket, and a group in China created the Confucius Peace Prize.

There is some debate over whether the prize (now defunct) was official or unofficial. Did it have the blessing of the government or not? At a minimum, we can say that there is little independent action in that totalitarian state.

Among the first winners of the Confucius Peace Prize was Vladimir Putin. Other dictators were to follow: Fidel Castro (yet another peace prize for him), Robert Mugabe, and Hun Sen. That is a murderers’ row, literally.

Back, now, to contemporary America. The administration and its allies are very eager to promote Trump as a peace president. Earlier this year, the administration gutted the U.S. Institute of Peace. As a Times report says, it even “dismantled a fixture inside with the institute’s name and logo, a depiction of a dove and an olive branch.”

But last Wednesday, the State Department had an announcement to make:

This morning, the State Department renamed the former Institute of Peace to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.

Welcome to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. The best is yet to come.

Try to remember, the U.S. State Department is supposed to represent all of us Americans, and America to the world. Yet it acts like an arm of the Republican National Committee.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, weighed in with this:

President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace. It’s time our State Department display that.

Day by day, the administration gets more North Korean.

On Friday at the Kennedy Center—which Trump is now calling the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” although unofficially, so far—Gianni Infantino conferred on the president the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Said Trump, “This is truly one of the great honors of my life.”

As the FIFA peace laureate, Trump received three items: a medal, a gold trophy, and a certificate. Nobel peace laureates also receive three items: a medal, a certificate, and, well—cash.

Press reports are unclear on whether the FIFA prize comes with cash. But not to worry: Mr. Trump and his family have done pretty well out of the presidency, when it comes to cash. The FIFA Peace Prize has its comical aspect. But what a humiliation, for the United States of America.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

As presidents do every November, Donald Trump issued a Thanksgiving proclamation last week. We will get there in due course.

You may remember an established notion in American life: “The president is the president of all the people—not just his party, not just his supporters.” That notion may now seem quaint.

Certainly Bush the Elder took it seriously. He was like that. On Election Night 1988, when he had defeated Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, Bush said, “I mean to be a president of all the people, and I want to work for the hopes and interests not only of my supporters but of the governor’s and of those who didn’t vote at all.”

Bush continued, “To those who supported me: I will try to be worthy of your trust. And to those who did not: I will try to earn it, and my hand is out to you, and I want to be your president, too.”

A certain graciousness was instilled in that family. You recall the tradition at the State of the Union address. The speaker of the House introduces the president by saying, “I have the high privilege and distinct honor ...” In January 2007, Nancy Pelosi was in the speaker’s chair, having become the first female speaker in history.

The president, Bush the Younger, said, “I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own—as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: ‘Madam Speaker.’”

American politics has never been a lovefest, because that is not the nature of politics, and our democracy is raucous. But certain standards were acknowledged (even if not met).

In 2012, at an event marking her 25th year in Congress, Pelosi said something that jolted some of her supporters: George W. Bush is “really a lovely man.” Which is true.

Last month, Pelosi announced that she would retire from Congress at the end of the current term. Asked to comment on this, President Trump said, “I think she’s an evil woman. I’m glad she’s retiring.”

“Evil.” There is no stronger word in the English language, at least on the negative side. I regard Vladimir Putin and his assault on the Ukrainians as evil. Have you ever heard Trump say that? Can you even imagine it?

Earlier this year, when he was a senior official in the executive branch, Elon Musk called the National Endowment for Democracy an “evil organization.” My view is different: that NED is a point of light (to borrow a phrase from the first Bush).

This Thanksgiving, President Trump issued not only a proclamation but also a tweet. In it, he inveighed against immigration and “Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen.” He ended, “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

The State Department issued a Thanksgiving tweet of its own. Is that a thing? Does the State Department do this? The current one did, saying, “This Thanksgiving, we’re grateful for President Trump.” That’s a helluvan opener.

State’s tweet went on to say, “Because of his bold and visionary leadership, our nation commands respect on the world stage.”

You and I can debate this: whether the United States “commands respect on the world stage,” because of Trump’s “bold and visionary leadership.” But what a claim for the State Department to make, on Thanksgiving Day!

The U.S. State Department is not a branch of the Republican National Committee, remember.

