Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about language, culture, politics, and existential dread. To subscribe to the Tuesday, which I hope you will do, please follow this link. A note: We sometimes hear from readers who are having trouble getting the Tuesday via email, and most of the time it is because they have opted out of National Review emails entirely without meaning to. If you are having that problem and need help fixing it, let me know at TheTuesday@nationalreview.com.
Expand NATO?
Just as the family budget is not really a very good model of the national economy, schoolyard rules are not normally the best guide for international relations. That being said, sometimes the best thing for a bully is giving him a bloody nose.
With China having comprehensively eclipsed Russia as the baddest bad actor among nation-states on the world stage, Vladimir Putin is begging for attention from the West. Perhaps it is time to give him some.
Putin, already having invaded and annexed part of Ukraine in 2014, has threatened further war on Ukraine and attempted to intimidate the country and its Western allies with a massive troop buildup throughout December. Now, he demands that the United States and its allies promise that there will be no expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ever, as the price of peace with Russia.
NATO has been slow-walking Ukraine’s membership since the 1990s. But the country is, at least formally, on track to become a full NATO member. In 2008, NATO and Ukraine agreed to an accession plan, with NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg specifically affirming that Russia would not be permitted to veto Ukraine’s membership. As recently as June of this year, NATO reiterated its commitment to Ukraine. And now Putin demands that which NATO has specifically denied him: veto power over NATO membership decisions.
Because we are so accustomed to outrages from Russia, we do not seem to really appreciate how outrageous this is. Ukraine is a sovereign nation that can decide for itself which international organizations to join; NATO is an organization of sovereign states, including the United States, that can decide for itself what its policies will be and to whom it will offer membership. Russia is a third-rate gangster state whose idiotic policies have immiserated its people. In spite of its petroleum wealth, Russia’s GDP/capita is half of Lithuania’s, Latvia’s, or Slovakia’s, a third less than Poland’s, and below that of China, Panama, or Costa Rica. Its record of barbarism and inhumanity at home is well-attested, and its penchant for violating the sovereignty not only of its near neighbors but also that of countries such as the United Kingdom (where it has carried out assassinations) and the United States (where it has attempted to monkey with elections) marks it as a particularly egregious malefactor.
The Biden administration talks a good game about strengthening the trans-Atlantic alliance, but it has, in fact, done at least as much to aggregate U.S.-European alienation as the Trump administration did, confusing — and endangering — our allies with its headlong and unilateral evacuation from Afghanistan and insulting them with its clumsy and undiplomatic rollout of AUKUS. It is, for this and other reasons, in a poor position to do what it needs to do, which is to convene an extraordinary NATO summit and begin the process of formally admitting Ukraine to the alliance.
And maybe someone over in Antony Blinken’s shop could remind the boss that Poland is a full NATO member, one that currently is being subjected to a destabilization campaign by Belarus, where the regime of Putin dependent Alexander Lukashenko is recruiting refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa to come to his country and then marching them illegally into Poland. This is if not quite an act of war in the conventional sense then an act of Mark Leonard’s “unpeace,” weaponizing refugees and immigrants in a campaign of soft social warfare. This ought to be understood — and responded to — as an act of military aggression against a NATO member.
The Europeans understand that they need to develop a more robust and unified foreign policy and a more credible self-defense capability. But they currently view the United States as an erratic and unreliable partner — at best. Repairing and reinvigorating that relationship is the work of years and decades, not something that can be accomplished at a single summit or with a few conciliatory speeches.
A cursory telephone call to Olaf Scholz, the new German chancellor, is not going to get it done. The Biden administration needs to get serious — and get serious now — about rebuilding the Atlantic alliance, with an eye not only toward Russian shenanigans in the here and now but also toward the imminent confrontation with China. That is, unless we are to conclude that all that happy talk about diplomacy and responsible internationalism was just a campaign talking point.
