Dear Weekend Jolter,
For the better part of two decades, Russia’s top diplomat has done whatever the opposite of ingratiating is to seat himself at the most exclusive tables of global affairs. Sergey Lavrov, by dint of sickle-sharp messaging, forged a reputation as a rival worthy of grudging respect. Here he is with Rice, with Clinton, with Kerry, with Pompeo, with Blinken . . . the constant counterpart across four U.S. administrations.
Profiles of the formidable diplomatic figure painted a complex portrait, discussing his fondness for poetry, his proficiency in multiple languages, and the intellectual heft he brought to bear as foreign minister.
The Washington Post wrote in 2014:
Personally, his dominating physical appearance — he’s known for his height and his athletic ability — is tempered by reports of his softer side that focuses on his apparent love of writing poetry (though he has also been reported to be a big fan of more macho pursuits such as buying Italian suits, Scotch whisky and smoking).
People respect him, even if they don’t like him.
Today, Sergey Lavrov draws inspiration not from Jonathan Goldsmith but some combination of the RMVP, Ri Chun-hee, and Baghdad Bob. His stature as a respected adversary is or should be, in all the aftermath of the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, irrevocably shattered.
You may have seen this quote from Mr. Lavrov: “We are not planning to attack other countries. We didn’t attack Ukraine in the first place.”
Okay. Then there was his response to the maternity-hospital bombing in Mariupol that produced a horrible image of a bleeding pregnant woman on a stretcher (her baby died, the mother is reported to have told the medics to “kill me now,” and then she died). Lavrov’s line was that Ukrainian radicals were using the hospital as a base and that patients had been moved out of the building before the strike, while a Russian embassy asserted the images were simply faked and echoed Lavrov’s claims. The foreign minister also has referred to components of the Ukrainian army as “Nazi battalions” and said the country’s Jewish president is being manipulated by “neo-Nazis.”
Lavrov is not merely bending the truth in his defense of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. He has no relation to it. The two have never met. His performance should ensure he never again wins an audience with an American official.
This amoral poetic polyglot is only the most prolific liar in the Kremlin’s operation. But the West must not forget the inhumanity of his falsehoods. The mendacity matters more immediately as U.S. policy-makers worry whether their own actions could be used by Vladimir Putin as justification to escalate. As Jim Geraghty writes, Putin does not need justification. He can create his own and often does:
Putin contends that Ukraine is not a real country, that it is run by drug-addicted neo-Nazis, that he’s liberating the Ukrainians by indiscriminately bombing their cities, that the Ukrainians are committing “genocide,” and that the West “forced” him to invade in what is not a “war,” but a “special military action.” . . . Putin doesn’t really need a good reason to take any particular action; if he doesn’t have one, he will just make one up.
As fighting drags on, Western journalists now count among the casualties of war. Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski was killed, and reporter Benjamin Hall was injured, in an attack on Monday; Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, working with Fox as a consultant on the ground, was also killed.
Jay Nordlinger relays the following:
War — mass murder — is not an abstraction. Elie Kedourie, the great Baghdad-born historian, had some words of advice for the young David Pryce-Jones. P-J passed them down to me, and I will never forget them: “Keep your eye on the corpses.”
They are piling up, as Kevin Williamson documents here, even if Russia’s long-standing foreign minister should claim otherwise. Exasperation toward him has turned to outrage; the U.S. personally sanctioned Lavrov, along with Putin, after Russia’s invasion.
Early this week, U.N. secretary-general António Guterres warned that the prospect of nuclear conflict is “back within the realm of possibility.” Lavrov confidently dismissed that concern a few days prior. If we weren’t before, should we be worried now?
NAME. RANK. LINK.
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: Ron DeSantis and the New Republican Party
Bing West: Ukraine’s Tragedy Should Refocus the U.S. Marine Corps
Kevin Williamson: A Problem Like Putin
John McCormack: After Zelensky’s Speech, No Surge in Support for U.S.-Enforced ‘No-Fly Zone’ Over Ukraine
Ryan Mills: Wisconsin Teachers Instructed to Hide Students’ Gender Identities from Parents
Matthew Mashburn: January 6 Committee’s Latest Court Filing Should Scare Stacey Abrams
Lahav Harkov: The False Narrative of Israeli Neutrality in Russia’s Ukraine Invasion
Philip Klein: The Benefits of Donald Trump Running Again
Charles C. W. Cooke: No to Trump in 2024
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Extraordinary Vapidity of Kamala Harris
Madeleine Kearns: Transgender and Women’s-Rights Activists Clash as Lia Thomas Dominates Opening of NCAA Championships
Caroline Downey: Biden Administration Handicapped Domestic Energy Production on First Day in Office, Memos Reveal
Dan McLaughlin: The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson
Jim Geraghty: A Hard Look at the Risk of a Putin-Ordered Tactical Nuke
Inez Stepman: Virginia School Covered Up Sexual Assault That Left Victim Hospitalized
Andrew McCarthy: Biden Considers Dropping Death Penalty to Entice Guilty Pleas from 9/11 Plotters
CAPITAL MATTERS
Jack Salmon charts a Federal Reserve failure: The Fed Has Failed in Its Inflation Mandate
Jonathan Lesser rides in with a reality check: Wind and Solar Proponents’ Arithmetic Problem
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Kyle Smith plays to the crickets when he asks: Who’s Stoked for CNN+?
