Welcome. The United States celebrates the worker this weekend. Happy Labor Day holiday. In its observance, this week we’ll just mention a couple of newsy bits, and then keep moving.

Last week we talked about European capitals returning to political life. This week we’ve already heard from Reykjavik that Icelanders are happy with their current relationship with Brussels, thank you very much. There was an interesting announcement in England on Tuesday, and early skirmishes have begun in the coming French presidential election. Then it’s a proper vacaton trip to an all-French holiday destination a long way from home for Parisians—due east of Madagascar.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

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•••••

ICELAND: Voters said no to talks about closer integration with Europe this week. Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister and Social Democratic Alliance chair, led the ‘yes’ effort and intentionally crafted a vague and gentle referendum question, on whether to explore further talks on the terms of a some day, maybe, next referendum on joining, to see right now what kind of terms Iceland could get, nothing more, nothing binding, mind you.

One might have thought (I did) that aggressive American sabre rattling next door in Greenland would cause the old Danish northern Atlantic allegiance (Greenland, Iceland, Faroes, Denmark) to close ranks and ally more closely with Europe, but voters decided, with 52.8 percent “No”, to say “we’re happy where we are now, thank you.”

But I don’t think that’s all that was going on. A couple of things.

First, a disagreement over fishing rights (forty percent of Icelandic exports) was key in the last round of EU accession talks, formally rejected by Iceland in 2015. This week’s urban/rural referendum results show that question was central again. The rural northwest voted 62.9 percent no, for example, while urban (in a manner of speaking) Reykjavik voted 57.5 percent yes.

Second, Iceland already has much of what it would want from a closer EU alliance. It’s a member of NATO, not an EU body, but, you know. It’s already in the Schengen area, and thus Frontex (the EU border policing regime), the European Free Trade Association and the EEA, the European Economic Area.

EEA membership means Icelandic citizens can live and work throughout the EEA under essentially the same free-movement regime as EU citizens, and guarantees free movement of goods, services, capital and people throughout the EU.

One other thought: there has been talk of a NATO-lite membership in that alliance for Ukraine. Admittedly, a military alliance is a different case. But if Europe is truly interested in closing ranks as it says, it might be worth the EU talking about a part-way-in-part-way-out arrangement like Iceland has as a workaround for institutional sticking points holding up EU accession of states like North Macedonia and Serbia. It might even be a way of knitting together closer cooperation with the likes of Ukraine and Canada.

•••••

ENGLAND: To start the week, Keir Starmer made an announcement that, for a moment at least, was exclusive news for his local paper, the Camden New Journal, which was rightly proud of its exclusive scoop.

A decent gesture from a decent guy, to give the story first to a local paper, the Camden New Journal, an independent, free weekly that apparently, actually still does reporting in Starmer’s constituency.

Starmer has just spent just spent two years making international policy at the national level, and now has personal relationships in NATO, the EU, China and elsewhere, and personal experience working with Trump, European leaders including Zelenskyy, and others.

He could always find an obscure sinecure, squirrel himself away inside an anonymous policy shop and never be heard from again, but I’ll bet he ends up in something connected to European security.

Everything needs to be done. The need for a vastly revised North Atlantic alliance is immediate and dire, and Europe must construct substantially greater independent capabilities at the same time. The opportunities are wide open. People like, say, an Atlanticist ex-PM who comes to the task already knowing the principals and understanding the machinery, ought to be a good fit.

FRANCE: François Bayrou, one of the many former French Prime Ministers interested in becoming president, isn’t one for subtlety. In a column in La Tribune Dimanche last weekend, Bayrou declared that Donald Trump has taken to acting “in a pathological frenzy.”

He also proposed an unorthodox (and unlikely) online vote at the end of January to choose who among the candidates flooding the political center should stand against candidates of the far political left and right.

Among the centrists, he thinks “none seem to truly embody the renewal the country expects at this political juncture.” “None,” he writes, “possesses sufficient legitimacy to dominate the others.”

He’s right. I might add the word “imagination.”

Le Monde uses no imagination in writing that “doubts are growing” about the ability of two other former PMs, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, and Bruno Retailleau, the right-wing Les Républicains leader, to take on the far left and far right. It may be unimaginative, but what they write is right. Philippe and Attal got nothing new.

Here’s an example, free for other French candidates to use. Both Philippe and Attal used the campaign’s first candidate forum to claim how serious they are about cutting public spending, something middle of the road politicians with no real answers have claimed most of this century.

In France, a voter need only remind Philippe and Attal of the more than €1 trillion in debt added during the Macron years during which they’ve both been prime ministers. (I’m not saying adding debt is always all wrong. Just that campaign promises like that act as useful unserious-politician-finder tools.)

To give the center-left equal smirking time, its savior is said to be waiting in the wings. Sadly, that’s François Hollande. In 2017 the former prime minister, last seen riding his scooter out of town, was the most unpopular president in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Le Monde reports Hollande is “waiting for the decisive moment.” Rather than seizing fate and rising up to prevent the calamity he fears for his beloved France, our savior is “giving himself until December to declare his presidential bid, should the winner of the left’s primary fail to emerge as a viable candidate.” Compelling.

•••••

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Travel story. Today we’re off to a legally and politically integral part of the French Republic, 5,800 miles from Paris, where some 712,000 voting age citizens are eligible vote in April’s presidential election. Welcome to the overseas Département of Réunion.

Out There: La France de l’Outre Mer

In the typical American city where we live, the average commute time is 78 minutes a day and 97.5% of these poll respondents agree traffic congestion is a serious problem. The last place you might expect to find people who commiserate is an island forty miles long and thirty wide, 420 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian ocean. But here we are.

We came to poke around some of the more outre bits of Overseas France, La France d’outre–mer. Welcome to the French département of Réunion Island, eighteen hundred miles from Johannesburg and 3275 crow-fly miles south of India in the southern Indian Ocean. It doesn’t sound very French, but it is, resolutely, and likes it that way.

It’s about a four hour flight out here from Johannesburg, the only continental African connection. You leave late at night, think you can sleep a little bit but these aren’t long haul planes, so you do your best in a tilt-back seat. They do a quaint thing, they still run a food cart down the aisle handing out newspapers, like in the old days.

Time zones work to smooth out flight schedules, not sleeping schemes, so as you arrive, if you squint while you’re still way up in the air you can just discern that dawn, somewhere over the Andamans and Nicobars, is screaming around the planet, about to catch you.

And now that we’re here, we can’t get out of town. People are just crazy, crazy busy, but where is it they’re so busy getting off to? Réunion’s economic engine is sugarcane and its main exports are sugar, rum and molasses.

How does sugar cane make for highways filled with jostling commuters, heating, air conditioning and auto glass repair trucks? I’m hard pressed to believe all the Peugeots and Renaults darting around on the motorway need to be in quite the hurry that they are in support of the cane trade.

It’s peppy, zippy and busy around here. There are N1s and N2s, divided highways, tunnels and dramatic cable-stayed bridges along the coast road. Down the N1 from St. Denis, back up the N1 from St Paul. Some 60,000 vehicles travel between them and the port every day.

“It sometimes takes more than two hours to drives the 30 kilometres between the two cities,” sighs Gerald Victoire, a local trucker.

They’re finishing the world’s most expensive road here, twelve-plus kilometers that won’t be subject to rockslides since it’s 20 to 30 meters out over the sea.

Traffic in the middle of the ocean may be a metaphor for today’s frightening world, or the pointlessness of human striving, or at least for something, but still it’s kind of a thrilling thing to see.

I’m hugging the slow lane, I admit it, absorbing French salutes in my rear view mirror. I feel like one of the insufferable elderly Floridian drivers who summer in our north Georgia mountains. While they putter along the roads blocking our way we call them clueless and things less kind.

Eventually we find the solution: climb down off the motorway onto the coast road and yield to the languor of the beach.

The surf pounds so that you can feel it in your chest in the hotels we chose, even while you are inside, when the world grows quiet after dark. One hotel is okay, the other, the Palm, is surely one of the nicest properties anywhere.

If you are on Réunion Island and you summon Google Maps, it will show you the French mainland. That’s apt, for this is France, proudly, happy to be and serious about it.

St. Denis, the capital, is staging strikes in support of the big guys back home, against raising the retirement age. Even at a physical remove of fifty seven hundred miles, Réunion’s Frenchness looks non-negotiable.

•••••

It takes some flying to get out here, but a stay on Réunion is hardly the grim holidaymaking of package tourists less fortunate than the French, say, northern Europeans on package tours to Ibiza or Mykonos or Crete.

Les métropolitains Francais, the mainlanders, have an embarrassment of outstanding holiday options in their outre mer. There is Réunion, with its varied topography, its active volcano and its sharks, and there are the French Caribbean territories, New Caledonie and French Polynesia.

Réunion is not Africa. It’s vaguely grouped with Africa since, who else are you gonna group it with, and it has an eclectic group of neighbors.

To the west is Madagascar, independent from France since 1960. As a general rule, coastal people there are descended from Africans, but in the highlands the largest ethnic group, the fairer almost olive-skinned Merina, descend from the Southeast Asian islands and/or Melanesia (the Melanesians are the same stock that later populated Rapa Nui, it’s thought).

There are flights listed on Réunion airport screens to holiday islands on Madagascar’s periphery, among them Nosy Be. I have never visited Nosy Be, but I know about it because my credit card was (unsuccessfully) charged for a stay at a resort there shortly after we once visited the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo.

Just over Réunion’s horizon, 200 kilometers northeast, lies Mauritius. It has spent time under Arab traders, the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, French and British. Nowadays Mauritius has a heavy Indian overlay. It’s a big holiday spot for the subcontinent and the only country in “Africa” where Hinduism is the most practiced religion.

While Réunion barrels along building roads and importing double it’s exports on Paris’s tab, things couldn’t be more different in the (relatively) nearby French département of Mayotte, part of the Comoros Islands archipelago. Much closer to the continental mainland than Réunion, opposite northern Mozambique, Mayotte and the Comoros are more closely tied to African ethnicity and culture.

Almost fifty years ago the islands held a referendum resulting in independence for the Comoros. Mayotte alone elected to stay French. As a result, while it’s still a poor place (it is “the poorest French department, with more than 80 per cent of its population living under the poverty line”) Mayotte has still drawn away from the rest of the Comoros islands in standard of living, healthcare resources and so on resulting in immigration from the other islands, so that now, about half of Mayotte residents are not citizens.

This produces periodic violence, including gang violence, and from time to time France threatens deportation of immigrants back to Comoros, and an overburdened Comoros resists. A military operation called Wuambushu (“take back”), involving troops sent from the French mainland, is ongoing just now.

The Outre Mer is having a couple of moments elsewhere, too. In French Polynesia this month, Agence France Presse reported on May first that

“Pro-independence parties lead by former French Polynesian President Oscar Temaru won the second round of territorial elections” last Sunday, and “this victory puts them in a strong position to negotiate a decolonisation process and a referendum on independence with the French government.”

And in New Caledonia, 2000 miles east of Australia, a vote against full independence is being contested because it was held during Covid, boycotted by some, and less than half the electorate voted.

•••••

The Portuguese saw value when they found the Azores in 1427, but they missed a trick by not putting down sticks in Réunion. They sailed here in the first years of the 16th century, but at the time their imaginations were fired by visions of conquest farther east, and they kept moving.

People think Réunion was largely uninhabited until the French arrived in the 1600s. They administered it from Mauritius. First they imported labor from places the most at hand, from East Africa and Malagasy. Over time they ventured farther afield and brought in Tamils, Gujarati Muslims and Chinese, resulting in the current French speaking creole.

There are bits of La France d’outre-mer more outre than Réunion. Most of us know about the French Caribbean, French Guyana, French Polynesia and New Caledonia.

[One place evading radar and seeming content to keep it that way is St. Pierre et Miquelon, a small archipelago in the north Atlantic, the knowledge of whose existence seems to extend only to nearby Newfoundland. St. Pierre will be the subject of a future column.]

Farther afield than Réunion are Wallis et Futuna in the South Pacific (population twelve thousand) and Clipperton (an uninhabited rock in the eastern Pacific. There are the nominally French Southern and Antarctic Lands, French acronym TAAF, where a few dozen people live at a research station, and probably the most remote, the Kerguelen archipelago.

There was a day when the search for an imagined great southern land mass led explorers to some of the loneliest places on earth. Between Australia and South Africa is part of the planet virtually never seen, never really even thought about these days until that ghostly search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

Captain James Cook made his way over from the South Pacific, but French navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec, coming from the other direction, beat him by four years. His discovery did not set the world on fire. The most useful plant his expedition found was a cabbage, the climate was atrocious, and Kerguelen didn’t even go ashore. Cook called them the Desolation Islands.

I once read on a fisherman’s blog that in Kerguelen, like in the Galapagos, evolution happens right before your eyes. There, butterflies have evolved without wings. Had they wings, it said, they would blow to sea. Instead they scurry between the rocks.

For the same reason there exists a wingless fly called Ana-Talanta Aptera. Flies without flight. Much of a fly’s energy is appropriated by its wings, so without them they need eat much less, and that is a boon in the Kerguelens.

It has been possible to visit the Kerguelen archipelago. Before Covid, there were berths for up to a dozen tourists on the supply ship that sails from Réunion four times a year. That was suspended during Covid and I’m unclear whether tourism has resumed. Berths cost around €9000 per person and the trip takes about 28 days.

•••••

Once you’ve made it all the way out to Réunion, do what everyone else does: get busy.

You should spend ample time on the lovely beaches, but don’t swim. There have been 22 fatal shark attacks in the last seventy years. Debris from flight MH370 washed up on the beach at Saint-André on the northeast coast in 2015, but don’t get the wrong impression about the beaches. They really are lovely.

You will eat. One cannot talk about France without French food and that’s true in the Outre Mer too. Not a bad meal in a week, even at a random stop along the beach, nowhere in particular, somewhere near St. Giles. In a gesture of supreme respect, my gauche American baseball cap comes off in restaurants.

There are hotels you choose from distant shores that, when you arrive, make your crest fall, plummet, even, but even at the slightly pompous and cloistered restaurant at the hotel on the hill, lunch was always lovely.

Where the Parisian mâitre d’ turns up his nose (along with his whiskers) and trades on hauteur, here the English language is exotic and having to deal with it over le menu flips the intimidation back onto le monsieur. Réunion rests at austral antipodes to Parisian disdain for English-speaking tourists. On Reunion, we’re interesting.

What is Cot American? I’m not sure but it must be American; it has a cowboy hat on the label. It’s ghastly sweet, unlike us Americans.

No matter what else you do, you will drive. Rent yourself a Peugeot and hit the road. Drive up into the center of the island, because Réunion is also not France, given its tropical interior, complete with active volcano. We picked two places to explore, a lovely rock face of falling water in the south called Grand Galet, and the crater of the now dormant Piton des Neiges volcano, as seen from the viewpoint called Fenêtre des Makes, inland from St. Louis.

En route to the highest point on the island, Google Maps sent us into driveways, trench-protected turnarounds and such micro-local circumstances that finally we were scolded in French by an elfin loiterer, one of those guys you run into way out in the country just standing around like there’s nothing to be done the whole day long. By all observable data he was merely an idler, but who knows, maybe he was with the neighborhood patrol.

In my most optimistic imagining, perhaps he was urging us back to some visitor center we’d blustered past. Or maybe he’d made a pretty good call and decided we just belonged back on flat land. In a less kind light, he stood there in his chest high cane, up in our faces about driving down his street, where no damned foreigner had been since 1964.

In this case, as in most cases, our call was just to blunder on.

It was 8:00 a.m. at the top, all quiet in contrast to the nerve rattling belt road, and utterly quiet. A haze hadn’t quite yet, but meant to settle. Lower down I judged were cooking fires, making swirls like from a fresh lit cigar. They were dirty gray, not the lighter shade of fog. The first morning clouds around the peaks had yet to muster. It hardly felt like an island at all. The view was magnificent.

This travelogue first appeared here at 3 Quarks Daily on May 22, 2023. My other 3QD articles are here. More Réunion pictures are here, and more Iceland pictures here.

•••••

That’s it for today. On Sunday there’s at least some chance that the Alternative für Deutschland could score an outright majority in provincial elections in Saxony Anhalt, Germany. If it does it will cross an ominous threshold, marking the moment when the far right party’s slow motion momentum attains escape velocity into actual governance. Whether that happens or not, it’ll surely be on the list to talk about next week.

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Welcome. Official Europe rumbles back to life. After a break only politicians can give themselves, the British House of Commons reconvenes Tuesday, having last met on July 16. By Wednesday it’s already back to Prime Minister’s Questions, Prime Minister Burnham’s inaugural edition.

António Costa, president of the EU’s European Council, is already on the road to the capitals, hammering out the next budget, and in Germany, Friedrich Merz held a two-day cabinet retreat through Wednesday at Schloss Neuhardenberg in Brandenburg, to set his autumn agenda.

In France, la rentrée politique is underway. The French presidential election is less than eight months away, and MEDEF, sort of the French equivalent of a US Chamber of Commerce, assembled a group of participants for what had the look of a presidential debate last night (August 27). We’ll take a quick look at that today. And then the US’s end-of-summer Labor Day holiday follows next weekend through the following Monday.

The world seems to have dodged catastrophe through a mostly lazy August. Let’s hope so. We won’t stay long today but I want to talk about two things: the developments this week in Russia’s War on Ukraine, and the coming French presidential election.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section, or directly at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE: There’s a lot of potentially interesting news this week. The CIA head, John Ratcliffe, flew to and from Moscow on Tuesday. The Washington Post judged from Flightradar24 that he stayed about eight and a half hours.

Potentially interesting is the Post’s report that Ratcliffe and whoever was in his entourage flew to and from Moscow via Riga, Latvia, where they—the plane, at least—stayed for 24 hours.

That’s interesting because Riga is the capital of one of the seen-to-be vulnerable Baltic NATO members, and we saw a flurry of reports early this week of an allied military operation last week in the Baltic Sea.

Best here to pause and refresh on the geography. A reference map for orientation:

Kaliningrad is an exclave that came to Russia in the settlement after World War II. Earlier, it had been part of Prussia. Riga is the capital of Latvia, the middle of the three Baltic NATO members, from south to north Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Suwałki Gap is the narrow corridor serving as the only land connection between the Baltic NATO members and the rest of NATO.

What happened last week: The US and its NATO allies deployed an unusually wide array of military assets to an area concentrated around northern Poland, the Baltic Sea and especially Kaliningrad.

One report on X characterized the activity as “intense NATO intelligence gathering” connected to activity in Kaliningrad, citing a Wall Street Journal story that Russian military officers travelled from St Petersburg to Kaliningrad last month “to test preparations for a potential mobilization of local residents.”

It went on to describe “an unusually active period around the enclave: NATO air and ISR activity, Russian naval and air exercises, and intensive intelligence collection by both sides.” ISR is military-speak for “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.”

The deployment included airborne command-and-control, electronic warfare, fighters, tankers and Polish ground forces. Speculation was, all those assets set out to collect intelligence on Russian preparations for a possible military mobilization and plans for testing NATO, about which speculation has circulated nonstop this summer.

Before Allied aircraft could operate freely over the Baltic states or the Suwałki corridor in any conflict, they’d have to identify Russian radar, communications and air defenses in Kaliningrad. The array of kit assembled around the exclave last week suggests that’s just what they were doing.

More speculative is whether all that activity came in response to specific intelligence about Russian moves. Allied officials denied that.

All this could be nothing more than prudent advance planning for a generalized scenario of a Russian challenge anywhere in Baltic NATO, and there has been no shortage of talk about the threat of that lately.

There’s one hopeful thing that all this military action points to. It’s the disconnect between the Trump administration’s hostile rhetoric toward NATO and its European allies, its frequent publicly expressed disinterest in European defense, and what’s actually been happening in the Baltic this week.

The president downplayed the Ratcliffe visit to Glenn Beck (why Glenn Beck?) this week, and the Wall Street Journal published a small story Wednesday night explaining that “the visit was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries.”

It was hardly authoritative. It was attributed only “to people briefed on the visit,” and didn’t do much to tamp down speculation. It also noted that Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Ratcliffe didn’t meet with Putin which, if seen as a calculated snub, doesn’t speak well of current Russian/American bilateral relations.

Politico later broadened the administration’s ‘nothing to see here’ message to suggest the Ratcliffe mission was also about “press(ing) Russia to reduce military and economic support for Iran.”

In spite of Ratcliffe’s overnight stay in Riga, Latvian officials, too, downplayed any danger. The commander of the Latvian National Armed Forces, General Kaspars Pudāns, told Latvian Delfi TV that ‘If there was a threat, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

The last known visit to Moscow by a CIA chief came in 2021. The Biden administration’s CIA Director, William J. Burns, undertook that mission, as several have pointed out, “to warn Putin against... invading Ukraine.” Consider the effectiveness of that message.

Timothy Ash, a strategist at RBC BlueBay Asset Management, whose Substack is worth your time, wrote:

“Ratcliffe is one of the few Russia hawks in the Trump adminstation, so the fact that Ratcliffe was chosen for the visit, and not the likes of the deal makers and Russia lovers Kushner and Witkoff, is probably significant.”

Indeed. It stands to reason that the visit didn’t have to do with low-impact process or the ineffectual Kushkoff team would have been a better fit.

On the other hand, there’s some chance that as a few people speculated, the visit was mostly about Iran. And the Riga stop could have been just symbolic. But if it were, why the twenty-four hour layover? Unlikely that busy people would add that kind of time to a trip in which they’re bringing a specific message.

We know the United States had pretty good intelligence ahead of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Recall that the Biden CIA thought the situation sufficiently serious to publicly release documentary evidence of its correct belief that an invasion was imminent, in spite of warnings that the documentation’s release could expose sources and methods.

If we assume the US still retains that level of high quality intelligence, and if the Ratcliff visit wasn’t about Iran, it’s a fair bet the US sees something fairly serious brewing in or near the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a notable early foreign policy move this week. Ukrainian Independence Day on Monday (August 24) gave Burnham a convenient hook for making Ukraine his first overseas visit. He brought along a first move that differentiated him from the “for as long as it takes” Starmer government.

France had already granted Ukraine a production license for the SCALP/Storm Shadow missile. The Burnham government has now authorized transfer of the classified technical information necessary to reproduce the British components in Ukraine.

Europe is thereby moving from supplying Ukraine with a flow of Western weapons it controls, to transferring to Kyiv the ability to manufacture as many of them domestically as it can, with no on/off switch.

SCALP/Storm Shadow missile capability equips Ukraine with deep strike offensive ability. An AP article describes the missiles as having “a sophisticated warhead (that) strikes the target at a velocity that means it can penetrate hardened structures and destroy buried targets in a way a slower drone without such a warhead is unable to do, at present.”

•••••

Here’s a few photos from around downtown Riga. I’ve had the pleasure of two visits. If the three Baltic NATO members had a capital, it would be Riga, a big, muscular old Hanseatic port city. Sort of makes me think of Chicago. It’s a working town, a City of the Big Shoulders kind of place.

•••••

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FRENCH ELECTION PRIMER, SURVEYING THE EARLY FIELD: A couple of quick words on the upcoming French presidential election. With the substantial chance of a far right government coming to power next spring, I think the political stakes are high enough for us to keep tabs here from time to time.

The European far right is on the march. A far right party reigns in Italy, where Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia brothers have ruled now for longer than any post-WWII Italian government save one. And it’s not that we’re neglecting Germany and the Alternative für Deutschland’s rise. It’s only that the AfD isn’t as close to national rule as is Rassemblement National (RN) in France.

Under the French two-round system, the two top vote-getters in the first round meet in a runoff for the presidency, on Sunday, April 18 and then Sunday, May 2 next spring. The RN has already separated itself from the field and is destined for one of the runoff slots; everyone else is fighting over the second qualifying position.

In current French politics there are two parties with significant support, one each on the far right and far left, and then several parties from the center-left to the center-right fighting for mainstream voters.

Renaissance, the party of Emmanuel Macron, assiduously maintains it represents not the center-right but the center. It was founded not only as a vehicle for Macron’s candidacy, but also on the claim that it transcended the old left-right division.

In fact, many of its positions are indistinguishable from those of candidates in the center-right cluster. Further, two candidates in the center-to-center-right group are former Macron prime ministers.

The problem here—and the worry—is that with all the candidates clustered from center-left to center-right could split the non-radical vote, sending Le Pen on the far right and and Jean-Luc Mélenchon representing the far left into a run-off without any of the traditional parties.

One thing the center cluster agrees on, though their parties might not all declare it out loud during election season, is that ultimately they’ll need unity to gather the entire center into a large enough group to fend off Mélanchon, and assemble a coalition large enough to win a place in the second round against Marine Le Pen and the RN.

François Bayrou, a former PM and center-right candidate, says so explicitly, arguing for a common “parties of government” competition stretching “from the Socialist Party, in its social-democratic version, to the Gaullists (on the right.)”

For its part, on the center-left the Socialists have organized a presidential primary among its candidates (first round October 9–10, 2026, runoff October 16–17).

With the end of summer political rentrée underway in France, last week a potentially intriguing candidate in the center-left cluster climbed off the fence and declared his intention to run. On Sunday (August 23) Raphaël Glucksmann used a primetime television interview to announce his candidacy and enter his Place Publique party in the wider Socialist Party’s primary.

Earlier Mr. Glucksmann had rejected participating is a primary of the entire left, which would have included far left candidate Mélenchon and the Greens. That was ruled out in a Socialist Party members-only referendum, and now, Glucksmann, by joining the primary, hopes to acquire the Socialist Party’s organization and legitimacy.

Glucksmann enters the race polling as follows against the established leaders:

Glucksmann, 46, is a MEP, son of prominent French philosopher André Glucksmann, and carries substantial national name recognition. He has also been involved in Georgian and Ukrainian politics.

His current partner Léa Salamé has been a TV presenter on a France 2 nightly newscast. On the day after Glucksmann’s announcement of his candidacy she announced she would withdraw from that role during the campaign.

Last night several presidential candidates, including Le Pen, Mélenchon, Glucksmann, center-right favorites former Macron Prime Ministers Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe and others met in the first big televised candidate debate/forum of the campaign, staged by MEDEF, a national French business association, at the tennis complex Roland-Garros west of Paris.

It was a business audience, so it’s not surprising that in unofficial polling by publicly funded Public Senat (sort of C-SPAN with a newsroom) center-right former PMs Attal and Philippe did well. One attendee said “The one who came out on top was Édouard Philippe.” Another: “Attal put on a show. Philippe was the most credible.”

It wasn’t a native audience for Le Pen, Mélenchon and participating center-left candidates Marine Tondelier of the Greens. “(S)he kept going around in circles on a single issue," said an attendee. And of Glucksmann: “substance. The problem is the delivery. It’s flabby.”

As the election approaches we’ll look at how the center cluster’s positions differ among themselves, and watch as they jockey for the potential second runoff spot next spring, as they attempt to head off a far-right presidency in France.

•••••

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THE UNITED KINGDOM: It’s a fine example of how to promote political cynicism. John Healey helped to undermine the previous British government by resigning in June as defense secretary because Kier Starmer’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves wouldn't urgently raise the defense budget to his satisfaction.