Words About Words
Because it contains the word bomb, bombastic is often treated as though it means rhetorically violent or aggressive. Donald Trump’s rhetoric was consistently described as bombastic, when, in fact, his style of speech was the opposite. Not artificially elevated, but programmatically coarse. Think Jesse Jackson, not Tucker Carlson.
Bombastic speech is pompous speech, often exaggeratedly formal or intellectual (or at least intellectual-sounding), or self-consciously literary speech that is full of fluff and filler, which is what bombast literally is: “raw cotton used as padding,” as Merriam-Webster has it. The word bomb is of entirely separate origin, having its roots in a Greek onomatopoeia, bombos. Bombast, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word for silkworm, bombyx.
Rampant Prescriptivism
The textbook example of bombastic speech is the nonsense word thusly, which seems to have been invented to satirize the oratory of uneducated people attempting to sound more refined and formal. The first recorded use of the word was in Harper’s in 1865, and it was deployed for comic effect.
But satire has a way of creeping into real life (see the recent history of the Republican Party), and so it has been with thusly. From a recent New York Times review:
Wary and self-protective, Lucille was always suspicious of strangers and their motives, a trait that intensified after her fame exploded. Her son-in-law, the actor Laurence Luckinbill, once aptly described her reaction to new people thusly: “Halt! Who goes there?” As he put it, “Lucille was a sentry in her own life.”
The problem (or the joke) in thusly is that thus already is an adverb — “Thus the day was won,” “He did it thus,” “The story was thus disproved,” etc. — so sticking an -ly on the end is an illiterate attempt to make an adverb out of a word that already is an adverb.
’Twas always thus, and never thusly.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
Home and Away
If you dislike New Year’s Eve pseudo-festivities as much as I do, you may enjoy my essay on the holiday, “Sinners in the Hands of an Indifferent God.” As Jay Nordlinger often points out, the daily nature of journalism is right there in the name (from the Latin diuranalis, meaning “of a day”) and most of what I write I forget as soon as I start the next piece, which usually is immediately. But I like this one and think it is one of the ten or twelve best things I have written for National Review.
A smidgen:
There is another, less enigmatic, less mysterious god (and capital letters are not his thing) who reminds us of his austere presence during these abbreviated days of winter: the god of passing time. New Year’s is his Christmas, Lent, and Easter all at once, but he is undemanding when it comes to the rituals practiced in his honor. He requires no priest or intermediary. His law is inscribed not on our souls but on our cells. His church is every place where we are laid prone with our names written at our heads: every nursery ward, every graveyard. There is an old joke about two men who as newborns were laid side by side in the nursery, and who, at impossible odds, end up side by side in the same hospital room at the ends of their lives; one asks the other: “So, how was it for you?” You can make jokes about the god of passing time — he does not laugh, he is not offended, he is comprehensively indifferent, as cold and remote as the star over Bethlehem. If we make jokes about him, we make them for ourselves. The proverb tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But nobody needs convincing when it comes to the god of passing time: We are born terrified of him and of the darkness of his eternal shadow.
You can buy my latest book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Wooly Wilds of the ‘Real America,’ here.
My National Review archive can be found here.
Listen to “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” here.
My New York Post archive can be found here.
My Amazon page is here.
To subscribe to National Review, which you really should do, go here.
To support National Review Institute, go here.
In Closing
It has been — another — vexing and disappointing year, from the eternal clown-show in Washington to the persistent problems associated with Covid-19. I am more thankful than I can say to the readers and supporters who have stood by us in these difficult times, most often with good cheer, grace, and courage — because it does take courage to continue to believe, and to act on the belief, that ideas and facts and arguments, and traditions and institutions, are part of what must save human civilization from human nature. For your time, your help, and your friendship, I remain sincerely grateful. National Review is a magazine, but it also a cause and a sensibility, and I wish all of our friends and allies the best in the coming year.
To subscribe to the Tuesday, follow this link.