Weighing in himself, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted,

It is truly a privilege to live in the greatest nation on Earth under a leader who always puts God and country first.

I am thankful for President Trump and the incredible work he is doing to usher in peace and prosperity. May God continue to bless him and the American people.

We can argue whether Trump puts “country first” (rather than, say, his personal enrichment). But God first? Would even Trump claim that?

But the more important point is: Why is the secretary of state talking like this? Can you imagine Colonel Stimson talking about President Hoover like that on Thanksgiving Day? John Foster Dulles talking about Eisenhower? Colin Powell talking about George W. Bush?

To some of us, it’s creepy, tending toward the North Korean.

Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations are an interesting subject, and I have long been a student of them. In November 1995—has it really been 30 years?—I wrote an article about them for The Weekly Standard, where I was then working. It can be found here.

Over the generations, Thanksgiving proclamations have not been untainted by political partisanship. But listen to Trump’s, last week:

This year, God has bestowed abundant blessings all across our land and indeed the entire world. As we give thanks to Him, we continue to advance our Nation through strong leadership and commonsense policy. As a result, the American economy is roaring back, we are making progress on lowering the cost of living, a new era of peace is sweeping around the world, our sovereignty is being swiftly restored, and the American spirit is coming back greater and more powerful than ever before.

We can debate the veracity of these claims—whether the economy is “roaring back” and so on. But what is a campaign-style statement doing in a Thanksgiving proclamation?

A lot of people like to snicker at “norms”—traditions, customs, ways of being. Ways of doing things. Standards and practices that are not written down but followed nonetheless.

For example, you attend your successor’s inauguration, even if you’ve lost the election. Bush the Elder did it. Trump, of course, refused.

Since the summer of 2015, a great many events and changes have occurred. But the fundamental question in our politics has remained the same: Is Donald Trump fit, in mind and character, to be president? Millions say yes, millions say no. And here we stand, shakily.

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For many years, I asked David Pryce-Jones to write articles on a variety of subjects: historical, political, literary, artistic, etc. We worked at the same magazine. DPJ was an all-purpose intellectual (who died at 89 on November 17).

Only one time did he balk at writing something: when I asked him to write about Vietnam, probably on some anniversary. The “boat people,” the “reeducation” camps, and so on. He asked to be excused from that assignment, for it was too painful to relive all that.

DPJ thought that the United States, and the West generally, had done badly by the people of South Vietnam.

Ukraine is a deeply painful subject for many of us. It is most painful, of course, for the Ukrainians! For long years now, they have endured mass murder, mass torture, mass kidnapping ...

And yet they have made a heroic stand in their own defense.

There are many, many Americans who don’t think the United States should aid the Ukrainians. You can imagine a statement that goes something like this:

“I admire the Ukrainians and I am horrified and sickened by the Russian invasion. I hope the Ukrainians prevail. But I don’t believe that support of them is in the US interest.”

Do you ever hear anyone say that? I do not. Instead, I hear a lot of hostility to the Ukrainians and a lot of sympathy for Putin and the Kremlin.

Someone who is pro-Ukraine but anti-aid is like someone who is anti-Israel but not antisemitic. Imaginable, sure, and maybe even spotted in the wild now and then. But damn rare.

One of the claims that President Trump makes about ... Let me start that sentence over, with more bluntness: One of the lies that President Trump tells about Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians is that they are ungrateful for the support they have received from the United States so far.

Last Sunday, Trump wrote, “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS.” (All-caps in the original, of course.)

This lie is easily disproven, and has been amply disproven, but this seems not to matter. Millions of Americans take Trump’s word as gospel. And he has shaped the way much of the country thinks about Ukraine.

Writing about disinformation, I sometimes quote Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”

In an attempt to counter Trump, Don Bacon said that he had heard Zelensky “thank America many times for our military aid.” All honor to Republicans such as Bacon.

But Trump is the leader and hero of the party, and of what still calls itself, astonishingly enough, “the conservative movement.” Bacon is a Nebraska House rep who is retiring after the current term.

Last week, a former House rep, Mike Pompeo, tweeted,

Putin cannot be rewarded for slaughtering thousands of people and kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children.

Now is the time to increase the pressure—not take our foot off the gas.