Selected as chancellor himself, presumably to put his money where his mouth is, Healey has now delayed setting out when the UK will meet his own target of allocating 3% of GDP to defense until next year’s spending review.

Says the Guardian, “Defence spending is on track to reach 2.7% of GDP by 2030, funded partly by Starmer’s decision to cut the UK’s aid spending. Healey had previously said that this figure should rise to 3% urgently….”

The Financial Times handles the story succinctly this morning under the headline “Healey to shelve his own defence spending target of 3% of GDP by 2030.”

•••••

AND FINALLY: Icelandic voters decide in a referendum tomorrow (August 29) whether to resume accession talks with the European Union. The country applied for EU membership after the 2008 financial crash but suspended talks in 2013. The main obstacle at the time was decision making autonomy over control of its fishing industry.

A more unsettled geopolitical environment (namely, American threats against its western neighbor, Greenland, coupled with the fact that, by design, Iceland has no army), has focused the Icelandic mind. The latest Maskína poll conducted August 21-25 gives “Yes” the barest lead, 51.3–48.7.

•••••

That’s it for today. Barring anything jarring we need to talk about, next week we’ll publish a holiday travel story. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Cheers,

Bill

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It’s not always a true story. Louis XVI was overthrown as revolution raged through Paris in August, 1792. Independence dawned for India and Pakistan in August 1947. The ground war against Saddam Hussein began in Operation Desert Storm in August 1991. A failed coup attempt was Soviet Communism’s last gasp in August of the same year.

World War One began in August 1914 and World War Two ended with Emperor Hirohito’s surrender in August 1945. What do you say we avoid that kind of drama in these last ten days of August, 2026.

It’s another lazy summer edition of CS&W this week, as we consider an uncommon pairing, Iran and South Korea. And a quick example of institutional bias in the media.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

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SOUTH KOREA AND IRAN: The sprawling United States Army Garrison Humphreys is the size of a small city, population more than 40,000, made up of US service personnel, their families and contract workers. It is the largest US military base anywhere overseas.

As dawn broke on Monday (August 17, 2026) across the more than 3,400-acre camp fifty miles south of Seoul, South Korean and American soldiers were assembled for Operation Ulchi Freedom Shield, this year marking fifty years since the initial exercise.

The drills stretched north and east to the demilitarized zone and south across the entire South Korean portion of the peninsula, involving South Korean K1A2 tanks and K200A1 armored vehicles, American M1A2 Abrams tanks and Strykers, CH-47 Chinook helicopters, M270A1 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, various exotic amphibious bridging systems and countless smaller lethal gadgets.

Then this:

This Truth Social post from the president appeared at 5:04 p.m. Eastern US time last Sunday, August 16, which was 6:04 a.m. the next morning in South Korea, on the day the exercise was to begin.

The exercise began as scheduled, but suddenly nobody knew what the bloody hell.

Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, went to the South Korean Defense ministry the next morning, Tuesday, to try to work out just what part of the exercise would be scaled back. By Tuesday evening in the US, neither side had publicly detailed the changes, but by midweek it turned out the exercise had been shortened by more than half, from eleven days to five. Field training was scaled back.

Clearly confounded at first, the office of President Lee Jae-myung’s initial knee jerk was to frame the decision as a diplomatic opening to North Korea. Rather than criticize the American president, the office of President Lee said this:

“We expect friendly relations between the North Korean and U.S. leaders to lead to meaningful North Korea-U.S. talks and the start of discussions aimed at advancing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”

They were reaching, but then, like both countries’ troops, they had been blindsided.

President Trump complained that the exercises were a big, onerous American expense. But before long the Korea Times suggested the real reason for the whole episode was Trump’s desire for another round of worldwide publicity and photo-ops with North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un.

Which, if that was his motivation, would be another of the president’s concessions in advance, extended without being asked in hopes of inducing Kim to join him for talks. It’s reminiscent of the historic Paragraph Five in the US Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, in which the United States effectively gave up its standing guarantee of freedom of the seas in international shipping lanes, even before the sixty day negotiating period had begun. (Those sixty days expired last week with no agreement.)

President Trump does seem to be interested in resurrecting his first term relationship with Kim, and admittedly, the two leaders have some new issues to discuss. Things have changed since Trump became the first American president to cross into North Korea, for the cameras, in June, 2019.

Six years on, the president would be meeting with a stronger Kim than in his first administration. Pyongyang has grown its nuclear stockpile since they last met, and it regularly test fires a growing array of short, intermediate and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, including new hypersonic systems (likely in cooperation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin), into the waters around the shores of US ally Japan. The third test firing just this month happened yesterday (August 20).

There’s something else: since Mr. Trump and Kim last met, North Korea has gained actual battlefield experience. The president connects Seoul’s reluctance to fight Iran with this week’s exercises on the Korean peninsula. But he has trouble making the connection that North Korea’s new battlefield experience comes through Pyongyang’s support for a historic American foe, Russia, against Europe, a US treaty partner, since the first months of Putin’s Ukraine conflict.

Members of the president’s own party are trying to help the president make that connection. Senator Thom Tillis wrote on X that “reducing joint exercises with South Korea does nothing more than free up thousands of North Korea’s troops to support Putin.”

It’s crazy, I know, but one might almost suspect the president isn’t trying to see that connection. In his Truth Social message, President Trump called the North Korean leader “unthreatening and respectful.”

We all know this administration isn’t much troubled by consistency. As the Chosun Daily newspaper points out, at the same time he is asking Seoul to help denuclearize Iran, by shortening Ulchi Freedom Shield the president is curtailing exercises mean to deter Pyongyang, the most immediate nuclear threat to South Korea.

Meanwhile, the New York Times pointed out this week that Seoul is frustrated that the president “appeared to put Saudi Arabia on the path to enriching nuclear fuel on its own soil, a demand Seoul has made for years.”

And the Associated Press notes that three months ago, Defense Secretary Hegseth praised South Korea for taking greater responsibility for the peninsula’s security, saying Seoul demonstrated the kind of “alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow.” But this week Trump is citing personal burden-sharing grievances as a reason to curtail military cooperation with Seoul.

But then, everything has been a little off kilter in Washington since the conflict with Iran began back at the end of February. The Financial Times pointed out this week that “In March, the Pentagon relocated parts of the Thaad missile defense system—an important layer of South Korea’s air defenses—from the country as it shifted resources toward the Middle East.”

Also because of Iran, the US has redeployed the USS George Washington strike group toward the Hormuz Strait to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, the carrier that’s been in domestic US news for all the wrong reasons.

The FT noted that that redeployment leaves “the western Pacific without an American aircraft carrier for the foreseeable future.” The paper sounded frustrated. It believes Seoul now has to ask itself whether Trump’s moves are negotiation tactics, just an impulsive Trump being Trump kind of thing, or an indication the alliance is headed onto rocky ground. Which, coming from a financial newspaper, is an appropriate complaint, calling up that same, dreaded uncertainty we always hear business hates.

As the second Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated in Europe, uncertain allies have a pesky tendency to make their own plans. So how will it all settle out? One prediction is that Seoul will go nuclear, setting off a nuclear arms race with its volatile and unpredictable autocrat neighbor to the north—the same one whose troops are engaged in a shooting war in Europe. And with whom the president is keen to resurrect reality TV as diplomacy.

Donald Trump’s actions as president make him the most consequential American leader since FDR. Just not in the way he thinks. This wrecking of the North Atlantic alliance, this fiasco in the Strait, this slow motion abandonment of Asian allies, this courting of the North Korean dictator in pursuit of a televised spectacle, all of it is spectacular, unnecessary and historically misguided American leadership.

It is past the time for giving the president the benefit of the doubt while trying to divine a deeper strategy. But where is one single American Republican official willing to stand up and say so?

Where is one individual with enough love of country to say to his fellow Americans what he surely says to his friends and fellow appointees, that we are governed by a disastrously incompetent man who is ruining our country?

Every last official serving this president who is silent, is complicit. None can expect to be a part of rebuilding the integrity of the office of the presidency, if that is possible at all. None is suitable to consider as a serious future leader. None of them.

The systematic abandonment of first the North Atlantic alliance and now, before our eyes, the East Asian alliance, unilaterally dismantles eighty years of American diplomacy. One region at a time, this administration is actively undermining this country’s place in the world.

On Wednesday this week, I saw clips of the president standing outside the White House describing his latest home improvement projects. He talked about the new driveway, the new helipad and stood near a flagpole he had replaced. “It’s a tapered pole,” he explained. “I’m very good at flagpoles.”

•••••

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•••••

ZAMBIA: The investor-oriented Bloomberg news service offered this unabashedly admiring report in a newsletter this week: “Hakainde Hichilema secured a second term as president of Zambia in a landslide that even eclipsed his big win five years ago. The mandate will allow him to build on the macroeconomic successes of his first stint and gives him time to ensure the benefits of a rebound in Africa’s second-biggest copper producer filter through to all citizens.”

We’ll see. It’s safe to say that wasn’t exactly the way a European Union Election Observation Mission’s would have summarized President Hichilema’s victory. The EU sent 100 election observers from EU member states plus Canada and Norway. It wrote in its preliminary statement that while the election was competitive, “key incumbency advantages blurred the line between state and political campaigning creating an uneven playing field.”

The EU mission noted “changes to the electoral system were enacted as late as only three months before polling,” which “reduced awareness of aspects of them,” “hampered effective inclusion and impinged on the exercise of fundamental freedoms.” It also suggested new cyber laws had a “chilling effect” on media operations.

Which is not to suggest that otherwise, Hichilema would have lost. But Bloomberg’s desire to celebrate the victory of a business-friendly president shows the importance of considering how your source’s built-in bias may color what you read.

•••••

REAL QUICK, TURKISH OFFICIALS, A TEENSY FAVOR? Please, before anything happens, could you guys pull aside and hold on to the specific vehicle that served as Catering Truck One last month when it ferried the president around your airport tarmac in Ankara? The next administration will be eager to bring it over here to the Smithsonian. Thanks, gotta go.

•••••

That’s it for today. Enjoy this most leisurely of months and I’ll see you next week. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

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Bill

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Most people claim at least a partial attention span deficit they blame on the internet. I do. And what we have today fits—a few half-baked ideas I haven’t necessarily thought all the way through. Don’t hold me to ‘em; they won’t be on the test.

Hats off to the US Secret Service. We learned it initiated a new, exotic mode of transportation at the recent NATO summit when the president was ferried between planes aboard Catering Truck One. As with airplanes, whichever catering truck a president boards assumes the mantle of Catering Truck One. I checked.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

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•••••

•••••

ARGENTINA:

New xenophobic rants aren’t a surprise these days. But that’s not all this is. Because the article above continues:

“Following the anti-foreigner decree, the president also announced, on July 30 on national television, a reform of the Central Bank, denouncing ‘the greed and passion for theft of high-level politicians.’”

That‘s curious. Because President Javier Milei’s sister, Karina Milei, Secretary General of the Presidency in Argentina, is so influential that her brother calls her El Jefe (”The Boss”). And Ms. Milei, who is among the highest-level politicians, is herself accused of theft.

She’s implicated in a pharmaceutical kickback scandal in which leaked audio recordings allege that companies supplying medicines to Argentina’s disability agency paid her kickbacks.

Ms. Milei was not merely an incidental beneficiary, the allegations go, but an organizer and central participant in the alleged influence network. President Milei has denounced the accusations as fabricated and politically motivated, while Karina has denied the allegations.

•••••

ISRAEL/GAZA: The Netanyahu government rejected the US-backed roadmap for Gaza this week, calling it ‘“a case of election politics'.”

Here is the reaction of a ‘senior US source’ quoted by the Turkish Anadolu news agency:

“We are not troubled by those comments from Netanyahu.”

“We understand his political needs [in this election period]. We have no problem with that, as long as he continues to do what we ask — especially as regards reining in the strikes in Gaza.”

The Trump administration is used to pursuing contradictory policies and saying different things to different audiences. Keep moving folks, nothing to see here.

•••••

RUSSIA: I’ve always had the impression, from my (I think) seven visits and from Russian literature, that the prototypical Russian citizen is stolid, superstitious, conservative and, if profane (probably), also god-fearing (usually). So Russia’s role as international loose cannon rolling around on the deck of international affairs for most of this century is puzzling.

A convoy of at least fifteen vessels laden with a million tons of oil is en route this week to China on the Arctic route, sailing north of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, traveling farther north than any previous Arctic tanker convoy.

The Barents Observer reports it will sail to 81.5 degrees north latitude. That’s farther north than the world’s northernmost city, Longyearbyen (78.22° N), the capital of the Svalbard archipelago.

Not all of Russia’s sailing ships currently sitting on the ocean floor are there because of Ukrainian attacks; its maritime fleet has a rich and hapless history. As of Wednesday (August 12, 2026), oil from the Russian-linked tanker Caroline Bezengi, which grounded off Oman on June 30 carrying roughly 800,000 barrels, has produced a major spill that has now reached the Omani mainland.

Less than two years ago the Russian tankers Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239 were caught in a storm near the Kerch Strait. Volgoneft-212 broke in half, killing a crewman; Volgoneft-239 was damaged and ran aground. Both were aging Soviet-era tankers. Thousands of tonnes of heavy fuel oil were spilled.

Eight years ago Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, was undergoing repairs when the giant floating dry dock where it was being tended sank near Murmansk. One of the dock’s 70-ton cranes crashed onto the carrier’s flight deck, punching a hole in it, killing one and injuring others.

The most famous incident was the sinking of the submarine Kursk during a Russian Northern Fleet exercise 26 years ago this month, taking 118 Russian sailors with it.

Consider the way sanctions force Russia to bring its oil to market. Every day Moscow pushes crude through increasingly exotic routes with insurance, maintenance and environmental safeguards that are questionable at best, aboard klunking, rusty, uninsurable hulks called a ‘shadow fleet.’

Best I can glean with my laptop this morning, several of the tankers are pushing twenty years old; two have no ice classification at all, and another has only a low one. So in sailing well beyond effective environmental mitigation, what could possibly go wrong?

•••••

THE VALUE OF AN AMERICAN PROMISE: About the Great Ankara Catering Truck Caper: if the president is willing to use close personal associates and senior figures in his own government (among them two of the most important figures in American government, the secretaries of State and Treasury), as unwitting bait on a flight his intelligence agencies considered too dangerous for Donald Trump himself, over a country bordering a war of choice he started, imagine what NATO allies must think of the US’s Article Five guarantee.

•••••

UKRAINE/POLAND: It’s disappointing, if understandable, that coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine slips from media headlines in America. Because the thing is, Russia’s daily bombing of civilian targets across Ukraine hasn’t stopped. It goes on night after night after night.

But there’s something else we hardly hear anything about in US media, even when they do report on the war, the deep and pervasive disenchantment at the corruption that pervades not just the Zelenskyy administration in particular, but Ukrainian governance in general, how it promotes cynicism about every new policy Kyiv rolls out, and how it affects Ukraine’s neighbors.

I come to this topic via a recent dinner conversation with an American university professor of history who regularly visits family in Poland. Fresh from a recent trip to Lublin, just fiftyish miles from the Ukrainian border, he brought a downbeat report of disillusionment among a Polish population that was once among Kyiv’s most stalwart supporters.

He suggested that Ukrainian war veterans commonly have to run a gantlet of corruption to receive attention that we in the US would consider an entitlement after military service.

Indeed, wounded Ukrainian soldiers and veterans may encounter corrupt medical commissions, demands for money to obtain disability status, and an exhausting bureaucracy that often forces them to finance their own treatment.

It’s an issue covered in Ukrainian media. A tough-to-read report from March 2024 in the Kyiv Independent describes:

“a military medical system that’s fundamentally broken on every level, no matter where you are, no matter how you’re injured. As a reward for fighting Ukraine’s battles, veterans have to fight a callous, sometimes corrupt, outdated bureaucracy that’s often working against them, while they are at their most physically and psychologically vulnerable.”

I wrote a very short travel book in 2013 called Visiting Chernobyl, after my first of three visits to Ukraine, in which we drove up to Chernobyl from Kyiv one snowy winter day, with two men named Igor. Here’s a pertinent little bit:

The drive up to Chernobyl took just shy of two hours. The drive back took a lot less, with less snow and a lot more overtaking. Judging from our Igors, real Ukrainians don’t wear seat belts.

Out in the middle somewhere Igor got a traffic ticket. It came from a radar trap, a freezing cop in a little Lada like the one we passed on the way up. We were approaching a village, see, where the speed limit drops, and 74 kph in a 50 kph zone will cost you 260 hryvna, something more than thirty dollars.

We wanted to know. Would the cop take a cash bribe?

“Of course, this is Ukraine,” Igor the driver said.

Maybe he would take 200. But if Igor offered it, it wouldn’t be to save 60 hryvna. What it would save him was time. He’d pay it to avoid the consarned bureaucracy.

Otherwise he’d have to go to the bank to pay the fee, then go to the police station to show them he’d paid, so a bribe might save him a whole day’s pay at work. The system, he said, is made for bribing.

Maybe the cop would take the bribe and maybe he wouldn’t, Igor thought, because after all he didn’t know who he was stopping and it could be another cop who might report him. Either way though, the cop was making $400 a month and he had a family to feed, so Igor had no complaint. The cop did what he had to do. That the bribee has fundamental sympathy for the briber, seems to me that doesn’t augur well.

That was thirteen years, ago and judging from the newspaper report and my dinner companion’s stories, it sounds like not much has changed. For a country that demonstrated its deep desire to be part of the West—at the cost of more than a hundred civilian protesters’ lives in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, for example—corruption is an especially pernicious foe.

Of course, corruption was embedded in the very day to day fabric of the Soviet system of governance Ukraine was born into, so maybe it’s maybe not surprising that it remains, and it’s also not the unique province of the Zelenskyy administration.

But its presence mustn’t continue indefinitely, not just because it’s wrong, but also because, as we can see in disillusionment among what should be Ukraine’s natural Polish allies in the war effort, it provides a ready device for Ukraine’s opponents to use to undermine its war effort.

•••••

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•••••

ENGLAND: I asked ChatGPT to Americanize the candidate running in a bi-election against Nigel Farage. It came up with Garbage Man:

It’s not so different from the real thing:

The election was held in the Essex constituency of Clacton-on-Sea yesterday, Thursday, August 13th. When the results were read out, after 6:00 this morning Clacton time, the man who calls himself Count Binface and campaigns with a trash bin on his head took 26.93 percent of the vote against the leader of Reform UK, the far right British political party.

Farage’s election strategy was standard populist fare, a rhetorical framing that they’re after us, it’s you and me, Mr. John Q. Public, standing for all that’s right and holy, against the evil bad guys (who are everybody but you and me brothers and sisters) and I need your help to stop them!

Farage has been dogged by ethical challenges, mainly charges that he has accepted outlandish gifts, like £5,000,000 either to provide for his personal security, or maybe in appreciation for his campaigning for Brexit (he claimed both).

Whatever. His response to critics has been to call himself a common man just like you, a victim of corrupt but not quite identified forces. SkyNews coverage last night reported that, speaking before Reform UK supporters while waiting for results, in response to an investigation into the ‘gift’ of £5m that he did not declare, Farage said:

"Who cares? The voters of Clacton don't care."

Reframing a personal legal or ethical problem as a collective struggle between “the people” and a corrupt establishment, as Farage has done, looks very much like a move Donald Trump might make.

During both his impeachments, President Trump consistently maintained that Democrats were not really impeaching him but attempting to overturn the 2016 election, or nullify the votes of his supporters. Trump, too, couldn’t decide on his favorite reason.

In his fundraising efforts over the years, Trump’s pitch is usually a variation on “if they can do this to me, they can do it to you,” inviting supporters to see themselves as participants in the same great struggle that’s against you and me together, little man.

And now that we’re talking Donald Trump, was not his formulation a few weeks back of ‘protection money’ for providing safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz a straight up parody of Brooklyn real estate developer as wanna-be mobster turned would-be statesman? He said it out loud:

But who cares, really, not to worry, it was just one of those stabs at strategy like he does. It came and went. This week he was back at it, playing international strategist.

On Saturday, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council laid out its conditions for reopening the strait, and among them was the demand that the United States “completely compensate” Iran for war damage.

Donald Trump’s response on Monday had a certain playground quality:

“They asked for reparations, you might say. Or they asked for money for the damage that we’ve done. I said that’s a good idea. Well, we’re going to ask for money for the damage they’ve done over a 50-year period.”

It’s the diplomatic equivalent of "Oh yeah? Well same to you!”

Al-Jazeera points out one nifty detail: in seeking his own compensation for ’50 years’ of alleged damages, the president cited the families of 17 sailors killed aboard the USS Cole in 2000 as among those due compensation. The Cole bombing was carried out by al-Qaeda, not Iran.

Whatever.

•••••

AND FINALLY, TIME WAS: I like the idea in a new book, The Fullness of Time, that today we think of the hours as identical abstract units, but they’re not, really. The author, Cathy Haynes, writes that once upon a time, “we called a phase of darkness cockcrow.” We used to tell time by shadows shrinking or the glow over a mountaintop.

By endowing different times of day with natural attributes instead of mathematical precision, I expect past generations grew up thinking of the day as a more animated thing, vibrant and full of life. That’s a more colorful, fanciful way of living in the world.

Once upon a time people looked at the world around them with wonder—superstitious, wide-eyed, and maybe a little fearful. Only much later have we begun immediately trying to measure everything, to assign boundaries, to quantify. We can thank science for just about everything these days, but not for stealing the romance from things once unmeasured.

•••••

That’s it for today. Enjoy this most leisurely of months and I’ll see you next week.

Thanks for your time, and let me hear what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. It’s just the third summer of the last dozen we aren’t out on the lake in Finland this month, and one of those was the Covid quarantine year of 2020. Starting with the mid-summer holiday and on into July and August in Finland, it’s hard to get non-essential official things done, because everybody, government included, has packed up and gone to the lake. It’s an approach that could only improve things here at home.

There will be plenty of time later to fret over Russia’s war on Ukraine, the prospects for the Persian Gulf, or the prospects for Andy Burnham, or to wring our hands over the looming far-right takeover of Germany and France by electoral means. And fret we surely will.

But why not hold on to that until the darker days of winter? For now, if we’re not out at the sauna this summer, we can at least reminisce. This week we’ll recount how, a decade and a half ago, we found ourselves sleeping on a rock atop the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

•••••

Okay, but first there’s one thing we just can not let pass.

PROFICIENT, PROFESSIONAL AND THOROUGHLY PREPARED: This photo appeared in news stories across the world this week. It’s from the 26th International AIDS Conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that ended a week ago today. The slide in the photo was part of a presentation by the US State Department's senior official responsible for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

It shows how deeply the Trump administration is engaged in AIDS relief, how much it thinks of the African beneficiaries, and how deeply proficient, professional and thoroughly prepared Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department is. The locations of all the countries on the map are wrong. Every one.

Reuters:

“The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory ​Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.”

"Whoever ⁠created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work," wrote Matt Petit, who works at the Atlantic Council.

Here’s where the countries actually are:

•••••

YOU WANT A CRUISE? I’LL SHOW YOU A CRUISE: Lots of people who enjoy cruises like the simplicity, things like daily prepared meals and seeing the world while checking into your room and unpacking only once.

We never thought we were exactly the type for cruises, my wife and me, but once, fretting we might be selling cruises short, I remember thinking we should try one, and if we’re going to try one, I’d find us something unique, and that’s how we came to climb aboard the last remaining British Royal Mail ship.

The RMS St. Helena (“Hel-EEE-nah”), now retired, left infrequently from Walvis Bay, Namibia and sailed out to near the mid-Atlantic ridge, the midpoint between Angola and Brazil, to the British Overseas Territory of St. Helena Island. Its primary mission was to restock the island and transport government workers and contract employees, because there was no other way to get there—in 2010, there was no airfield, only the sturdy little RMS St. Helena.

That cruise continued to Ascension Island, home to the nearest airstrip at the time. From Ascension the British Royal Air Force flew (and still flies) between RAF Station Brize Norton near Oxford, England, and the Falkland Islands, and that was our way back home.

Not a lot of people visit St. Helena (here’s a little about that visit) and even fewer visit Ascension. Here’s what it was like.

ASCENSION ISLAND: When the Brits exiled Napoleon to St. Helena in 1815 they denied the emperor newspapers, subjected him to curfew, and guarded him with 125 men during the day and 72 at night. So intent were they to avoid a second imperial escape that sailing down, they garrisoned Ascension Island on the way, better to defend St. Helena.

Napoleon died six years later. With the Suez Canal fifty years in the future, the Admiralty hung on to Ascension as a sea base and it serves now as an airbase shared with the Americans, who built the island’s Wideawake airfield to move troops in WWII.

Ascension provided the middle link in an airbridge for the United Kingdom’s 1982 Falkland Islands campaign. During that conflict Ascension came alive like never before or since, as the UK Ministry of Defense ran a frenetic schedule of flights between the Brize-Norton air base near Oxford, England, and the RAF’s Mount Pleasant airport near Stanley, in the Falklands.

Other than aboard your own ocean going yacht, at the time of our visit there were only two ways onto and off of Ascension Island: the airbridge, which ran twice weekly flights, and the Royal Mail Ship St. Helena, which supplied St. Helena Island with periodic trips from Cape Town, and usually continued the additional 800 miles northwest to Ascension Island.

Where much of St. Helena is graceful and green, Ascension is stark and volcanic. St. Helena’s population has ancestral roots, while Ascension’s 34 square miles are home to no permanent residents, no farmers, fishermen or private property. St. Helena exports labor via contract workers. Ascension imports most of it.

Ascension is home to various NASA satellite tracking stations and military installations. The BBC transmits its World Service broadcasts to Africa and South America from an other-worldly array of broadcast antennae on the island’s northern tip. The military airstrip was lengthened so it could serve as an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. It remains the longest in the Atlantic, supporting the 800 working residents, comprised of a changing coterie of research scientists and a small community of contract workers, like my new friend Nick.

I met Nick on the two day run up from St. Helena. But for a trickle of tourists this was a ferry full of “Saints” like Nick, residents of St. Helena on their way back from Christmas holiday to contract work on Ascension. Nick ran a shop in the neighborhood of Two Boats.

Nick and I sat drinking beer in the open air aboard the RMS St. Helena, out on deck behind the indoor sun lounge. We were escaping the games inside, bingo and the like, meant to entertain passengers grown weary of the monotony of no sight of land.

Nick spoke in bursts, quick half-sentences. He’d make a point and give a knowing nod and a smile, like he’d just heard himself and agreed with what he said. He had things to say about life in the middle of the South Atlantic.

“St. Helena got its problems, y’know? Some people makin’ a fortune. Guy goes off to the Falklands to work, lives almost like a slave. Livin’ in dormitories, cleanin’ up after the Brits. He gets free travel, now, but he makes what, five grand a year, comes home and a house gonna cost him twenty. No way to live.

“And a man ought not have to go away to earn a living anyway. Here I go to Ascension, been there eleven years. Now the good thing: the way you can raise kids. It really is good. I’m bringin’ my son because I have a little shop and my wife, she teaches. No lockin’ doors, keys in the car. 900 people, maybe a thousand, right? Somebody ever takes something, eventually you find it.

