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A Russian defeat in Ukraine would strengthen the nonproliferation treaty. Ukrainian success on the battlefield has been achieved with conventional weapons aimed at military targets—not with nuclear weapons causing mass civilian casualties. If the nation possessing the most nuclear weapons in the world is unable to gain victory, the importance of having nuclear weapons will be greatly diminished. And the need to abolish nuclear weapons will be even more obvious. Theories of nuclear deterrence are based on the behavior of rational actors; they offer little protection against leaders who are delusional, suicidal, or religious fanatics. The threat of nuclear annihilation will never vanish until the day when nuclear weapons are stigmatized and abolished.

You don’t have to look far from Russia to find a clear-eyed view of Putin’s intentions. While isolationists and academic socialists in the United States blame the invasion of Ukraine on America’s hegemonic desire for NATO expansion, the social-democratic government of Finland holds a different view. The Finns have a unique, firsthand perspective on Russian imperialism and colonialism. Finland was ruled by Sweden until 1809, when it was conquered by Russia and became part of the Russian empire. Efforts to “Russify” the Finns proved unsuccessful, a strong national identity emerged, and Finland gained independence in 1917. “The Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is called in Russia, began not with the Soviet Union heroically leading the fight against Nazi Germany but with the Kremlin supplying oil to Hitler’s war machine and the Red Army invading Poland and then Finland. Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the Finns imposed heavy casualties on the Soviets, gained international support, and managed to end the conflict retaining almost all of their territory. Finland remained neutral during the Cold War and built up a formidable army purely for self-defense. It can now mobilize about 1 million soldiers and reservists—nearly one-fifth of the population.

Implicit in these lessons is a final point: the need to see competition as a way of life. The United States did not, thankfully, destroy its institutions during the Cold War. Yet the patterns of American policy, government, and society did change remarkably. This is not surprising. The Cold War forced Americans to understand that the hardships of competition were the alternative to the greater misery of a world in which hostile ideologies and hostile powers were once again ascendant.

Over two generations, the United States geared its statecraft to an unceasing struggle for influence and position; it took on burdens and sacrifices that would have seemed appalling in any prior “peacetime” era. America reoriented the federal government and reconsidered domestic challenges in the light of the Cold War. Above all, the country accepted, albeit fitfully and warily, that competition in the space between war and peace was the natural state of global affairs, and that security, let alone triumph, would come only through extraordinary effort over an extraordinary time span. Americans might complain that “we have been carrying this burden for 17 years; can we lay it down?” as John Kennedy remarked in late 1962. But “we can’t lay it down, and I don’t see how we are going to lay it down in this century.”30

A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.

The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved.” His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.

Kagan: And so it, it's an old trope to say, we are interested in the American, in defending America, not in defending some global liberal order, which they portray as being a kind of conspiracy of the elite to keep down, to keep down the average American. And again, that the idea that there are these vast conspiracies of plutocrats, uh, and communists and Jews, uh, et cetera, was a, was a constant refrain in the 1930s, uh, in conservative circles. It was a major element of Father Kauflin, the, the, the, the famous radio priest of the 1930s. Those links were the ones that he made communism, war mongering, Jews, et cetera. Charles Lindbergh got into trouble for saying that Jews were trying to force the United States into war, uh, for reasons that were quote unquote not American. And of course, we, we hear those kinds of, those same tropes today, people are a little bit more careful about the words they use. They generally talk about globalists and liberal globalists and neo-conservatives, et cetera. But it's all the same. It's all that same picture. A lot of mileage has been gotten by conservatives over the past century and more playing precisely to Americans’ xenophobia, which, uh, which crops up now and then their fear of the other, their fear of people who don't look like them, et cetera. These are normal human qualities, of course, and Americans are not immune to them. But it's been one of the, it's been one of the goals of, of these conservative attacks to sort of stir up those kinds of fears in the United States. And that is very much part of Republican foreign policy today. And, and, but getting back to your point where we can see all this come together is in what now is clearly becoming the dominant view in the Republican party, which is that we should completely cut off our aid to Ukraine. Um, it was interesting to see Ron DeSantis, who has been pretty quiet on the subject of foreign policy lately, finally come down and make it clear that he doesn't think the United States really should be engaged in this conflict even indirectly with Ukraine. And Josh Hawley gave a speech just recently in which he called for the, not only for the immediate cutoff of aid to Ukraine, but the withdrawal, the beginning of the, to withdraw American forces from Europe entirely. And he says explicitly that he wants the Europeans to know that the United States is no longer able to protect them. Now that you would do this in the middle of a war is rather extraordinary. But there you have the, the sort of the throwback to the Real America first approach and of course Hawley's argument. And in general, the Republican argument against helping Ukraine is filled with this notion of a conspiracy to impose some kind of liberal plutocratic, communist empire on the world, which is the great global elite conspiracy that they're pointing to. Republicans have taken to calling their opponents, for instance, uh, not only Chinese Communist party sympathizers, which is another old throwback to an earlier day, but also this constant refrain of that they are globalists, that they're liberal globalists, they're left globalists, et cetera. It's an old game and it has been resurrected in force.

