Portside

How to build a just green future

As a Hungarian-American on my mother’s side, this election was very personal to me. just as people like Steve Bannon have learned powerfully evil lessons from Orban, we should also learn lessons from the successful opposition movement against him.

Putin dusts off millennia-old chronicles, finding in them proof of his reactionary utopia, his imagined historical right to possess Ukraine. Let’s talk about the most underestimated cause of this war — ideological obsession. The Russian idée fixe.

London and Washington were right about the Russian invasion, but failed to persuade European powers. They underestimated Ukrainian resistance and overestimated Russian power, just as Putin had. Four years later, the war continues.

A left that fails to analyze the causal role of Western militarism, even when analyzing the crimes of its adversaries, risks becoming a moralizing appendage to the very power structures it claims to oppose.

Epstein might be the answer. What makes the present situation so extraordinary is that the Russians can exercise enormous influence without Trump being a recruited agent, but through the pressure of the possibility of kompromat existing.

A time to try our souls

Europe is erupting

Some of Russia’s maximalist demands have been removed from original 28-point proposal drawn up last month by Vladimir Putin’s special envoy and Trump’s representative Steve Witkoff. European leaders warn that no deal can be reached quickly.

Forget the US president’s seeming volte-face on Ukraine this week: he and Putin fundamentally agree that European liberal democracy is the problem.