"The Top Of Mount Stupid"

In the aftermath of the midterms and Trump's presidential announcement, the FTX scandal hasn't been a top story, even though some commentators are calling it worse than Enron. So far, in fact, nobody has noticed an odd coincidence that the scandal emerged within days of Elizabeth Holmes's sentencing for the Theranos hoax -- but both Caroline Ellison, the reputed queen of Sam Bankman-Fried's harem and CEO of Alameda Research, and Elizabeth Holmes were products of Stanford University.

I did a quick check; Stanford produced 11 Nobel laureates since Elizabeth Holmes was on campus in 2002, but it's worth noting that Ellison and Holmes must hold ranks equivalent to the Nobel Prize among famous financial hoaxers, up there with Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski. Two of them in just a decade! Remember as well that Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski didn't achieve prominence until they were well into middle age; Holmes and Ellison emerged meteorically when they were much younger.

But it's also worth noting that the Stanford Nobelists weren't undergaduates there; they were largely recruited to the faculty specifically for the Nobel prospects they'd developed in their careers elsewhere. Holmes and Ellison were selected for their unique adolescent promise via the elite-school admissions game and were home grown. And the elite-school connections don't stop there. Ms Ellison is the daughter of Glenn Ellison, the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sara Fisher Ellison, also an economist at MIT.

I have a question. If she's so smart, and indeed the offspring of such smart parents, how can the YouTuber at the top of this post credibly assert she's reached the peak of Mount Stupid? The video shows clips of her giggling sophomorically and making vapid remarks worthy of the most superficial Valley girl. Yet

Ruth Ackerman, a math professor who taught Ellison at Stanford 10 years ago, called her former student “bright, focused, very mathy” — a challenge, she said, to reconcile with Ellison becoming wrapped up in one of the largest alleged frauds of the past decade.

“The first I heard of the current controversy was when people started contacting me on LinkedIn, telling me to withdraw my endorsement of her skill as a computer scientist,” Ackerman told Forbes.

This carries echoes of Elizabeth Holmes, who also seems to have had a remarkable ability to con otherwise educated adults. As the Youtube psychologist Dr Todd Grande noted a few days ago at the time of Holmes's sentencing,

"Some people have called her extremely intelligent. One of her references said that she was the most intelligent person they had ever met, which means they need to get out more. . ."

There are similar questions about her collaborator, Sam Bankman-Fried. Although he himself went to MIT, his parents are Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School, an odd mirror image of Ellison's background with both parents at MIT. Both are clearly products of the post-1960s American gentry class, and both appear to have risen with the help of enablers in the same class. Elizabeth Holmes's background is very similar:

Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA.

All of these notorious hoaxers come from the same prosperous, highly educated backgrounds, and we might almost say they were groomed for their roles throughout adolescence, with Holmes and Bankman-Fried attending prestigious private schools and Ellison attending the controversial Newton North High School, one of the largest and most expensive high schools ever built in the United States. All were treated as prodigies; Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students; Ellison represented the US in the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad (if you ask me, the whole field of linguistics is a hoax); Holmes's parents arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring.

These backgrounds are in remarkable contrast to Ken Lay, raised in poverty as the son of a Missouri Baptist preacher; Dennis Kozlowski, raised in a working-class Polish-American family in Newark, NJ; or Bernard Madoff, a Jewish working-class graduate of Far Rockaway High School with a spotty later academic record. Ivan Boesky, a contemporary of Madoff, had a similar background, although the crimes for which he pleaded guilty in 1986 were much less severe, and his reputation has faded.

The Stanford-MIT millennial fraudsters are instead products of what David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise calls the bourgeois bohemians, unlike the boomers and depression kids Lay, Kozlowsi, and Madoff, groomed and entitled from the start, though by no means polished -- and few of their peers had any questions. I'm still digesting this, but I'm wondering if the whole elite-school racket, which the earlier fraudsters avoided, has anything to do with it. David Brooks would likely deny it. Still, how come Ellison and Bankman-Fried look like they've ascended the to the summit of Mount Stupid, while the likes of Bernie Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski, or Ken Lay never came off that way?

Trump's Future, The Midterms, And COVID

On Sunday, I mentioned that I'd found an opinion piece that made some productive observations about Trump, COVID, and the disastrous year 2020, but I hadn't been able to locate it again. I finally did, it's by David Srrom at Hot Air, which has greatly improved with the departure of Allahpundit. Strom expands on those insights in this piece from Thursday, Trump's Achilles' heel?