Brian Allen sounds off on museum mask mandates, and then pans across the pond to a controversy involving the depiction of slaves in a mural at the Tate’s restaurant: The Great Unmasking — of Patrons and Fake Altruists Alike
Armond White assesses the legacy and the significance of an American classic: The Godfather at 50
FROM THE NEW, APRIL 4, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Kevin Williamson: Population Bomb Scare
Dominic Pino: Biden’s Low-Energy Policy
Jerry Hendrix: The Defense Budget We Need
Daniel Foster: Standing Our Ground
THE PRICE OF BEEF IS GOING UP, BUT THESE EXCERPTS ARE INFLATION-PROOF
In the latest issue of NR, Dominic Pino looks down the road at what Biden’s energy policies would mean for the country:
The problem with Joe Biden’s energy policy is not that it caused the high gas prices we currently see. The problem with Joe Biden’s energy policy is that, if it were adopted, the present situation would be liable to happen again down the road — and the wound would be self-inflicted.
The Germans are experts in self-inflicted energy wounds. They made themselves dependent on Russian oil and natural gas as a result of a years-long campaign against nuclear energy in favor of renewables that don’t work well enough to power a large country yet. But the solution to Germany’s problems now is to make better decisions ten to 20 years ago. Nixing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline helps to prevent further energy dependence, but it doesn’t undo over a decade of bad energy policy. Chancellor Olaf Scholz doesn’t have a time machine. His predecessor Angela Merkel made his bed, and he has to lie in it.
Biden’s energy policy, if implemented in full, would leave an American president one to two decades hence in a situation similar to the one Scholz finds himself in today. Anyone who thinks John Kerry’s views of energy are worth promoting should not be trusted to run a gas station, let alone make energy policy for the world’s most powerful country. Biden’s energy policy prioritizes the transition away from fossil fuels, whether through billions in subsidies for renewable energy or appointing Federal Reserve officials who want to use financial regulation to punish oil companies. The radical progressive environmental movement that’s part of Biden’s coalition uses environmental laws to drown energy expansion in a sea of litigation.
Since it’s much easier to shut things down than to invent new technology, foreign fossil-fuel production would have to make up for the lost American production. Biden’s energy policy encourages that in two ways. First, by going abroad and simply begging other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Venezuela and Iran, to produce more oil. And second, more crucially, by making it difficult to transport oil by opposing pipeline construction.
It’s not just Keystone XL that progressives oppose; they want to make it harder to build pipelines within America as well (and they’ve successfully stonewalled multiple projects in New York). If oil can’t move through pipelines from where it’s produced to where it’s refined — and from where it’s refined to where it’s consumed — foreign alternatives become more attractive. American West Coast refineries are built for light, sweet crude, but lacking pipeline capacity to get it from Texas, they import it from elsewhere. New England lacks sufficient pipeline capacity to get refined products such as heating oil, so those states often import them too.
Not everyone here agrees, but Philip Klein makes the case for another Trump presidential run, with a pretty big caveat:
It’s worth considering some of the benefits of his running — and losing the primary. . . .
Suddenly, somebody else will have shown that it’s possible for a Republican to go up against Trump, and not only survive, but win. Or, to put it in the immortal words of pro wrestler Ric Flair, “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.”
A primary would also provide a built-in opportunity for the eventual nominee to create some distance from Trump in the general election. Any attempts to link the nominee to Trump will fail, because the nominee will have just come off a bitter primary against Trump. When asked to respond to anything Trump says or does, the candidate could simply wave away the question by pointing out that differences with Trump were spelled out during the primary and emphasize that it’s now time to focus on his or her own vision for leading the country. . . .
