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G-7, NATO summits show Russia may “win” in Ukraine but will lose against a united West | ||||||||
Russia is gaining ground in their war in Ukraine, but not in their war with NATO and the West. | ||||||||
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Want to understand the world a little better? Subscribe to GZERO World with Ian Bremmer for free and get new posts delivered to your inbox every week. Like this newsletter? Share it with others you think would enjoy it, too. All eyes were on Europe this week, where world leaders met in Germany’s Bavarian Alps for the G-7 summit before heading to Madrid for the NATO summit. Both gatherings were the most significant of their kind in over a decade, thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its threat to the international order. The meetings, which are usually largely symbolic, had a few tangible outcomes. The United States and its G-7 allies—the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan—committed $4.5 billion to address the global food crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. They announced a ban on imports of Russian gold, one of Russia’s major pre-invasion exports. They imposed new sanctions curtailing Russia’s ability to import key inputs for its arms industry. There were discussions of setting a price cap on Russian oil, which if enacted would sharply dent Russia’s export revenues while at the same time maintaining global supply and potentially reducing global oil prices. Turkey agreed to drop its veto on Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership bids (even though President Erdogan hedged a tad on his way out), mostly clearing the path for an expansion of the military alliance that would more than double the length of its border with Russia. NATO leaders agreed on a new strategic vision putting the alliance on a war footing—NATO is increasing its high-readiness forces from 40,000 to 300,000—and positioning Russia as the “most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability.” Many NATO members including the United States also pledged increases in collective defense spending, additional troop deployments, and further military aid for Ukraine.
But the biggest takeaway was just how aligned advanced industrial democracies remain in support of Ukraine and in opposition to Russia. Despite the remarkable political weakness of their leaders and the mounting economic pain they are feeling as a result of their response to Russia’s aggression, these countries continue to show little daylight on Ukraine. That’s not to say they all see exactly eye to eye on everything. The Americans and the Brits have a different position on, say, the appropriate level of military assistance than the Germans and the French. Every government has its own idea of how best to help Ukraine defeat Russia. But the core desire to support the Ukrainian government, to ensure they can push Russia back, to punish the Russian regime and sever relations with them—that desire is shared by everyone in the West. Such a degree of agreement on any issue between leaders with wildly different ideologies, interests, and constraints was unthinkable before the Russian invasion of February 24. And as the war enters its fifth month, that unity is showing no signs of fraying.
Might cracks emerge going forward? Despite facing staunch Ukrainian resistance, Russian forces now control 98% of the Luhansk region and about two-thirds of Donetsk. They will likely continue to make gradual gains in the Donbas in the coming months. The longer the war goes on and the more the U.S. and its allies get hit with high inflation and soaring energy prices, the more likely it is that support for Ukraine will eventually waver. The reason Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called into the G-7 summit and said he wants the war to be over by wintertime is that he knows that come winter, his American and European counterparts are going to face enormous public backlash due to persistently high inflation and soaring food and energy prices. He rightly worries that six months from now, as the fighting on the ground settles into an unstable stalemate, Western leaders won’t have the political capital to sustain the level of support for Ukraine they were able to show in the first four months.
That’s why he is so adamantly pressuring the West to ramp up its military and financial aid before it’s too late: so that when international support for Ukraine inevitably dries up, the country is in the best position it can be to continue fighting and, eventually, to negotiate. Make no mistake, over time support for Ukraine will diminish, and Russia will gain the upper hand. Ultimately, it is very likely that the Russians will end up in a better military and territorial position in Ukraine than they were before they invaded. They will have seized most of the Donbas, probably formally annexed it as part of Russia, and they will have a land bridge to Crimea. At the same time, though, the longer the war goes on, the more leverage the Russians will lose vis-à-vis the West. There is no conceivable scenario in which Russia ends up in a better economic and geostrategic position than it was before February 24. Once the Russian economy is fully decoupled from the West, any power that Moscow once had over Western capitals will be gone for good.
Long term, the U.S. and its allies will adapt to the loss of Russian oil and gas. The same cannot be said of Russia’s ability to withstand the loss of not just export markets but also, most importantly, access to imports critical to its manufacturing and military capabilities. While Russia may “win” in Ukraine, it will most definitely lose against the West.