Lots of arrows will be fired at his vulnerable heel. Some are likely to hit.

The target? Trump’s response to COVID was simply awful. He did exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, pushed all the worst Establishment folks to the top of the policymaking heap, and actively aided them in destroying his chance to get reelected. Trump was forced to choose between good policy and bad, courageous leaders and bureaucrats, and he chose wrongly. It was his undoing in 2020, and could be his undoing in 2024.

He quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Justin Hart:

When Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign Tuesday, he didn’t apologize for the lockdowns or even mention them. I supported him in 2016, and during his tenure he did much to dredge the political swamps, but his decision to approve and extend drastic Covid interventions should disqualify him for a second term.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, put the Constitution into an induced coma. Mr. Trump’s decision to adopt Chinese Communist Party tactics and close down the country gave license to states to amplify and extend these terrible policies, to governors to wield unprecedented executive powers, and to school districts to shut students out for months or even years.

The COVID-related electoral revisions, including universal mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, also contributed to Trump's defeat later that year, and they probably had an impact on Republican underperformance in 2022. Strom continues.

The Declaration of Emergency that Trump put into place in 2020 has been extended into 2023, and in all likelihood will be extended again. This time around some Democrats stood up to stop it, but the Left had made clear that they will be punished. Emergency powers for the president will extend indefinitely–powers Trump first put in place.

Trump didn’t just make bad choices during COVID, he actively attacked those such as Governors Kemp and DeSantis for making the correct ones. Unsurprisingly he took shots at both men before and after the midterm elections, and I would be surprised if his vulnerability on the COVID issue didn’t play a role in his decision to do so. He took particular aim at Sweden, one of the only places in the world where they got things right.

. . . Trump didn’t quite make Anthony Fauci on his own, but he did make him a czar with power over my life and others’. That is hard to forgive, and I suspect it may cost his his shot at the presidency for a second time.

My feelings, at least for now, are closer and closer to Strom's. My current sense is that Trump will fade before 2024, although there is a risk that if Biden uses the FBI and the Justice Department to pursue Trump politically, it could enhance his status as a cult martyr and damage Republican unity going into the election. On the other hand, I simply don't think either Biden or the Democrat leadership is smart enough to develop that subtle a strategy, and it's probably more likely that they will simply pursue an exclusive anti-Trump focus and ignore the rise of a more effective 2024 Republican candidate.

What I've been seeing, though, is a tendency for neoconservatives to emerge from the woodwork, who have generally been aligned with the Never Trump movement in the past, and as I've been saying, figures like Secretary Blinken and Anne Applebaum have advocated an activist anti-Russian Ukraine policy that's hard to distinguish from the classical neoconservatism at the Institute for the Study of War. So far, Trump has continued to make public statements that distance himself from such a policy, and the Republican right continues to insist that Ukraine aid is being diverted by corruption there.

It's too early to tell how this may impact the alignment of the Democrats in the 2024 election, or indeed if rhe Ukraine war and the Russia problem will have been quickly solved by then -- but I donk't think the Russia problem in particular can be disposed of so easily, I still think Trump's issues have been overtaken by events, and the political environment will be different in 2024.

Ukraine And The Big Money

In yesterday's post, I noted that the US has an open-ended commitment to aid Ukraine based not just on a goal of securing its pre-2014 borders, but on a vaguely expressed additional objective that embraces preventing Russia from being able to re-invade in the future -- although this must also imply changing Russia itself in some fundamental way, which Anne Applebaum, an ally of Secretary Blinken, explains. This will inevitably involve remaking the global political and military order in a way comparable to the Congress of Vienna, Versailles, or Yalta/Potsdam.

In fact, looking at circumstances from that perspective, it appears that Russia's decline as a major power has already rendered Potsdam and its consequences obsolete. Resolving the dilemma will be expensive, and expensive at a world war level. I assume that Secretaries Blinken and Austin see the problem from specific diplomatic and military perspectives, but I would also guess that if pressed, they would say that evaluating the overall national priority, especaily from a budgetary perspective, is above their paygrade.