“Now they have these clubs, a man doesn’t need money, just sign and have a beer, pay for it on payday. He don’t pay, he can’t leave the island, they take his last paycheck or somethin’.

“Sometimes I say no at my shop. A boy come in, wants a case of beer, if he can’t pay I say no. Otherwise I end up with no beer and no money to buy more. But my father taught me never say no if a man is a couple a pounds short for his kid’s shoes.

“Grinds people down. Some people make too much money, some people really poor, best thing they want is maybe a broken down second hand car. They just never gone anywhere, never seen anything in the world.

“Now I been eleven years on Ascension. I been lucky. Time for me to go back. My father died young. Not young, 62. My mother died in her 50’s. Lucky, my Auntie keeps my business back home. Won’t say I’ll never go back to work on Ascension. You get really big fish there, you know?”

Ascension Island. Hell with the fire put out. Volcanic, 100 kilometers west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the above-water tip of a 3,200 meter high, 60 kilometer wide volcano. Most recent lava flows thought to have been in the last 1,000 years but none since at least 1501. Some eight degrees south of the equator.

Astonishingly young. Its most ancient rocks are no more than a million years old. The slopes descend to the ocean floor, a visitor wrote, like a lorry full of gravel just unloaded, with “the same steepness and regularity, something totally unlikely in a natural mountain.” In the black lava from the most recent eruption NASA tested its LEM, or Lunar Excursion Module.

In ordinary places travelers perform a trivial ritual meant to assure their return, like tossing coins in the Trevi Fountain. On the tip of Chilean South America, you will return to Punta Arenas if you kiss the toe of the Ferdinand Magellan statue.

It’s different on Ascension. The Obsidian Hotel’s island-touting brochure describes a golf course on the road east from Georgetown as the worst on the planet, where “the ‘Greens’ are called ‘browns’ and are made of crushed compacted lava smoothed flat with diesel oil.” Across the road are two canoes stood on end, one third buried, planted in lava.

Logically enough, these boats mark the road to the gaggle of housing called Two Boats, where Nick has his shop. The Ascension travelers’ legend centers on an elaborately painted stone beside the boats. When you are due to leave Ascension you cast paint upon this stone, to assure you need never return.

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The waters off Ascension are home to spotted and bottlenose dolphins, humpback and Gervais’ beaked whales and the big attraction, the green turtle. The green turtles were laying when we arrived, in December. They would then swim across the Atlantic to Brazil, and return in three or four years to these very same beaches to once again mate and lay their eggs, a behavior scientists call ‘natal homing.’

We joined three conservation officers and four or five others one night for a walk down Long Beach in search of nesting turtles. Ten minutes from the middle of town, an all-enveloping darkness. A very hushed affair broken only by the chest-thumping impact of Atlantic rollers, waves that gather unimpeded for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

The lead conservation person slipped away then back, summoning us to shuffle through the sand toward a massive green turtle nesting on the beach. It’s a rare and fascinating sight, common to no one, even a researcher.

Turtles favor Ascension for the absence of predators. No dogs, no monkeys. The Ascension green turtles are the largest in the world, a meter and a half long, weighing as much as 300 kilos. Green Turtles are between 20 and 40 years old when they make the journey for the first time, males and females swimming together to mate.

A turtle will nest as many as ten times at intervals of 10-17 days. Once she has dug a large pit with all of her flippers the turtle digs a chamber with her hind flippers into which she lays around 120 ping-pong sized eggs.

Both laying and hatching happen at night. One hatchling after another pops out on to the sand and races for the sea. They are born all at once. Only by working in numbers can they generate sufficient strength to burrow up through the sand. Once out in the air, their numbers increase the chances some will survive the headlong dash into the surf.

Everything about these turtles is remarkable, but the poet Amit Majmudar reminds us that all animals are “routinely superhuman in one way or another. They outstrip us in this or that perceptual or physical ability, and we think nothing of it.”

Perhaps because we live our lives in conscious thought, we discount the astonishing ways our fellow beings, seemingly unconsciously, navigate the world. Green turtles appear to use their own internal maps of the Atlantic Ocean. Some migratory birds seem to navigate by the pole point, the due north spot in the sky around which the sky rotates.

Ants’ ocelli, light-sensitve organs on their heads, can read the sky even when the sun is obscured by cloud, using patterns of polarized light to orient themselves. The cataglyphis ant uses an internal odometer to keep track of outbound steps to then find its way home.

Other ants seemingly do trigonometry, taking circuitous routes outbound then the most direct route back to their nests, figuring out spatial relationships between the various places they’ve been each day.

Honeybees use polarized light to find the most direct way back to the hive – a beeline. This with brains of fewer than one million neurons and with 20/2000 vision. Also shown to use polarized light: Monarch butterflies, lizards, shrimp, lobsters, cuttlefish, crickets, and rainbow trout as well as numerous migratory birds. And maybe, so did the Norse.

•••••

Human navigation away from Ascension Island in 2010 meant either sailing back to St. Helena Island aboard the RMS St. Helena, which has since been retired, or flying via the airbridge to the United Kingdom or the Falkland Islands. Since 2017 maintenance at the Wideawake airbase has precluded landing of larger aircraft, and the Falklands airbridge is for now rerouted via Cape Verde. Current options for getting to and from Ascension are even fewer than those ten years ago.

We took the airbridge. A testudinologist (studies turtles and tortoises) named Sergio Ghione wrote that at the time of his work on Ascension, the Airbridge was a grim military affair, with the first row or two of seats removed in order to accommodate stretchers. By the time of our visit, at a non-military time, flights staged to and from RAF Brize Norton using charter contractors, like the Scottish company Flyglobespan, which had the contract until it filed for bankruptcy a month before our scheduled flight.

Unsure who might fly in to pick us up, we assembled to leave Ascension in a little chain link holding pen just off the Wideawake Field tarmac, and a brightly-colored Air Tahiti Nui widebody arrived to pick us up, which later set up a jarring visual as the airliner, in its merry Polynesian livery, glided in to touch down at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, in the snow.

•

Here’s an article about the St. Helena part of the cruise.

•••••

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Welcome, thanks for reading the 102nd weekly edition of What Just Happened, another height-of-summer edition. We’ll be brief again this week.

It’s a European birthright to abandon the office in August and that’s a goal Americans should adopt as well. CS&W won’t get in the way. We’re on a relaxed publication schedule for the remaining weeks of summer.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there. If you like what you see please subscribe and you’ll get updates whenever there’s something new here to read.

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•••••

Every other month I write a column for 3 Quarks Daily. I counted them up a couple of columns back and found that seven of my last ten columns there examined Western decline. So it’s time to offer some good faith solutions.

The Trump administration has demonstrated it’s in over its head, but there won’t always be a Trump administration. Here’s what to do next.

For most of the last hundred years, ships sailed the globe without much thought to who ruled the sea. Governments agreed on organizations and protocols for getting along, capital flowed, scientists collaborated and manufacturers built supply chains stretching around the world. The international commons became so ordinary as to disappear from view. That didn’t happen by accident, and it isn’t guaranteed to continue.

To preserve America’s place in all this, its next president must abandon the Trump administration’s goal of hemispheric dominance. The future won’t be secured by controlling more territory, but by building stronger networks of allies across institutions, industries and technologies. America’s next leader must be a builder.

Former Secretary of State George Schultz once compared diplomacy to gardening. Maintaining relationships, he thought, was “one of the most underrated aspects of diplomacy.” He believed that “the way to keep weeds from overwhelming you is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.”

The United States spent the seventy years before Donald Trump pruning away at the public commons, deterring great-power war, developing and enforcing trade rules, keeping the dollar the global currency and the sea lanes open—in short, maintaining the alliances that made its global position possible.

Neglected for the past decade, the public commons is in disrepair. The question for our moment is how future American leadership might restore an international commons that promotes progress based on common interests, and fend off the return of the law of the jungle.

George F. Kennan was chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow in February 1946 when he sent his seminal “Long Telegram” back to Washington. Kennan was an old hand at US-Soviet relations, having served as part of the original American embassy staff in Moscow in 1933. He had become convinced that at heart, the Soviet Union was ideologically driven and expansionist, but also insecure and fundamentally cautious.

He proposed to match Soviet caution by resisting its expansion, consistently and over the long term. That became known as Containment, and constraining Soviet ambition shaped American strategy throughout the Cold War.

But the Cold War ended more than thirty years ago, and much of the world’s institutional framework still operates on Cold War rules. For the United States to lead a renewal will require a new strategy of inclusion, to recruit and ‘contain’ the world’s most innovative economies within an allied ecosystem—a sort of positive Containment.

This is no argument to abandon self-interest for altruism. Rather, it begins with the observation that strategic advantage can emerge from unexpected places.

After the Soviets astonished the world by launching Sputnik in 1957, the United States founded ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later DARPA) to reduce the risk of being surprised by technological breakthroughs like Sputnik in the future.

It was a strictly reactive move, certainly not meant to invent the future. Yet it ultimately spurred development of then undreamed-of life-enhancing benefits—the internet, global positioning and Siri, among many others.

In an era of potentially revolutionary new tech, updating a means to grapple with unknown unknowns and minimize strategic surprises is only prudent. But to get there we have to stop measuring power in twentieth-century terms.

Decisive, forward-looking leadership ultimately will not turn on tariffs, for example. That’s a little short on the vision thing.

FIRST DO NO HARM: The Trump administration proposes hemispheric dominance, an expression of power in which Fortress America rules from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego. Step one in righting the ship of state is abandoning this ‘Donroe Doctrine.’

The diminishing effectiveness of relying solely on military might is playing out around the world, before our eyes. The next administration should augment its military capabilities with a policy of innovation in which containment no longer means confining adversaries inside physical borders.

Hemispheric dominance may suit the unilateralist tendencies of this administration, but it is ill-suited to our strategic moment. In America’s current state of ennui and dysfunction, the last thing it needs is an imperial, chest-beating lunge toward territorial acquisition.

Post-Cold War American triumphalism may have survived the Forever Wars, but American hubris now needs a reality check, and fast. The unipolar moment is long gone and the United States faces a century full of new challenges and rising adversaries.

Today’s contest for strategic leadership plays out across fast technological advances, fabrication of sophisticated electronics, energy flows, undersea pipes and cables, maritime chokepoints, digital platforms and industrial capacity. Only some of these sources of power depend on physical possession of territory. Semiconductors don’t much care about contiguous territory.

America’s future strategic mission is to attract the world’s most innovative economies into a web of international networks built around interoperability, shared research and supply chains shared with trusted partners, underwritten, in large part, by believable security guarantees from Washington.

This will require an adjustment to Americans’ self-image. It will mean embracing a policy of helping partners grow stronger alongside the United States.

Put another way, that means accepting relative American decline. Decades of fierce, bare-knuckled international competition have made such a notion thoroughly foreign, but in the 1940s the United States followed just such a strategy with the Marshall Plan.

Deliberately accelerating the recovery of Germany and Japan, implicitly promoting America’s decline relative to those vanquished countries, resulted not in American weakness, but decades of shared prosperity and the creation of two of the country’s strongest and most enduring alliances.

The mission ahead is to assemble a new group of the world’s most capable partners, both public and private, comprising an array of strategic capabilities, to think about the foundations of future power.

Work should range from basic research and scientific discovery across industrial production, financial architecture, digital infrastructure, collective defense and much more. The world needs new research into institutional design, as postwar creations like NATO, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the GATT lose relevance.

As capabilities increase across an emerging array of partners, new areas of exploration will emerge organically. As new participants create new relationships, each with all the others, the collective value of the group increases sharply, as each new participant exploits new relationships with all the others.

In the last century alliances grew with the addition of like-minded states and their physical territory. Physical space provided buffers, but some of those buffers may effectively be bypassed in future wars. Future alliances are likely to grow differently.

One way they might grow is by using the same network effect that allowed social media to rise so quickly, as each new participant strengthens the network as a whole, such that an effectively networked alliance ultimately attracts new partners, clamoring to join and bring their strengths to the mix. In such a network, every member reinforces the others simultaneously.

Development of the Covid-19 vaccine involved just such a networked alliance, of universities, intellectual property law specialists, regulatory agencies and manufacturing and supply chains that had previously hardly existed. Some players were countries, others private business. The strength of the project lay less with any one contributor than in the density of the resulting network.

Such future cross-border collaboration won’t be so much a new strategy as a recalibration of national strengths, and a new weaving together of capabilities across public and private spheres. It’s an accelerated integration of the best capabilities of partners, both governmental and corporate, that stands to succeed less by acquisition of territory than by creating denser networks of cooperation among trusted partners.

With democratic systems under strain today, those who prefer democracy to autocracy acutely need such a broad alliance of states and private entities to work together. Happily, that’s already happening.

The Nordic countries aren’t waiting for a temporarily hostile Washington to solve every problem in the Baltic. (Read more here about the lattice of competencies growing in Nordic Europe right now in response to American hostility to NATO.)

No longer as stunned by a suddenly reluctant America, Europe now develops its own defense industries. South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem is sharing technology with Poland to build Black Panther battle tanks in Gliwice.

Australia will use a Japanese design from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for its next-generation frigate fleet, replacing the standard Japanese anti-ship missiles with naval strike missiles supplied by the Norwegian defense company Kongsberg.

American companies design blueprints for the world’s most intelligent computer processors. ASML, in the Netherlands, builds the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines used to print the smallest features on advanced microchips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company uses those machines to manufacture the chips themselves. No one country controls the entire process in any of these examples, and the network benefits as a whole.

A model like this can apply to any number of exciting propositions for the future: Solid state electrical transformers. Long-duration battery storage of energy generated by intermittent renewable power sources like wind turbines. Industrial biotech, in which organisms are engineered to produce chemicals and medicines.

The European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and the US have complementary strengths in the area of next generation geothermal systems, which seek to provide always-on carbon-free electricity. Or consider the advancements a collaborative effort might make in space services, things like removal of orbital debris or development of in-space manufacturing.

These are the kinds of efforts that positioned a confident post-World War II America as a world leader, and that could become a twenty-first century expression of a new alliance built to do far more than protect trade routes. It could create and lead a reinvigorated new, collaborative international commons.

•••••

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A WORD ABOUT HOW AMERICA THINKS: This kind of collaboration doesn’t diminish American influence. To the contrary, it reduces the burden the country must carry.

But the United States will need the ability to play well with others, a skill it has lost since the unipolar moment. It must be willing to allow networks to emerge instead of insisting on designing systems and retaining control. Counterintuitively, in doing so, the United States grows relatively stronger while simultaneously becoming less central.

America’s new role must reach beyond providing military security to include leadership and maintenance of this new network. Beyond being the military provider of last resort, America’s contribution, in former Secretary of State Shultz’s metaphor, is to serve as gardener: cultivating relationships, doing the maintenance and tending the whole enterprise.

Done right, the network as a whole, as well as its individual geographic entities, acquires agency. In the process, capability is deliberately distributed for the benefit of all.

When the international commons has functioned smoothly, the secret has been keeping friction low. But today, friction in international affairs is on the rise. Today’s America, jaded by ineffectual forever wars and debilitating political dysfunction, is of a mind to tear things down.

The overuse of sanctions as coercion, for example, (well described in Edward Fishman’s book Chokepoints) illustrates a harmful tendency toward punishment as a first option. Too much of America’s strategic prescription has become negative: stop this, deter that, punish the other.

This is no strategy for the future. New American leadership must clear a path allies can travel together.

•••••

George Kennan and the other architects of Soviet Containment were informed by three of the last century’s important geostrategic thinkers, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford J. Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Mahan, writing first, argued that command of the seas translated into national power.

Next, Mackinder proposed that whoever controlled the Heartland (his term, essentially the interior of Eurasia), would be unbeatable. Elaborating on Mackinder, Spykman thought control of what he called the Rimland (the area that surrounds Eurasia and extends beyond), was the key to world domination.

Kennan, as an inhabitant of that Rimland, developed his theory of Containment to contain the Soviets in Eurasia.

All these twentieth-century theories were fundamentally rooted in territorial control. Geography remains essential today, but it is now only one source of national power.

The international commons is fraying just as the world enters the most consequential tech revolution we’ll ever see. At such a moment, democracy needs an advocate.

But the same tech that’s changing our world is accelerating disinformation, political fragmentation and institutional distrust, putting democracy on the defensive just at the moment it sorely needs confidence.

Staking out a hemispheric sphere of influence just won’t do. Reclaiming the international commons will require a new agenda-setting alliance that seizes the world’s attention, providing a vibrant new venue for invention, networked and distributed across countries, companies and competencies.

America’s historic strength has been its ability to bring together people, ideas and institutions on a scale no other nation could match. No other country is as well placed to reach beyond geographic boundaries and create conditions in which the world’s most advanced technological ecosystem can thrive.

America’s challenge has grown beyond defending the twentieth century order. Its challenge, its strategic necessity, is to inspire and then harness the collective ambitions of the next one. America built the postwar commons. It can build its successor.

•••••

Further reading:

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The influence of sea power upon history, 1660-1783.

Halford J. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History.

Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power.

•••••

That’s it for now. Enjoy the weekend and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for your time.

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Cheers,

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Welcome, thanks for reading the 102nd weekly edition of What Just Happened, another height-of-summer edition. We’ll be brief again this week.

Some time ago the fashion industry, to accommodate the baby boomer generation as it bulges its way demographically and otherwise through the population, introduced the option of the ‘relaxed’ fit. Relaxed is an appropriate term here, too.

We’re on a relaxed publication schedule for the remaining weeks of summer. It’s a European birthright to abandon the office in August and it’s a goal Americans should adopt as well. CS&W won’t get in the way.

College football starts six weeks from now, the European soccer leagues a week or so before that. Labor Day in the US heralds the return with a vengeance of electoral politics, with the midterm elections then to follow in just eight short weeks. We’ll be busy again soon enough. So for the next few weeks, let’s just chill.

Lately I’ve been reading about how formative the 1990s were for Russians today (as one does), and that caused me to come across a column I wrote less than a month before Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began. It brought back details about the run-up to war that I’d forgotten about.

For example, while we were playing the ‘will-they-or-won’t-they-attack’ game, Russia brought stocks of real blood to the front lines of what they’d said was a war game. I thought we might revisit that column today.

Try to remember our innocence and concern on January 31st, 2022, the day this column was published on 3 Quarks Daily.

After that, we’ll close this week with some gratuitous, smart-assed free media advice.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

Originally published January 31st, 2022:

Ukraine is surrounded by 100,000-plus miserable, freezing, foot-stamping Russian soldiers who are Chekov’s gun on the table in Act One of our new post-Cold War epic. We’ve moved from “surely he wouldn’t?” to “he’s really going to, isn’t he?” It’s the moment when Wile E. Coyote has run off the cliff but not yet begun to fall.

Two years ago Covid crowded out every thing but the most immediate, every body but family. Shocked by the viral invader’s audacity, we scrambled around in a new, unfamiliar world. Everything was frightening. We had precious little time to reflect.

Now comes the malign intent of a real-life invader. Unlike Covid, Ukraine isn’t exactly appearing out of nowhere. Russia has been moving toward military aggression for months. The US president has had time to commit high profile gaffes about any U.S. response. Russian landing craft have moved clear around Europe from the Baltic Sea to threaten Ukraine in the Black Sea. We’ve had ample opportunity to reflect.

So far the west has performed a pretty nifty feat – defying physics. Specifically Newton’s third law, the one about for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Only now, at last, comes a grudging rumble from the big American reaction machine.

If a Quisling-in-waiting sleeps in Russkiy Mir tonight, if Russia installs a Minsk-style puppet in Kyiv, if Russian military hardware further enters and remains in Ukraine, it will be the design of a violent nationalist leader. Threatening sanctions is the response of a technocrat, but at least it’s a response.

Everybody is playing the Vladimir Putin ‘will he or won’t he’ parlor game and opinion is genuinely divided. Those who think this is all elaborate Russian respect-seeking may be right, but I’m skeptical, and here’s why. Watching battle gear arriving from as far away as Khabarovsk (on the Amur River border with China), Ulan Ude (east of Lake Baikal) and Primorski Krai (which is eight time zones from Kyiv and borders North Korea), and then a perfectly timed and well scripted further deployment across Belarus for ‘exercises’ involving 200 trains moving hardware day and night, persuades me that going to all this trouble is more than just saber rattling. If all this is just standing shaking a fist and shouting stay off of my lawn, what’s at stake could turn out to be one mighty costly lawn.

Russia has been moving hardware for weeks. Those hoping this is all a great feint say what’s lacking, if they really mean t0 do it, is field hospitals. During a pandemic, even an autocrat may find it hard to pull medical personnel from civilian hospitals for a training exercise, they say. But over the weekend it was widely reported that the military buildup now includes “supplies of blood along with other medical materials that would allow it to treat casualties.” That sounds real.

After weighing Talleyrand’s advice to Napolean that “My Lord, you can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them,” the U.S. president, who has plenty of bayonets, having taken his precious time surveying his options, has begun to fulfill the basic Leader of the West job description, maintaining dialogue, mustering allies, bolstering defenses, polishing strategies.

(And oh lordy don’t you know Jens Stoltenberg is the most relieved man in the house. The NATO chief’s number one mission has to be, don’t be the hapless Nordic fellow who lost Europe. And the most relieved woman must be Ursula von der Layen, the face of the thoroughly sidelined E.U., who as German Defense Minister never met a crisis she couldn’t evade.)

Germany’s new coalition has yet to declare quite how much of a Putinversteher it wants to be, but the answer looks like pretty much. Sympathy is due to new Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, whose government is only fifty days old. His SDP party’s greatest hit is ‘Ostpolitik,’ working with Russia, after all.

Signs are not good. Last week von der Layen’s successor, the new German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht, declared that Germany “will deliver 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, as a very clear signal, we stand by your side.” As full of élan and camaraderie as it may have looked on the minister’s keyboard, Ms. Lambrecht’s tweet hasn’t exactly been taken as a token of undying solidarity. Yet even that was too much for some German politicians:

Translated, that’s roughly “Delivering 5,000 safety helmets to Ukraine is a bad sign. Germany must play the role of mediator and must not side with one another in a biased manner. The federal government is wandering around aimlessly in terms of foreign policy – stop this saber-rattling!”

With chalk poised above a blank slate, Scholz’s government has so far squandered the opportunity to set the table for its leadership role in a 2020s Europe. The UK disdainfully shook its metaphorical head and simply flew around Germany to deliver anti-tank weapons to Kyiv rather than be held up by paperwork.

•••••

Memories of the Soviet Union are aging but they’re not gone yet. Americans of a certain age will remember civil defense markings on the AM radios in their cars. In the event of, say, a Cuban missile crisis, children would duck and cover and drivers would tune to the triangle on their car radio for guidance. When my wife and I spend summers in Finland, we still hear the civil defense test sirens, sounded at noon on the first Monday of every month.

Civil preparedness is mostly a memory for many of us. But consider lived experience in the new NATO Baltic states. Because Estonia, Latvia and Lithuana were Soviet republics into the 1990s, much of the population speaks Russian and watches Russian TV.

Latvian journalist Kristaps Andrejsons says while “clowns such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and a well-known figure in Russia’s ‘controlled opposition’ who has called for the immediate bombing of Kyiv—might be ignored in the Western media, in the Baltics, he and people like him are watched closely.” In the same way that even Donald Trump finds supporters, Russia finds support in the Baltics, because if you live in the Baltics, the threat of war is already in your house.

Consider lived experience in Ukraine right now. American former soldier and Kyiv resident Nolan Peterson writes:

“If an attack is imminent, Kyiv’s air raid sirens will alert residents to tune in to emergency service announcements. Cars equipped with loudspeakers will also patrol the streets to announce important information.

“The Kyiv City Council has posted an interactive online map, which shows the locations of the roughly 5,000 official locations where residents can shelter from a military attack.

“(For example) From ground level, a nondescript metal door opens into a staircase that descends multiple stories underground. The shelter has a special air ventilation room (originally intended to protect against radioactive fallout) and is connected to the city’s water main…. Daily deliveries of food and medical supplies would sustain occupants in the event of a drawn-out Russian bombardment or siege.

“Known as dual-use facilities, the remaining 4,500 shelters include basements, underground parking lots and passageways, as well as Kyiv’s 47 metro stations.

“Should Russian forces target Kyiv … city officials will order a mass evacuation. To that end, a citywide evacuation commission has already been established, as well as regional evacuation commissions in each of Kyiv’s administrative districts.

“Each citizen should prepare an “emergency suitcase” ahead of time…. This should be a backpack with a capacity of at least 25 liters, a little more than 6.5 gallons, containing ‘clothing, hygiene items, medicines, tools, personal protective equipment, and food.’ The service also recommends carrying important documents and cash in the backpack.”

•••••

Russia is forcing a conversation the US doesn’t want to have, at least not right now and not on Russia’s terms. If Russia strikes further into Ukraine, one way or another, as with Covid, the world will change. The first day of renewed conflict will be a fateful, life-changing day for entire nations. Its effects will last the rest of many peoples’ lives. When we look back here from two years on, today may look less complicated, even quaint. I invite you to pause and enjoy the good old days.

Should conflict come, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania could, like Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, become frontline border states. Russian malign intent will have to be be assumed.

Russian troops already occupy Moldova’s border with Ukraine in a region called Transnistria. Depending on Russian intent, Moldova may face existential questions, but in any case it will acquire a newly threatening neighbor. Any military move in Transnistria will be meant to intimidate not only Moldova but neighboring NATO member Romania as well.

A fundamental geopolitical realignment is hurtling our way that won’t simmer down for years. By spring, tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees – or more – could be storming the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, and how can those countries, how could they hold them back? Across those borders Russia, or it’s newly installed Ukrainian puppet, will try to stare down four new NATO neighbors.

Current NATO borders in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Norway will be reinforced, and depending on the depth of the next couple of months’ ill will, Finland’s Russian border may be too. With sudden new face-to-face NATO/Russia exposure, all sides will want substantial, fortified borders. Each country will surely want its own sovereign border backed by its own conventional forces. Here come concrete barriers, anti-vehicle trenches, mesh fencing, electronics, guard towers, barbed wire, electronic and other defenses. Suddenly, it’s a good bet that Schengen’s best days are behind it.

Once we’ve had time enough to consider the longer term, we may find ourselves in a new, raw standoff across conflict-embittered battlefields. Russia v NATO eye-to-eye across borders bristling with weapons and evil intent will be a sight to see. Once again.

Doomsday warnings are cheap for hand-wringing punditry, that’s true. But if some of this stuff does come to pass, world changing ramifications follow. As Sweden’s FM Ann Linde says, “it can still go completely to hell.”

As Covid darkness drew across the world in the early weeks of 2020, I thought, ‘remember this, hold on to this moment, the way things are right now, how good you have it, in case this thing gets out of hand.’

The last two years haven’t been years to love. But now I wonder if we might stop to appreciate even early 2022 the same way. Here we may be, in the twilight moments just before the great mid-twenty-twenties European realignment. Remember these fleeting good old days, while our grasping at the remnants of democracy is not quite yet a wry memory.