Well and good. Pompeo was once secretary of state, in Trump’s previous term. But his like are far from the levers of power now.

Closer is Darren Beattie, an acting assistant secretary of state. I examined some of his handiwork in an article last summer, here. Let me share an example from February 2021: “Putin>>>>>NATO” (wrote Beattie).

Is Putin greater than NATO—to say nothing of five times greater? Is it odd for an official of the US State Department to think so?

To me it is, but I came of age in the Reagan era.

Many times, Steve Witkoff has expressed his affection and respect for Vladimir Putin. Witkoff is not some random Trump voter. He is the president’s personal envoy to Russia.

Last April, Witkoff met Putin for a lengthy talk (four hours). As Putin approached him, to shake his hand, Witkoff put his hand over his heart. (Watch it here.)

That was on Friday the 11th. Two days later, Russian forces committed a massacre in Sumy, Ukraine. They killed at least 36 people and wounded 119. It was Palm Sunday. The Russians struck just as people were going to church.

Unlike other Free World leaders, President Trump issued no official statement. But, questioned by a reporter, he managed to say, “I think it was terrible, and I was told they made a mistake” (“they” meaning the Russians).

In Ukraine, President Zelensky said, “Excuse me, but this is a murder. This strike went to the center, it did not go to the front line. We cannot find excuses when you hit the city center with missiles.”

For years, many Americans have mocked others who have a Ukrainian flag in their social-media bio. I wrote an essay on the subject of solidarity last year: “Blue and Yellow in Our Time.”

These same mockers have mocked Zelensky for the clothes he wears—military attire, or quasi-military attire. He and others think it is appropriate to the situation.

Last February, Trump, Vice President Vance, and their media claque ganged up on Zelensky in the Oval Office. A correspondent for the network that styles itself “Real America’s Voice” had a question for Zelensky: “Why don’t you wear a suit?” And: “Do you own a suit?”

Imagine having a chance to question Zelensky, who will go down as a historic figure, whatever happens in, or to, Ukraine. You could ask him about his decision to stay in Kyiv when Russia launched its full-scale assault. You could ask him about prospects of national survival. You could ask him about corruption in his government.

But “Do you own a suit?” (Months later, again at the White House, the correspondent who had posed that question apologized to Zelensky.)

The February affair left a lot of us sickened. In the House of Lords, Andrew Roberts, the British historian, spoke for many of us: “We must not underestimate the gravity of what has happened, which is that during a war against totalitarian dictatorship, the United States has effectively changed sides.”

Roberts went on to speak of “this startling American defection to the side of a dictator who, throughout his career, has only ever wished America ill.”

Last week, Anders Åslund, the veteran Swedish analyst, had a question: “Trump is successfully destroying the western alliances to Putin’s benefit. Why?!”

One could point to Trump’s desire to do business—personal, lucrative business—with Russia. One could also say this: Trump favors Putin and autocracy over the liberal-democratic West.

Lots of people in the Free World do, you know. It is a sad, outrageous fact of life.

Maybe 20 years ago, I had an argument with Armando Valladares, the Cuban human-rights hero. Not so much an argument as a discussion. Why were so many Americans—in the land of the free and the home of the brave—sympathetic to the Castro dictatorship?

They were ignorant, Armando said. Ill-informed. Later, after the collapse of the regime, when the archives opened up, the scales would fall from their eyes.

I was afraid the truth was bitterer: They liked it, a lot of them (“it’ being the dictatorship).

It has been bitter to see the American Right, much of it, be hostile or churlish toward Ukraine and warm toward Putin and the Kremlin. One of my articles on this subject is titled “Our Political World, Topsy-Turvy.”

A few days ago, I noticed a tweet from Hillary Clinton:

With his ultimatum that Ukraine surrender to Russia, Trump finally wins a prize:

The Neville Chamberlain award for betraying peace, freedom, and justice.

Huh. I remember when Republicans talked that way (rightly or wrongly).

When she was in high school, Hillary Rodham was a “Goldwater Girl”—a supporter of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Of course, she “evolved” from there. But when I saw her tweet, I could not help thinking: “She has more Goldwater in her today than many Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives do.”

It has been a strange trip, and a bad one.

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