But that means kicking the decisions up to the White House, where they aren't being made now and are likely not to be made in the near future. Instead, we're getting ad hoc expenditures every few weeks, $500 million here, $30 billion there, with no plan and in particular no budget. Only a few people are starting to recognize this.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show,” author, Washington Post columnist, and CNN political analyst Josh Rogin argued that while it’s important for the U.S. to keep up its support for Ukraine, the Biden administration “hasn’t done enough, to be honest, to keep Congress in the loop. They won’t tell them exactly what the money’s going for. There’s not a clear strategy to end this thing.”

“[T]here are a lot of people in both parties that have real concerns about this money. I mean, $54 billion so far. Now, the President’s asking for another $38 billion. That’s a lot of U.S. taxpayer money.

It's probably more accurate to say that the president has been induced by his handlers to ask for another $38 billion. Even if there isn't a medical condition involved, I don't think it's in his nature to concentrate on plans or objectives of any complexity, and what evidence we have is that Ukraine simply tests his limited patience:

​President Biden lost his temper and raised his voice on the phone with​ Volodymyr Zelensky when the Ukrainian president continued to press for more aid even after Biden signed off on $1 billion worth of military assistance earlier this year, according to a report Monday. ​

The phone call in June, one of many between the two leaders, turned testy when Zelensky began listing what else Kyiv needed and wasn’t getting​ shortly after Biden announced the aid package, NBC News reported.​

The commander-in-chief reportedly blew his stack ​and, with his voice rising, reminded Zelensky of the generosity of the American people, stressing that his administration​ and ​the US military w​ere doing all ​they could to help Ukraine in its war with Russia.

He got testy in June over $1 billion; now he's signing off on $38 billion, with no end in sight. I would guess that Secretaries Blinken and Austin are delighted to see him in Delaware as often as possible and have worked out a means with his handlers to get his signatures on these things when he's preoccupied. Nevertheless, with the Republicans in control of the House, this won't go on forever:

‼️#Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives demand an audit of the funds allocated to support #Ukraine.

The bill stipulates that Congress must receive, within 14 days of its passage, all documents on aid provided to Ukraine, signed by Joe #Biden. pic.twitter.com/eQ5J4Rhw5i

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) November 18, 2022

My own view continues to be that Zelensky is an honest dealer, but he's working at the level of a real-world Victor Laszlo whose responsibility is primarily to his own small country's interests, while he makes effective appeals to universal principles in doing this. If he can get the attention of the US and the EU, fine, but as Churchill understood about Roosevelt, it's important to have as an ally a US president who's enough of a statesman on his own part to get the support of the US public behind major sacrifice.

In general, the US political process has yet to grasp the scope of this whole project and begin a serious discussion of priorities. At this point, neither Trump nor Biden is enough of a statesman -- even at the Zelensky level -- to start or effectively influence this process.

Wait A Moment: Aren't We Already Committed To World War III? What Will It Cost?

I've kept returning to Anne Applebaum's Atlantic piece that I linked Tuesday, The Russian Empire Must Die. Let's keep in mind that this wasn't written by a raving right-winger; it was published in almost the most prestigious of establishment outlets (I don't know if she shopped it to Foreign Affairs) and written by a fully formed, fully vetted member of the liberal Democrat establishment with credentials comparable to, say, Secretary Blinken, who is currently following policies with goals that, while not as clearly expressed, are at least congruent with those Ms Applebaum outlines in her essay.

Her argument is clear:

Ideas move across time and space, sometimes in unexpected ways. The notion that a country should be different—differently ruled, differently organized—can come from old books, from foreign travel, or just from its citizens’ imaginations. At the height of the Russian empire, in the 19th century, under the rule of some of the most ponderous autocrats of their time, a plethora of reform movements flowered: social democrats, peasant reformers, advocates of constitutions and parliaments.

. . . Most suffered from one major blind spot: Neither then nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project itself was the source of Russian autocracy. The White Russian armies lost to the Bolsheviks in part because they would not join forces in 1918–20 with newly independent Poland or would-be independent Ukraine. Democratic ideas did not triumph in either the branch or the trunk in the years that followed the Russian Revolution, partly because the state needed to use so much violence to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and the other republics inside the Soviet Union.

Still, even the decades of fear and poverty that followed the Russian Revolution did not eliminate the belief that another kind of state was possible.

. . . They lost, of course, to yet another dictator who is using an imperial war to eliminate his enemies and spread fear across Russia.