Also, despite the likelihood that Trump would claim any election he loses was rigged, it will be much harder to pull off in a primary. It’s much easier to convince Republican voters that there were shenanigans going on in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, or Atlanta than it would be to argue that Republican-controlled primaries in states such as Iowa and South Carolina were somehow fixed to steal the election from him. Having chosen another candidate, the base would likely have much less patience for attempts by Trump to sabotage the nominee and help the Democrats keep the White House.
But there is a more fundamental reason that it would be good for Trump to lose a primary. If the rise of Trump has taught us anything, it’s that the direction of the GOP will not be driven by party bosses, prominent media figures, or any other elites. It will be ultimately determined by the people. Until Trump is defeated among a Republican electorate, he will still command an enormous amount of influence within the party. Trump’s losing to another Republican at the ballot box is the only way for Republicans to truly move on.
Dan McLaughlin reminds America that there are so many reasons to hate Woodrow Wilson beyond daylight saving time. Do take the time to read his definitive takedown, which begins like so:
If you were dragging getting out of bed to start this week, thank Woodrow Wilson. Daylight saving time is just one of a battery of ways that Wilson and his presidency changed America, most of them for the worse.
I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause. . . .
He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”
Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship. . . .
Probably the broadest ground for modern agreement on the awfulness of Wilson is in his disgracefully racist treatment of African Americans. The only president to grow up in the Confederacy, the Virginian Wilson ordered the resegregation of the entire federal government. He required photographs on job applications to screen out black people. The Army under Wilson was so segregated that some black units fought under French command in the largest battle of the First World War. (Naturally, black men who were banned from being hired for peacetime federal jobs were still subjected to the draft.) When you read about Harry Truman’s courageous desegregation of the Army, remember whose work he was undoing. Wilson screened the pro–Ku Klux Klan film Birth of a Nation at the White House; the film quoted pro-Klan passages from one of Wilson’s books. He backed legislation making interracial marriage a felony in the District of Columbia.
ICYMI, Kevin Williamson examined the question a lot of us have in making sense of Russia’s Ukraine invasion: How is it that one man is able — is allowed — to cause such destruction on such a vast scale?
The danger . . . is not men such as Vladimir Putin. The danger is totalitarian states per se. Every society has men such as Putin, and healthy liberal societies often find useful work for them to do. In totalitarian societies, such men end up commanding armies — and, in Putin’s case, a vast nuclear arsenal.
It is not as though these tendencies do not exist in liberal societies. American politics often attracts the worst sort of men and women our country can cough up, and they achieve power through the same dynamic [F. A.] Hayek described in the totalitarian states, welding together effective factions of the low-minded but like-minded. We have the testimony of no less a totalitarian than Adolf Hitler that the greatest strength of the totalitarian states is that they force those who fear them to imitate them, a principle that can be seen at work in the distinctly autocratic and centralizing tendency of the Franklin Roosevelt administration or in the desire of the Trump administration to become Beijing’s mirror image. What liberal societies have is not better men — it is independent courts, a free press, the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic accountability, competitive elections, powerful private institutions, and vibrant civic life. There have been some men of remarkably low character elected to the American presidency, but the American system has limited the damage they could do.
The Russian system does not limit the damage a man such as Putin can do. It amplifies the evil he can do.
Shout-Outs
Christine Rosen, at Commentary: The Privilege of Being Judgmental
Steve Miller, at RealClearInvestigations: How Schools’ Covid-Aid Joy Ride Could Send New Hires Off a Fiscal Cliff — Again
Tyler O’Neil, at Fox News: Ukraine war upended China’s plan to invade Taiwan, alleged FSB whistleblower says
Adam Kredo, at the Washington Free Beacon: New Iran Agreement Would Let Russia Cash In on $10B Contract to Build Nuclear Sites
CODA
Last weekend, this newsletter put out the (last) call for a tune about tipple. Kevin Antonio answered, writing in with an old-timey, fun, spoofy number by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, “Clink! Clink! Another Drink.”
It could be argued that the bandleader, active in the ’40s and ’50s, carved out a predecessor genre to what would eventually be called comedy rock. His heyday was before my time, so Kevin’s recommendation compelled me to do a bit of research. That research led to an Internet rabbit hole, which led to Spike Jones’s comic renditions of classical music, such as “The Blue Danube” and “Dance of the Hours,” which probably would have been a hoot to see live.
Meantime, send your song recs in a Jolt-ward direction — perhaps more in the comedy-rock genre, if something comes to mind. Serious times require a sense of humor, as the Ukrainians have shown. Email me here: jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading.