Disagreeing With Parag Khanna: There Is No Need To Appease Putin

Settlement in Ukraine Is Not Appeasement
Settlement in Ukraine Is Not Appeasement The deep and actionable lesson we take away from Ukraine must be to settle disputes before they become great power wars and humanitarian catastrophes. ....... This year, Russia is projected to earn $320 billion in oil revenues (one-third more than in 2021), and its current account surplus will rise to $240 billion. Even on the back foot, he can continue to fund his war machine. The question is not whether he can eventually be stopped, but what he would settle for in order to hasten an end to his genocidal campaign. To get straight to the point, the answer lies in a clear legal partition of territory (gains for Russia) countered with NATO membership for Ukraine. ...... Putin has frequently spoken about his desire to unite the ethnic Russian “near abroad” under one flag. ....... knowing what we do about Putin’s disturbed psyche, isolated behavior, and delusions of grandeur—and the reality of his political and biological longevity—what diplomatic accommodation could have been sufficient to avert this worst of all possible outcomes? ....... The answer lies in settling borders before tanks cross them. In the case of Ukraine, the 2014 capture of Crimea should have disabused the West of any notion that Putin would either return the peninsula or engage fairly in a peace process over Donbas, where he has relentlessly supported pro-Russian separatist militias. Rather than the past eight years of inevitably futile diplomacy followed by the current campaign of destruction, Crimea and Donbas could have been formally ceded to Russia at the time—and Ukraine promptly admitted into the EU and NATO in response. Give—and take. ...... A country is either sovereign or it is not. Calls for “neutrality” are not conflict resolution but a recipe for further subterfuge. ..... unlike Russia, China’s military capacity is growing by giant leaps. All the more reason then, to settle with China now rather than risk misperception and escalation later. Those islands that China has built up into its own de facto possessions should be recognized as belonging to China—but allied countries should take similar actions to reinforce and defend every rocky outcrop they still possess—with bluntly transparent Western support. China should be told in the sharpest terms that military assistance will mount across the South and East China Seas until it engages in reciprocal and binding recognition. Again: settlement with deterrence. .......... Clarity over borders enables their opening to flows of talent, a competition in which the West prevails hands-down over both Russia and China. Just look at the outflow of Russian and Chinese students and professionals over the past generation, including those fleeing Moscow and Hong Kong today. A generation of talent gained is worth more than a sliver of territory lost. ......... Recent decades have laid bare how great powers can be eager to enter wars but are rarely good at preventing them. That is a dangerous paradox given how many so-called “frozen conflicts” are flaring just below the surface and away from the headlines. From the Balkans to the Caucasus to the Himalayas, unsettled conflicts are perpetual powder kegs. ....... A world of settled borders is a more peaceful world even if it is still populated by authoritarian despots.

And to think Putin is on record wanting Russia to join NATO. That was the song he was singing in the early 2000s. And that might have happened had he been a democrat like Vaclav Havel, or like Zelensky. But NATO is not just a gun, tank and missiles alliance. It is an armor wrapped around democracy. Belarus as it stands today would not be accepted as a NATO member. Because it is not a democracy.

So if Putin's Russia can aspire to join NATO, why can't Zelensky's Ukraine? Or Georgia, for that matter. Is it not for a sovereign state to decide?

If I were Ukraine, I might have aspired for a Switzerland like neutrality. Because a big military is a big expense. But Ukraine got in a hurry to join NATO precisely because Putin misbehaved in Georgia. Like Finland and Sweden are in a hurry now. The Baltic states are apopleptic.

Staying neutral was not an option after Georgia. It is even less of an option now.

The best way to make NATO defunct would be for the Putin regime to fall, and Russia go on the path of true democracy. A vibrant, democratic, federal Russia would make NATO defunct by its mere presence.

Putin went into Ukraine for the reason Saddam went into Kuwait. A dictator can not maintain the constant tension that keeps him in power unless he can keep conjuring up external threats out of thin air. Many argue Saddam might still be in power today if he had just stayed put in Baghdad. Why did he go into Kuwait? Well, he had to. That is what dictators do.

Ukraine might not have the option to militarily take back Crimea, and now Donbas, but that does not mean it needs to stop claiming them both.

It is not like there are ethnic Ukrainians in western Ukraine, and it is all just Russians in Crimea and Donbas. There are easily 100 different nationalities inside Ukraine. There are more than 100 inside Russia. Putin sits atop an empire as it is.

He does not speak for the Russians in Moscow. How can he speak for the Russians in Donbas and Crimea?

Putin's military defeat in Ukraine will lead to a collapse of support all around him in his inner circles. The world will see a new wave of democracy very much like it saw in 1989. The biggest beneficiary of Ukraine's immense sacrifice and suffering has been the United States. When you are a two party democracy, and one of those two parties is hellbent on disenfranchising large swathes of the population, you are not much of a democracy any more.

Trump needed to be beat in the US. Putin needs to be beat in Russia. And Le Pen needs to be beat in France.

This War Goes To Moscow

Eastern Ukraine braces for onslaught U.S. military analysts are predicting Russian forces will conduct a major attack on eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, between the city of Izium and the strategic hub of Dnipro. ...... Russian airstrikes have already destroyed Dnipro's airport. Meanwhile, local leaders are urging civilians to evacuate. ...... In the aftermath of the Kramatorsk train station attack that killed more than 50 civilians, one shopkeeper told The New York Times, "The town is dead now." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded a tougher global response to the missile strike. ........ Ukraine is pursuing 5,600 war crimes cases ....... The latest EU sanctions include a ban on the import of coal, wood and chemicals from Russia and banning many Russian ships and trucks from accessing the bloc. ....... S&P Global downgraded Russia's currency rating to "selective default" over concerns the country won't fulfill its obligations on foreign debt. ...... Russia has revoked the registrations of 15 foreign organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that have accused Russian troops of committing war crimes. ......... NATO countries have agreed to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine. ....... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted in an interview that Russia has suffered “significant losses of troops” in Ukraine, a rare admission by Moscow that the war has not gone to plan. ...... More than 11 million people have been displaced by the war in Ukraine. That number includes 4 million who have fled abroad, half of whom are children. .......... Western sanctions are likely successfully disrupting Russia’s military-industrial base. .



Nepal’s shortsighted view-tower craze Corruption is the driving force behind wasteful spending on construction of view-towers on Himalayan peaks ....... Politicians at all three levels of government in Nepal appear to be racing against time to build a concrete view-tower on every mountain in the country, and a gate outside every town. ........ politicians know exactly what they are doing by putting up these non-essential monstrosities. It is kickbacks that are lubricating these contracts. ....... So, instead of expanding health posts and hospitals, retrofitting school buildings to make them seismic resistant, or ensuring safe drinking water supply, elected people’s representatives are squandering taxpayer money on useless structures. .......... It is not just view-towers, but high rises in the middle of nowhere, enormous statues of gods and saints, outsized cement replicas of fruits and products municipalities are famous for, and elaborate gates at the entrance of every town or village. ........ A 80m high statue of the saint Byas is being constructed in Tanahu district at a cost of Rs450 million in the hope of attracting pilgrims to a place where the holy man was supposed to have meditated. ........ In Morang, the Sundar Haraicha Municipality has started building the world’s biggest statue of a cow, lavishing nearly Rs1 billion in the project. ....... Former prime minister K P Oli set the stage by laying the foundation stone for a Rs2.5 billion view-tower project in Jhapa’s Damak last year. His rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal of the Maoist Centre was not far behind and inaugurated a $6 billion view-tower on a mountain top in Rolpa commemorating guerrillas killed during the insurgency. ....... Bagmati Province has allocated Rs180 billion for over a dozen view-towers projects across central Nepal this year. Gandaki Province has budgeted Rs176 million to develop 44 tourist destinations, most of which will have

view-towers on already lofty peaks

. ....... it appears like local governments have run out of places to dig new and poorly-engineered roads and have been attracted by erecting view-towers to impress voters ...... Kathmandu Metropolitan City is building a 29-floor high rise at a cost of Rs5 billion near Tundikhel that is already an eyesore and will be a white elephant. Not to be outdone, Biratnagar is putting up its own high rise at a cost of Rs4 billion. ....... Federalism was supposed to inject more accountability — at least at the local level. The opposite seems to have happened in the past five years. ........ It could be because view-towers are easy to build, posts can be padded and accord a lot of opportunity for hidden over-invoicing, and the political party gets to show voters it is committed to ‘development’. ........ Many environmentalists and even engineers have pointed out that Nepal’s high mountains are already so high that they serve as view-towers. Adding an extra few metres on them is illogical and adds nothing to the panorama. They say that if it is the vista that the planners want, viewing platforms would be more appropriate. ......... Inspired by the Great Wall of China, Helambu Rural Municipality is constructing a 60km stone trail, dubbed ‘the Helambu Great Trail’. ........ All these view-towers have one thing in common: they are of no help to the local people — they serve no purpose, economic or otherwise. There is no business plan or an analysis of return on investment. .

Meanwhile, In France

France’s Far Right Turn A rising nationalist faction has grown its coalition by appealing to Catholic identity and anti-immigrant sentiment — and reshaped the country’s race for president......... With only one month to go until France’s presidential election in April ..... Emmanuel Macron’s presidential victory as an independent five years ago shook up France’s multiparty system. ...... Now Zemmour and Maréchal’s alliance, with its “anti-wokisme” and its appeals to anti-immigrant sentiments, has forged a revanchist politics that captures a notable shift in the public mood. ...... As the far right enjoys its greatest cultural primacy in France in 75 years, it is Zemmour and his followers, not the National Rally, who are defining the future of the French right wing ....... In 1992, Maréchal appeared in a campaign poster as a startled blond toddler held aloft in her grandfather’s arms. Twenty years later, Maréchal was elected to the National Assembly as a representative of the party. At 22, she was the youngest member of Parliament in the history of the modern French Republic. “The Le Pen name is a brand,” Maréchal, now 32, told me last fall. “It has been both my handicap and my advantage. I wouldn’t have been elected without it.” ......... Maréchal’s impending betrayal of her aunt, with its tantalizing mix of political ambition and familial wounds, had been a subject of media speculation for weeks. ...... the family’s treacheries have for decades delighted the French media ....... In 2015, Marine kicked her father out of the National Front for the same reason. They didn’t speak for months. (Eventually, they reconciled.) ....... Maréchal told me. “In people’s minds, it’s the nation, authority, family, heritage, preservation. Broadly speaking, that’s our identity.” ....... and, on the right in particular, around the father of modern France, Charles de Gaulle ...... Maréchal, who has continued to dodge precise questions about her political future as she campaigns full-time for Zemmour, is sometimes called the “fantasy” of the right, a double entendre that captures her political currency and symbolic importance. ....... the word “photogenic.” If it’s taboo to remark on the sex appeal of a female politician in 2022, it would also be disingenuous to pretend that it isn’t a strategic element of Maréchal’s public persona. ........ “So young! So pretty!” ...... she was 22 when she was elected to the National Assembly in 2012, and photos of her from that time, long blond hair swept to one side or, better yet, blowing in the wind against a backdrop of pastoral France, her face fixed in an expression of concern or confident command, are still used frequently by right-wing groups. ...... I’d attended several events where she was on the program, and I never saw her ill at ease. “Distance creates prestige,” Maréchal said, echoing de Gaulle, when I remarked that she had been out of politics for five years but everyone was still talking about her. “They’re projecting their fantasies onto me.” ...... Early on, Maréchal established a reputation not only as a nationalist but also as a Catholic. ...... introduced Maréchal into networks where Zemmour was also a frequent V.I.P. “Paris is the center of everything,” Maréchal told me. “It’s not that way in every European country, but Paris is the economic, cultural and political center of the country. And when you’re politically nonexistent in Paris, it’s very complicated to succeed.” ........ Maréchal also “had a hunger for intellectual questions,” says Eugénie Bastié, another young conservative journalist who worked with Zemmour. “She cultivated that dimension of herself, a depth that her aunt doesn’t have.” Le Pen famously floundered in a debate against Emmanuel Macron in 2017, an embarrassment from which she struggled to recover. “We have this need for our political figures to be intellectuals,” Bastié said. “Someone who doesn’t make us ashamed.” ........... Yet Maréchal still possesses the Le Pen hardness. She can rally the masses with the kind of primal emotion that can only be credibly acquired from a sense of grievance ...... She observed that, of the three traits of the French Republican trinity, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” only the last couldn’t be imposed by law. “Fraternité is a sentiment of attachment,” she said, and concluded, “it is fragile.” ........ Like their American counterparts, Zemmour and Maréchal like to denounce the liberalism of cultural institutions, namely the media and academia. ...... Renaud Camus, the source of the “grand remplacement,” or “great replacement,” conspiracy theory (which has been picked up across the Atlantic by commentators like Tucker Carlson) ........ Camus’s argument holds that the white French population is being replaced by a nonwhite, non-French population. ........ the Overton window,” Tegnér said, referring to a shift in what’s considered acceptable discourse. D’Ornellas, of Valeurs Actuelles, agreed, pointing out that 15 years ago, the term “ ‘identity’ was absolutely a dirty word. Now it’s pretty much normal to talk about it.” ........ Some of this shift in French public life can be traced to the Islamist terror attacks that have devastated France, beginning in 2015. ........ Prominent left-leaning intellectuals formed a collective to battle Islamist extremism. ....... since the 1980s, as French Muslims became a more visible public presence, has been interpreted to mean that public life should be free from overt religious expression. ...... Last fall, Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, founded the Laboratory of the Republic, a government-organized think tank meant to further the ideals of laïcité, proclaiming that “The veil itself is not desirable in French society” and decrying “le wokisme” as an American import. In 2013, Manuel Valls, interior minister to the Socialist president François Hollande, called for systematically deporting Roma, who are European Union citizens, from the country. ....... Conservatives like Zemmour openly use the doctrine as a tool to delegitimize Islam. He tells his audiences that under his presidency, he would “not want to hear the voice of the muezzin,” the person who issues the Islamic call to prayer, while simultaneously extolling France’s “Christian heritage.” ........... Michel Barnier, the former Brexit negotiator for the E.U., said, but he allowed that the French sometimes had a feeling of no longer being “at home.” ....... an environment in which “reasonable people decided that to be reasonable, you had to agree with unreasonable people,” Fassin said. They were made to feel that if they weren’t against the so-called Islamo-leftists, a way of branding those on the left as Islamophilic for cautioning against anti-Muslim bigotry, then they were “complicit with terrorism,” Fassin said. “And, of course, that has consequences. Intimidation, basically.” .......... “The ideas of humanism and solidarity have weakened in the public debate” ....... “They have refused to get into any questions of security, immigration or Islam. Every time those topics come up, they say, ‘Those are right-wing topics.’ So people say to themselves, ‘OK, then I’m on the right.’” ........ the far right has been able to set the terms of debate ...... “We are still far from dominant,” d’Ornellas told me. “But you could say at least that for the first time, we are in a position to contest the liberal cultural hegemony.” ........ Maréchal and Zemmour have long proselytized for what they call the union des droites, the joining of disparate right-wing factions behind a single leader. This could happen either by fusing the center-right party and far-right parties, though that is considered highly unlikely, or, more probably, by joining the most right-wing voters of the center to those on the far right. ....... It is hard to say what is electoral strategy and what is Zemmour being Zemmour. .......... He has asked whether “young French people will accept to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors,” a concern Maréchal shares. .........

“in 2060 the historic native people could be minorities on French territory.”