. . . Russian liberals have failed before. They failed in the 1900s, they failed in the 2000s, and they are failing now. They failed to stop Putin, failed to prevent this catastrophe from unfolding. Some of them failed, at least until recently, to understand how Russian imperialism has fed and nurtured Russian autocracy[.]

I quoted her overall conclusion on Tuesday:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

Her argument, as far as we can parse it out, is that Russia is a problem. It has been a problem at least since the 19th century. The problem can be traced to its imperialism. Russian liberals, however well-intended, have failed repeatedly to solve the Russian problem. Outsiders must help Russia change, since Russians themselves have failed. Thus we must aid Ukraine in this project, although the overall project is greater than Ukraine, it's ending the imperialism that feeds Russian autocracy.

I'm not completely comfortable with this; it seems to be at least a first cousin of sloganeering about the war to end wars, or the war to make the world safe for democracy, with its scope somewhat reduced to making it the war to end Russia as we know it. But slogans have never been the real cause of anything. Nevertheless, even if Russia is a problem that needs urgent fixing, the US otherwise guaranteed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, under which the borders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were to be guaranteed in return for those countries surrendering their former Soviet nuclear weapons. In addition, there can be no question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter, which the US has frequently used to justify its own policy goals.

But if those were the sole issues, we wouldn't have a bigger problem, which is that even leaving nuclear armageddon aside, solving Ukraine alone will still be like pulling the fatal thread. Secretaries Austin and Blinken expressed US objectives in the Ukraine war on April 25:

At a press conference in Poland after a surprise visit to Kyiv, Lloyd Austin was asked if he would now define US goals differently from those set out soon after the Russian invasion. In response, he started out with the established administration line about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty and defend its territory.

Then Austin added a second goal: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” That meant Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that had been lost in Ukraine.

. . . The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled with Austin to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, agreed with his formulation of US objectives, saying: “I think the secretary said it very well”.

I've been saying here for quite some time that Austin and Blinken appear to have been able to establish Ukraine policy as a completely separate carveout within the administration, with Biden's role closely circumscribed to the extent that he and his immediate staff aren't allowed to deviate from carefully crafted, minimalist expressions dictated to them by State and Defense. This has worked up to now.

However, as the Guardian link above points out, the view of the mission within the State-Defense carveout has expanded from the simple obligation of restoring Ukraine's borders under the Budapest Assurances to the larger objective of weakening Russia militarily to the degree that an invasion of Ukraine (or by implication any other former Soviet state) can't be repeated. And this isn't so far from Ms Applebaum's goal of solving the Russia problem by dissolving its empire.

This is going to be expensive, and why shouldn't it be? I've been posting fanciful maps here now and then of people's ideas about what a post-imperial Russia might look like; another one is at the top of today's entry. The implication of all these projected scenarios, if it's never expressed directly, is this is what Russia would look like after a Tom Clancy fantasy of World War III. And if you play around with this kind of fantasy, this is precisely what you're going to get, a Treaty of Delhi, say, that codifes agreements made by the allied powers in the Auckland Conference, which results in a map like the one above.

If you're going to fix Russia, you're talking about something at the level of World Wars I and II, followed by something comparable to the Congress of Vienna. The current US strategy of nickel-and-diming a few dozen billions in aid to Ukraine every few weeks isn't going to cover that kind of cost, even if US military forces are never directly involved.

Right now, there seem to be two separate factions in the establishment, whether either recognizes it or not: there's the Blinken-Austin-Applebaum faction that thinks fixing Russia is a priority, while there's the Pelosi-Harris faction that places priority on climate change, pansexualism, and the alliance with the Lumpenproletariat. If we're going to have World War III, we simply can't pay for both. My guess is that neither faction thinks it can rely on Biden to make an effective decision, and that's where things will stand for the foreseeable future -- except that circumstances are inevitably going to force a choice.

Space Aliens Are Neo-Malthusians!

Yahoo links, somewhat misleadingly, a strange paper in which the authors argue that Malthusianism governs the destiny of life in the universe.