•

There are many more photos from prewar Ukraine on my photo site, EarthPhotos.com. And to keep up with the war as it continues, you may find my list of experts on the war useful. It’s a constantly updated compilation of X posts from around 250 experts, gov't officials, media in neighboring countries, regional diplomats, academics, OSINT sources and others. The war has faded from American front pages but it’s still a lived daily reality in Ukraine.

•••••

FREE MEDIA ADVICE: When you’re being asked to share your wisdom on a podcast, and who’s not these days, never use any of the various permutations of “in many ways,” unless you are prepared to quickly list at least three of the many ways. It’s a habit, it’s a cliché and it’s lazy. It has no meaning.

It seems to be intended to paint the user as a deep thinker who has considered the topic from many angles. Instead, it’s meaningless filler, fast climbing the chart of hackneyed phrases.

Like the thoroughly irritating exhortation, “Look…” with which all cable TV commentors begins their sentences, it’s a crutch that shows the user is a pack member instead of a leader.

Here’s another bit of free advice: drop the word “absolutely” from your vocabulary. Completely. Forever. It demonstrates you may not consider nuance. Your opinion is absolute, unchanging as Mt. Rushmore (let’s hope). It’s way overused and it cheapens your response like inflation cheapens your spending power.

“Susan, it looks like your shoe’s untied."

“Absolutely!”

One more: there is no requirement that the first and/or last words out of any panel member’s mouth in every discussion must be smarmy. You are not required to say the words “thank you for having me” just because everybody else does. Again, pack member.

If your host welcomes you to the discussion, consider the perfectly acceptable brevity of “thank you,” or, if you’re eager to exhibit your grace, maybe try a crisp, brief variation on "my pleasure.”

•••••

That’s it for now. Enjoy the weekend and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for your time.

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Welcome, thanks for reading the 101st weekly edition of What Just Happened, the height of summer edition. Just a couple of items today.

First I want to follow up on a story from last week that talked about next spring’s French presidential elections. Then (these words may have never before been written) a joyous and uplifting story about Nigel Farage.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

FRANCE: Last week I presented a scorecard of possible contenders in next spring’s French presidential elections. There have been developments.

Very briefly, France will vote next April 18th, with a likely second round in May, to select the successor to Emmanuel Macron, who is term limited. The candidates of the far left and far right are set, subject to possible future court rulings on the far right. Candidate selection for the rest of the field is the current battleground.

At the end of last week the French Socialist Party (PS), which shares the non-radical left with smaller parties, held a referendum asking members whether to approve holding a presidential primary to choose a common candidate, and the PS membership endorsed the idea.

The party’s leader, Olivier Faure, preferred an open primary in which voters sympathetic to the broader left could participate, not just PS members, and that was rejected. The far left leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ruled out participating in the primary in advance, and Faure’s proposal was an attempt to unite the non-Mélenchon, social-democratic left under one banner.

The results demonstrated that although PS members support the broad idea of unity, they wanted the party to retain control of who the party puts up as their nominee, rather than share the ultimate choice of a candidate with the wider centre-left.

In the end, the whole exercise was mostly about a politician we talked about last week, Raphaël Glucksmann, who is not a PS member. To preserve his freedom of action, up to now, Glucksmann has resisted participation in the proposed primary.

He heads a party called Place Publique, which, as happens in France (see Mélenchon and his La France Insoumise and Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National), is closely identified with an individual candidate … Raphaël Glucksmann.

In the interest of not splitting the vote on the non-Mélenchon left, Faure and his Socialists would like to run under a common banner with Glucksmann’s Place Publique.

Both Faure and Glucksmann recognize the obvious danger of splitting the vote by fielding separate candidacies. But so far Glucksmann has been wary of committing to a PS-designed process.

But this week Glucksmann’s party had warm words for the Socialists. Note that Glucksmann had Place Publique, and not himself personally, welcome the process and praise “the hand extended by Socialist members.” But he has yet to join in. Negotiations will ensue.

If voters on the left reject a Socialist candidate in favor of Glucksmann, it looks like PS pols want to offer him their party’s heft while retaining its levers of power as a way for the PS to stay relevant. It’s also true that Glucksmann’s Place Publique likely couldn’t win without the PS machine. So there’s a lot to talk about.

At bottom, all this summertime jostling is about whether the French Socialist Party, badly diminished from its glory days, can once again lead the French centre-left.

But the referendum has raised other questions. The party has created the expectation that they’ll produce their presidential candidate through an October primary. Should negotiations between the Socialist Party and Raphaël Glucksmann break down, who will be the PS candidate?

Chances are, party leaders hope to avoid that question entirely through an alliance with Glucksmann.

The candidates of the radical left and far right have already set their campaigns, and most experts seem to think Marine Le Pen, representing the far right, will be one of the top two candidates and make it into the second round.

If that’s right, to join her in the second round, whoever ultimately represents the center left, unified or otherwise, will need more first round votes than everybody else. But not so fast.

There’s another remaining fight—to pick the candidate of the centre and center right. For the moment, polling shows former prime minister (and current mayor of Le Havre) Édouard Philippe as the strongest candidate in that bloc. When we come back to French politics we’ll look at that field of candidates.

THE UNITED KINGDOM: It’s high noon for Nigel Farage. The Reform Party leader has resigned his parliamentary seat in Clacton-on-Sea, a coastal constituency north of the Thames in Essex. It’s a stunt in which he first displayed fake high dudgeon, then asked his constituency to endorse his receiving questionable personal gifts of millions of pounds, all while maintaining that he’s a man of the people.

He resigned to set up a by-election his resignation caused, then said he would stand in the by-election so the people could choose between him and his questionable personal gifts of millions of pounds, and the despicable politics of accountability.

He expected he would then stand shoulder to shoulder with evil ‘establishment’ politicians, giving him a month of self-righteous headlines, at the end of which the people of Clacton would ask him back into office, to return to his seat.

About those gifts: there was a £5 million gift from a British cryptocurrency investor and businessman who lives in Thailand. There was a different gift of personal security and staff for Farage’s social media operation and use of a five-story Georgian townhouse near Buckingham Palace from “Posh” George Cottrell, a longtime Farage associate who served a prison sentence in the United States for wire fraud, and there was a separate donation of approximately £500,000 to Farage’s party by Fiona Cottrell, Posh George’s mother. The ‘establishment’ had the temerity to suggest some of that might be questionable.

But then the most wonderful thing happened. All of Farage’s presumed opponents— all the big British political parties—declined to stand candidates against him, save one.

Count Binface.

Count Binface is a comedian named Jon Harvey, who has stood stood against former PM Boris Johnson, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Prime Minister-in-waiting (to become PM next Monday) Andy Burnham, among others. He advocates for things like making the universe metric and capping the price of a type of ice cream cones sold from ice cream trucks trucks at under a pound.

In order for Nigel Farage to perform his fit of theatrical self-righteous posing, will now have to share a stage—or avoid—a man wearing a trash bin on his head.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves observed that "If [Farage] wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won't stop him."

And who knows? Maybe Binface wins; British voters can take—and deliver—a joke. In 2016 a British environmental organization ran an online poll to let the public name its new research vessel. The winning suggestion, with 124,109 votes, more than three times the runner-up, was “Boaty McBoatface.”

•••••

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Short week this week and we’ll be on a shorter summer schedule for the next few weeks. Enjoy the weekend and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for your time. Let me know what you think.

Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future of intelligent content is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year.

Cheers,

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Welcome, thanks for reading today’s 100th edition of What Just Happened. This week, developments in the French presidential election campaign, the Ankara NATO summit has come and gone without calamity, Putin’s yacht finds the water too hot in the Baltic, and a book recommendation.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

FRANCE: Next year’s presidential election dates are now set. First round voting is April 18th next year, with a runoff on May 2nd. And so begins a monumental campaign. We’re going to spend a lot of time on this election in the coming months because its outcome could be transformative not just for the Fifth Republic, but for all of Europe.

The French president is limited to two terms, so Emmanuel Macron, first elected in 2017, has timed out of the competition. With a scant nine months to go, here’s the state of the emerging field:

SHE RUNS: The poll-leading far right National Rally party’s candidate became known this week. The Cour d’appel de Paris affirmed on Tuesday that the party’s long dominant figure, Marine Le Pen, was guilty of embezzling more than a €1,000,000 of the European Parliament’s money. More important to Le Pen’s electoral prospects, though, was how the court changed her sentence.

The prosecution wanted a €100,000 fine, a five year ban on her standing for election, four years imprisonment, but three of them suspended and the other served at home wearing an electronic monitor, which would have precluded her actively campaigning.

Instead, as the AP put it, the appeals court “cleared the way for Le Pen by shortening a ban handed down by a court last year that kept her from seeking public office for five years.”

On Tuesday the court affirmed that she must wear an ankle bracelet, which Le Pen had previously said would make campaigning impossible. But it cut the original sentence “to 45 months, with two-thirds of it suspended. Le Pen has already served 15 months of the ban, meaning that the potential obstacle is now removed,” says the AP.

Before the day was out, Le Pen demonstrated, in case there was any doubt, that National Rally is fundamentally a family business (founded by her father). She promptly assumed the mantle of declared candidate, sending her understudy, thirty year old MEP Jordan Bardella, off to learn how to be a prime minister.

As to the ankle bracelet, “Le Pen said she will appeal the ruling to France’s highest court and that the process will suspend the sentence that she be electronically monitored for a year. ‘I will therefore campaign without an electronic bracelet,’ she said.”

While her appeal is heard, Le Pen’s sentence will be put on hold. But there’s a wrinkle:

Le Monde reckons that the Cour de Cassation (the high court) would be able to rule at the start of next year, and “if the decision goes against her and requires her to wear an electronic tag, Le Pen could enter into an arm wrestle with the judiciary, arguing that she has been campaigning for several months and that the election is imminent.”

Whatever happens in court, Ms. Le Pen may now expect nine months of attacks on her integrity. The Socialist MP Boris Vallaud said on Wednesday, for example, “Marine Le Pen is a delinquent,” and former Prime Minster Gabriel Attal claimed that, after just one day, “Her candidacy is hanging by a legal thread.”

The campaign will be Le Pen’s fourth run and, if polls are to be believed, her best shot yet at the presidency. Le Pen joins a field crowded in the center but with dominant personalities at either extreme. Her radical left counterpart is Jean Luc Mélenchon, who leads the party he founded, La France Insoumise. (’Insoumise’ carries the sense of ‘unbowed,’ most literally, ‘unsubmissive.’)

While Mélenchon may be the most polarizing politician in France, he commands a level of personal loyalty not found anywhere else in French politics. His supporters, like Donald Trump’s, tend to identify with him personally before his party.

Mélenchon advocates unlikely but people-pleasing notions like lowering the retirement age to 60 (Le Pen says 62) and raising the minimum wage to €1700 a month. In polls, he usually commands just shy of 20 percent of the vote.

While the candidates on the political extremes may be settled, political turf fights loom just about everywhere else, even as election day fast approaches. Here’s a very brief cheat sheet:

Both the political left and right come in essentially two flavors: moderate and broadly pro-European, or radical and broadly Euro-skeptic.

The non-radical left is comprised of the Socialists (the loyal opposition during the Gaullists’ glory years), the Greens, the smaller Place Publique and a few smaller groups. The challenge for the left is avoiding fragmentation.

The Socialists don’t know what to do. They can’t decide how much footsie to play with Mélenchon, and they’ve yet to decide on a single candidate to represent the party.

Some on the left propose a ‘primary of the willing’ in October to produce a united left candidate and stop fragmentation. So on Thursday, July 9th, Socialist Party members were voting to decide whether to participate.

Mélenchon is out; he’ll go his own way. The Greens, with more to gain as a smaller party, are all in on the idea. But Socialist leaders are in open conflict over whether to hold a primary.

Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure is a ‘yes’ on his party’s participation in the referendum. He favors maintaining a broad left-wing coalition, and has previously positioned the party alongside La France Insoumise in his idea of that broad left-wing coalition. As the Socialists’s First Secretary, a defeat on the referendum proposal would be a blow to his presumed candidacy to run as the Socialist nominee.

Other notable Socialist Party figures, among them Karim Bouamrane, mayor of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, a commune between Montmartre and Saint-Denis just north of Paris, and Boris Vallaud, who held an economic post during François Hollande’s Presidency, want to stay away from Mélanchon’s radical left entirely.

Then there’s Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European parliament who was already well known as a journalist, essayist, and documentary filmmaker before politics. He leads the center-left party Place Publique which, in the same way that La France Insoumise serves Mélenchon, is Gluksmann’s personal vehicle.

Though it was only established in 2018, Place Publique maintains polling support broadly equal to the leading center-right candidates, and better polling numbers than leading Socialist candidates. That’s notable because Place Publique is, compared to the Socialists, tiny.

Glucksmann has been coy about any formal alliance with the Socialists, and says he won’t participate in a primary. He maintains that his polling demonstrates more electoral appeal than the Socialists in spite of their much larger party.

Still, he would ultimately need their superior apparatus to mount any convincing big league, national campaign. So the outcome of this week’s Socialist Party referendum is important to Glucksmann, too.

Glucksmann may not end up this year’s big new phenomenon, but he’s squarely in the middle of where the game on the left is being played. If his numbers hold up, a substantial number of Party Socialist members might be secretly happy to get behind him as the foremost center-left candidate.

One other note about the Socialists: former president Francois Hollande, who was run out of politics entirely by his historic unpopularity in 2017, is now polling well. Hollande, the president before Emmanuel Macron’s election, has again become an MP and appears to be rehabilitating himself. Though he’s not a declared candidate, in a poll for the business newspaper Les Echos, Hollande was billed as “the favorite personality of left-wing voters.”

As with the center left, the non-radical right is also in a bit of a muddle. The challenge here, too, is diluting the vote by fielding too many candidates.

Gabriel Attal, from President Macron’s Renaissance party, and Édouard Philippe, who founded his own party, Horizons, in 2021, are the most prominent rivals for now. Both are former prime ministers, both pro-European, and it feels like media is treating Philippe as the moderate camp’s standard bearer.

Attal, born in 1989, bills himself as the candidate of generational change. France’s youngest ever prime minister served in that office for nine months in 2024. He’s an MP, head of the Renaissance Party and polished on TV.

Phillipe, Macron’s first prime minister, presents himself as experienced, competent—a safe pair of hands. Then there’s Bruno Retailleau, representing the Gaullist Les Républicains, the party of DeGaulle, Pompidou, Chirac and Sarkozy.

The grand old conservative party, which dominated French politics for decades, is a shadow of its glory days, and Retailleau, who draws ten or twelve percent in polls, feels the heat from both political directions—from the more moderate Phillipe and the farther right Bardella/Le Pen. Les Républicains are fighting as much to reestablish themselves as players as to win the presidency.

It’s ironic. Since the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, in which France played a pivotal role, the words ‘as goes France, so goes Europe’ have perhaps never been uttered. Economically, Germany has been larger. London is Europe’s financial powerhouse and Brussels is the center of continental governance.

But there are reasons to think this election could be unusually consequential for Europe. A center-left or center-right win could cement existing EU integration, support for Ukraine, and Franco-German cooperation, at least for now.

If Marine Le Pen takes the presidency, France would likely resurrect Viktor Orbán role of obstructing common policies from within. We’ll be talking much more about these elections.

(Note: I’m an American who lives four thousand miles away. My observations surely lack nuance, and some things I’m missing could be vital. If I need setting straight, please do it.)

•••••

NATO: The yearly summits like the one this week in Türkiye have become excruciating for everybody concerned. Europeans enter and leave in a defensive crouch, Mette Frederiksen has to defend Denmark’s territorial integrity, Mark Rutte tries to design the shortest event with the briefest agenda he can get away with, to minimize what could go wrong. And at this one, Donald Trump even had to leave his prized new Qatari gift 747 behind.

In spite of all that, a few deals were agreed and notable announcements made.

TÜRKIYE: The host country finally got its F-35 aircraft. Sort of.

Türkiye signed a purchase order for Russian S-400 Triumph air-defense systems during Donald Trump’s first administration in 2017, worrying the defense establishment and the Congress.

The F-35 is a stealth fighter, and American officials rightly feared that operating Russian S-400 and F-35s in proximity to Russian S-400 technical support staff would allow Moscow to get hold of F-35 proprietary secrets.

So the first Trump administration removed Türkiye from the F-35 program, and Congress mandated sanctions that the Biden administration never tried to reverse.

Now, though Trump II is willing to make the sale, members of both parties in Congress say they still oppose it unless Türkiye no longer possesses the S-400 system. Also, in Ankara this week, while sounding like F-35 sales were a done deal, Trump happened to mention in passing that he hadn’t made up his mind.

Still, under current defense policy, that’s progress.

UKRAINE: The man with no cards finally got his Patriot air defense missiles. Sort of. On Wednesday in Ankara, Trump said the U.S. will give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot interceptor missiles.

Based on Ukraine’s faltering ability to intercept Russian ballistic missiles over Kyiv, it looks like Ukraine is out of stock. Since the US’s own supply is low, too, the obvious solution is to license Kyiv to make its own Patriots in Ukraine.

There are obvious questions, like how much technology transfer the US will allow, and what the companies that currently make the missiles in the US, Lockheed and RTX (Raytheon) might have to say. We don’t know if production will even work in Ukraine—production lines may be too vulnerable to Russian attack.

Still, in the Trump administration, that’s progress.

CANADA: Prime Minister Mark Carney continued to diversify Ottawa’s defense procurement away from the United States, using the NATO summit to announce the choice of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems—in a joint venture with Norway—to build twelve new Type 212CD submarines, over a South Korean bid.

When it happens (the contract’s not signed) it will be Canada’s biggest defense procurement in history, and it continues Canada’s closer integration with the European defense industry.

South Korea’s bid came from a company called Hanwha Ocean, offering faster delivery of attack submarines already in production—in fact, already in service. But given Carney’s European orientation, his government’s choice of Germany and Norway was probably never in doubt.

ALBANIA: The collective leadership of the NATO alliance left one last bit of business dangling. Granted, it’s fair to say that Ankara, with due respect, is on precious few shortlists for its high life and fine dining.

Perhaps everyone was just relieved the alliance hadn’t fallen apart. Whatever it was, when the leaders bolted for their planes they neglected to announce details for the next NATO summit.

There’s no formal rotation or bidding process for hosting these summits, and nothing says they must be held annually, but in a show of shoulder to shoulder solidarity, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the usual scheme has been that the following year’s summit is announced before the end of the current one.

So the 2022 Madrid Summit declaration announced the 2023 meeting in Lithuania. The 2023 Vilnius summit tapped Washington for 2024, the Washington summit named The Hague for 2025 and the Hague confirmed Ankara for 2026. But at the close of business on Wednesday, no country was named as next year’s host.

It’s a little odd. I like the notion that all the leaders secretly met in the cloak room and Wednesday morning and agreed to skip the 2027 summit entirely if nobody else noticed. But that’s unlikely.

In fact, Albania had already been announced as host at the summit last year in The Hague, where the summit declaration explicitly stated that “We look forward to our next meeting in Türkiye in 2026 followed by a meeting in Albania.”

Since that communiqué didn’t explicitly say “the 2027 leader’s summit” would be held in Tirana, only “a meeting,” maybe Albania has been downgraded to a foreign minister’s meeting instead of the summit.

Reuters puts all this down to US reluctance due to Albania’s “low defence spending.” Then there’s the current kerfluffle over the Trump organization’s proposed Albanian resort.

Personally, I suspect some kind of Machiavellian Trump clan property development maneuvering is a more likely reason than Albanian defense spending. Or maybe, in their haste to leave all things NATO behind, everybody just forgot.

POTEMKIN LIVES: Here’s an observation, from the Turkey: Lost in Translation substack, without comment or editing:

One of the main controversies was the installation of large panels along the airport route, blocking views of informal settlements on Ankara’s outskirts. These neighborhoods are home to lower-income communities, including Roma and Kurdish residents, as well as growing populations of Syrian and Afghan refugees and irregular migrants from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Critics argued that, rather than fighting poverty, the Erdoğan government was simply trying to conceal it from NATO leaders and foreign delegations visiting Ankara.

•••••

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HEADING NORTH: Quick, name the world leader whose personal yacht gets an anti-submarine escort, even when he’s not onboard.

From the Barents Observer this week:

“The luxury yacht Kosatka left the Baltic Sea last week and sailed north along the Norwegian coast under the escort of the anti-submarine destroyer Severomorsk and the special patrol vessel Voevoda.”

Kyiv’s increasingly frequent drone attacks on and around St. Petersburg (including again on Monday), may be making the Baltic Sea too hot to store Vladimir Putin’s personal £100m superyacht.

Ending an absence that started six months after Russia’s war on Ukraine began, Putin’s yacht was identified on June 29th underway in the Skagerrak, north of Denmark. The ship headed north across the North Sea along the Norwegian coast, shadowed by NATO. Summering in Svalbard, anyone?

•••••

UKRAINE: Bojan Pancevski’s The Nord Stream Conspiracy gives a blow-by-blow account of how six people on a chartered yacht with diving equipment and explosives managed the destruction of the world’s longest undersea natural gas pipeline system, one of the most expensive energy infrastructure projects ever built.

That 2022 cloak and dagger operation below the Baltic Sea presages the way conflict has since been turned upside down - by Ukraine’s subsequent development of new drone tech and indeed, by overmatched Iran’s holding off the American military in 2026.

It’s suddenly the age of the little guy. Or, as Soviet-born British historian Sergey Radchenko puts it, “What did it take in the end to blow up this piece of highly sophisticated undersea infrastructure that cost billions of dollars to build? A rented boat, a set of improvised bombs, and a team of dare-devil civilian divers who were willing to put their lives on the line to help their embattled country.”

The Nord Stream Conspiracy has the added benefit of qualifying as a beach read; it’s a page turning adventure thriller that happens to be true. “Must read” is clichéd publishing hype, but in this case, it’s true. A “Must read” is what The Nord Stream Conspiracy is.

•••••

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Welcome, and happy 250th birthday to the United States of America.

Here in the US, Russia’s war on Ukraine has faded into the media background. But it rumbles on, with another huge Russian ballistic missile strike on Kyiv just yesterday. Today let’s catch up a little bit, with a good look at Russia’s reluctant ally Belarus.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

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•••••

BELARUS: A couple of weeks ago something unexpected happened: Kyiv threatened to widen Russia’s war on Ukraine by bombing Russian installations in Belarus. Days later the Belarusian leader promptly set out to meet with the leaders of Russia and China.

Did he seek Putin’s advice? Was he summoned? What happened in Beijing? Let’s figure it out.

First a little background: Belarus and Russia became independent countries at the same time, in December 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met at a government hunting lodge in one of Europe’s few remaining old-growth forests, the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, in western Belarus. They signed an agreement there declaring that the Soviet Union would no longer exist.

The current leader of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenka, has held power since 1994. He has been the country’s only post-Soviet leader but one. Lukashenka is often described as Europe’s last dictator, and he governs like it; he keeps his jails full of political prisoners, and the vibe in Minsk, at least during my one brief visit, was institutional, chauvinist and vaguely intimidating.

The biggest political scare of Lukashenka’s reign came in 2020, when his presidential reelection campaign led to serious protests and mass arrests. Protestors were killed, some 30,000 detained and at least 8,000 convicted in politically motivated trials. Tens of thousands fled into exile.

DILEMMAS: Lukashenka turned to Moscow for help. Vladimir Putin responded, and since then Putin has required a never-ending series of favors as payback, including among other things, staging the beginning of his war on Ukraine from Lukashenka’s country. The initial ill-fated Russian tank assault on Kyiv in February, 2022 came straight down from the north, across the Belarusian border. Lukashenka must fear a demand from Putin he can’t fulfill.

Moscow’s constant needs aren’t the only pressure Lukashenka faces. Since his 2020 election debacle, Brussels has held sanctions against Minsk in place. They only grew more onerous when the Belarusian leader allowed Russian troops to mass on his soil against Ukraine.

Something else: were Putin to demand active Belarusian participation in his war on Ukraine there is a real question whether Lukashenka’s conscripts would participate. Moreover, Belarusian troops are entirely untested in battle. They haven’t fought a war since independence.

Then there’s the anti-Lukashenka movement that rose from the 2020 election. Domestically, rail traffic has been sabotaged and outside the country a shadow government waits. It’s not an imminent threat, but it’s at least a niggling worry.

For all those reasons, Lukashenka is feeling the pressure. Perhaps that’s why he may be—delicately, tentatively—seeking a hand from the West.

In the last couple of years Minsk has released around 400 political prisoners to the US, acting via Maryland trial lawyer and Donald Trump associate John Coale, who has made two publicly confirmed visits to Minsk. In return for a release last December, the US granted limited sanctions relief to three key Belarusian potash companies (Potash is one of Belarus’s biggest sources of foreign currency.)

ABOUT THAT OPPOSITION MOVEMENT: A thoroughly organized Belarusian leadership-in-exile exists, recognized to variously depending on various bodies’ politics. It is headed by the woman most people believe won that 2020 election, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Among the prisoners who have been released by Lukashenka was Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was arrested at a protest in May 2020, and is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s husband. On his release he was sent straight into exile in Lithuania.

Tsikhanouski, a populist YouTuber focused on corruption when he was arrested, originally meant to contest the 2020 election himself, but was disqualified and thrown in jail for his uppityness. His wife Sviatlana—an English teacher with no previous political experience—ran in his place.

Back in Drozdy, the government residential compound where he lives, Lukashenka couldn’t imagine being defeated by a girl, so allow Tsikhanouskaya to stay in the race. She became the opposition’s unity candidate, and in the view of pretty much everybody, Tsikhanouskaya was the legitimate winner of the election.

Which didn’t stop Lukashenka from altering the results to claim victory with eighty percent of the vote. Protests immediately erupted across the country. Lukashenka turned to Moscow for help and, as we have seen, became irrevocably indebted to Vladimir Putin.

Lukashenka chased Tsikhanouskaya to exile, and she set up shop in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Five years later she moved her operation to Warsaw, where she remains the face of the democratic opposition. She flies around meeting heads of state, ministers, NATO officials and so forth, while her husband, time served in prison adding to his cred, travels around Europe arguing instead for a neutral Belarus, on the grounds that Russia might better accept that than a free and democratic Belarus.

A HASTY TRIP TO RUSSIA AND CHINA: Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy threatened Lukashenka with military strikes on June 19th, demanding that the Belarusian leader remove Russian signal relay stations operating inside Belarus. (These look like ordinary cell towers, and are used to strengthen Russia's communications with drones attacking Ukraine.)

Shortly after, Lukashenka said Belarus had turned the relay stations off.

And then he hit the road. The obvious conclusion is that someone, either in Minsk or Moscow, took Zelenskyy’s threat to widen the war seriously enough to call a meeting. Thursday a week ago (June 25th), Belarusian state media announced Lukashenka would travel to Russia the following day to meet with Putin.

After that meeting Lukashenka flew directly to Beijing, where he held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In neither Russia nor China were there public read-outs about the meetings.

Lukashenka flew on from Beijing to Indonesia with plans to meet President Prabowo Subianto, as reported by Lukashenka’s BelTa news agency:

(Note that BelTa neglects to report the weensy little detail that Lukashenka was leaving from Beijing.)