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Trump mulls early 2024 announcement with July on the table: ReportFormer President Donald Trump is apparently eyeing an early 2024 announcement in an attempt to win back the White House — and it could come in the next few days. |
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Liz Cheney warns GOP 'can't survive' if Trump becomes 2024 nomineeRep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) says the Republican Party "can't survive" if it picks former President Donald Trump as its 2024 presidential nominee. SOME GOOD FOURTH OF JULY NEWS — N.Y. Mag: “Someone Finally Turned Nathan’s Hot Dogs Into Ice Cream” SOME BAD FOURTH OF JULY NEWS — WSJ: “The average cost of a summer cookout rose 17% from last year.” MORE DOUBTS ABOUT THE FRONTRUNNERS — It’s going to take a long time to process the events of June 2022. Two monumental storylines unfurled last month that will shape politics for the foreseeable future: the Supreme Court’s transformational decisions on guns, climate regulation and abortion and the Jan. 6 committee’s evidence of potential criminality by DONALD TRUMP. On Friday, we looked at how the Supreme Court’s flurry of decisions pushing the country rightward is sowing doubts about Biden on the left. For more on that, check out these two numbers in the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll: — 64% of registered voters “think Joe Biden is showing he is too old to be President.” — 71% of registered voters say Biden should “not run for a second term.” But today we want to look closer at how the Jan. 6 committee’s work is sowing doubts about Trump on the right. The same poll reports: — 61% of registered voters say Trump should not run for president. The reasons? — He's erratic: 36% — He will divide America: 33% — He's responsible for Jan. 6: 30% Two must-read pieces are chock-full of on-the-record quotes from Republicans who want to move on from the former president: Via AP’s Steve Peoples and Thomas Beaumont: — “You’d be hard-pressed to find people in this area who support the idea that people aren’t looking for someone else,” said DAVE VAN WYK, a transportation company owner. “To presume that conservative America is 100% behind Donald Trump is simply not the case.” — “People are concerned that we could lose the election in ’24 and want to make sure that we don’t nominate someone who would be seriously flawed,” CHRIS CHRISTIE said. — “His approval among Republican primary voters has already been somewhat diminished,” Maryland Gov. LARRY HOGAN said in an interview. “Trump was the least popular president in American history until Joe Biden.” — “Republican activists believed Donald Trump was the only candidate who could beat Hillary,” MARC SHORT said. “Now, the dynamic is reversed. He is the only one who has lost to Joe Biden.” — “If it looks like there’s a place for me next year, I’ve never lost a race, I’m not going to start now,” NIKKI HALEY told reporters. “I’ll put 1,000% in and I’ll finish it. And if there’s not a place for me, I will fight for this country until my last breath.” — “I just don’t know if [Trump’s] electable anymore,” [KATHY DE KONING of Iowa] said.
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PoliticsDeSantis benefits from ‘Trump fatigue’ ahead of possible 2024 face-offJanuary 6 panel’s revelations about ex-president boost Florida governor’s presidential prospects JULY 3, 2022 by James Politi and Kiran Stacey in Washington |
Summer 1964 was known as the “Freedom Summer.”
Americans, Black and white, southern and northern, eager to defend the right of all Americans to vote, planned to register Black people for the upcoming election. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point. Under Bob Moses, a New York City teacher who began voting work in Mississippi in 1961, volunteers set out. Just as they were getting underway, on June 21, three voting rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
No one knew where they had gone, but although some white people tried to argue they had chosen to disappear simply to call attention to their cause, no one with a grip on reality in that racially charged era imagined they had gone anywhere good.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as Senate majority leader had wrestled the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, was determined to pass the stronger civil rights bill his predecessor President John F. Kennedy had advocated in 1963. Indeed, just five days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson had told Congress: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”
Southern white men passionately defended their right to rule over their Black neighbors through state legislation, but Johnson, for all that he hailed from Texas, wanted none of that. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
The House of Representatives had been considering a civil rights bill since June 1963 but had left for winter recess without its being moved out of the Rules Committee, where the chair, staunch segregationist Howard Smith (D-VA), bottled it up. During the recess, so many congressmen heard from constituents angry the bill hadn’t passed that Smith backed down and let it out of committee. The House passed the bill on February 10 and sent it on to the Senate, where everyone knew the southern segregationists would not give up easily.
And they didn’t. The Senate began to debate the bill on March 30, and southern Democrats launched a filibuster. In those days before the Senate rules change, filibusters required that senators actually hold the floor to talk a bill to death, so they made up squads of senators who rested and spoke in teams. The head of the southern bloc, Richard Russell (D-GA), said: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
Meanwhile, the northern Democrats in favor of the bill held their own. At stake were the votes of those Republicans who liked the idea of civil rights in principle but didn’t want to increase the power of the government, whose business regulation they opposed.
As the spring wore on, Black people and their white neighbors demonstrated their support for civil rights by integrating formerly segregated spaces, while opponents of the bill attacked them. On June 18, when Black and white people jumped into a whites-only swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, the hotel’s owner, James Brock, poured acid into the pool. While the water diluted the acid enough that the swimmers were not injured, law enforcement arrested them. News crews covered the incident. Seeing a white man pour acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people was the last straw.
The next day, Republican Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) to break the filibuster. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who said, “I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color or creed, or on any other basis,” voted against ending the filibuster, saying he believed it was “a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional republic in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government.”
The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent their version back to the House. Meanwhile, rage over the three missing voting rights workers grew, and Johnson used that anger to pressure the House to pass the bill.
It did. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television “to talk to you about what that law means to every American.”
Keenly aware of the bill’s timing, he noted: “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week, a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor not only to found a nation, but to forge an ideal of freedom—not only for political independence, but for personal liberty; not only to eliminate foreign rule, but to establish the rule of justice in the affairs of men.”
That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”
Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.”
“The purpose of the law is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. It does not give special treatment to any citizen…. It does say that…those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
“Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.”
“We will achieve these goals because most Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right,” he said. “My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
It was indeed a time of testing. When the American people came together to push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opponents of it saw a call to arms. Two weeks after Johnson signed the bill, a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the nomination. On July 16, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina were the ones that put him over the top for the nomination.
On August 4, the U.S. had a powerful example of what certain Americans thought of as “extremism in the defense of liberty” when the missing bodies were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and it turned out that Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, had murdered them.
Voters in the 1964 election continued to back Johnson’s vision of the world, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. And those voters perhaps took false hope that their will had triumphed when Goldwater won only his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. They didn’t see there was a shift underway that would transform first the Republican Party, and then the nation itself.
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PoliticsTrump 2024 is a threat to Europe’s securityThe January 6 hearings show how deeply unstable the US political system remains, with clear implications for allies JULY 1, 2022 by Gideon Rachman |
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