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

Curious, I went to the paper itself. The lead author, Jonathan H Jiang, is a "principal scientist" (whatever that means) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with degrees including a PhD in fields related to astrophysics. This is a field that, like linguistics, seems to be dominated by wild speculation, so that's red flag number one. Number two is that, although he's the lead author, his co-authors include Philip E. Rosen, who is listed as an "independent researcher" in Vancouver, WA but is elsewhere listed as "retired"; Kelly Lu, a member of the class of 2024 at Santa Margarita Catholic High School; Kristen A. Fahy, a member of the Tropospheric Composition Group in the Earth Science Section at JPL, who holds an MEd in Physics Education; and Piotr Obacz, a lecturer in the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He holds a PhD, but apparently not in astrophysics or a related field.

I don't know if his co-authors qualify as a group red flag, or if each one qualifies as a red flag individually. The paper is located at a site called arXiv.com, and it doesn't appear to have been vetted by any peer-reviewed journal. Mr Rosen and Ms Fahy frequently appear with Dr Jiang as co-authors on numerous papers related to extraterrestial life. Mr Jiang and Ms Fahy appear together on the YouTube video A Beacon in the Galaxy to Message ET: Are We In The Dark Forest?

The best we can conclude is that two of the authors are employed at JPL, but I don't think we can assume that it's endorsed by either JPL or NASA, and it isn't peer reviewed. However, it proposes an intriguing solution to Fermi's Paradox, as the paper puts it,

Even as ambitious programs such as SETI aim to solve the technological challenges, the results have so far turned up empty for any signs of life in the galaxy. We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially toward space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which explains the cosmic silence.

Note the presence of "exponential" in the premise, which is a key component of Malthusian theory, that populations expand exponentially while resources grow only linearly. The piece goes on to argue that the Great Filter may be several things, like pandemics or nuclear war, but it certainly includes climate change. Maybe, that is, all civilizations throughout the universe grow exponentially until they exhaust linear resources, if they don't blow themselves up in the meantime. You'd think they'd be on the verge of Jiang's Law, an equation showing the inevitable rate at which those things predictably happen, but of course they're nowhere close.

Returning to the Drake Equation, recent modeling suggests that it is the lifespan of civilizations capable of interstellar comminication, "L", which is the most influential among its seven variables. Taking this claim as stipulation, it follows immediately that the sub-factors comprising "L" must be identified and studied in detail if we are to maximize humanity's lifespan.

Parsing this out, of course, we have no idea what the value of "L" is, since we haven't located a single civilization capable of interstellar communication, much less determined how long it took to get that way. However, if we stipulate that "L" has a value, we need to study what that value is in order to maximize humanity's lifespan. But isn't this a non sequitur? We have an unknown variable, but we'll postulate it's knowable, and we'll arbitrarily agree that it has everything to do with humanity's lifespan. But if, as the authors agree, we haven't even seen a civilization (including ours) that's capable of interstellar communication, how can we know anything about it? Where have you been, H G Wells?

Nevertheless, the authors conclude that nuclear disaster and climate change must be avoided if we're to communicate with aliens, even though Jiang's Law so far asserts that the other alien civilizations have already destroyed themselves. So, er, if there's nobody to communicate with anyhow, why bother?

Doesn't matter. We have to shrink our carbon footprint so we can do this.

There are lots of things we can conclude here, but the first one is that the workers at JPL must live lives in many ways comparable to those who've worked, up to now, at Twitter. They've spent countless hours generating this gobbledygook on taxpayer money. Whether they get free breakfast, free wine, and yoga rooms remains to be seen.

One disturbing sign, though, is that both Yahoo and Hot Air took this piece of fluff seriously.

So, Are We All Neoconservatives Now?

I keep thinking about George Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram, which formed the basis for the consensus US Soviet policy up to the Reagan administration. One of his major conclusions in the telegram, though, is questionable in long term perspective, although it was justifiable in 1946 with Stalin still in power. At best, it was long delayed and not the result of individual transfer of power:

Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme [test] of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin's death was first such transfer, and its effect wracked Soviet state for 15 years[. . . .] Stalin's death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom.

Kennan wasn't an advocate of NATO. This article in The Hill outlines his opposition to much of Western Cold War strategy:

Writing in 1997 at age 92, he declared that expanding NATO to the east “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

“Such a decision,” he went on, “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”

Were he with us today, Kennan would undoubtedly say “I told you so.”

