Unholy Alliances

Charap and Priebe analyze four faulty assumptions driving current NATO strategies toward Russia: that Russia is rapidly rebuilding its military capabilities, NATO’s deterrence is insufficient, Russia is likely to engage in opportunistic aggression, and a Russian victory in Ukraine would threaten NATO’s security. They argue that these assumptions lead to a narrow focus on preventing Russian aggression postwar while ignoring more plausible conflict scenarios, such as war from escalation or first-strike pressures. NATO should adopt a broader strategy aimed at preventing these more likely threats, addressing sub-conflict challenges, and stabilizing European security.

The periods following major wars are precisely the moments when states should seek to keep their options open; the policy choices that the United States and other powerful countries make—or do not make—in a war’s aftermath tend to have long-term effects. … The Russia-Ukraine war is not a global systemic conflict as of this writing; its end therefore might not present a global ordering moment. However, the choices around even regional wars have resulted in arrangements that define regional security and create durable patterns of relations. … US and allied policymakers’ decisions after the hot phase of the Russia-Ukraine war comes to an end will likely have significant long-term effects on Western interests. But today’s rhetoric about the Russia threat could constrain options at what will be a critical time.”

British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes was a global bestseller when it was published in 1994, the last in a tetralogy explaining the “long nineteenth century” and the “short twentieth.” For Hobsbawm the former was defined by material, intellectual and moral progress, the latter by regression. Patrick Iber reflects on the lasting impact of a brilliant historian’s greatest work.

“Thirty years later, does The Age of Extremes hold up? Many of its good qualities remain. Hobsbawm remains a brilliant writer and communicator. It is impressively wide-ranging, covering the arts and sciences along with politics and economics. Its Marxism both helps and hinders the text. At times, he strains to explain things that don’t need explaining, and he seems uneasy with social changes that another historian might see as demonstrations of moral progress. But if a classic is a work that remains worth reading both for what it is and for what it tells us about the time it was created, Hobsbawm’s text deserves that status. It rewards the reader not because a historian would write the same book today but precisely because they would not.”

Climate politics in the West must grapple with the fact that China dominates the global emission’s balance, and there is little reason to believe Beijing’s policy is meaningfully impacted by “the erratic and inconsistent decision-making of the West.” The West faces the unsettling prospect of authoritarian China taking the lead on climate policy. This state-led decarbonization seems anomalous, but actually, at the birth of modern global climate politics in the 1980s, “the political economy of the crisis was understood as “mixed” and polycentric,” explains Tooze.

“It was only in the course of the 1990s that the fossil-fuel-driven climate crisis was reframed in unipolar terms, as primarily a US-driven phenomenon … The efflorescence of Marxisant writing on the climate crisis and long durée histories of the “capitalocene” have contributed to the intellectual charisma of this Western-centric reading. For political purposes, the imagery continues to serve useful political purposes today. But, both as history, when we approach the mixed economy of energy in the postwar “great acceleration”, and as an analysis of the climate crisis in the 21st century it is fundamentally misleading. It should be understood as an epochal political and intellectual accompaniment to the unipolar moment of the 1990s, an era which is now behind us. To the extent that that vision of the climate crisis continues to resonate, whether in affirmative and critical takes on Western “climate leadership”, it is a marker of our disorientation.”

Robinson criticizes The Atlantic for publishing bad ideas by presenting poorly reasoned arguments and superficial analyses that mislead readers. It fails to rigorously support claims made in its pieces, often omitting crucial counterpoints, he writes. Examples include pieces on Medicare for All and the defense of Henry Kissinger. This casual treatment of serious issues contributes to a decline in public debate, as factually incorrect and unsubstantiated ideas make their way into the mainstream, argues Robinson.

“… I want to explain exactly what it is that I think makes The Atlantic terrible and why I think we’d all be better off if it stopped publishing. My basic criticism is that while it presents itself as a magazine of ideas—which makes readers feel as if they are engaging intelligently with important issues—it in fact covers those issues in such a superficial and slipshod way that people are liable to be left with a worse understanding of the issue than when they went in, though they may be wrongly convinced that they have learned something. I do think that the ideological suppositions that predominate (with exceptions) in The Atlantic’s pages are dangerous and wrongheaded, but my critique of the magazine’s glib carelessness with ideas would be valid even if I was not also annoyed by its tendency to publish aggressive criticism of my fellow leftists and a never-ending sequence of cheap swipes at protesters.”