Thursday, June 11, 2026
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Putin and The Felon: Both Trapped in Losing Battles Against Reality
The strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.
The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of rubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.
The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest.
Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working.
Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.
Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.
If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.
That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.
Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.
That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.
It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.
This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.
It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.
In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Monday, June 08, 2026
Sunday, June 07, 2026
The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate
This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.
For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”
The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party.
“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”
The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.
Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.
The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black district (out of six total, in a state that is one-third Black) was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week’s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais. The Court’s logic may apply only to districting for now—but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.
Theoretically, Callais was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.
But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. . . . Alabama’s plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the district court found, and the legislature was attempting to “rob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.”
Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. . . . This week’s decision is important because intentional discrimination is banned, not just by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court’s ruling “failed to follow our instruction,” it is referencing Alito’s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.
The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. . . . . Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.
The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. . . . This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.
[T]he Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.
Saturday, June 06, 2026
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)