However, the Hill piece at the link is dated January 28, 2022, a full month before Putin's invasion and the recognition within a matter of days that Kennan's appraisals in fact weren't prescient. Stalin's death was handled with ruthless efficiency, while Khrushchev was even allowed a peaceful retirement. His successors died in their beds without provoking civil war, which was the consequence Kennan implicitly expected. Beyond that, while the Ukraine crisis is the result of the internal strains Kennan recognized, it didn't emerge with a Russian leadership transition. Instead, it came in the course of a long-term weakening of the Soviet system's successor state, over which Putin and his allies presided for decades.

Now let's look at someone wno might be regarded as Kennan's successor in formulating Western post-Soviet policy, Anne Applebaum. I'd read some of her books, and I was generally familiar with her public profile, but I never looked carefully at her bio until just now. According to the Wikipedia link,

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. . . . She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University, where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in fall 1982.

There you have a set of major data points. Trust me, I went to high school in Bethesda. If she went to Sidwell Friends and then Yale, she was connected. I suspect those connections, even more than her Yale degree, would have influenced her subsequent path. Take the analogy of the speedometer: it may say you're driving at 110 mph, but that's just an indication you have a fast car. Sidwell Friends and Yale are just the number; the connections are the car:

As a student, Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), which, she has written, helped to shape her opinions. She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

Applebaum is a member of the elite; I've got to assume that, like her contemporary Antony Blinken, she was born into it, but Wikipedia makes no mention of how. The link does say of her career, though:

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties". On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies". At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.

. . . She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". In July 2016, before the US election, she was one of the first American journalists to write about the significance of Russia's ties to Donald Trump and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."

I don't buy the view that Trump was, or is, Putin's puppet, and I think the right-wing intellectuals who admire Putin are at the Rod Dreher level. Nevertheless, It seems to me that Applebaum, if she doesn't specifically endorse neoconservatism, is clearly aligned with it -- as indeed are Secretaries Blinken and Austin. In fact, neoconservatism in foreign and military policy is hard to define. According to Wikipedia,

The term "neoconservative" was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush, with particular emphasis on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.

. . . The Bush Doctrine was greeted with accolades by many neoconservatives. When asked whether he agreed with the Bush Doctrine, Max Boot said he did and that "I think [Bush is] exactly right to say we can't sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike on Manhattan. We have to go out and stop the terrorists overseas. We have to play the role of the global policeman. ... But I also argue that we ought to go further". Discussing the significance of the Bush Doctrine, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol claimed: "The world is a mess. And, I think, it's very much to Bush's credit that he's gotten serious about dealing with it. ... The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little".

It's worth noting that one inflection point in the 2008 election was Obama's insistence that by ending the Iraq war, which had been the creature of Bush's neoconservative advisers, the US would achieve a "peace dividend" that would allow funding universal medical care. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was effectively a disagreement over how that "peace dividend" would be distributed, not for the resumption of Bush Doctrine interventionism and as Wikipedia puts it,

Several neoconservatives played a major role in the Stop Trump movement in 2016, in opposition to the Republican presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, due to his criticism of interventionist foreign policies, as well as their perception of him as an "authoritarian" figure.

It seems to me that what we're looking at right now is a recalibration of the center, driven by the perceived exigencies of the Russo-Ukraine War, and a return to an even more muscular interventionism than Bush's. Anne Applebaum's most recent Atlantic piece is The Russian Empire Must Die:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

In other words, Applebaum is advocating an essentially neoconservative policy of proactive interventionism on behalf of Ukraine, but with the clear implication that Ukrainian independence is just one step toward the dissolution of the Russian empire -- and clearly Applebaum, with both Polish and US citizenship, sees Poland playing a major role in northeastern Europe in its wake.

This in turn was brought about by the complete surprise of Ukraine's performance in the first weeks after Putin's invasion. When I look at the Banksy mural in Ukraine at the top of this post, I think the figure of the big attacker being brought down by the smaller, childlike figure, applies to more than just Russia and Putin -- Zelensky has performed the same sort of martial arts move on Western received opinion, and he's done it in a matter of months.

The issue isn't whether Putin tried to affect the US midterms -- if he did, for instance, by delaying the evacuation of Kherson until the following day -- this was feckless and clumsy. Zelensky had already sent a much more powerful message. In fact, I believe he's handed the Democrats a strategy to move the political center, if they're smart enough to take it.

They do have to do something about Biden, but we'll have to see how this all shakes out.