Lukashenka did indeed meet with Subianto in Jakarta, and then Myanmar’s Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyidaw, before flying home. It was a regular autocrats tour. Kim Jong-un must have been busy.

What is all this? Certainly Lukashenka and Putin, meeting at Putin’s compound on Lake Valdai rather than the Kremlin, discussed Zelenskyy’s threat. There’s more we don’t now than we know, so we can only speculate.

So here’s some speculation:

It’s interesting that by the time they met, Zelenskyy has already announced that the Russian relay stations had shut down. That suggests Lukashenka decided to comply with Zelenskyy’s demand before he talked with Putin.

So much for allies coming together in solidarity to make a joint decision. But neither has there been anything since to indicate Putin demanded that Lukashenka change his mind. Perhaps Putin decided to do without his relay stations rather than put at risk other Russian assets in a growing Ukraine/Belarus dispute.

That would make sense, because if Belarus became involved in combat, Russia would presumably need to deploy air defenses to protect those assets, and we see nearly every day now that Russia keenly needs its air defenses back home just now.

Before he left for Valdai, Lukashenka said he had met with Zelenskyy’s people. That was Lukashenka being tough guy: He said he had warned them not to drag Belarus into the war.

“I told them bluntly: 'Guys, tell your president: if he thinks he can talk to us like that—and drag us into a war to boot—then he needs to understand that the nature of the war would change instantly,'“ he said.

But Lukashenka’s talking publicly about having a separate channel with Ukraine could have unnerved Putin. Putin may have wanted to hear from Lukashenka’s lips that he was only talking with Kyiv to reduce the risk of war, not to cosy up to Zelenskyy at Russia’s expense.

On the other hand, Valdai could have been Lukashenka’s idea. He may have wanted Putin to hear his version of his discussions with Kyiv rather than have the meetings filtered through Putin’s intelligence channels. Or to counter what Lukashenka feared Putin’s spies would say.

Or perhaps Lukashenka wanted to reassure Putin in advance that he wasn’t flying off on a secret end run with Beijing. Or, to turn things around, perhaps Putin had a message for Xi he wanted Lukashenka to carry personally.

Then there’s the China visit. Lukashenka flew straight from meeting with Putin to Beijing, where, publicly at least, he and Xi conducted a bland and ordinary ‘working meeting.’ China Daily had a photo (above) of the two leaders, and Xi said China supports Belarus in safeguarding its “national sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.” Which could have been Xi shaking a rhetorical finger at Zelenskyy for his threat against those Russian relay stations in Belarus that started this little flurry in the first place.

Whatever this was all about, there’s not much evidence anything big, new and dangerous is imminent. If it were, if Putin had persuaded Lukashenka to make a big new commitment to involvement in his war, it seems likely we’d see some public evidence by now.

CONCLUSIONS?

As for the Russian relay stations that started the row in the first place, on Tuesday (June 30th), Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview, “One repeater was turned on yesterday. Well, I think they won’t be turning any more of them on.” It’s hard to tell if that was a further threat, but fair, I think, to surmise that Kyiv doesn’t consider the issue resolved.

And the Atlantic Council thinks Zelenskyy is right to worry about Belarus. It points out how intertwined Belarus and Russia are in this war effort:

“Hundreds of Belarusian enterprises now manufacture components for Russian missiles, air-defense systems, drones, electronic warfare equipment, and ammunition.”

But it presses the idea that Lukashenka may not be making his own final decisions:

“(H)e appears to be steadily building up his country’s military capacity in case he finds himself pushed more directly into the war.”

Lukashenka’s woes are a subplot in the larger story of a war that Ukraine has pretty clearly evened up in 2026. This doesn’t mean Ukraine will win the war. It doesn’t even mean Ukraine has the upper hand. But it does suggest, I think, that the Kyiv/Moscow power balance has shifted, and that puts Minsk in as tough a spot as the combatants.

•••••

UKRAINE: Not long ago we all fretted about whether Europe would step up to cover Ukraine’s needs when the Trump administration abandoned Kyiv, and most of us had our doubts. It’s only fair to recognize that it has.

As Timothy Ash has put it, The EU has “more or less has provided Ukraine with a blank cheque to sustain its defence, and in so doing that of Europe - sending a powerful message to budget constrained Russia.”

The European Commission’s proposal for the EU’s next seven-year budget gives Ukraine a pre-accession and reconstruction path like nothing ever offered to a candidate country before. It has its own name—the Ukraine Reserve—and contains funding of up to €100 billion between 2028 and 2034..

As you’d expect if someone offered you €100 billion, there are conditions. “(F)unds will be disbursed in exchange for continued reforms—primarily in the areas of the rule of law, anti-corruption, public administration reform, and harmonization of legislation with EU standards.” (More about conditions here.)

Brussels-bashing is a daily parlor game across Europe, but implementation of any such agreement would be a clear example of the EU getting real things done. Strahinja Subotić writes for the European Policy Center that:

“Since the war in Ukraine began, EU institutions and member states have openly acknowledged the need to turn over a new page in the Union’s functioning. A fivefold increase in funds allocated to defence and security represents an attempt to elevate and embed common defence capacity-building policies more permanently within the EU’s budgetary structure – aiming to establish a European Defence Union.”

•••••

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•••••

CHANGING TIMES: Playing to stereotype as a Nordic social welfare state, Finland debates how to cover the wages of those who miss work due to drone threats.

Here’s state broadcaster YLE on the unexpected change brought on by drone warfare:

“In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about what will happen to the salaries of employees who are forced to stay home due to the drone threat and cannot work remotely.

An agreement has been sought between employers, employees and the government. Minister of Labour Matias Marttinen (Confederation) has given the labour market organisations until Friday, or the matter will be transferred to the minister’s desk and he will resolve it before the summer holidays.

According to Yle, the Confederation of Finnish Industries is proposing that health insurance contributions be collected separately from employers to cover the wages of those who miss work due to the drone threat. Companies could apply for compensation from the collected contributions to cover the wages of those who miss work.

Health insurance premiums are a side expense of wages, paid by employers and employees. According to information from Yle, in a recent proposal, however, only employers would pay health insurance premiums for drone threats.

The employers’ association EK reportedly raised the issue in a tripartite working group that is seeking an agreement on the wage dispute.

Sources familiar with the negotiations tell Yle that the Confederation of Finnish Employers’ Associations’ proposal has been considered bureaucratic and burdensome, at least on the employee side, and the negotiations are still so far apart that reaching an agreement between employers and employees seems difficult.

The working group is led by Timo Jaatinen, the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Employment and the Economy , who did not want to comment on the content of the negotiations to Yle on Wednesday.

Employers and employees have been divided on how the Employment Contracts Act should be interpreted in the case of a drone threat. According to employers, there is no obligation to pay wages, as the obstacle caused by the drone threat affects the commute and not the work.

However, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (Congress) said in A-studio last week that he believes that an employee cannot be left without pay if they have to stay home for their safety due to the threat of drones.

In mid-May , the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) ruled that there was no need to pay wages to those who were absent from work due to the drone threat. Finnish Enterprises, on the other hand, has previously proposed that if wages were paid, they would be financed by the state, not the employer.

The drone threats that have been in the public domain have targeted Uusimaa and Southeast Finland. One idea is reportedly that through health insurance contributions, it would be possible to spread the burden among employers onto broader shoulders.”

•••••

Last week we had a story about Donald Trump’s efforts to take Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark. I may have gotten the grand strategic order wrong. Here’s a post I missed from the president, using the White House’s X account:

•••••

AND FINALLY: There exists something called the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, UN-OHRLLS for (not so) short. UN-OHRLLS calls Kyrgyzstan “the landlocked developing country (LLDC) located farthest from the sea.” Kyrgyzstan is therefore the least maritime country on Earth.

And yet Kyrgyzstan joined the International Maritime Organization in 2024. A reasonable question at the time was “why?” And now we know the answer. This month lawmakers in Bishkek approved legislation allowing seagoing vessels to be registered under the Kyrgyz flag, and set out rules on maritime safety, seafarers’ rights, insurance, and shipowner liability.

This would allow merchant ships to register under the national flag, laying the groundwork for an International Ship Registery. Ministry officials “told parliament that the registry could eventually bring Kyrgyzstan $10 million-$15 million a year.”

•••••

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That’s it for today. Thanks for your time, and let me know what you think. Good weekend, and to Americans, happy 250th! I’ll see you next week.

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Cheers,

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Welcome. Solstice behind us, now we get down to serious summer heat. Today, NATO under strain, protests in Albania, developments in Russia’s war on Ukraine, Nordic allies close ranks in Greenland, and Abiy Ahmed’s electoral dominance in Ethiopia is not real.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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THE UNITED STATES & EUROPE: Between the first and second Trump administrations the NATO alliance moved from a rhetorical ‘will Article 5 hold?’ to the widespread flat assertion that ‘no one trusts Donald Trump will be there for Europe.’ The alliance now actively prepares for a decrease in American military assets across Europe.

When the incoming Trump administration made it clear that the U.S. would no longer unilaterally donate military aid to Ukraine, NATO chief Mark Rutte hammered out an arrangement with the US to create a mechanism called PURL, for Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, in which allies buy American-made weapons from U.S. stockpiles for Ukraine.

The US welcomed it and loved it. But as time has gone on, politics is pulling Europe away from Washington.

Somewhere deep in State Department rules, under U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations, any weapon containing even a single American component requires Washington’s legal sign-off before it can be exported or even fired. Europeans worry that’s too restrictive.

They worry too that US monopoly over things like software updates, data networks, and spare parts on its weaponry like the F-35 fighter aircraft could effectively act as a ‘kill switch,’ should the US one day turn its back entirely on Europe.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told German media, “I consider a so-called kill switch on the part of the United States to be ruled out” because “if such a scenario were implemented, the US defense industry would lose all trust from its partners.”

With trust running low these days, and with Washington holding to an unflinching hard line, change was bound to come.

In late 2024 the Brits fast-tracked Project Brakestop to develop a new generation of low-cost, long-range cruise missiles without any US components, specifically to avoid any question of a US ‘kill switch.’ The MoD expects the first operational missiles to be in Ukrainian hands by the end of 2026.

France has explicitly refused to participate in the PURL initiative from the beginning, choosing instead to develop home grown, pan-European defense systems. Other countries have made expensive, long term commitments to American weaponry, like Finland, which committed to purchase of 64 F-35 fighter jets in December 2021, during the Biden administration, before questions about American reliability became acute.

Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine, Kyiv keenly sought to join the NATO alliance, seeking its security. A lot has changed since 2022. Since meeting resistance to NATO membership Ukraine has developed a remarkable self-reliance, and an equally remarkable new arsenal of its own weapons.

Now the lure of NATO—for prospective new members at least—has weakened, in large part because of the increasing doubt about wether the US would stand behind its paper defense guarantee.

This has thrown the alliance into crisis, and there is no point in using over-polite analytics-speak. NATO’s self-doubt originated in the destructive presidency of Donald Trump. The question now is whether the NATO alliance can restore its effectiveness as a deterrent force.

•••••

ALBANIA: You may have seen a US or European version of a recent news story, in which, as CNBC has it:

The protests have been sustained for weeks now, and the display of civic involvement has to be satisfying for your ordinary Besnik, Arben and Fatmir (possible Albanian equivalents of Tom, Dick and Harry). But the story of these protests sounds a little different if you’re inside Albania.

The protests began in Tiranë, Albania’s capital, at the end of May, after a fence went at the Kushner/Trump resort building site at Zvërnec on the Albanian Adriatic Sea coast. Collectively, the protests have been called the Flamingo Revolution, because the construction site on Sazan Island opposite the Zvërnec peninsula is an important flamingo habitat.

There have been nightly protests outside Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office. A June 20th protest, in particular, drew tens of thousands of people and was widely described as one of the largest protests Albania has seen in years.

Trump opponents in the West call the protests opposition to the Trump family’s self enrichment, and they are about that. But while that may have been the spark, the protests seem to have developed into expressions of general dissatisfaction with Albanian leadership.

More than three decades after its authoritarian government collapsed, the country’s politics is still dominated by two men, Prime Minister Rama and Sali Berisha, who have shaped Albanian politics that whole time. These two politicians, and the camps built around them, still have the backing of about half the country’s politics each.

Rama has been prime minister for thirteen years now and remains popular with his half of the electorate. He can (and does) point to economic growth, infrastructure projects, tourism expansion, and progress toward EU accession.

His supporters look at the country today and see a state immeasurably more prosperous and functional than the Albania of the 1990s, and obviously, not every post-Communist leader can demonstrate the same success. On the other hand, Albania started life after dictatorship in dire, dire shape. After the wreckage of the 1990s, even modest competence could pass for wizardry in statecraft.

Berisha was the first president of the country after they forced out the dictator, all the way back in 1991. His crowds demonstrate how roughly half the country remains skeptical of Rama.

The very staying power of Rama and Berisha makes people weary, and the Trump/Kushner angle provides a good pretext to rally around. So, it’s anti-corruption. The New York Times put it this way:

“Nobody here is protesting against Trump or Israel,” said Elis Kodra, 33, who turned up with his girlfriend for a recent rally with several thousand people outside the office of Albania’s beleaguered prime minister, Edi Rama.

“We are protesting against everything else,” he added, complaining that Albania has been ruled since the collapse of Communism 35 years ago by the same self-serving politicians who rotate in and out office, give state contracts to their friends in business and pay little attention to the economic and other grievances of ordinary citizens.”

(Speaking of common Albanian names, Hoxha is by far the most common surname. There are around 40,000 of them in a country of under 3 million people. Albania’s longtime authoritarian leader was Enver Hoxha, who died in office in 1991.)

•••••

RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE: Three short items you may have missed:

First, On June 19th Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Belarus of allowing Russian signal relay stations to operate on its territory, demanded that the Belarusian leader remove them, and said:

“I think a week will be enough for him to do that. If he doesn’t do it, we’ll do it.”

Ukraine says the radar was helping guide Russian drone attacks against Ukrainian civilians. Was Zelnskyy serious about intervening in Belarus? Was he was trying to pressure Lukashenka to choose between closer alignment with Europe or Moscow?

Ukrainian military action against Belarus would obviously widen the war, which would bring a whole series of new risks for everybody involved. For Belarus, should conflict break out there would be the question of whether/how enthusiastically its all-conscript army would engage with Ukraine.

Whichever, Zelenskyy’s threat was apparently seen as serious enough for Lukashenka and Putin to talk about it. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that Vladimir Putin would be meeting with Lukashenko shortly to discuss the ultimatum.

Then on Wednesday (June 23rd) Zelenskyy said the relay stations are no longer operating. He said Ukrainian intelligence doesn’t know whether they have actually been dismantled or merely switched off, but that they had been inactive since Monday and Ukraine was monitoring them.

Second, Ukrainian and South Korean foreign ministers will hold negotiations in Seoul on June 30 regarding North Korean prisoners of war who fought for Russia, Reuters wrote on June 23.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry stated that the country is ready to accept all North Korean prisoners of war who fought on Russia’s side, provided they wish to relocate there.

“South Korea opposes any repatriation of North Korean prisoners of war to Russia or North Korea against their will,” the agency quoted the South Korean Foreign Ministry as saying.

Third, just across the Black Sea from Ukraine, it looks like Russia has accomplished a creeping, stealth annexation of part of Georgia. In 2008 Russia invaded part of Georgia, taking over the South Ossetia region (which runs right up to an alarming 25 miles from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi).

During the Soviet era North Ossetia was an autonomous republic within Russia while South Ossetia was an autonomous oblast within the Georgian republic. Their border wasn’t politically significant until the Soviet Union fell apart.

They lie on either side of the Caucasus Mountain range, which is formidable. You don’t just drive over the top from the northern capital, Vladikavkaz, to the small southern capital, Tskhinvali. But there’s a tunnel.

Russian troops drove through the Roki Tunnel to occupy South Ossetia in 2008, and since then, the legal fiction of South Ossetian independence has remained, barely, but last month Vladimir Putin and South Ossetian leader Alan Gagloyev signed a “Treaty on Deepening Allied Interaction,” allowing Russian citizens to hold senior government positions inside South Ossetia for the first time.

South Ossetia’s prime minister then resigned and Gagloyev nominated Marat Kambolov, a Russian federal bureaucrat, to replace him. So now South Ossetia’s government will now take its marching orders directly from Moscow, and formal annexation is just about pointless.

•••••

GREENLAND: On March 5th last year, Donald Trump told Congress, “I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” He was talking about Greenland. The Nordic countries’ response (besides righteous irritation) has been to knit themselves more tightly together in solidarity.

(This fits into larger Nordic military cooperation, as we discussed in a column on Europe after NATO, called What to Do Next, here.)

This week Denmark let a contract to directly bring the bright red-liveried Air Greenland into defense of the territory. The national carrier will now take over operation of Arctic surveillance and rescue flights currently flown by the Danish military.

Meanwhile Norway will open a consulate in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, joining Canada, the EU, France, Iceland and the US. The Consulate General in Nuuk will report to the Norwegian embassy in Copenhagen, as Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

•••••

MEANWHILE BACK HOME: Donald Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller wrote this on X:

If the voters don’t look inclined to vote for you, you might have to change the voters.

•••••

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•••••

ETHIOPIA: From a Bloomberg newsletter this week:

“Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s party won parliamentary elections by a landslide, giving him another five years to pursue his reformist economic agenda. Abiy’s Prosperity Party faced off against a fragmented opposition and won 438 of the 486 seats in the House of Peoples’ Representatives where tallies had been verified.”

These numbers didn’t exactly add up to me, in a land where separatists control in significant regions of the country. You might plausibly surmise that winning “438 of 486 seats” meant Abiy and Prosperity command ninety percent popular support. They don’t.

For one thing, large parts of the opposition didn’t participate fully or at all. All 38 parliamentary constituencies in Tigray, in the north, were excluded from the election after rebels fought the Abiy government from 2020 to 2022, in a conflict that drew in Eritrean forces.

Voting also didn’t happen in at least eight constituencies in the densely populated Amhara, including in the historic imperial capital Gondar. The government in Addis decided that conditions weren’t suitable.

The Oromo Liberation Front has an armed wing that has fought the government for years, such that in parts of Oromia, normal electoral politics becomes difficult. Voter intimidation and such. Plus, sometimes separatist groups don’t bother to contest parliamentary seats.

The election result doesn’t tell us that Ethiopia is politically unified. All it really tells us is that the federal center in Addis keeps itself electorally dominant.

•

Ethiopia isn’t the only place the government can be unquestionably in charge of the country while not holding effective control over parts of its own territory. There’s Colombia at the height of the FARC insurgency. Or rising and falling periods of insurgency in India, in Jammu and Kashmir, parts of the northeast (Manipur in particular), or Maoist pockets in central India. Or local control by drug gangs in Mexico. These examples show that there is a difference between control of the state, as Abiy clearly exercises, and unquestioned control of its territory.

•••••

AND FINALLY: A perennial target of political candidates is waste, fraud and abuse. Here’s one office I might could get behind eliminating: The US National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms. No offense to the algae lobby.

•••••

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Welcome. Last night in the UK, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham won a convincing by-election to become a Member of Parliament and set up a challenge to the Prime Minister for leadership of the Labour Party, and the country. Earlier this week Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy convincingly bombed targets around Moscow, exposing an embarrassing deficiency in air defenses around the Russian capital.

Both those events point to an active summer to come, and will require discussion in the weeks to come. Today we have first thoughts about the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding. Then we look at how leaders choreograph elaborate diplomatic road shows around summit meetings like this week’s G7 summit on Lake Geneva.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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First, a few first impressions of the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding:

The document as published Wednesday morning by Bloomberg was significantly different from the version that a White House official read to reporters on a Zoom call Wednesday afternoon. Apparently, every reporter transcribed that version as they heard it.

Then on Thursday the White House sent a photocopy of the apparently final version, signed by the president, to Congress.

Releasing an agreement this way is maybe not a best practice.

Paragraph 5 strikes me as the most geopolitically consequential. In fact, it strikes me as historic. Here it is, from the version the president signed in France:

It says that Iran will provide safe passage “with no charge for 60 days,” but after that “the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz” are up for discussion by a group that does not include the United States.

That means that the US isn’t insisting on freedom of passage without charge after sixty days. Which would mark the end of the US guarantee of freedom of the seas in international shipping lanes.

Since the US emerged from World War II with the world’s dominant navy, it has underwritten worldwide maritime commerce. It has called freedom of navigation through international straits a principle implicitly protected by international law, and occasionally explicitly guaranteed by American naval power. Until the Trump administration, apparently.

After the Iranian revolution in 1979 the Carter Doctrine specifically guaranteed access to Hormuz. essentially elevating the Persian Gulf into a vital American security interest. There’s one more Democratic president whose work the Trump administration looks set to undo.

I can find no US concerns in the MoU about Iran imposing tolls for passage after sixty days. If that is true, Paragraph Five will never not be part of Donald Trump’s legacy, because with it, the US appears to cede its eighty-odd years of enforcement of freedom of navigation.

•

J D Vance came out all carrots this week in a media blitz aiming to frame the MoU as a revolution in US/Iran relations. On Monday he told CNN:

“one of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process is that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. That really hasn’t happened in 47 years of our relationship with Iran.”

It remains to be seen just how cool killing a country’s leadership in search of new interlocutors will turn out to be.

Vance has clearly been put out front as the administration’s point man. If need be, Trump defenders will twist and turn to pin the blame on Vance. Trump said as much. Vance is perhaps being made to pay for letting it be known that he personally advised against this war. The VP may calculate it’s a price he must pay for Trump’s 2028 endorsement (if it’s eventually forthcoming).

Marco Rubio has tried to disappear from the entire Iran question, as he did from Gaza. On Greenland Rubio tended to process as a cabinet member while Vance was again the front man.

Rubio also tends to north Atlantic organizations. He would represent remaining traditional Republicans on Europe if he did any actual advocacy, but instead Defense Secretary Hegseth and others go to Europe to make scary headlines. Rubio appears to be keeping his powder dry for Cuba.

•

The Obama administration’s previous agreement with Iran was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, ‘joint’ because it was jointly negotiated with the other members of the UN Security Council, China, France, Russia and United Kingdom, along with Germany and the European Union.

Trump withdrew the US from the agreement during his first term. Much of the criticism from the American right, Israel, and Gulf Arab governments was that it didn’t deal with Iran’s regional proxies like Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias and the Yemeni Houthis. But neither does the MoU.

Donald Trump likes the story he tells often about the Obama administration raiding banks in the capital region to come up with cash to send “on pallets” “in a Boeing 757” to Iran as part of the JCPOA. This week he again said the amount of cash Obama sent was $1.7 billion.

Article Six of the MoU offers Iran “at least USD 300 Billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

•

The MoU sets a sixty day negotiation period to resolve all outstanding issues. Sixty days from today, the original ceremonial signing date, is August 18th. (Although Vice President Vance is no longer traveling to Geneva for the signing today, and talks have already been postponed.)

A prediction: outstanding issues between the United States and Iran will not be wrapped up by August 18th. From August 18th until the US midterm election day on November 3rd is 77 days.

Vanishingly few Republican politicians (or Americans in general) will want to return to war less than three months before election day. The Trump administration will be under heavy pressure not to resume fighting. At the same time it will face constant pressure from Iran to accede to Tehran’s demands, at pain of another blockage of the strait.

A better political option would have been to set the MoU’s negotiating period at six months. Historians might wish to explore whether that occurred to the Trump administration.

•

Since the US began this round of war began on February 28th, President Trump has exhibited no strategic patience. Iran has shown strategic patience for decades.

Trump has very publicly hustled the process along for all the world to see, claiming a deal was imminent some forty times. Iran has gone without sanctions relief for decades.

My guess is that short of a serious domestic uprising, something not currently on the horizon, Iran will use the same rope-a-dope negotiating strategy they’ve used historically, well beyond the sixty day negotiating period to come. It is bound to drive the American administration crazy.

•

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly rejected withdrawing his forces from the territory Israel currently occupies in southern Lebanon. He said this week that Israel would remain in a Lebanese “security buffer zone” “for as long as necessary.”

He has reserved freedom of action in Lebanon regardless of arrangements between Washington and Tehran. He has argued that his campaign against Hezbollah is incomplete and that Hezbollah must ultimately be taken apart.

He is, after all, the leader of a sovereign state, and as such he needn’t necessarily bend to the will of either Iran or the United States.

To say that Netanyahu is “seeking to topple its (Iran’s) clerical regime and boost his political standing at home,” as Reuters did this week, is to be journalistically careful. That’s not something to which an opinion column is bound.

Opinion: Netanyahu will do his best to deliberately prolong military conflict if it preserves his own political position. As the International Crisis Group analyst Mairav Zonszein put it about Gaza, “Prolonging the war would first and foremost provide Netanyahu time to ensure his political survival.”

An Israeli election must be held no later than October 27, 2026, though it could be held earlier. October 27th is ten weeks after the expiration of the MoU.

•

In the end, there’s no reason to believe the MoU is a good faith document in the first place. It’s riddled with potential for either side to hold up negotiations or suspend their participation entirely. So there’s a long road ahead.

•••••

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THE G7: The G7 was born as France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and West Germany in 1975. That’s six countries, not seven. Canada joined the next year and the group became the G7, which stands for nothing more grand than ‘the group of seven countries.’

The European Community (which became the European Union) joined later (without getting a number), and then post-Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was invited at the urging of Bill Clinton. Thus was born the short-lived G8, which died with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Leaders from non-member countries are routinely invited at the discretion of the host country’s leader, and this year’s guests were Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates. Syrian President al-Sharaa was invited but declined. He plans to meet with Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara three three weeks from now instead.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came for a Ukraine working meeting, and the Middle Eastern leaders attended for bilateral meetings with various other leaders.

For European leaders, Évian les Bains, a resort town thirty-odd miles from Geneva, is just a day trip. But when leaders come from farther away for a summit like the G7, they can’t just beam in and beam back out. So they make a trip of it.

Canada’s PM Mark Carney arrived first for talks in Paris, where he continued his deepening engagement with Europe by announcing, with French President Macron, an agreement allowing deeper sharing of classified information. He then flew off to Dublin to meet the Irish Taoiseach, and County Mayo to meet the president, before returning to Évian and the G7.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met French President Macron in Nice to jointly attend a business conference. Modi made a quick run over to Slovakia for an official visit, the first by an Indian prime minister since Slovakia became its own country in 1993, focusing “on expanding cooperation in trade, investment, automobile manufacturing, and railway infrastructure.”

Modi held talks with Slovak President Peter Pellegrini and Prime Minister Robert Fico, and then returned to France for the summit.

Sanai Takaichi , the Japanese prime minister, is making her first European trip since taking office, with stops in Britain and Italy before the summit.

In London Takaichi and Kier Starmer used talks “to push Japan-U.K. ties toward ‘quasi-alliance.’” In Rome, she and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni “reaffirmed support for accelerating GCAP, the joint fighter jet project involving Japan, Italy and Britain.” Boilerplate.

With both the British and Italian leaders, Takaichi tried to nudge forward “support for accelerating GCAP,” a joint fighter jet project involving Japan, Italy and Britain.

