Timothy Snyder’s simplest judgment may also be the hardest to evade: we lost this war.
The United States demonstrated that it could destroy. Iran demonstrated that it could endure, retaliate, disrupt the Gulf, and force Washington back to negotiations under worse terms than before. That is not victory. It is tactical power mistaken for strategic wisdom.
The discussion of Venezuela was especially revealing. A successful operation appears to have taught the administration that military force was a tool without meaningful limits. But one fortunate outcome does not make a nation invulnerable. It can merely make its leaders reckless.
Iran treated Operation Epic Fury as an existential war because its leadership was assassinated while negotiations were beginning. The enemy had a vote, as Snyder put it. The administration simply failed to imagine that Iran would cast it.
His final remarks on freedom belong to the same lesson. Freedom cannot mean only that the powerful are released from restraint. When wealth and power are already concentrated, removing every limit from those who possess the most does not create freedom for everyone else. Institutions, laws, public goods, and constitutional checks exist in part to make freedom something more than a privilege of the already powerful.
The president was granted freedom from Congress, expertise, restraint, and consequence.
The nation was left with less freedom, less strength, and a war it never truly chose.
Others who support DT, support an elitist viewpoint that government is meant to
support only those who are a certain color,
come from a certain background and are
male. To them, freedom means being unconstrained from being forced to share
their achievements with “lesser” humans,
including children not related to them. In
other words, the Libertarian mentality.
The third group supporting DT seems to be
the gullible, those who believe superficial adherence to certain religions entitles them
to judge others who adhere to different religions or no religion, and who believe government is meant to support their way of life and their religious dogma over others.
Although I don’t agree with any of these groups, I can intellectually grasp why they
have their beliefs. What I don’t understand
is why the people currently in power believe
it is in their best interests to destroy the framework of the government we’ve had for the last 250 years. It is that framework which made our nation the most powerful nation in the world and one of the wealthiest countries
in the world. Our country set the standard for contributing to scientific progress, for healthcare and for a professional military. We
readily collaborated with other like-minded
nations, but now that’s apparently a bygone era. To what end are these standards being
destroyed?
What the current group in power is doing makes us extremely vulnerable to other
nations who want what we have in the way of natural resources and intellectual property. It makes no sense to put fools in charge of our government, even if you intend to radically change it. It makes no sense to deliberately undermine the health of the population. Every country needs able-bodied men and women.
Snyder's distinction between negative and positive freedom, freedom from constraint versus freedom to build together, maps onto something that rarely gets named in strategic analysis of these conflicts: what prolonged displacement does to the capacity for collective self-determination.
Ukraine has roughly 3.7 million internally displaced people alongside 6 million refugees abroad. The drone revolution Snyder and Sullivan describe is genuinely remarkable, but it exists alongside a population scattered across Europe whose ability to participate in building whatever comes next is structurally constrained in ways that outlast the military outcome. Winning a war and then reconstituting a society capable of the kind of positive freedom Snyder describes are two different tasks, and the second is harder.
The same point applies to the Iran discussion. The populations most affected by the Strait closure weren't the great powers whose economic interdependence everyone focused on. They were the 24.8 million people in Sudan already dependent on humanitarian supply chains that run through the same chokepoint, and who had no vote in any of it.
Snyder's right that freedom requires building something together. The harder question his framework raises is how you build together when the people most affected by these conflicts have been most thoroughly scattered, displaced, or cut off from the systems meant to support them.
the scumbag who threw Ukraine under the bus during Biden years.
26 tanks - the whole armada! - were provided to Ukraine from the so-called 'ally' and Budapest memorandum signatory. F-16s from the U.S., permissions to hit russian territories - those are still yet to come, perhaps when the new Democrat administration will hand that nobody Sullivan yet another government job.
Have to say I didn’t follow the Putin part of the discussion with Wendy. Could you follow up on that? It seems really important to understand and maybe collectively guide the potential paths post Putin, especially is his departure is not his death.
Timothy Snyder’s simplest judgment may also be the hardest to evade: we lost this war.
The United States demonstrated that it could destroy. Iran demonstrated that it could endure, retaliate, disrupt the Gulf, and force Washington back to negotiations under worse terms than before. That is not victory. It is tactical power mistaken for strategic wisdom.
