|  | | with Sammy Westfall |
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| President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are depicted at an exhibition, “Yalta 2.0”, a reference to the 1945 Yalta Conference, at an art gallery in Livadia Park in Yalta, Crimea, on Feb. 8. (Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters) |
“I don’t think we’re going back to the one we had before.” That was the prognostication of Alex Younger, a former chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, whose remarks last week during BBC’s “Newsnight” on the state of the international order in President Donald Trump’s second term went somewhat viral. “We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions,” Younger said. “They’re going to be determined by strongmen and deals … That’s Donald Trump’s mindset, certainly [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s mindset. It’s [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s mindset.” Trump did little to disabuse Younger of his views in the days thereafter. On Monday, the United States voted alongside Russia, North Korea, Belarus and a clutch of West African juntas against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russian aggression on the third anniversary of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The move shocked analysts and European onlookers, who saw it as the most brazen indication yet of Trump’s willingness to flout norms and bully partners. If launching trade wars and cratering alliances weren’t enough, here was the U.S. president seemingly whitewashing Russia’s land grab in a weaker neighbor. Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the International Crisis Group, told my colleagues the divide between the United States and Europe now marked “the biggest split among Western powers at the U.N. since the Iraq War — and probably even more fundamental.” Trump seems keen for a rupture and has cast himself as an agent of peace. “We’ve had some great conversations, including with Russia, since my return to the White House,” Trump said at a White House news conference this week. “My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy values of the past administration, and, frankly, the past.” But it’s also returning to a more distant past. Trump’s “America First” agenda has little interest in the universalist internationalism that broadly undergirded generations of postwar U.S. foreign policy. He doesn’t see the extent to which the international order largely built by Washington has helped guarantee U.S. primacy and boosted American prosperity. Instead, he looks out at an international arena and sees a United States that has been asked to do too much, has been hoodwinked by its allies and exploited by its adversaries. Better then, the White House’s thinking goes, to reckon with a world shaped only by great powers and their supplicants, and to behave like the greatest power of them all. His attempts to strong-arm neighbors in Mexico and Canada, to threaten the annexation of the Panama Canal and call for the absorption of Greenland were all gestures of an imperial potentate grasping for his sphere of influence. “Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction,” wrote Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of “Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.” “Call it ‘national globalism’: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.” Michael Kimmage, director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, laid out in a thoughtful Foreign Affairs essay how Trump is seemingly more aligned with strongmen such as Putin, Xi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — all, to varying extents, right-wing leaders of so-called “civilization states” that see their nations tethered to a glorious past that must be redeemed in the future. They abhor the cosmopolitanism of urban elites in their own societies, and are skeptical about the liberal pretensions of the fraying “rules-based” order backed by the United States for almost a century. “With Trump in power, conventional wisdom in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Washington (and many other capitals) will decree that there is no one system and no agreed-on set of rules,” Kimmage wrote. “In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of ‘the West’ will recede even further — and, consequently, so will the status of Europe, which in the post-Cold War era had been Washington’s partner in representing ‘the Western world.’” Europeans are already coping with that shock. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s incoming center-right chancellor and a veteran transatlanticist, has vowed to lead his nation’s “independence” from decades of reliance on the United States’ security umbrella. He expressed outrage at Trump’s seeming embrace of Kremlin talking points on the Ukraine war, including his suggestions that Kyiv’s desire for NATO membership provoked the conflict. “This is basically a classic reversal of the role of perpetrator and victim,” Merz told a German radio station. “This is the Russian narrative, and this is how Putin has been portraying it for years. And I am honestly somewhat shocked that Donald Trump has now apparently made it his own.” We are likely seeing “the opening salvo in a major U.S. effort to renegotiate the terms of its bond with Europe,” wrote Christopher Chivvis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, citing also the rhetorical bombshells dropped by Trump’s lieutenants during their visits to the continent this month. “How far the Trump administration will get cannot be known, but this foundational relationship of U.S. statecraft, which was born in the moment of the U.S.’s rise to global superpower status, will change in fundamental ways.” Trump and his allies see themselves as carrying out a great feat of “rebalancing” on the world stage. They seem to harbor hopes of carrying out a “reverse Kissinger” — that is, forging an opening with Moscow in a bid to drive a wedge between Russia and China, just as President Richard M. Nixon undermined the Soviet Union when achieving a détente with Beijing in 1972. Most analysts, including onlookers elsewhere, doubt the White House can pull that off. “China and Russia have built a more comprehensive partnership that extends beyond security to economic development,” Cui Hongjian, a scholar of European studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told my colleagues. “These are not the same countries they once were. As a Greek philosopher famously said, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’” As he wades back into the maelstrom of great power politics, Trump seems keen to prove that philosopher wrong. |
| People walk on a main street in the Mezze 86 neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) |