On his own visit to Rome, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung attended religious events at St. Peter’s Cathedral and invited Pope Leo XIV to visit South Korea for World Youth Day 2027. Mark your calendar.

Lee’s was one of the more elaborate of all the leaders’ road shows. He began in Brussels, where he met Bart De Wever, the Prime Minister, then paid a courtesy call on the King before getting to his main business.

Because Belgium is the home of the European Union, Belgian leaders must be accustomed to getting second billing in their own country. After meeting Belgian leaders Lee went on to meet with the European Council President António Costa then Ursula von der Leyen.

Then he was off to Rome at the invitation of President Sergio Mattarella for a state visit. He met Mattarella, Prime Minister Meloni, and at the Vatican, the Pope.

Rome and Seoul have been pursuing cooperation on tech—semiconductors, AI, aerospace, defense. Meloni visited Seoul in January, and Lee returned the favor. The leaders elevated the relationship to a “Special Strategic Partnership,” suggesting that Meloni’s January visit was fruitful enough to institutionalize with an Italy/South Korea “2026–2030 Action Plan.” Only after all that politicking did Lee turn up in France for the G7.

WHILE YOU’RE IN TOWN: Lee also met with Kenyan leader William Ruto on the sidelines of the summit, while they were both in France, to discuss economic and development cooperation.

As for Ruto, like Lee, he visited Brussels, calling on António Costa, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and King Philippe. He moved on to Finland for the first formal state visit for a Kenyan leader, meeting President Alexander Stubb in Helsinki. Then it was off to Oslo and meetings with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Crown Prince Haakon, followed to a visit to the Storting (the parliament) for a visit with Storting President Masud Gharahkhani, and from there the last stop was Évian, where the official meetings began for all the leaders.

•••••

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That’s it for today. Thanks for your time, and let me know what you think. Good weekend, and I’ll see you next week.

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Bill

Welcome. Today, the US repeats a diplomatic mistake in Ukraine. We consider Ebola in Kenya, politics in Britain and France, and we welcome the World Cup to North America.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

WELCOME TO THE WORLD CUP: The 2026 World Cup is underway, hosted here in North America this time. Locally, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium hosts five group stage matches and three more in the knockout round.

In Atlanta like elsewhere in the United States, the anticipated tourism cash bonanza never materialized. In fact, hotel bookings are down a remarkable 83,000 rooms for the tournament period, compared to last year when the MLB All-Star Game was in town and Beyoncé played four concert dates.

I think it’s more fun when Europe plays host, as it has for four of the last twelve World Cups. Europe is a ready-made, tourist-friendly continent-sized museum that all the world’s favorite teams and biggest stars call home. The United States is continent-sized, but we’re going through a rough patch on the tourist-friendly thing.

FIFA has sailed into authoritarian waters these last eight years, holding the 2018 World Cup in Russia and 2022’s in Qatar. By coming to North America it’s trying to right the ship. But with the United States hosting the most matches (US 78, Canada and Mexico 13 each) politics is inevitable. Signature Trump administration gestures like not issuing visas to a Somali referee or Iranian team staff just come with the turf.

Every four years at this time the journalist herd converges around the idea that once the competition begins, politics is cast aside to reveal the only thing that truly matters—the fans’ pure love of the game.

The notions of “FIFA” and “pure love” do not overlap in most people’s internal Venn diagrams, unless perhaps in common with “money.”

Where the fans fit in, we all hope for the best.

•

Here’s an unusual possibility, from a worth-your-while Substack called Sports & Geopolitics:

“The tournament bracket even opens up the possibility of a direct on-pitch showdown between the United States and Iran. Should both national teams finish as runners-up in their respective groups, they would face each other in the Round of 32. The match would take place on American soil, in Dallas, marking the first time in the World Cup’s nearly century-long history that two nations actively at war face off on the pitch.”

•••••

THE UNITED KINGDOM: British Secretary of State for Defence John Healey, a Labour politician previously known as a domestic policy guy, resigned on Thursday, declaring Prime Minister Kier Starmer was “unwilling to commit the resources” necessary to defend Britain.

Job one for any leader is protection of his/her borders, so it’s a big deal when any defense minister resigns, all the more when s/he slams you on the way out the door. So that’s gotta hurt if you’re Starmer, but it looks like what Healey says might be true.

At around 72,000 troops, the British army right now is at its smallest since the time of Napoleon. Even in the midst of a spectacular drawdown from the European continent, the United States right now has more soldiers in Europe than there are in the entire British army.

Later in the day on Thursday, Al Carns, who was Minister for the Armed Forces, also resigned, and two of Healey’s ministerial aides followed the two of them out the Defense Ministry’s doors. It looks like a preview of the next couple of weeks, as the end of the Starmer government quickly comes into view.

The Financial Times used what it called a quote from a ‘senior Labour adviser’ to express this sentiment: “This isn’t the beginning of the end, it has gone way beyond that.” The FT added that Starmer’s premiership risks unravelling in “precisely the undignified fashion that his allies want to avoid.”

A by-election in the Labour stronghold constituency of Makerfield is next Thursday. Should Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham win it, it will set up a leadership race during which further resignations are likely among Starmer’s team.

It’s curious, this Labour Party notion that it’s a good idea to change leaders without a plan for what comes next. Is this just an attempt at reform on the cheap? Reform through relabelling? If that's all it is, why bother?

Could it be because Starmer looks like a loser? Yeah, maybe.

In the three and a half weeks since Wes Streeting’s initial leadership challenge, has Sir Kier mounted his white steed and ridden purposefully toward the future, laying out his case and carrying his winning vision of leadership from sunlit upland to cool and shady dale?

•••

Brexit turns ten years old this month, and in the ten years since the British people Took Back Control, they’ve had six prime ministers (and counting).

Prior to Brexit, the previous six British Prime Ministers, Callahan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron, served forty. From Callaghan’s arrival in 1976 to Cameron’s departure in 2016, Britain averaged one prime minister every 6.7 years. From Brexit in 2016 to today it’s been a prime minister every 1.7.

One way to read that is that the British people were so grateful to the Tory party’s PMs Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak for giving them back control, that they wanted to have as many as they could.

•••

In one study of the impact of Brexit, last month Britain’s Federation of Small Businesses reported that “of those importing and exporting goods, 85% report problems,” and that “some 75% of small firms that have engaged with EU value-added tax systems report significant difficulties.”

That’s incredible. Seventy-five percent of small firms trying to do business in the UK’s largest export market report significant difficulties since Brexit.

Even more incredible: one of the most vocal, most public leaders of the Take Back Control campaign to leave the European Union, the most prominent advocate for the self harm of Brexit still in politics today, is the early odds-on favorite to win the next British election.

•••••

UKRAINE: History repeats this week, as Kyiv’s ‘partners’ try to stop it from acting in its own best interests. The head of the Presidential Office in Kyiv has told a gathering of governors, regional and district authorities, mayors and such like that “partners” have asked Ukrainian authorities not to destroy Russian oil terminals.

Speaking to the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, Kyrylo Budanov blamed the request on the partners’ fear of rising energy prices. Here is what he said:

“I can only say in general terms: yes, such a thing exists. Why is this happening? You, as a reasonable person, can also understand - this is a question of price formation. But we have our own war.”

Budanov is Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and principal security adviser. He assumed the role in January, having previously been head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service. He’s one of the most influential figures in the Ukrainian state.

We can almost hear him thinking, oh, our poor partners. Let me run and ask my boss if we can stand down against the attacker who is bombing our cities so our partners’ countrymen can get to the beach this summer.

Early in the conflict the Biden administration was afraid the conflict might escalate into a confrontation between Moscow and Washington. Even so, it sent tens of billions of dollars to keep the Ukrainian government functioning, paying salaries for teachers, civil servants, and so on.

That sort of thing effectively ended as soon as Donald Trump was elected. The new American president got right to the point. Just thirty-nine days after his inauguration Trump summoned Zelenskyy to the Oval Office for his ‘you have no cards’ ambush.

And yet only months later, “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and chief of staff Gen. Randy George became the highest-level Trump Pentagon officials to visit Ukraine when they arrived on an unannounced trip” last November, Politico reported.

The ostensible focus of the trip was “to engage Ukrainian leadership on the stalled peace process with Russia.” But the real purpose was to deepen cooperation, especially involving drones and autonomous systems.

Driscoll told reporters,

“When you look at Ukraine, [they] have not accepted the current version of a thing as sufficient, and they have MacGyvered and come up with whatever they have to do to get to an outcome they need.”

That was apparently Pentagon-speak for “we admire what they’ve done with drones.”

It’s simply not a good look cutting off support for Ukraine—with the Trump administration’s signature rudeness—and months later traveling to Kyiv for help. Then asking Ukraine for help keeping oil prices down during the summer driving season.

The US asked Ukraine not to act in its own best interest once before, and it was a mistake then, too:

As the USSR disintegrated at the beginning of the 1990s, US President George HW Bush was trying to talk what eventually became fifteen former Soviet states down from starting wars of succession against Moscow.

Most just started to quietly ignore the center, in effect saying, in the case of Tajikistan, for example, “Okay guys, if Dushanbe is so important to you, y’all march all eighteen hundred miles over here right quick and arrest us.” In every case the Kremlin declined.

In the case of Kyiv (then Kiev to us in the West), Washington thought it knew better than Ukrainian lawmakers and President HW Bush travelled to Ukraine to address the parliament.

He said the lawmakers should “refrain from breaking away from the Soviet Union.” This came to be derided as Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech.

Bush urged Ukrainian MPs to remain within a reformed Soviet Union rather than pursue full sovereignty. After declaring that “we will not meddle in your internal affairs,” the president made clear that neither would the US tolerate a leadership it wasn’t sure about.

Local despotism may or may not have been in the future. But at that fraught moment most Ukrainians sought, then in 1991 as they did in the uprisings of 2008 and 2014, their own democratic self-determination, home rule and local sovereignty, ideas basic to America’s own system of government.

Three weeks later Ukraine rejected Bush’s advice and declared independence.

To be clear, in helping to manage the Soviet Union’s unravelling, Bush got most of the hard stuff right, including, crucially, preventing the spread of Soviet nuclear materials.

But he was wrong about Ukraine in 1991, and the idea that Kyiv should not do all it can to prevent the reimposition of Kremlin rule now, in order to keep the price of oil low for its Western ‘partners,’ is also wrong.

•••••

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•••••

KENYA: The largest Ebola outbreak in history so far occurred in 2014 in West Africa. More than 28,000 were estimated to have been infected, and more than 11,000 died. It that event it was no surprise that the United States’s capacity to isolate and treat patients with Ebola was limited—so was everybody else’s.

But 2014 was before the systematic dismantling of American healthcare preparedness, and during the 2014 outbreak three US hospitals — Emory University Hospital here in Atlanta, University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue in New York City — developed protocols on isolating and treating patients that led to a national framework for treating Ebola.

The National Ebola Training and Education Center (NETEC) was established the next year to enshrine the arrangement:

“The US Department of Health and Human Services office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sought to increase the competency of healthcare and public health workers, as well as the capability of healthcare facilities in the United States, to deliver safe, efficient, and effective care to patients infected with Ebola and other special pathogens nationwide.”

(It’s worth pausing here to note how crisp and competently that paragraph reads, from a time before the systemic and senseless destruction of live saving healthcare proficiency - not to mention untold numbers of well-intentioned careers - by a mad squad of no-nothing idealogues.)

All those facilities have specialized isolation facilities, experience treating actual Ebola patients and the ability to provide full intensive care.

But with this year’s outbreak, the Trump administration has made a political decision not to send Americans with Ebola to these centers. It proposes to send them to a hastily built facility adjacent to the Laikipia Air Base near Nanyuki in central Kenya, reportedly a 50-bed field hospital, not a permanent, highly specialized biocontainment facility.

The US now proposes to send Americans who were infected with Ebola in other countries, to Kenya. As Jeremy Konyndyk, President of a group called Refugees International, puts it,

“we’re saying to Kenya, this is such a disease that we do not dare bring it to the United States to these specially built facilities, but hey, Kenya, it’s fine for you to deal with this.”

“I can understand why that’s not going over very well in Kenya,” Konyndyk says.

•••••

FRANCE: The French legislative elections will be Europe’s story of the first half of next year, and with a year to go, the far right National Rally Party (RN) has begun to introduce itself.

Every move it makes now is solely focused on the elections, because RN stands its best chance yet of winning the presidency ever, with polls suggesting it could take a commanding lead into a runoff next summer.

Job one for the party’s leader, Jordan Bardella, is to look reasonable to the persuadable center, and Bardella seems to hope some of German Chancellor Merz’s mainstream cred (such as it is) will rub off on him.

One recent Bardella effort is to compare himself to Merz on border control.

Under threat from the German far-right Alternative for Germany, Merz campaigned last year on rejecting asylum seekers directly at the border, arguing that Germany’s asylum system and local governments were overstretched.

Bardella’s ploy seems to be, “If Merz does it, I can’t be a far right xenophobe if I do it too, can I?” Bardella worked this angle in an interview with Le Point this week.

While Merz’s efforts are meant to be temporary and have been legally contentious, Bardella told Le Point “we campaigned on … the possibility for Member States to permanently reinstate border controls.”

Unlike Merz, RN also proposes restricting birthright citizenship, limiting family reunification, sharply reducing legal immigration, and making naturalization more difficult.

Meanwhile the two countries’ far right parties, National Rally in France and the German Alternative for Germany, have been tussling. Last month, when Bardella said he had some “points of ideological agreement” with Merz, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla observed that “Mr Bardella should become president first,” before “throwing himself at Friedrich Merz.”

•••••

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That’s it for today. Thanks for your time, and let me know what you think. Good weekend, and see you next week.

Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. Today, the US and China meet, Hungary and Ukraine patch things up, Germany flounders, Armenia reaches for Europe, some African dictators just won’t quit, and we try to decide the right way to govern.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

US/CHINA RELATIONS: This column was away last week, so just a couple of words on Donald Trump’s visit to China. The president came back without a lot to tout. And to the administration’s credit, it didn’t set expectations all that high.

There were the Boeing jets. The press just about marched in lockstep on this one. Almost every single review played a variation on this theme: “The package was for fewer airplanes than most had thought, but it was still a deliverable delivered.”

That view was so nearly unanimous that I went looking for anybody who disagreed. Reuters reported that 200 planes was “far fewer than analysts had expected.” No disagreement. The number bandied about before the trip was 500 planes.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg called the 200 an “initial tranche” and emphasized that the important achievement was reopening China after nearly a decade of stalled orders.

Everybody was tactful enough not to mention the ‘stalled orders’ came about because of the Trump tariffs in the first place. Boeing stock fell more than 4 percent after the announcement.

At some point during the summit the president surely urged Beijing to use its influence to pressure Iran, but, again in fairness, that was always going to be a tough sell. For the same reasons the Chinese haven’t used their leverage with Russia to end its war in Ukraine, they were unlikely to do so with Iran. That’s because they’d much prefer to see the US occupied in the Middle East than finally getting around to its never-materialized pivot to Asia.

The Obama administration proposed that pivot even before Trump’s 2015 golden escalator ride. The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy and its National Defense Strategy the next year both identified China as the US’s primary long-term competitor.

The Biden administration began to build a coalition to actually do something about it. Remember the QUAD? (Don’t worry if you don’t, it won’t be on the test.) That was Biden.

The second Trump administration recruited Elbridge A. Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, which is the title for the Pentagon’s main policy guy. Colby wrote a book on how he saw the China challenge and called it The Strategy of Denial, to position himself as the “China can’t have hegemony over Asia” guy.

It’s interesting how ‘Bridge’ Colby has just about completely disappeared into the bureaucracy since taking office. It’s ironic because it was a real battle for Colby to land his job in Trump II. He wanted influence over strategy, not simply a title, he said, and he made clear he wanted to get things done.

Colby’s nomination ran into opposition over the degree to which the United States should prioritize Asia over other places. He once asserted that it is “eminently plausible and practical” to constrain a nuclear-powered Iran,” which got Senator Tom Cotton particularly riled up. Eventually, though, JD Vance and Don Junior gave Colby the push he needed, and he got the gig.

In office he hasn’t exactly made new friends among remaining defense Republicans by holding up Ukraine weapons shipments, and as a skeptic about US support for Europe. And neither has his proposed China policy come anywhere close to fruition, because the administration in which he pledged to prioritize China, hasn’t.

•••••

HUNGARY/UKRAINE: For years Viktor Orbán government stood in the way of various EU initiatives involving Ukraine, including progress on membership talks. Orbán’s Hungary argued that Ukraine didn’t adequately protect the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region.

The new Magyar government this week announced it had negotiated an agreement with Kyiv on minority-language, education, and cultural-rights issues in Transcarpathia, such that Hungary would no longer stand in the way of Ukraine’s EU accession process. And because Moldova’s accession track has been moving in parallel with Ukraine’s, both may now move forward.

The next step in that process is an intergovernmental conference in Luxembourg on June 15, where the first of cluster of items to be negotiated, on fundamentals, is set to be formally opened. There are six clusters, and realistically, any eventual EU accession for Ukraine or Moldova is years away.

(Incidentally, in case you’re a real Hungarophile, here is a link to probably the definitive account of everything you wanted to know about what really happened in the Hungarian election.)

•••••

HOW TO GOVERN: Why has good governance so evaded the grasp of so many Western governments in this new 21st century? Just meeting basic, long-held expectations, of a good education, well-paying jobs and reliable public safety, never mind more ambitious goals like keeping deficit spending under control, rescuing retirement programs, climate change and the like.

Facile answers like ‘social media did it’ won’t do. Could it be that we have reached a certain critical mass of population, that there have just gotten to be too many people?

A few huge cities work, though. Beijing works, mostly. China has cities you’ve never heard of with ten million people. Might there be something along the fractious democracy/oppressed authoritarianism axis that affects governability?

John Kampfner (I think) wants to pin the governability problem here in the West on a lack of courage. I say ‘I think’ because I haven’t read his new book about it, titled Braver New World, just recently published in the UK (not until September in the US). But he introduced it recently with a longish feature article in the Times of London.

Kampfner, an international affairs reporter for forty years, argues for a new approach to governance of a certain kind. It’s bigger than a strategy, or an approach, or a style. It doesn’t seem like something you can exactly feel in a leader’s character.

Is it grabbing the bull by its horns? Mark Carney did this in Canada in the service of democracy, while, in this moment of budding worldwide ‘postliberalism,’ a clutch of far right leaders have applied a take-no-prisoners approach to the way they govern.

Donald Tusk, in turn, brought an almost blunderbuss technique into office to try to repair the damage done by the previous far right ruling party in Poland. Safe to say that so far, Péter Magyar is not using quite the same heavy-handed approach in Hungary, but it’s early days there.

It looks from here like Kampfner may be after a politics of hands on, or high-agency governance. And so he’s brutal with Keir Starmer. He doesn’t call Starmer the culmination of decades of political caution, exactly, although he might.

But caution is natural in politics. Bill Clinton was cautious; he offered no huge new initiatives over eight years in office. We recall his ‘triangulation’ as a sort of political survival strategy.

And in a time of relative prosperity like the Clinton era, it served him well for most of a decade. Starmer, less than two years into the Prime Ministership, may not survive the summer.

Kampfner wants to shake us awake. He thinks government has an obligation to impose long-time-horizon solutions on short-horizon electorates. He writes that “By 2050, four in ten Japanese are expected to be pensioners.” Six workers paying for every ten - that can’t possibly work.

Kampfner seems to take the position that ‘at least they’re trying’ in Japan. He says Japan has a system in which your eligibility for medical treatment is determined by software, and regularly reassessed.

He pits Japan’s care system against the UK’s, and in such a comparison, Japan shines. As he puts it, the UK system “is based on the blithe assumption that most elderly will buy their care through the sale of assets.”

Kampfner concludes:

“Neither hubristic populists nor frightened mainstream governments are levelling with citizens about the rewiring required across all areas of society. No serious discussion is taking place about how public services can be maintained in the future, or about the skills required to equip the next generation,”

And

“accept that the old ways are over; be ever self-critical, open to best practice elsewhere and reject “we know best” hubris; accept that what matters is delivery not ideology and be prepared to ditch shibboleths; embrace modernisation and digital solutions; plan for the long term, not merely the next election; be candid with citizens and don’t hide problems from them. Most of all, demonstrate courage…. If we don’t, we will have only ourselves to blame.”

•••••

GERMANY: Can’t catch a break. Germany, Austria and Portugal campaigned for two European seats on the United Nations Security Council, and on Wednesday, Germany came in third.

Portugal was generally reckoned the favorite, with support from its Lusophone diaspora, and sure enough, Portugal got the most votes in the secret ballot. That left Germany and Austria to fight it out for the final seat.

Both countries actively campaigned, Austria on its neutrality (it’s a member of the EU but not of NATO) and Germany fought for the seat, too, maintaining that as a powerful country it could get things done. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul flew to New York last week to lobby members in person.

Wadephul might as well have stayed home, as Germany came last, adding to a general - and solidifying - sad sack impression of the Merz government. The tally: Portugal 134, Austria 131 and Germany 104. So Portugal and Austria will join Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe and Trinidad and Tobago as new Security Council members on January 1st.

[DOES THE MATH WORK? Add all those votes and you get 369, but there are only 193 UN members. Why? Because since two seats were allocated to Europe, all countries got two votes. 193 countries x 2 votes = 386 possible votes. Which just means that seventeen nations abstained or cast fewer than two votes.]

•

In a column on Wednesday, I argued that Germany can’t seem to get to grips with the real world - that it can even declare a zeitenwende and still just carry on with the status quo without missing a beat.

There is a flip side to that coin.

If current plans are realized, Germany is set to become the biggest military spender in Europe, and if sustained over a decade or so, it could be the biggest by far. Everybody wants Germany to do more in the defense of Europe than send helmets to Ukraine, but in reality, a remilitarized Germany presents a different version of Europeans’ prior fears of German reunification:

Because what if not in these or the next elections, not even in say, a decade, but somewhere down the road the Russia-friendly Alternative für Deutschland - currently the highest polling political party in the country according to several national polling averages - comes to power, and wields all that weaponry?

•••••

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••••

ARMENIA: Parliamentary elections are this weekend. Armenian elections are not always a subject of American news coverage, but there are potential geopolitical consequences. And there’s an American angle besides.

The Armenian Prime Minister is Nikol Pashinyan, who has made a real effort to move his country away from Russia and toward Europe and the United States. He has campaigned on regional reconciliation and economic integration, which in Armenia’s case means peace with Azerbaijan and the normalization of ties with Türkiye.

Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party leads the polls. It’s a quick turnaround after the difficult days of the loss of Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan not three years ago. In September 2023 protests erupted in Yerevan, demonstrators demanded the president’s resignation and the government claimed to have foiled a coup.

Pashinyan argued that Karabakh was lost, Russia failed to protect Armenia, chasing the dream of recovering Karabakh could become existential for the whole country, and so Armenia should normalize relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey. And it worked.

From 1993 until this month Armenia had been subject to a trade blockade by Türkiye, a strong fellow Turkic ally of Azerbaijan during the long Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict. As you can see on the map, in the neighborhood where Armenia lives, there aren’t a whole lot of other ready trade partners.

Vladimir Putin, naturally, has been hostile to Pashinyan’s goal of Armenian alignment with Europe, and is predictably engaged in one of his disinformation efforts, calling Pashinyan abusive, dishonest, a fraud, a warmonger, a criminal, a corrupt oligarch, a dictator, a traitor, secretly controlled by foreign powers and, in a secret deal with France, preparing war with Russia.

Less predictably, Donald Trump has also taken an interest.

A Trump endorsement might seem surprising at first glance, given the president’s generally Putin-friendly worldview. But recall that one of the eight wars the president claims to have ended is the Armenian/Azerbaijani conflict.

Trump ended his endorsement this way:
“Make (Armenia) Great Again — MAGA!”

•••••

UGANDA: Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, 81, has been sworn in for a record seventh consecutive term following his most recent landslide victory in disputed elections back in January.

He is among the few African leaders in power for more than 40 years. Others include Congo-Brazzaville’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang and Cameroon’s Paul Biya.

If you’re having your 40th birthday this year, these guys have been in power since before you were born.

An honorable mention is due here to Isaias Afwerki, who has ‘only’ ruled Eritrea for about 33 years, but effectively without elections for the entire life of the state.

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Welcome.

Every other month I write a column for 3 Quarks Daily. I counted them up and found that seven of my last ten columns there examined Western decline. Time to quit complaining.

So here’s my latest 3QD column, my first stab at trying to figuring out how to turn things around. I’d like to know what you think.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

1

One of the most memorable images from Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine was that 40-mile traffic jam of tanks, armored vehicles and supply trucks headed south from Belarus, backed up on the M07 highway in a futile lunge toward Kyiv.

Ukrainian civilians took down road signs, used tractors to tow abandoned vehicles over to their own army, gave Russian troops bad directions and guided them onto roads that turned to mud. Where they sat for a week or more.

Today, Russian tanks rarely approach the front lines. For this war, at least for now, the battle tank has become obsolete. We now compare the evolution of warfare not to the storming of Iraq 35 years ago, but to 35 months ago.

Ukraine deployed some 3.5 million drones in 2025. Their projected capacity this year is seven million. Drone swarms, now under intense development, are coming next, before ethical concerns have been thoroughly vetted.

Racing toward deployment, too, are autonomous fighting systems, in which military judgments involving life and death can be made by artificial intelligence instead of people. AI is already creeping onto the battlefield.

Against the backdrop of this sort of accelerated change, NATO’s requirement for unanimous agreement across 32 countries before commitment to action looks downright quaint. So it’s time to consider what might work better.

2

To negotiate with Russia today is to seek appeasement of an expansionist, autocratic regime. Ask the leaders of Estonia, where a NATO F-16 shot down a drone involved in Russia’s war on Ukraine in May.

Ask Latvian officials, who have repeatedly scrambled NATO aircraft against drones, one of which struck an oil facility. On three consecutive days in May at least one drone entered the country’s airspace. Train service has been temporarily suspended.

Ask civilian Finnish and Norwegian pilots. Last summer a pilot for a Finnish airline called Russian GPS interference at Inari and Kirkenes airports in northern Finland and Norway “a daily nuisance.”

Ask Swedish military leaders, who “took down a drone of unknown origin” in Swedish territorial waters “in the proximity to the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle” in late February. Sweden’s Defense Minister confirmed the drone’s Russian origin.

Or most dramatically, ask Lithuania’s political leadership. When radar detected a potentially hostile drone in May, air traffic at Vilnius airport was suspended, trains were halted, schools moved children to shelter and the president, prime minister, cabinet officials and Members of Parliament were moved into bunkers.

These examples show the threat is clear and present. Eastern NATO airspace no longer enjoys secure domestic tranquility. Indeed, it increasingly stands watch as NATO’s front line. This is happening now. This is real.

As the challenge grows more serious, leaders have been speaking more plainly. Here is Poland’s President Donald Tusk on April 24th:

“For the whole east­ern flank, my neigh­bors . . . the ques­tion is if NATO is still an organ­iza­tion ready, polit­ic­ally and also logist­ic­ally, to react, for example against Rus­sia if they try to attack.”