Rothkopf: It really is, and it's really resonated throughout this era. Frankly, I could go on talking about this a lot. Uh, yesterday I was in a conversation with somebody who was dealing with a different dimension of it. There is also a group of so-called realists today who are not associated typically with the right or conservatives, but are associated typically with the left. And they have also embraced this idea that, you know, the west started the war in Ukraine and the West, uh, uh, is responsible and the US shouldn't be involved. And there's an interesting subtext, which this guy pointed out to me yesterday, which is a bunch of these people are beneficiaries of, of programs that are underwritten by the Koch brothers, who are also sort of vaguely sympathetic. There is a kind of, not just conservative sympathy to the Russians, but there is a, a libertarian progressive sympathy to the, to the Russians. And I find it all kind of hard to get my brain around given the world I grew up in. But I'm just wondering what your thought is of that other side of the equation.

At the global level, it is difficult to counteract nationalist populists’ influence. Multilateral regimes may be able to withstand temporary problems caused by individual noncompliant states. Some may hope that populism will simply wither away and that they can wait the populists out. But, as argued above, the underlying assumption that populism is a passing phenomenon is questionable.

The Alliance for Multilateralism, which is an “informal network of countries united in their conviction that a rules-based multilateral order is the only reliable guarantee for international stability and peace and that our common challenges can only be solved through cooperation,”Footnote111 can be understood as a way to balance and constrain the destructive policies of nationalist populists at the global level. Yet it is not clear what shared interests, apart from opposing nationalist populism, these multilateralists have.

If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power—or, for that matter, Western power—is not a better world.

For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.

Japan has tons of bomb-grade plutonium, left over from its atomic-energy program, and could build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. South Korea could do the same in perhaps two years, and on January 11, its president raised the possibility that his country might need to “possess its own nukes.” Japan and South Korea now face nuclear threats from North Korea and China. More than 70 percent of South Koreans think their country should obtain nuclear weapons, and Japan has decided to double the size of its military budget. Taiwan could have its own nuclear weapons within a few years of deciding to build them. Saudi Arabia could also obtain them quickly. At a conference in Abu Dhabi this December, the Saudi foreign minister made clear that “if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off.” And if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria might build them soon too.

On a number of occasions during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to a nuclear conflict that neither side wanted—a conflict that could have killed hundreds of millions of people. It is remarkable that no city has been destroyed by an atomic blast since Nagasaki in 1945. The spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, amid today’s rising nationalism and bitter ethnic hatreds, would no doubt increase the likelihood of mushroom clouds rising over the rubble of cities.

If the American people do not want to make the effort needed for an effective defense of their allies, they have two options: they can accept Chinese regional hegemony or tolerate (or even encourage) some proliferation of nuclear weapons to US allies and partners. I outlined the demerits of the first earlier.

Some of the demerits of the second are well known. A world in which more states have nuclear weapons is probably a considerably more dangerous one. Although some prominent scholars have argued that general nuclear proliferation would produce a more stable world, this idea has had little purchase outside the academy.54 A world in which many states have nuclear weapons might contribute to deterrence among them, but it would also contain more, and more complex, relationships among nuclear weapons states, more opportunities for accident or error, and more drivers for cataclysm. Whereas general proliferation might promote some level of stability, then, it would come at an extraordinarily high level of risk.

As to the benefits side of the ledger, consider this comparison: In the 76 years before World War II—before the liberal international order took hold—America’s per-capita GDP increased by 136 percent. In the 76 years between the end of World War II and 2021—under the liberal international order—America’s per-capita GDP increased by 320 percent.

This increase in economic prosperity didn’t happen magically, organically or accidentally. It was the byproduct of the institutions, systems and guardrails of the liberal international order—and especially the stability and security represented by civilization’s first responder and last line of defense: the United States.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that there is little scholarly merit in the notion that a short-term reduction in access to food increases the probability that conflict will break out. This is because to start or participate in violent conflict requires people to have both the means and the will. Most people on the brink of starvation are not in the position to resort to violence, whether against the government or other social groups. In fact, the urban middle classes tend to be the most likely to protest against rises in food prices, since they often have the best opportunities, the most energy, and the best skills to coordinate and participate in protests.

Accordingly, there is a widespread misapprehension that social unrest in periods of high food prices relates primarily to food shortages. In reality, the sources of discontent are considerably more complex---linked to political structures, land ownership, corruption, the desire for democratic reforms and general economic problems---where the price of food is seen in the context of general increases in the cost of living. Research has shown that while the international media have a tendency to seek simple resource-related explanations---such as drought or famine---for conflicts in the Global South, debates in the local media are permeated by more complex political relationships.

Monster Subsidies That Are Unnecessary, But Seemingly Unstoppable

Cato's Lincicome pointed out that Australia and New Zealand both largely eliminated agricultural supports years ago and remain major producers. Their farmers learned to adapt and innovate in response to the market.

There is no scientific basis to suggest that climate breakdown will “annihilate intelligent life” (by which I assume the report authors mean human extinction) by 2050.