The discussion of Venezuela was especially revealing. A successful operation appears to have taught the administration that military force was a tool without meaningful limits. But one fortunate outcome does not make a nation invulnerable. It can merely make its leaders reckless.
Iran treated Operation Epic Fury as an existential war because its leadership was assassinated while negotiations were beginning. The enemy had a vote, as Snyder put it. The administration simply failed to imagine that Iran would cast it.
His final remarks on freedom belong to the same lesson. Freedom cannot mean only that the powerful are released from restraint. When wealth and power are already concentrated, removing every limit from those who possess the most does not create freedom for everyone else. Institutions, laws, public goods, and constitutional checks exist in part to make freedom something more than a privilege of the already powerful.
The president was granted freedom from Congress, expertise, restraint, and consequence.
The nation was left with less freedom, less strength, and a war it never truly chose.
Venezuela shows what happens when you replace Diplomacy by CIA covert actions.
I’m afraid most Americans today would
define freedom as the absence of
government, because it is what we have
been led to believe by those who support
DT—who seem to be on some nihilistic
mission where life is a “free-for-all” — and
government is in the way. It seems to be a
smash and grab mentality where the strong
and clever are entitled to prey on the weak
without the constraints of laws.
Others who support DT, support an elitist viewpoint that government is meant to
support only those who are a certain color,
come from a certain background and are
male. To them, freedom means being unconstrained from being forced to share
their achievements with “lesser” humans,
including children not related to them. In
other words, the Libertarian mentality.
The third group supporting DT seems to be
the gullible, those who believe superficial adherence to certain religions entitles them
to judge others who adhere to different religions or no religion, and who believe government is meant to support their way of life and their religious dogma over others.
Although I don’t agree with any of these groups, I can intellectually grasp why they
have their beliefs. What I don’t understand
is why the people currently in power believe
it is in their best interests to destroy the framework of the government we’ve had for the last 250 years. It is that framework which made our nation the most powerful nation in the world and one of the wealthiest countries
in the world. Our country set the standard for contributing to scientific progress, for healthcare and for a professional military. We
readily collaborated with other like-minded
nations, but now that’s apparently a bygone era. To what end are these standards being
destroyed?
What the current group in power is doing makes us extremely vulnerable to other
nations who want what we have in the way of natural resources and intellectual property. It makes no sense to put fools in charge of our government, even if you intend to radically change it. It makes no sense to deliberately undermine the health of the population. Every country needs able-bodied men and women.
Frankly, the senselessness of their endeavor
is why I believe they won’t succeed.
Snyder's distinction between negative and positive freedom, freedom from constraint versus freedom to build together, maps onto something that rarely gets named in strategic analysis of these conflicts: what prolonged displacement does to the capacity for collective self-determination.
Ukraine has roughly 3.7 million internally displaced people alongside 6 million refugees abroad. The drone revolution Snyder and Sullivan describe is genuinely remarkable, but it exists alongside a population scattered across Europe whose ability to participate in building whatever comes next is structurally constrained in ways that outlast the military outcome. Winning a war and then reconstituting a society capable of the kind of positive freedom Snyder describes are two different tasks, and the second is harder.
The same point applies to the Iran discussion. The populations most affected by the Strait closure weren't the great powers whose economic interdependence everyone focused on. They were the 24.8 million people in Sudan already dependent on humanitarian supply chains that run through the same chokepoint, and who had no vote in any of it.
Snyder's right that freedom requires building something together. The harder question his framework raises is how you build together when the people most affected by these conflicts have been most thoroughly scattered, displaced, or cut off from the systems meant to support them.
Jake Sullivan? Oh, I remember the name:
the scumbag who threw Ukraine under the bus during Biden years.
26 tanks - the whole armada! - were provided to Ukraine from the so-called 'ally' and Budapest memorandum signatory. F-16s from the U.S., permissions to hit russian territories - those are still yet to come, perhaps when the new Democrat administration will hand that nobody Sullivan yet another government job.
Have to say I didn’t follow the Putin part of the discussion with Wendy. Could you follow up on that? It seems really important to understand and maybe collectively guide the potential paths post Putin, especially is his departure is not his death.
What were the other books your father recommended?
Super dialogue, thanks guys !