Tusk tried not to imply that he was skeptical of American commitment to NATO’s Article Five, but stressed he was looking for “practical ways countries would support each other in the event of attack.” He said his “mission is to reintegrate Europe,” and that he sought “a common effort to protect our eastern borders.” Regardless of Washington.

The Trump administration has shown, with rhetoric and action, that the United States will no longer guarantee defense of the NATO alliance. The loss of European leaders’ fundamental trust — see Greenland — is a separate, and complicating, question.

But back to the Polish president:

“This is something really ser­i­ous. I’m talk­ing about short-term per­spect­ives, rather months than years,” Tusk said, in ref­er­ence to a poten­tial Rus­sian attack.

Listen to the leader of Poland when he says “This is something really ser­i­ous.”

Yet Europe is perennially unable to organize its own defense without American help. As ever, there is vast, general agreement on three basic steps, all the natural province of European organizations, or individual governments acting together:

A. Standardize weapons manufacturing within Europe to avoid duplication of effort and to establish economies of scale.

B. Establish a joint buying pool for armament procurement.

C. Consolidate national financial markets into an integrated European whole.

All are longstanding needs that won’t be solved by this paper, or soon. Yet they must be solved. It is not hopeful that they are no closer to resolution, even as from Trump I to Trump II, the alliance moved from a rhetorical ‘will Article 5 hold?’ to the working assumption that Donald Trump won’t be there for Europe.

NATO was created at a particular historical moment, as an expression of solidarity against a perceived threat to North Atlantic democracy by the communist Soviet Union. A foundational feature of the new alliance was its promise of a durable American commitment to Europe’s defense.

Today the alliance appears to be losing the American guarantee around which it was built. That may not be as catastrophic as it is usually framed.

Waiting for a 32-member defense alliance to achieve political unanimity before lumbering into action no longer makes sense. In a world undergoing profound, rapid change, situational agility matters more.

In any coming conflict with Russia, a fractious NATO, where consensus is elusive, should be supplanted by a roster of groups with shared stakes, groups that provide overlapping circles of competence and security. The Cold War rewarded solidarity. A more fragmented world rewards adaptability.

3

Northeastern Europe has been preparing for war since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, making it the natural place to forge real-world, practical solutions to the problem of Europe’s defense.

Donald Tusk and his fellow frontline leaders no longer have the time to constantly affirm Madrid’s (or Washington’s, or anyone else’s) commitment to Article 5. They need faster, better and more responsive mechanisms to grapple with the challenges on their doorstep.

Today, frontline states think in terms of operational coalitions rather than alliance-wide unanimity. Smaller, faster, more agile regional defense groupings can operate within or alongside the shell of the NATO treaty left behind by an indifferent America.

NATO won’t disappear. The United States still needs European bases, if only for force projection elsewhere in the world. So long as it does, an appropriately scaled-down NATO is a logical vehicle to manage that presence.

And useful new NATO initiatives are underway. NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, for example, is designed around just-learned battlefield lessons and taught by Ukraine, even as it adapts and learns, in real time and under pressure.

4.

Various post-NATO defense schemes are already in operation. The policy shop term for this type of group is “minilateral.” At least three different groups of frontline states already function, and during the second Trump administration all have gained strategic momentum. They are:

First: the Joint Expeditionary Force, created in 2014 and initially comprised of Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. Finland, Iceland and Sweden joined later.

This group grew out of a concern we’ve seen borne out — that NATO’s formal structures might be too cumbersome in fast-developing crises. Its quick buy-in from the Russian-threatened Baltic states makes it a natural starting point to build up defense against Europe’s most likely adversary.

Second: the Bucharest Nine, founded by Romania and Poland, includes the three Baltic states, as well as the southeastern flank countries Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia. Like the JEF, it was created as a reaction to Russia’s seizure of Crimea.

Third: the so-called Nordic-Baltic Eight, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden, is a natural complement to the other two. The name, shortened to NB8, sounds like think tank jargon, but the geographic idea is clear on a map:

The NB8 is different from the other two in that it was not created as a reactive military coalition. It evolved organically out of geographic proximity, shared political culture, post-Cold War integration and simple practical cooperation among small northern European states.

There are also natural allies outside these budding organizations. Opposite NATO’s southeastern flank, Moldova, a frontline state to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, has a government eager to align with the West. And Ukraine itself is already a close de facto ally, whether inside NATO or not.

It’s been an eventful fourteen months since the ‘you don’t have any cards’ Oval Office encounter between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump. Ukraine’s military innovations are now sought after worldwide, including by the Trump administration. In some areas critical to warfare today, Ukraine’s new war-fighting prowess far exceeds America’s.

Ukrainian instructors are teaching drone warfare in Britain and Germany. Ukrainian experts work with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE on maritime security and drone threats.

Last summer in Estonia, Ukrainian teams acted as “opposing forces” in NATO exercises and “successfully simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes in half a day, effectively neutralizing two NATO battalions before dinner.”

•

If proto-organizations like the JEF, B9 and NB8 and new and eager allies form a post-NATO future, they will only be a part of it. Agility and new-found vigor alone are not enough.

Frontline states will still require the political legitimacy, industrial capacity, and financial backing of old-line Europe. There is no substitute for the expertise and institutional memories of Brussels, the defense ministries, the European Central Bank and the bond markets.

Newer coalitions can bring adaptability, speed and new focus. But the continent’s deepest reserves of power and competence still lie in the traditional manufacturing and commercial centers of Europe: the Rhine-Ruhr valley, northern Italy, the English Midlands, and the financial markets of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Here, too, in a role that could grow less military than political and financial, could help coordinate that support.

Throughout the process of change, frontline leaders will still require steadfast diplomatic backing from like-minded allies beyond Europe. There is no longer time to convene continent-wide festivals of diplomacy in pursuit of ideologically perfect consensus. But neither can Europe’s newer security groupings operate alone.

•••••

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•••••

5.

It all sounds just about plausible, and the times demand that the Western alliance give it a try. Still, time is short, the road ahead is poorly marked and the challenges are many, real and dangerous:

The very multiplicity of new “minilaterals” concerns many, who worry about potential duplication of effort. Two of these proto-organizations have existed since 2014, yet neither has formal treaty obligations, standing forces, or integrated command. The JEF has ‘frameworks.’

The Bucharest 9 serves a membership that reflects geography more than political harmony, and the Nordic Baltic 8 is looser still. All this despite twelve years of worsening European security conditions since the Crimean invasion.

But these are procedural questions, for which answers can be found. The biggest obstacle facing a post-NATO West is deeper, cultural and harder to change. That problem is Germany, and it warrants a good look.

6

It’s everybody’s cliché that the German economy is the economic engine for the continent, and Germany’s economic problems are forever blamed for whatever Europe can’t get done.

It’s a problem that Europe’s economic engine has experienced extremely weak growth since 2018, with multiple years of outright contraction or stagnation.

Real GDP today is only marginally above pre-pandemic levels. Germany has been one of the weakest-performing big European economies since the late Merkel years.

In a fit of almost magical conjuring, Chancellor Merz finagled himself a €500 billion “special fund for infrastructure and climate neutrality” before he assumed office last spring. And here we sit, a full year later.

If you have a half a trillion Euros to push out the door, how do you fail to move the needle on growth? That much money is enough even to overspend a bit in the service of getting things moving.

Even as vastly changed times cry out for new approaches, Germany’s governing culture clutches for the Cold War virtue of stability. The German system is surely the West’s best at caution. And consultation. And incrementalism. And procedure.

At times like this Germany is wont to use its “special history” card. But the Cold War ended more than thirty years ago. The Third Reich fell in 1945. Dear Chancellors Merz, Scholz and every last twenty-first century German leader: adaptability is now a virtue. It’s stasis that’s the problem.

A healthy state facing a perceived civilizational shock like Russia invading Europe does not spend the next four years explaining the problems it has building railways or power lines or a military quickly. A healthy state changes some rules. It turns out Germany is not a healthy state.

Merkel clung to her Russian pipelines. Lindner brought down a government rather than ease his debt brake. Scholz, hardly a theatrical man, tried drama, declared a zeitenwende just three days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then … nothing happened.

In Scholz’s case, if the zeitenwende speech was a missed opportunity, the follow-through was German managerial majesty: squeezing a turning point through procurement rules and committee procedure.

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius wears a media-conferred mantle of competence. He may be the first Bundesminister der Verteidigung in years to strike the public as actually serious about defense.

When Ursula von der Leyen served Angela Merkel in Pistorius’s current role, German troops trained with broomsticks instead of machine guns. Under Chancellor Scholz, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht sent 5,000 helmets as Russia drove toward Kyiv. (Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wondered if they might send pillows next.)

Pistorius seems to understand that Germany has entered a more dangerous era. But has he transformed the Bundeswehr? Germany wants the strongest conventional army in Europe and dramatically increased troop numbers, but it struggles with recruitment.

Judged against the low baseline of late Merkel and early Scholz defense policy, Pistorius and the Merz government look dynamic. But against the scale of the historical challenge?

7.

NATO no longer inspires the confidence required to defend the North Atlantic alliance. Some combination of the new initiatives we’ve considered today should begin to replace NATO’s original defense structure.

Relevant new organizations are already taking shape and finding their way toward one another. This mixing and matching illustrates both the logic and the promise of Europe’s emerging minilateralism. Its members do not agree on everything, but neither do they need to. Rather than striving for unanimity, they should seek to cooperate where they can.

In these frightening times, geography and a shared threat perception already drive cooperation. Unlike in NATO, the new coalitions we’ve discussed here can develop and work together without requiring a rigid ideological underpinning — or continent-wide consensus — designed for an ideological struggle that no longer prevails.

An Estonian think tank sums up today’s moment this way: “the proliferation of different coalitions of the willing is a direct consequence of the deepening malaise in common institutions, above all NATO and the European Union.”

That’s true. And now a timely, effective course correction, if done right, could leave the region a more cohesive whole.

•

Examination of Western decline is nothing new. Taking a minute to rue the loss of the ‘rules-based international order’ that prevailed for four generations is understandable. But you can talk things to death.

In the Obama administration, ‘admiring the problem’ was shorthand for overanalyzing things and avoiding taking action. Consider the problem sufficiently admired. The times call out for action. It’s time to shape the future. I offer this as a modest, good-faith conversation starter with some chance of success.

•••••

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Thanks for your time, and please let me know what you think. See you Friday. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. We call it summer now.

In the US, the Memorial Day weekend unofficially kicks off the summer season. We wait till then mostly for the benefit of New Englanders, who once thought of themselves as the cultural core of the country, because weather up that way is slower to warm. Here in Georgia, it’s been summer for weeks, and it will continue to be long after northeasterners and midwesterners pack up their backyard grills in September.

This week my writing time has been spent on an article I’ll share with you next week, about how the North Atlantic security treaty area, whose security was once protected by NATO, might take care of itself now that the United States has declined that responsibility.

And next Friday we’ll catch up on the events of the last two weeks with the regular What Just Happened? week in review, including the first Russian drone attack on NATO territory to cause injury, which happened early this morning in Galați, Romania.

For today, here is one of my most read columns, originally published back in 2918 after a visit to East Africa. Good weekend, see you next week.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

It all started with zebras.

Hard to believe, but sustained, hands-on field work in east Africa only has a sixty year history. Today Hans Klingel is an emeritus professor at the Braunschweig Zoological Institute, but when he arrived in Africa in 1962 Herr Klingel was one of only three scientists in the entire Serengeti.

Klingel and his wife made wildlife their career. Their first mission was to recognize individually and study ten percent of the 5500 zebras in the Ngorongoro Crater west of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Zebra stripes are whole body fingerprints. The Klingels took photographs, taped the photos to file cards and carried them into the field. They came to recognize some 600 individuals.

Their file card technique caught on. In 1965 zoologist Bristol Foster studied giraffes at Nairobi National Park, photographing their left sides to memorize their unique patterns. He glued pictures onto file cards too. From 1969 a researcher named Carlos Mejia photographed and carried cards of giraffes in the Serengeti. Scientists swarmed into east Africa and the game was on.

On the open savanna, giraffes and zebras form a natural alliance. Zebras (and wildebeests, their fellow travelers) benefit from giraffes’ strong eyesight, elevated vantage point and superior field of view. Giraffes have the largest eyes among land animals and can see in color. Their peripheral vision allows them to just about see behind themselves. The next time your safari Land Cruiser rattles around the corner into view of a giraffe, you can bet the giraffe has already seen you.

In turn, giraffes appreciate zebras’ superior hearing and their awareness of the smell of predators. Perhaps because of their distance from the thick soup of ground smells, giraffes’ olfactory senses have fallen away.

A safari guide in Botswana’s Okavango Delta once described to me the most dramatic single wildlife event he ever saw; a fierce squall of giraffe anger led a long-necked posse to kill around ten lions before one giraffe finally went down to the final five.

If a horse’s kick can seriously injure a man, he explained, imagine the giraffe, whose foot is wide as a dinner plate. Having perfectly good sense, lions usually give giraffes wide berth. Except at the water hole.

Watch giraffes before they drink. They survey their surroundings at length and in great detail before they commit, for they will require time and effort to splay into the ungainly, legs-spread stance they need to get their mouths to the ground, and then more time to clamber back upright. Fortunately they needn’t drink more than every second or third day, because to counter the peril at the water hole, giraffes have learned which leaves yield the most moisture.

Nobody else except the largest elephant can reach twenty feet into the trees. There isn’t a great deal of feeding competition up there, so serene, heads in the clouds, giraffes can be discerning eaters.

If you weigh a ton and a half, you’ll need to eat a lot of leaves. You may spend three quarters of the day feeding. In Portraits in the Wild, Cynthia Moss writes that no more than five to thirty minutes of a giraffe’s day are spent sleeping.

Using your prehensile lips and half-meter prehensile, muscular tongue, you take a branch in your mouth, pull your head away and the leaves come with it. Your preferred leaves are thorny acacia, which contain some 74 per cent water. You grind the thorns between your molars.

Scientists like that word “prehensile” because it is obscure. It just means “adapted for holding,” from the Latin prehendere, “to grasp.” Unlike a giraffe’s hoof or a dog’s paw, our hands are prehensile, with our opposable thumbs.

At the border of the Luangwa Park in Zambia it is jarring to see people and giraffes sharing the road. The giraffes have eaten the leaves on the other side of the river inside the park, forming a browse line. The trees are bare of leaves below a line as distinct as the bottom of the clouds, while the other animals fight it out for food on the ground.

Giraffes aren’t out to hurt you, so workers, kids on their way to school, occasional automotive traffic and giraffes share the road, if gingerly. Most unusual.

You’ve seen squirrels, maybe rabbits, dart onto the road in front of you, become confused and run straight ahead instead of ducking off to the side. Once a giraffe did just that in front of our vehicle near a bush camp on the Luangwa River.

A laptop had disappeared from a rondavel in camp a few days before. We happened upon two boys in deep woods, a place they surely shouldn’t have been. Caught out, they dropped their backpack and crashed away into the bush. Inside the backpack, the laptop. In the ruckus a thoroughly alarmed giraffe stormed onto the road ahead of the LandCruiser.

If giraffes ran like most hoofstock their extra-long legs would get tangled up, so when they run they move both legs on one side and then the other. All four of a giraffe’s legs leave the ground at once.

This is called “pacing” and has the visual effect of making the giraffe seem to run in slow motion. In fact those long legs cover prodigious ground. The word giraffe comes from “zafarah,” Arabic for “one who walks swiftly.”

Excited as we were to return the stolen laptop, we didn’t intend to alarm the giraffe, but it was long gone. In short bursts, giraffes can put up speeds of 35 miles per hour. This one surely did.

The giraffe’s front legs are longer and stronger than its hindquarters. At a gallop, the power stroke of each front leg sends the neck moving from side to side, leaning ahead, swinging opposite its stride. No other animal has such a neck and no other animal’s neck is so deeply involved in forward movement.

•••••

Why such a striking neck in the first place?

Sixty years before Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that evolution proceeded from the accumulation of small, gradual, acquired characteristics. He wrote that the giraffe “is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them. From this habit … it has resulted that the animal’s forelegs have become longer than its hind-legs, and that its neck is lengthened….”

Had giraffes cried out for another explanation (and they didn’t, they just kept chewing acacia leaves), Darwin came along to give it a try. “The individuals which were the highest browsers and were able … to reach even an inch or two above the others, will often have been preserved. … These will have intercrossed and left offspring…. By this process long-continued … it seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe.”

•••••

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•••••

Lamarck’s and Darwin’s adherents still battle it out. Lamarck is lately staging a bit of a comeback.

Allow psychology professor David Barash to enter the debate and posit that they’re all wrong. To Barash it’s all about sex.

Younger males’ neck musculature grows visible in maturity, signaling their readiness to challenge for mating privileges. With females in estrus, male giraffes stand shoulder to shoulder and wield their necks as Barash puts it, “roughly like a medieval ball-and-chain weapon, or flail.”

They hammer each other neck-to-neck in turn until one cedes dominance. Barash speculates that longer necks lead to dominance, more mating opportunities, and so are passed along genetically. He calls it “necks for sex.”

Beyond the grand debate, there are simple enough ways to circumvent any generations-long path to giraffehood. Craig Holdrege, director of the Nature Institute, points out that to eat leaves, goats simply climb trees.

Baby giraffes are almost entirely vulnerable. At least half are killed before they reach their first birthday. Once in the Thula Thula Royal Zulu Game Reserve in Kwa-Zulu Natal, we came upon a newborn calf that only just reached its mother’s knees, far below her body. Mom kept it tight to her side and never took her eyes off us.

But protective maternal instincts can’t cover up the brutality of a baby giraffe’s birth. The calf drops head first some five and a half feet from the womb to the ground. Vulnerable as they are, calves get right to their feet, in as little as five minutes.

And they grow so fast! Cynthia Moss writes that they can grow nine inches in a single week. Oxford zoologist Dr. Jonathan Kingdon suggests this was “an early evolutionary strategy whereby very large, but relatively defenseless, animals were able to mitigate predation by growing too large for predators to overpower.”

•••••

Giraffes present as above it all, and not just physically. The biologist Richard Estes reckoned that of all the animals, giraffes give the least back to the curious viewer. Implacable, delphic stoicism, maintaining a stance, chewing and looking back at you.

I think Edith Wharton unknowingly spoke for giraffes: “Make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity – to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”

These are the sentiments of any giraffe.

•••••

Giraffes are a safari favorite because of their utter evolutionary strangeness, but they have a little-known cousin that is stranger still – the okapi, the last large animal discovered by western science.

Further confined than the giraffe, to a single refuge in the Ituri forest in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, the okapi is the national symbol of the DRC, but you will likely never see one except on the Congo’s 1000 Franc note.

An animal seemingly built by committee, this forest giraffe is donkeylike and tall-shouldered with a thick, elongated neck and chestnut black, glistening coat. Like the giraffe, it paces, and splays its legs while drinking. But the giraffe’s closest relative displays startling zebra-like stripes wrapping around its back end. Inexplicable.

The giraffe’s habitat has fragmented catastrophically (already extinct in seven countries, there are now less than 98,000 individuals left in the world). The okapi’s circumstance is more dire still. The Okapi Conservation Project’s John Lukas estimates there are only 3,000 to 3,500 okapi in the Ituri forest reserve. Lukas says okapi are so secretive and solitary that a ranger may walk 500 kilometers before sighting an okapi in the wild.

Henry Morton Stanley wrote of the okapi in 1887, prompting the British High Commissioner for Uganda to organize a search that failed to find a single animal. 100 years later, Lukas set up his facility at Epulu in Mbuti pygmy territory in the DRC in hopes of breeding okapi.

To get an idea how isolated opaki are, Lukas told me by email, “For the first 10 years we had to fly from Kinshasa to Goma and drive 5 days to get to our field station…. We built (an) airstrip in the middle 90’s but still drove from Goma getting supplies along the way. … In 2003 we started coming in from Uganda to Bunia and either driving or chartering a plane depending on the security along the road.”

For a time, fourteen okapi lived at the project reserve, but in 2012 all of the okapi – and six people – were killed in a two-day siege of the project, the bad guys apparently exacting retribution for a crackdown on the illegal ivory trade and illicit mining.

•••••

One afternoon near Naivasha, Kenya, we bounded outside our LandCruiser, excited to behold the largest group of giraffes I have ever seen. We counted 23 on one side of the road and five on the other.

This was a crowning, exhilarating moment, but as exuberant as the humans may have been the giraffes declined comment, silently cud-chewing, mild-mannered, staring you down, sizing you up, batting an eyelash, inscrutable. Their long curly eyelashes suggested a certain sensitivity.

Like elephants, giraffes and okapi communicate with infrasound, low frequency tones inaudible to humans (and in the case of okapi, inaudible to their main predator, the leopard). Perhaps infrasound accounts for some of the giraffe’s aloof silence. After sixty years of field work, there is still a lot we don’t know.

From afar, giraffes stand out as masts on a dusty sea, triangles on the plain. Watch at distance their stately traverse, waves of heat rising from the savanna. In Karen Blixen’s words, “When cruising, with its gaze on the horizon and high center of gravity, the giraffe hardly seems in contact with the earth.”

•••••

You can view these and tons more photos in the Animals and Wildlife section of EarthPhotos.com, which is where I keep my 20,000 or so travel photos from over a hundred countries all over the world. You can buy prints, framed photos and downloads there, too.

This article originally appeared here, on 3 Quarks Daily, on September 17, 2018. I write a column for 3QD that currently appears bi-monthly.

And you can buy my book Out There: Thirty Essays on Travel, a collection of 3 Quarks Daily columns like this one, or my three other travel books, at Amazon in your country (here in the United States).

•••••

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That’s it for today. See you twice next week. Thanks for your time, and let me know what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. It’s a holiday weekend, so today we take a briefer spin around the world than usual. We look at how golly gee, gosh darn hard it is for the French far right to obey the law. We consider that it’s just as hard for the Trump administration to maintain alliances (Taiwan edition), we test your geography skills (Baltic edition) and we discover just how much paperwork it takes to join the European Union.

Enjoy the holiday weekend and I’ll see you next week.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

FRANCE: More problems for the ever-lovable National Rally. With it’s leader Marine Le Pan awaiting sentencing as a convicted embezzler, her glamorous understudy Jordan Bardella has found himself in trouble in a probe about a similar type of crime:

“The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) has opened a formal investigation into suspected misuse of EU funds linked to Jordan Bardella. At the centre: €133,300 of European Parliament money allegedly spent coaching the RN leader for a French presidential campaign.”

The story, as relayed by Julian Hoez, is that a former TV presenter turned communications consultant named Pascal Humeau “was paid around €133,300 via the EP’s budget to train Identity and Democracy MEPs on European affairs, instead met Bardella 26 times to prepare him for Marine Le Pen’s 2022 French presidential campaign.”

And Hoez reports that “Under Articles 432-15 and 131-26-2 of the French Penal Code, a conviction for misappropriation of public funds carries a maximum ten-year prison sentence and a fine of up to €1 million. Since 2016, ineligibility for public office has been mandatory for up to 10 years following conviction.”

Hate to see ‘em go.

•

THE NEVER ENDING, ALWAYS DESTRUCTIVE ART OF THE DEAL: At the beginning of the second Trump administration there was a great debate about the strength of NATO’s Article 5. Would it hold up? Would the US keep it’s commitment to stand behind the alliance?

Sixteen months into the second term the question has answered itself. We’ve learned that if the United States treats a treaty commitment as conditional, transactional, or even expendable, that commitment comes to be seen as no commitment at all.

Here is the president’s answer when asked about a delayed $14 billion arms package for Taiwan in a FOX News interview, following his trip to China: “I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China. It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons.”

That makes the American position all too clear. Support for Taiwan’s defense is now a matter of negotiation with Beijing. Which upends the position the United States has held since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Up to Trump II, support for Taiwan has never been negotiable.

•

IF CANADA JOINED THE EU: It would have to adopt the EU’s Acquie Communitaire, the accumulated rules and regulations of the European Union. That would surely take years.

Because a person named Christian at the Association of Accredited Public Policy Advocates to the European Union once determined that “If all the legislation the EU has passed were laid out lengthways, it would be 193.12 km long. Even if you just account for the amount of EU legislation currently in force, at 51km it stretches even further than a marathon (42km) and would take the average person more than four hours to run along.” And that was back in 2013.

So JUST HOW BIG IS THE ACQUIS COMMUNAUTAIRE????

More from the Accredited Public Policy Advocates:

“Politicians have asserted for years that the EU’s acquis communautaire- the body of EU legislation which European companies, charities and individuals have to comply with is roughly 80,000 pages long. However, if you total up pages in the many volumes of the EU’s Official Journal of legislation, you will find that the EU has passed a staggering 666,879 pages of law since its inception in 1957. If you research the EU’s legislative database Eur-lex, you will find that 26% of all EU regulations passed since 1957 are still active. Thus the true size of the active acquis communautaire is over 170,000 pages long or double the number of pages that is normally claimed by the EU Commission and other commentators. Of these 170,000 pages, over 100,000 have been produced in the last 10 years. If the EU continues to legislate at current trends the acquis communautaire will have more than doubled by 2020 to 351,000 pages.”

That just might be enough to put Canadian officialdom off of joiining the EU. And what about the Canadian people? Consider that with the fourth-highest GDP in the bloc after Germany, France, and Italy, Canada could become a net contributor to the EU’s budget.

Which all suggests the more likely approach would be some kind of custom, invented association agreement.

AND FINALLY, LATVIA: This week, Latvia has repeatedly scrambled NATO aircraft against drones, including one incident in which a drone struck an oil facility. On three consecutive days at least one drone entered the country’s airspace. Train service in the area was temporarily suspended.

The crash of one of the drones inside the country was the trigger for a political crisis. The Prime Minister fired the Defense Minister. Whose party, the Progressives, announced they no longer supported the prime minister. Two opposition parties, the National Alliance and the United List, joined in opposition and the PM (from the center right New Unity party, Jaunā Vienotība in Latvian), who no longer had a parliamentary majority, resigned.

President Edgars Rinkēvič invited the head of the largest opposition party, United List, to try to form a government. Its leader, Andris Kulbergs, has no previous government experience. Should he fail President Rinkēvičs could invite someone else to try to form a government, or the fallen government could continue as a minority caretaker until parliamentary elections in October.

This crisis is a marker because Latvia’s is the first NATO government to fall primarily over the “gray-zone spillover” effects of the Ukraine war rather than over economics or ideology. I’ll have more on this in an upcoming report on what comes after NATO for European defense.

Now, test your knowledge of Baltic geography. Which one id Latvia?

If the next military conflict with Russia will start in the Baltic, and that’s a fair bet, it might be useful to have just a bare, working knowledge of the three Baltic countries, former Soviet republics all.

That big bite out of the country is the Gulf of Riga and that’s where the capital, Riga, is. It’s a big, busy, muscular place, an old Baltic trading port that joined the Hanseatic League in the 13th century. Located at the mouth of the Daugava River, trading goods from the Russian interior and northern Europe flowed came naturally to it, and today it’s bigger than the other two capitals, Vilnius and Tallinn.

To me, Riga feels maybe not so much like the capital of the Baltics, but in US terms, maybe a little like an ancient Chicago, the Baltics’ big, muscular working waterfront town.

•••••

If you’re reading this as an email, be aware that your provider may clip the article before the end. Try clicking on ‘view entire message’ to see the whole thing, or you can always read everything at Common Sense and Whiskey online.

•••••

Next Friday I’ll share a column about giraffes. Here are some stars of next week’s show. See these and tons more wild animals in the Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, along with something like 15,000 more of my travel photos.

•••••

Subscribe now

That’s it for today. I’m working on a longer report about what might come next after NATO, and that’s taking most of my writing time for now, so next Friday I’ll share one of my most read ever columns, originally published in 2018. It’s one in a series of African travelogues.

Then the following week I’ll see you twice. Thanks for your time, and let me hear what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

Share

Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. We heard many times this week that the president and Xi Jinping are friends. We may need to wait a little bit to see if anything really happened at the summit in Beijing. As Air Force One headed home on Friday, it looked like a visit short on achievements.

Today, we recap election fallout in the British Labour Party, discuss cultural cross-pollination in the High North and consider events in South Korea and Hungary. Then we close with an uncharacteristically gloomy commentary.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

If you’re reading this as an email, have a look at the online version at CommonSenseandWhiskey.com, where all CS&W content is available, and if you like what you see, please subscribe. Talk to me in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com. Let me know what you think.

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•••••

LONG HOT SUMMER FOR LABOUR: In a statement meant to criticize Kier Starmer from the left, Starmer’s former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner delivered a broadside just three days after last week’s devolved and local elections in Great Britain:

“Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first. We need to learn from that.”

Criticism from Labour’s left might be expected to cite the government in Spain, given Pedro Sanchez’s history of confronting austerity through, for example, repeated increases in the minimum wage.

But Canada? It’s a country that, it’s true, is governed by a nominally center-left government, but its leader is best known as a career banker.

Used to be, a Labour critique from the left might have appealed for solutions associated with organized labor, or public ownership, or maybe appeals for redistributive solutions.

Once upon a time Carney would have represented the very embodiment of managerial capitalism. In 2026 the leading British center left party opposes austerity and nationalist populism. These days in the UK, it’s no longer Labour versus capital.

Rayner was cleared of “deliberate wrongdoing or carelessness” by HMRC (broadly the British equivalent of the American Internal Revenue Service) in a tax matter this week. The ruling seems to have come a wee bit late for her to use as a springboard for what looks like a brewing leadership campaign in the Labour Party.

The first potential candidate showing a public interest in the Prime Minister’s job so far is Wes Streeting, until this week the Health Secretary. Streeting lives on the right of Labour. He’s comfy with the private-sector inside public services in a way that not all Labourites are, and was a sharp Jeremy Corbyn critic.

Thursday morning Streeting resigned from the Starmer cabinet to clear the decks for his leadership challenge, and promptly backed Burnham. It was unclear whether he has enough support for in the first place. He would need 81 MPs to sign on to his bid to mount a direct challenge.

It was thought Rayner might oppose Streeting from the left of the party, but rather than using the news of a clean slate from the tax authorities to help mount a candidacy, she spent the week issuing less-than-leaderlike statements like this:

“I’ll play my part in doing everything we possibly can to deliver the change, because it’s not a personal ambition, I know the difference it makes.”

And by Thursday that was all just as well, because Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham looked set to play the role of challenger-from-the-left. The Greater Manchester mayoralty Burnham holds is second only to London in size, at just under three million.

Burnham has a wee barrier to get through first, though, because at the moment he’s not a member of parliament. Burnham found an MP, 32 year old Josh Simons, who was willing to resign his seat in the Greater Manchester constituency of Makerfield to make room for Burnham, which would give him standing to enter the leadership race.

Burnham will need to be selected for and win a Makerfield by-election first. He may not be a shoo-in. As the Guardian has it:

”While Burnham won the constituency in the 2024 mayoral race with 62% of the vote, at last week’s local elections (far-right) Reform won 50.4% across the eight wards up for election, with Labour trailing on just 22.7%.”

All this maneuvering will take time. Even if the whole party agrees to wait for Burnham, a by-election probably can’t be arranged until around the beginning of July, and the leadership challenge can’t begin until then. There’s plenty of time for plotting.

It looks like shaping up to be a long, hot summer for the Labour Party. And as they fight it out, let the American opposition take one lesson now from what may be the coming fall of Keir Starmer:

Make a plan. Be ready to come to office with goals. Devise a Project 2029 and run on it.

•••••

CULTURAL CROSS-POLLINATION IN THE NORTHLANDS: Cultural cross-pollination has broken out across the Atlantic in the northern countries, as evidenced by this headline in the Globe and Mail: “Canadians should embrace Norway’s dedication to open-air life” about the Nordic idea of friluftsliv. Cold-climate democracies are borrowing social habits, institutional ideas, and even stories about identity from one another.

The two sides of the north Atlantic start out as a natural fit; Montreal remains one of the great capitals of the Francophone world. There’s even a tiny sovereign, Euro-spending bit of the French Republic just a fifteen mile ferry ride off the coast of Newfoundland.

And it works in both directions. Canada is coming to be seen a kind of “North Atlantic middle power” in parts of northern Europe that share these characteristics: large territory, thinly populated, with Arctic exposure, potential resource wealth, members of NATO but with a defensive orientation.

With good reason, since they share unique common political interests; Arctic sovereignty and indigenous affairs are perhaps foremost among them

In the quarter century or so I’ve been traveling there, the Nordics have transformed from nearly homogenous societies racially and ethnically, to a much more multicultural realm. Especially after the waves of immigration into northern Europe over the last fifteen or so years, Canada’s comparatively mature multicultural model is widely debated across northern Europe. It’s also official Canadian policy.

Plus, wilderness, lakes, remoteness, resource economies, northern indigenous cultures and just knowing how to handle winter are all naturally familiar terrain.

Canada and the Nordics are growing together, not merely as allies, but as civilizational cousins. It’s a process nudged along as an unintended consequence of Mark Carney’s US/Canada ‘rupture.’

•••••

SOUTH KOREA: More news about the High North comes, if a little improbably, from Seoul, where the government aims to become “a key player in emerging Arctic shipping routes.”

The legislature has prioritized “a sweeping bill to build port infrastructure, coordinate national strategy and secure a foothold in polar logistics,” according to the always usually interesting High North News. It hopes to develop Busan into “a hub for the Arctic route.”

Whatever comes of the initiative, some legislators got a free trip to Norway. “A delegation from the port of Busan recently signed a partnership agreement with Norway’s port of Tromsø.”

•••••

HUNGARY: Following his defeat in Hungarian elections a month ago this week, former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reported feeling “pain and emptiness.” He revealed this to the YouTube channel Patriota.

He also told Patriota “I have never tolerated any corruption.”

The London Times reported separately that Orbán’s daughter Rahel, “prominent in the tourism and beauty sectors,” had moved with her husband to New York, “so she could pursue further studies.” That couple’s combined fortune has been estimated by Forbes as at least 151 billion forints” ($561 million), the Times reported.

•••••

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•••••

NOT A HAPPY COMMENTARY: The United States is in a tailspin, and that’s not just based on the headlines of the day: yes, there’s the war with no way out in Iran, Russia’s war on Ukraine (and freedom), inflation that won’t go away and grumbling and dissatisfaction about the economy.

More consequential is the tidal pull of tyranny, and the dispiriting realization of how many people are happy to help see democracy off. We’re witnessing the real-time weakening of political institutions.

And there’s something else: the hollowing out of humanity from all of economic life in America—not just from where Americans get goods and services, but also from where they get their paychecks. We’re living through all the things a raft of books have been warning us about.

At least we were warned.

I hope you had a chance to read the article I shared earlier this week from the Australian writer David Lewis. David wrote:

“Neoliberalism promised flexibility, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it delivered something more corrosive: the systematic transfer of risk from institutions to individuals, while leaving institutional authority largely intact.”

That it did. And as a result, trust evaporated. As a result you get:

“… a refusal to grant institutions the presumption of good faith they once enjoyed,” which is a failure of legitimacy. It’s “the accumulated consequence of institutions that retained authority while shedding obligation.”

And then we reelected Donald Trump.

What’s more worrisome is that it’s not just the United States. David was writing from Australia. Governments across the West are unable to care for their citizens.

Rana Dasgupta argues that the state has become unable to manage economic inequality, eco-degradation and tech’s manipulation of the truth. More to the point, the state has shown it’s inability or unwillingness to even try.

To Dasgupta, “the nation-state is a constantly changing commercial engine, whose interests coincide only sometimes with those of human beings.” There’s the problem. The solution, which is considerably easier said than done, is to change the state.

If you believe this, the way to pull ourselves out of this is not just to take control of the House in November. It is to change the state. There’s next week’s project.

•

A corrective is needed but none is in sight. Antonio Gramsci has perhaps been over-quoted in the 2020s, because his famous “interregnum” maps so perfectly onto today.

His circumstances, his lived reality was in fact radically different. For him the backdrop was the breakdown of the old order after the Great War. As a Marxist, he saw defeat snatched from the hands of victory.

He saw the old liberal order replaced not by a governing working class, but by Italian Fascism. And during his “interregnum,” he was in jail.

Still, his words apply:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

A modern paraphrase says, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

In our context, no matter how much leadership sets out to maintain a system many see as morally bereft, that leadership itself is seen as ineffectual at best and complicit at worst.

The disillusionment that follows, compounded by the confounding zeal of those converted to ‘illiberal democracy,’ allows for the rise of Gramsci’s monsters. From the roster of our day, they include Berlusconi, Kaczyński, Orbán, Johnson/Farage and, of course, Donald Trump.

We must also consider that this may not be an interregnum at all, and a corrective may not be coming. There is “the possibility that we have entered a time of more frequent crisis – a time after stable orders.”

•••••

Like most people, you’ve probably quit paying attention to what the president puts on social media. Here’s the kind of thing you’ve been missing:

•••••

MALAWI: Bloomberg reports that when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to an attack by the US and Israel, it choked off shipments from producers who supply almost 60% of the nitrogen-bearing fertilizer needed by subsistence farmers who make up the bulk of Malawi’s population.

As a result, landlocked Malawi, one of the countries in the world least prepared to afford a new raft of troubles—and three thousand miles from the conflict—now faces the second-highest fuel prices in the world, scarce fertilizer and impending food shortages.

Now, as a consequence of the war, fertilizer costs have surged (if it’s available at all) and the cost of transporting it to remote rural areas is prohibitive.

Malawi is poorly connected to the nearest ports, in Mozambique and South Africa, and customers with more money often snatch up cargoes en route, to replenish dwindling stocks.

•••••

GOT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? And finally, Ukraine may not have any cards, but on the new 2026 press freedom list from Reporters Without Borders, Ukraine moves up seven slots to 55th, surpassing the United States, which slides seven slots to 64th.

•••••

Subscribe now

That’s it for today. Thanks for your time, and let me hear what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

Share

Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. What follows is a guest post that originally appeared on David Lewis’s Cultural Notes Substack back in January, used here with David’s kind permission. I share it because it sums up my dismay about the corporatization of business—and the bad things that follow from it—better than I could write it myself.

David Lewis is an Australian musician, historian and essayist who writes about how music, folklore, and popular culture shape the way we think. He also co-hosts the New Politics Podcast, which has for me been a useful window into Australian politics.

He’s on Substack Notes @dlewis and you’ll find his writing on Substack here. I recommend his writing and I encourage you to subscribe.

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On trust, institutions, and what happens when authority outlives obligation.

David Lewis: Cultural Notes

Originally published here on Jan 07, 2026

by David Lewis

I was recently speaking with a small business owner who was struggling to keep staff. He wasn’t a bad employer. He paid well, conditions were reasonable, and in several cases he had gone beyond what the rules required rather than merely complying with them. By any ordinary measure, he was acting in good faith. Still, people didn’t stay. At first, he reached for the explanation that has become almost reflexive: millennials. They were unreliable, uncommitted, insufficiently grateful for the opportunities on offer. He said this without venom, more in puzzlement than anger. He genuinely couldn’t understand why what had once worked no longer did.

I suggested, carefully, that it might be more complicated. As we talked, something shifted. He realised it wasn’t just millennials. Gen Z employees came and went just as easily. So did people his own age. Even Gen X — the supposedly pragmatic, institutionally loyal generation — showed little inclination to stay put. That was the moment the problem clarified itself. This wasn’t about youth. It was about trust.

For much of the twentieth century, institutions — businesses, universities, professions, governments — operated on an implicit bargain. If you showed up, behaved reasonably, and did your part, you would be offered a degree of stability, security, and meaning in return. That promise was not always honoured, but it was widely believed. Belief mattered. It shaped behaviour, encouraged patience, and sustained loyalty even when conditions were imperfect. People stayed not because everything was good, but because they trusted that institutions would, over time, reciprocate. That trust has largely evaporated. And once trust goes, behaviour changes — not out of spite or entitlement, but out of rational self-protection.

What we are living with is not simply cultural drift or generational attitude. It is the long moral afterlife of neoliberalism — not as an economic doctrine, but as a lived social order. Neoliberalism promised flexibility, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it delivered something more corrosive: the systematic transfer of risk from institutions to individuals, while leaving institutional authority largely intact. Over time, security was privatised, employment made provisional, careers fragmented, and failure reframed as personal rather than structural. Institutions learned to insulate themselves. Individuals learned they were on their own. This lesson did not need to be taught explicitly. It was absorbed through casualisation, outsourcing, disappearing pensions, and the steady normalisation of instability. Once institutions stopped absorbing risk, they forfeited the moral basis on which loyalty had rested.

The small business owner I spoke to hadn’t broken any rules. In some cases, he had exceeded them. But neither had the institutions his employees had grown up watching. They had done something worse. They had retained the language of commitment while withdrawing the substance of protection. Workers were told loyalty would be rewarded. It wasn’t. Students were told education guaranteed security. It didn’t. Citizens were told expertise was neutral and benevolent. It often wasn’t. So now, when even a decent employer asks for commitment, employees silently ask a different question: why should I believe you’ll be different? This is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition. Under these conditions, work becomes transactional not because people lack character, but because institutions trained them to expect nothing else.

What many employers now experience as unreliability is better understood as withheld belief. People no longer behave as though institutions will catch them if they fall, so they keep moving. They do not invest emotionally in structures that have shown themselves brittle or self-protective. They do not trade flexibility for promises that resemble those their parents were given — and saw broken. This is why appeals to work ethic and generational virtue consistently miss the point. They mistake a legitimacy problem for a discipline problem. Institutions continue to assert authority, but they no longer reliably command belief. Authority without belief produces compliance at best and disengagement at worst.

The same pattern is visible across public life. Universities struggle to assert intellectual authority, not because knowledge is devalued, but because they are increasingly experienced as corporatised service providers rather than custodians of truth. Public health messaging fractures not primarily because people reject science, but because institutions that speak in its name are no longer trusted to act transparently, proportionately, or with restraint. Even fringe movements gain traction less through persuasion than through disbelief — a refusal to grant institutions the presumption of good faith they once enjoyed. This does not make bad ideas sound. It does explain why they spread. When trust collapses, people do not become more rational. They become more defensive.

The tragedy is that institutions often respond to declining trust by doing precisely the wrong thing. They moralise, tighten control, and speak with greater certainty and less empathy. But legitimacy cannot be commanded back into existence. It can only be rebuilt when institutions demonstrate — consistently and visibly — that they understand the lived conditions of those they claim to serve, that they are capable of restraint, and that they are willing once again to share risk. Compassion is not indulgence here. It is the precondition of authority.

The small business owner I spoke to did not suddenly become a bad employer, nor had he failed to meet his obligations. But he grasped, perhaps for the first time, that even good faith now operates inside a system that no longer rewards belief. Trust cannot be assumed. Loyalty cannot be requested in advance. Stability must be demonstrated repeatedly, not promised rhetorically. This is not a generational failure. It is the accumulated consequence of institutions that retained authority while shedding obligation. Until that is faced honestly, institutions will continue to misdiagnose the problem — and blame individuals for behaviour they were methodically taught. The cost is not merely disengagement at work or disbelief in public life. It is the slow erosion of legitimacy itself.

[END]

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My gratitude to David Lewis for allowing me to share this guest post.

That’s it for today. See you Friday.

Thanks for your time, and let me hear what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

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Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Cheers,

Bill

Welcome. This week we start with a quick recap of Keir Starmer’s Judgement Day yesterday, as seen from Wales. Then, ahead of tomorrow’s Victory Day parade, the question of whether Vladimir Putin is struggling sems to keep popping up. We have a couple of short political items from the eastern part of Europe, and I leave you with an unfinished thought that’s been rolling around in my head.

Common Sense and Whiskey goes deeper than the headlines on a few stories a week, in a presentation that busy people can absorb quickly. It’s a short, sharp look at the world out there.

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BRITISH LABOUR’S JUDGMENT DAY: Expectations for Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party were so low in local and devolved elections this week that some anticipated a top to bottom house cleaning, with the insertion of the Reform party as a Tory-killer, and a hustle out the door for the Prime Minister.

Some of the more breathless predicted a systemic reset, bemoaning in advance the gutting of the two party system. And after a night long on waiting and largely lacking results, it appeared voters were indeed in the mood for blood—with relish.

The elections expert Sir John Curtice expected more than half the electorate to vote in the Senedd contest for the first time.

National results came all too slowly. Counting in Scotland, Wales and most English councils didn’t even begin until this morning, so the larger national question, what does it all mean, is beyond our grasp for now.

But we can have an early look, and set the stage for the devolved legislative contest in the smaller, more compact nation of Wales. As this was published, Friday midday US east coast time, Welsh Labour was expecting to return just 10 seats in the next Senedd, the party said.

Which is even worse than it sounds. “Labour has never returned fewer than 26 seats in the 60 seat Senedd,” the Guardian reported Friday morning. But the new Welsh Senedd, reconfigured for this election, will be made up not of sixty seats, but ninety-six.

We should look quickly at how they’ve changed things.

With this election, Wales moves to proportional representation. Last night they voted for the devolved Senedd, which is expanding from 60 to 96 members. Sixteen “super-constituencies” each elect six members of the Senedd.

[Senedd is pronounced something like “SEN-eth.” “dd” = “th” in Cymraeg, the Welsh language.]

Voters cast one vote, for a party list or an independent candidate, and seats are allocated proportionally. The aim is that ten percent of the vote would garner about ten seats.

The contenders, ranked by the number of seats they currently hold, are Labour (29), Conservative (13), Plaid Cymru (13), Reform UK (2), Liberal Democrats (1) and Greens (0):

The politics: The British national icon, naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday is today and naturally enough, Brits have begun measuring events in David Attenborough time. As the BBC put it Friday morning, “Labour have won elections in Wales since before Sir David Attenborough was born.” That era ends today.

Welsh Labour has indeed dominated politics there for a century. And like most everywhere else across the United Kingdom today, Labour suddenly finds itself out in the substantial Welsh woods.

The First Minister, leader of Welsh Labour, was expected to lose her seat. Pundits had been reckoning Labour would be happy just to remain part of the governing coalition. Polling had shown Labour collapsing into third place, its vote share down in the mid-teens.

YouGov, Britain’s most frequently cited pollster, said 54 percent of the public believed the Welsh Labour-led government was doing a bad job.

Jostling to benefit from Labour’s collapse became a tale of two insurgents. Plaid Cymru ran a soft nationalist, social-democratic alternative kind of campaign, soft-pedaling previous talk of independence, emphasizing competence and Welsh identity.

[“Plaid” means “party” and “Cymru” is the Welsh name for Wales. Pronounced approximately “Plied Camry.”]

Before the election it looked as if it could emerge as the largest party for the first time.

Then there is the Welsh version of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a party of older, less educated, xenophobic, ex-Tory Leave voters, rejectionist, disaffected and anti-everything—but mainly anti-immigration— voters, who are the unavoidable story in this election nationwide.

Here is a cheery sampling of the caliber of candidates Reform is fielding:

Nathan Gill, a former Reform UK Wales leader, pleaded guilty to bribery offenses and was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison last year for taking money to make pro-Russia statements while an MEP.

Laura Anne Jones, a sitting member of the Welsh Senedd, was suspended for two weeks without pay over a racial slur about Chinese people.

Corey Edwards, briefly Reform’s lead candidate in Pen-y-Bont Bro Morgannwg, stood down as Reform’s a candidate after a photograph emerged that appeared to show him making a Nazi salute.

And Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage is under scrutiny over an alleged £5 million undeclared gift/donation from a crypto investor. Farage/Reform says it was a personal gift for his security. (Sort of like the US Senate’s says its proposed $1 billion fund for the Donald Trump ballroom is for security.)

Even with that, heading into Welsh elections, Reform’s poll numbers were in a horserace with Plaid Cymru.

My characterization of the Reform voter is overdone and reflects my bias, but there is in fact a constituency for Reform among otherwise generally left-leaning disaffected Plaid voters in post-industrial areas of the country.

On Tuesday, the final YouGov poll before the Senedd vote put Plaid Cymru slightly ahead of Reform, 33% to 29%. Other polls had the race even closer.

The Greens, as in the wider UK, were forecast to make a bit of a breakthrough. The general idea was that as voters on the right fled the Conservatives for Reform, so those on the left fleeing Labour would have a look at the Greens. In Wales, that meant primarily in younger college communities and the capital Cardiff.

Under new leadership, the Greens became more willing to play footsie with a broader left-populist stance, broadening their pitch away from just the environment and opening up to a hint of anti-establishment anger.

They also got a jolt of fresh momentum with an unexpected by-election win, the pick-up of what had been a safe Labour seat in Greater Manchester in February. Plus, parts of Labour’s younger, urban coalition have been none too pleased with the party’s approach to Israel and Gaza.

But more important than all that for the Welsh Greens, the switch to all proportional representation means, a vote total of eight or ten percent can now make a Green vote more than a protest vote. It could now translate into actual seats. And in fact YouGov put the Greens on course to elect seven members of the Senedd, where they had never previously won any.

With a rise of Plaid and Reform, we have neither a populist breakthrough nor a right-wing insurgency, neither a left nor a right wing surge, it looks like, but rather a generalized collapse of the governing center, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s party, but also comprising the Conservative Tory party. This mimics results we’ve talked about a lot on Common Sense and Whiskey, across all of Europe—as Wales’s Irish neighbor W B Yeats would have it, the center has been unable hold.

This is the wider, UK-wide headline. Labour falling to a distant third leads the end of a century-long political order. Here’s a graphic illustration based on polling from before election night.

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RUSSIA: Last Friday we speculated whether increased Kremlin paranoia might be manifesting in widely reported restrictions on the internet in Russia. I concluded with a ‘maybe, probably no big deal yet’ kind of conclusion.

And yet ahead of tomorrow’s annual Victory Day parade in Moscow, the Kremlin does seem to be doing an unusual amount of publicly visible hand-wringing. The Russian newspaper-in-exile the Moscow Times declared this a “period of instability.”

An opinion piece there this week pointed to the “reported flight from Russia to the U.S. of Denis Butsayev, the recently dismissed deputy minister for natural resources and ecology,” saying it “echoes earlier moments in Soviet history, when defections tended to cluster around periods of instability: the purges of the late 1930s, the chaos following Operation Barbarossa during World War II, the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953 and the crumbling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.”

On Monday of this week it surfaced that Max Seddon at the Financial Times, Nick Paton Walsh at CNN and, it was reported, other journalists had been briefed on a report from a ‘European intelligence agency’ about Russian internal security. That will do nothing to tamp down speculation.

It’s fair to sum things up by saying that Russia’s internal security system is under some strain, with Kremlin infighting reported this week over security issues.

It probably doesn’t lighten the pressure that all four of Moscow’s major airports—Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky—on Tuesday, because of reported Ukrainian drone threats and air-defense activity around the capital ahead of tomorrow’s parade.

Reporting suggests the screws have been tightened on policing, internal surveillance, and regime-control mechanisms, which are never allowed to go slack in the best of times. Add ongoing wartime conditions and the sustained economic pressure of more than four years of sanctions, and it’s probably not safe to count on that Black Sea sanatorium vacation time that front line security services may have been dreaming of.

Finnish President Stubb summed things up this way: ““During World War II, Russia reached Berlin in four years. During the war against Ukraine, Russia reached Pokrovsk in four years.”

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•••••

THINKING OUT LOUD IN PRINT: An incomplete thought here, just the start of an idea, really. Consider: for the last eighty-plus years, the United States has assumed, and asserted, that it controls international shipping lanes. Whether in fact it actually has, has been mostly beside the point, because no one has ever challenged Washington on it.

This was a posture the US assumed as part of the post-World War Two order that Washington itself largely designed.

Now Iran has taken that grand idea down a peg with not much more than an assertion that it’s not so. Whether or not the Trump administration will acknowledge wearing the mantle of Loser of Prestige and Loser of Face, historians will bestow it. It’s an ignominious moment for a group of men who define themselves by their bellicosity and bluster.

Most observers outside the White House would suggest that contrary to its rhetoric, the administration’s actions are moving the country away from its self-perception as the world’s leading power. Experts now argue just about how far and how fast.

Insuring safe worldwide shipping lanes was an expensive proposition, and it didn’t come from altruism. Washington took on that expense to guarantee international commerce based mostly on the US dollar. This war makes it hard not to acknowledge that fading dollar dominance will set in, and may gather pace, with all the cascading effects we might expect to follow.

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VERY BRIEFLY:

ROMANIA: The pro-European government of Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan government fell on Tuesday. The center-left Social Democrats withdrew from government and then joined the far right AUR party to bring Bolojan down.

[The AUR is the Alliance for the Union of Romanians—Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor. AUR is also a deft branding choice. It’s the word for ‘gold’ in Romanian.]

Relatively new President Nicușor Dan wants to preserve a pro-EU, pro-NATO governing direction in the face of the threat of further fragmentation, as we discussed in today’s lead item about the United Kingdom. Dan insists the AUR will play no role in any future government.

Bolojan remains as a caretaker while possibly weeks or even months-long coalition talks proceed.

ARMENIA: If Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a jauntiness as he strode off his plane in Yerevan this week, it would be because his very presence was a big thumb in the eye to Vladimir Putin. It served as a visible reminder that even Russia’s traditional allies, like Armenia, are hedging against the Putin administration.

It’s cheeky. Russia’s 102nd Military Base—home to mechanized infantry, tanks, artillery, air-defense systems, MiG-29s and something between 3,000 to 5,000 troops—is housed in Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city, near the Turkish border.

Which I admit is news to me. I have always been proud to have visited Armenia, driving from Yerevan in the middle of the country north to Tbilisi, Georgia. Gyumri? Never heard of it.

•••••

That’s it today, but I’ll see you twice next week, on Friday as usual, and early in the week to introduce a guest post from an Australian writer that I think you’ll find unusually perceptive.

Thanks for your time, and let me hear what you think. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Substack authors, feel free to restack this or any other column on your own Substack anytime.

Share

Content on Common Sense and Whiskey is free. There’s no paywall, but if CS&W is beneficial to you, please subscribe for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Big American media is increasingly falling under the control of government-friendly oligarchs. The future is on Substack and platforms like it — please invest in independent writers you trust. We’d all appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

Cheers,

Bill