........ Maréchal told me that the identity question is central to the election, that “for the French it is a vital question, they feel it in their flesh, a vital threat that gives them anxiety.” She explained that it was “because they have the feeling that in several years France will no longer be France, because the population will have largely changed, it will be majority-Muslim, it will no longer be France as we’ve known it.” She went on: “Often, Muslim women who wear the full-body veil or burqa are reproached: ‘If you want so much to live like in Afghanistan or in Iraq, then go live in Afghanistan or Iraq.’ ........... Officially, France promotes an “assimilationist” model. This means that anyone can be French, so long as they adopt French cultural norms. The origins of this code date to the 19th century, when the French government, in order to form a cohesive nation-state, imposed unifying measures on different regional identities. “French culture,” in other words, was created. ........... But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the emerging French right is interested in neutral statism; on the contrary, it wants to assert the primacy of a particular notion of Frenchness — part historical, part phantasmagorical. “I think people on the right are exasperated by the idea that we put all the religions on the same level,” Bastié said. “The right has turned the page on this kind of relativism. We have a specific Judeo-Christian heritage that we must assume. Only Europe and the West refuse to assume their own heritage. A Muslim country would never say that its heritage isn’t Muslim.” .......... The French far right, like its American counterparts, has taken an interest in the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban’s calls for a Europe that rejects multiculturalism and asserts its “Christian heritage” were always meant to attract the attention of Western European conservatives. Zemmour and Maréchal visited Budapest together last fall, and Marine Le Pen made a showy campaign stop there. ......... Marquardt had invited a young philosopher and historian named Mohamed Amer Meziane to give a presentation on his recently published book, in which he argued that Europe, and France specifically, give themselves credit for having modernized during the 19th century. But this was the period of France’s imperial adventures in the Muslim world, which — not coincidentally, he argued — racialized the concept of “religiosity,” rendering it “uncivilized.” After Meziane finished, Marquardt opened up the discussion. Yassine Belattar, a well-known Paris comedian, observed that he thought the upcoming election would break relations among the French. “It’s a referendum for or against Muslims,” he said. .............. In response to Meziane and Belattar, one such guest stated that there was only one question to be answered, with a simple yes or no: Was being Muslim more important to them than being French? ........... a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic. ........

a standard that would never be applied to Catholics. “If you were a believer, would it be Jesus or Macron, the decisive influence in your life?” he shouted. “Answer that!”

........... In the postcolonial era, when ideas about social hierarchy have been overturned, a generation whose ancestors were born under colonialism but who are themselves French-born and highly educated are not keen to be instructed on how to be “French.” .......... In 2018, he said that he dreams of a French Vladimir Putin, a man who “takes a country that was an empire, that could have been a great power, and tries to restore it.” ........ Putin’s Russia has always been the model for the kind of conservative Christian civilizational state that Zemmour and Maréchal espouse, one ruled by a strong leader who patronizes the church, enforces traditional values and unapologetically rebuffs any kind of rights-based progressivism. ........ Le Pen’s party has taken loans from a Russian bank; in 2017, in an attempt to bolster her standing, she met with Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Le Pen’s campaign moved quickly to trash a trove of campaign leaflets that featured a picture of Le Pen and Putin shaking hands at the Kremlin. ......... The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the monarchy and the aristocratic order that preceded it; but there is a deep-rooted reactionary right that never fully accepted the new republic. It is a sentiment that still resonates in the bourgeois Parisian circles that Maréchal and Zemmour frequent. Maréchal has remarked that France and the Republic are not necessarily the same thing, that the Republic is just one regime, and “France preceded the Republic.” ........ At the rally in Toulon, the speakers who introduced Zemmour and Maréchal, some of them former National Rally members, spoke of France’s past “imperial grandeur” and the war in Algeria. ........ I stayed to talk to the young man, Salahedin Hamzi, who is 17. He showed me his ID, marked “République Française.” “I have to prove 10 times a day that I’m French,” he said, gesturing to his face. “When I was little, everyone was the same, but as I got older I was made to understand that I wasn’t French.” ....... when France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944, many of the soldiers that freed Toulon were from the French colonies. .