Chef's Surprise

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In 2006, Peter Pomerantsev, a British writer born in Soviet Ukraine (his parents emigrated shortly after his birth), moved to Moscow, wanting to work in television. As set out in his Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), most media programming there was organized to entertain, beguile, and distract, to preserve the illusion of freedom even as its remnants were being dismantled. His latest book, How to Win an Information War, revolves around the World War II activities of Sefton Delmer (1904–1979), a British propagandist dedicated not to preserving illusions but to whittling them away. His most remarkable project (probably) was using GSI, a “radio station” purportedly based in Germany (in reality in the south of England), not to win over his German listeners but to unsettle them in ways that the Nazis would not welcome.

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The Green Road to Serfdom

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Deciding who has been the worst British prime minister of the 21st century (so far) is tough, but Theresa May (2016–19) strengthened her strong claim to this title shortly ahead of her ignominious departure from office. Desperate to secure a “legacy,” she saw to it that Britain became the first major country to legally bind itself to reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. That is, the nation committed itself to releasing no more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it removes. Quite how this ambition could be fulfilled or what fulfilling it would cost was unclear, but no matter: This potentially enormous commitment passed into law with support across the political spectrum, astonishingly little scrutiny, and a great deal of self-congratulation. The 2050 target date reflected a widely held view that this is what it would take to contain the increase in the average global temperature since pre-industrial times to a more or less bearable 1.5 degrees Celsius.

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The War on Growth

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The industrial revolution is not yet canceled, but it has become “problematic.” When delegates arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for Conference of the Parties 26, the 2021 edition of the U.N.’s climate jamboree, Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed them with a speech in which, after some by-the-numbers apocalypticism (crops withering, locusts swarming, wildfires, cyclones, Miami underwater), he turned his attention to the industrial revolution: “It was here in Glasgow, 250 years ago, that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam, that was produced by burning coal. . . . We’ve brought you to the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick.”

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Putin’s Useable Past

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After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so…

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How Poland Sees the Ukraine War

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Poland is, as it was in 1920, on the West’s front line, even if this time the conflict — cyberattacks apart — is across its border and it has NATO at its side. Back then, Western assistance consisted mainly of some French matériel, a large detachment of French officers, and a smaller collection of Brits. Led by Józef Piłsudski, the father of a reborn Poland, Polish forces launched a counter-attack against the Bolshevik army that was nearing Warsaw. The result, named after the river running through the city, was the “Miracle on the Vistula.” The invaders were routed, Poland was saved, and the Red Army was stopped from spreading Lenin’s revolution to a dangerously fissile Germany.

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The EU's China Conundrum

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America’s support for Ukraine has removed any remaining doubts that the Cold War’s two leading adversaries are embarked on a new version of that contest. And Beijing is now in a very different position. After China’s break with the USSR in the early 1960s, the relationship between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing evolved into an intricate triangular dance in which the distance between the three vertices was always shifting.

Forty years on, the nature of that dance has changed, and not to America’s advantage. Thanks to its growing economic, technological, and military power, China has now emerged as America’s most formidable challenger…

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Wars After The Fall

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Despite a subtitle that suggests that it covers Russia’s two revolutions and the subsequent civil war, Antony Beevor’s new book is best seen as a history of that war (or, more accurately, wars) prefaced by a lengthy prologue chronicling the events that triggered it. To anyone reasonably familiar with the story of the months that culminated in the Bolshevik coup, there is little that is new in that preamble, although Beevor tells the tale of that year, 1917, briskly, with brio and characteristically sharp insight. Thus, the liberal February revolution that overthrew the czar is generally seen as a relatively peaceful affair, which it was compared with what was to come, but, as Beevor shows, that still left room for lynchings, rapes, mutilations, drownings, shootings, burnings to death. “The people’s hatred has been brewing for too long,” wrote one cousin of the czar.

Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, knew how to manipulate that hatred…

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Stranded: The False Promise of Electric Cars

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The more the state ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” This may resonate with the driver of an electric vehicle (EV) who has pulled up at a charging station in the middle of nowhere, only to find it broken.

In January last year, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker (it was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot), described electrification as “a technology chosen by politicians” and said it was “imposed” on the auto sector. By contrast, the triumph of the internal-combustion engine (ICE) over a century ago was organic. Human ingenuity and the power of markets led to a product that swept almost everything else off the road. EVs (which first had a moment around 1900) were not banned, and neither was the horse. In due course, ICE horseless carriages for the Astors were followed by the Model T and its kin. The automotive age had truly arrived…

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How Europe Invited Its Energy Crisis

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The historian Barbara Tuchman famously compared European civilization before the First World War to a “proud tower” but showed how that tower was more rickety than those at its summit imagined. The pride was overdone, the hubris all too real.

If Europe today can be symbolized by a similarly proud tower, one candidate might be a giant North Sea wind turbine in September 2021, its blades barely turning thanks to winds that had dropped, unexpectedly, for weeks. This unproductive calm had led to a scramble for other sources of power to remedy the shortfall. But the price of one obvious alternative, natural gas, was already soaring (the European benchmark, Dutch front-month gas, was around five times as high as it had been two years before)…

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Putin's Genocide in Ukraine

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When, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new. 

This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians.

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