The Return Of Trump Dubya

The least-noticed development of the midterm elections' aftermath is this one:

Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia https://t.co/aI0uXJt4sX

— CNN International (@cnni) November 11, 2022

CNN continues at greater length in a story:

The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

This will be the first public discussion between Zelensky – whose participation will be virtual – and the former president, following a private meeting they had earlier this year. After that initial meeting Bush called Zelensky the “Winston Churchill of our time.”

Both Dubya and his father have scrupulously followed the traditional protocol whereby former presidents maintain a low profile and don't normally engage in political dialogue after leaving office. Here, Dubya is pushing that adherence to the limit by very visibly endorsing a particular foreign policy that's been controversial at home. On one hand, I find this reassuring; at least in comparison to both Trump and Biden, Dubya, for all his faults, is much closer to a functional adult at this stage.

But let's see if we can peek behind the scenes at what this really means. Although Dubya is as close as we have to an adult, he isn't eligible to be reelected to the presidency and probably isn't interested in any other office. He's standing in for someone or something else. On the other hand, his chief proxy, Liz Cheney, daughter of his vice president, is a lame duck at the end of her own political career. For whom is he acting, then?

The answer is fairly clear, he's acting on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky, the only consequential leader now on the world stage. Biden is on a whirlwind tour of climate conferences, the US election is uncertain with no clear Republican leadership, the UK conservatives are in a muddle, the Putin state is in crisis, and every other European leader has been upstaged by Zelensky, who de facto controls NATO and EU policy without being a member of either.

Let's consider as well the effect Zelensky has had on the US political environment. In summer 2021, Biden singlehandedly ordered the Kabul debacle. Had the Russian invasion of Ukraine not developed the way it did, the 2022 midterms might have been very different. By not fleeing Kyiv in a US C130 as Biden offered, Zelensky saved him from another disaster and created not just a distraction but a whole new issue that quietly saved the congressional Democrats. They were aligned with Winston Churchill; the Republicans wanted to appease Hitler. Joe Kemp apparently lost his House race in WA-03 over just this question.

Dubya is copacetic with this. Not only that, but we may be sure this public conversation with Zelensky has the tacit approval of Secretary Blinken, if Blinken himself wasn't the instigator. But wait a moment -- Dubya's foreign and defense policies were neoconservative, and neoconservatives have been out of favor since public frustration with the Second Gulf War helped defeat Republicans in 2008. The Obama policy, which had been the default for Biden as well, was to draw down from Iraq and Afghanistan, de-emphasize Israel, and build up Iran as the regional power broker. How's that working out?

At the same time, Trump, who has made few specific comments on the Ukraine war other than to say it wouldn't have happened if he'd been president, had a policy of treating Russia as a near peer of the US, granting it autonomy over a sphere of interest that included Ukraine provided it didn't rock the boat. The problem for Trump is that this policy has been overtaken by events; Russia did rock the boat big time. The best estimate we can make is that Biden's Kabul debacle led Putin to miscalculate and believe Biden, a weaker figure than Trump, would not react to a renewed invasion and annexation of Ukraine.

The miscalculation left Zelensky out of the equation, but neither did Putin figure in his own military incompetence. The political consequences for Russia are yet to be determined, but the political consequences for the US are beginning to emerge, especially a return of neoconservative foreign and military policy. This has most visibly taken the form of the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, led by the prominent neoconservative Frederick Kagan, becoming the chief articulator of US Ukraine strategy, unabashedly pro-Zelensky. Zelensky is an authentic figure, as Dubya says someone at the Winston Churchill level, whom I don't think either Biden or Trump can easily relate to or appreciate. But as of yesterday, the ISW clearly expresses what has been, and according to Dubya will continue to be, US policy:

Ukraine has by no means liberated the minimum territory essential to its future security and economic survival even with the victory in western Kherson, finally. The city of Melitopol and surrounding areas, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, land on the east bank of the lower Dnipro River, and territory in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are all vital terrain for Ukraine, as ISW has previously argued.

. . . Ukrainians and the West must bend every effort toward enabling the liberation of those lands as rapidly as possible before worrying about what lies beyond them. Momentum is an important factor in war. Ukraine has it now. Kyiv and its partners must make the most of it.

Dubya is back. The neoconservatives have in fact been back since February. At this point, I think both Biden and Trump are irrelevant, but we don't know what else will come, except that the real leader of the free world has turned out to be the former actor and comic Zelensky.