Hundreds of Syrian politicians and activists gathered Tuesday in Damascus to endorse a two-day national dialogue billed as the opening steps of the country’s political transition, a milestone event after decades of ironfisted one-family rule. Nearly three months after President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria in the face of a rebel advance, much of the country is still suspended between relief at the dictatorship’s demise and anxiety over what is to come, report our colleagues Louisa Loveluck, Mohamad El Chamaa and Zakaria Zakaria. Fourteen years of war and Western sanctions have shredded the economy and left Syria’s social fabric badly frayed. |
| • Ukraine and the United States have agreed to a framework for an expansive minerals deal, according to a Ukrainian official and another person familiar with the matter. The broad outlines of the deal would grant Washington partial access to Ukraine’s minerals, oil and gas, part of an effort by the Trump administration to recoup the cost of U.S. war aid and, advocates of a deal say, offer a form of security to Ukraine by deepening U.S. investments there. • Trump said he will replace a controversial visa program for foreign investors with a new initiative to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy individuals looking for a path to U.S. citizenship. “They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people.” • The Trump administration has rescinded a Biden-era regulation that sought to ensure American allies don’t use U.S.-made weapons in violation of international humanitarian law, current and former officials said Monday. Biden had imposed the February 2024 directive as his administration struggled to reconcile its support for Israel’s war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and its alarm about the civilian toll of that fight. • An unknown illness has killed 53 people in a northwestern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a significant portion of deaths taking place within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms, according to the World Health Organization, which describes the outbreak as posing “a significant public health threat.” |
| | OpinionJon Lee Anderson | The New Yorker | | |
OpinionArash Azizi | The Atlantic | | |
OpinionCatherine Rampell | The Washington Post | | |
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| They were boys when the war began — innocent and ignorant of missiles, drones and Russian occupation. Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion — the war still raging — they are facing adulthood in a country where being a man often means carrying a weapon. Martial law keeps all men over 18 and under 60 inside the country. Many have volunteered to fight and the draft has forced others age 25 and older to join. Ahead of their 18th birthday, boys have to decide whether they will leave the country while they still can — knowing that if they return, they might not be able to leave again. The Washington Post spoke to six pairs of Ukrainian fathers and sons about how the war has changed their views on manhood, fatherhood and themselves. These are their stories. Mykhailo, 17, and Yehor, 48 |
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Seen through a bus window, Mykhailo encourages drivers to honk their horns at a weekly ‘Free Azov’ protest in Kyiv, where activists call on the Ukrainian government to do more to free prisoners of war captured by Russia. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post) |
On Feb. 23, 2022, hours before Russian forces burst across Ukraine’s borders, former lawmaker Yehor Soboliev piled his three young children into his car and drove them west to safety. He and his wife, journalist Marichka Padalko, had prepared for this moment. He would leave their children in the Lviv region, near the Polish border, then return home to join his volunteer military unit and defend the capital. She would remain at her TV station in Kyiv, where, early the next day, she would announce Russia’s invasion. For six hours, as his two young daughters slept in the back seat and Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders, Yehor’s eldest, Mykhailo, then 14, peppered his dad with questions about history and politics — a change from their usual chatter about soccer. “‘You have many things to do in your future,’” Mykhailo recalled his dad saying to him. “‘Your military task is to be with your sisters — and to defend them.’” As Yehor turned the car back east to fight in Kyiv, Mykhailo sobbed so loudly he woke his sisters up. Now 17, the war has deeply changed him. His father has become a drone commander on the southeastern Zaporizhzhia front and is rarely home — but the two are closer than ever. It was at Yehor’s urging that Mykhailo abandoned plans to study humanities and instead pursued math, knowing the defense industry will be the future of Ukraine’s economy. His soccer obsession has been replaced: He now spends all his free time building drones in Kyiv and sent his first drone to his dad’s unit. “I hope after we win the war I’ll have a period of my life where I’ll have free time,” he said. “I’m not nostalgic about what I used to do. If you’re nostalgic, you’re not accepting reality.” Soon, Mykhailo — the same boy who cried when his dad drove away three years ago — will be old enough to sign up to fight himself. Yehor will support whatever decision he makes. It would hurt him more, he said, if his son wanted to flee the country before he turns 18 and settle abroad. Still, he told Mykhailo that if they fight together on the front line: “‘I won’t hide you behind me.’” “My recommendation for him is please, if you want to help your country, if you want to join the army, if you want to become a big part of our victory, please invest in your brain,” he said. Nazar, 16, and Andrii, 43 |
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Nazar and his father, Andrii, in their kitchen. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post) |
It had been six months since Russia invaded, and far from the front lines, in the western town of Truskavets, 13-year-old Nazar Smolskiy was running through an abandoned building playing “war.” As he pushed against a metal door with his right arm, he felt a jolt of electricity that threw him to the ground. For the next two weeks, doctors in Lviv tried to save the limb, knowing that an amputation might destroy his dreams of playing violin professionally. In the hospital, Nazar’s father, Andrii, a Greek Catholic priest, looked around at the rooms surrounding his young son. They were filled with wounded soldiers. Accepting the doctors’ decision to remove Nazar’s arm was the hardest moment of his life, Andrii said through tears in January — but the experience shifted something in him. I talked to Jesus and was very grateful he saved my son’s life,” he recalled. “And I told Him, ‘until the end of the war, I will try to save servicemen’s lives.’” Andrii left his hometown congregation of many years and enlisted as a military chaplain. He now counsels wounded soldiers at a military hospital. – Siobhán O'Grady, Kostiantyn Khudov, Anastacia Galouchka and Ed Ram Read the full story: Three years in, Ukrainian fathers fear passing the war on to their sons |
|  (Elizabeth Watson)
By Kyle Melnick |
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