However, climate breakdown does pose a grave threat to civilization as we know it, and the potential for mass suffering on a scale perhaps never before encountered by humankind. This should be enough reason for action without any need for exaggeration or misrepresentation!

Still, that money will do little more than make up for cuts — including those to the Conservation Stewardship Program — in the past two farm bills, according to Day. Groups like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and even the more conventional American Farm Bureau Federation want to see Congress spend more on the conservation programs and target emissions. In recent years, those programs have shied away from funding “climate-smart” agriculture, according to an Environmental Working Group analysis published last year. Currently, half of the farm bill-authorized funds for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which shares costs for conservation-minded farm projects, goes to farmers’ livestock needs. That includes bankrolling methane digesters — systems usually made up of sealed tanks or ponds — that some farms use to convert methane from manure into fuel, called biogas, and fertilizer.

“On the surface, that absolutely reduces the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions,” Day said. “However, those methane digesters also support an existing agricultural system that is built around high fossil-fuel use.” Digesters are often, though not always, used at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, sometimes called CAFOs, industrial livestock pens that are a major source of methane emissions. Rather than propping those facilities up, Day said the farm bill should subsidize practices like perennial grazing and agroforestry, which involves diversifying farmland with trees and shrubs that limit soil erosion, create wildlife habitat, and store carbon. Day said she’s not sure yet if such proposals will see bipartisan support but that incentive-based policies stand a better chance than mandates.

In this telling, “political capital” is finite. When you spend it, you lose it, and if you spend it on the wrong things, you can’t get it back. But that doesn’t make any sense.

Actual “capital” isn’t spent; it is invested. The point is to get a return on that investment by directing capital to some productive use. The point of capital, in other words, is to produce more capital.

But it also reflected a more disturbing reality for the 79-year-old president: in the space of just 17 months, he has already burnt a lot of the political capital he had when he walked into the Oval Office in January last year.

According to the Realclearpolitics.com polling average, just 39.6 per cent of voters approve of Biden’s performance in the White House so far, compared with 54.9 per cent who disapprove — a wide gap of 15 percentage points that will be hard to close.

As always, simple theories with broad explanatory power generally catch on quickly in academia because they offer a catch-all mechanism through which to understand how certain phenomena work. However, political capital as a theory may be too simplistic, and virtually all empirical data disproves the idea that presidents have an invisible currency they can spend on influencing members of Congress to carry out their bidding. Presidents do have influence in legislation, but not to the extent that political capital theorists would have you believe. Other factors, such as ideology, party affiliation, constituents, and election cycles, more accurately explain legislative outcomes, but political capital conflates these with actual examples of presidential influence.

My research does not support Greenstein’s theory. Instead, my findings align more closely with those of George Edwards in At the Margins, where he argues that the “national preoccupation with the chief executive is misplaced,” and that presidential power is, in fact, limited in the Constitution’s “purposefully inefficient system in which the founding fathers’ handiwork in decentralizing power defeats even the most capable leaders.”50

Instead of focusing on legislative skills as a source of presidential influence, Edwards argues that party support and public support are more important. Legislative skills are only critical for “members of Congress who remain open to change after other influences have had their impact.”51 In a time as polarized as today, where very few members of Congress are “open to chang[ing]” their vote, these skills play a minor role in legislative negotiations. Similar assertions are made in another book by Edwards, Predicting the Presidency. He argues that exploiting existing opportunities (consolidating existing party and public support) is much more important for presidential success than creating opportunities (convincing legislators to change their vote vis a vis legislative skills).52

As David Roberts of Vox observes: In 2009, Obama and his aides made the mistake of thinking that their major initiatives had to be rolled out one at a time in sequence, because he had a finite store of “political capital” that had to be spent carefully. But political capital is not something that exists apart from any particular issue; it isn’t a special sauce that has to be poured on a policy in order to make it palatable.

And with the parties as polarized and unified as they are, political capital has become all but meaningless. There may have been a time when a popular president possessed so much capital that a senator from the opposition party would feel compelled to support him on part of that president’s agenda, but that time is long gone. There is no account Biden can draw on to turn Republican “no” votes into “yes.”

Some House members are not sold on RESTRICT because they say its scope is too broad and it simultaneously is not explicit enough on TikTok.

What they're saying: "We think it would have an impact on a broad range of U.S. companies, and I think there's a fear among trade associations when there's a sentiment on the Hill that you should be tough on China," one industry source told Axios.

Climate denial is alive and well in Congress. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), who now chairs the conservation subcommittee of the ag committee, told Politico, somewhat fuzzily, that “CO2 is not responsible. Especially American-produced CO2, I mean we’re a tiny part of the whole thing.” Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) is trying to divert attention to just about any remotely ag-related issue that doesn’t involve climate protection. Pointing his colleagues toward a couple of favorite targets of right-wing hostility, he has called for investigations into the purchase of U.S. farmland by Chinese interests and for cuts in SNAP benefits to low-income families. Meanwhile, five House members led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL) got even meaner, with a letter to President Biden urging him to “enact work requirements” for SNAP recipients.