On the Baltic Frontier

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Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.

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From Pillaging to Prosperity

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The Viking Heart, the latest work by the historian Arthur Herman, is engaging, informative, and highly readable. As Herman deals with four separate topics each of which deserves a book of its own, it is also an extremely ambitious undertaking. His reach may some­times exceed his grasp, but even when that is the case the results are likely to leave readers wanting more — in a good way.

The first topic, taking up a third or so of The Viking Heart’s text, is a history of the “classic” Viking era. The second is a discussion of what happened next — the Vikings did not just vanish into nothingness when the longships ceased setting sail. The third touches on the Scandinavian experience in America. The fourth, which is more of a thread running through the book, is an examination of what Herman dubs “the Viking heart,” character traits (mercifully somewhat evolved since that heart began beating) that, in his view, contributed so much to the development of these northern peoples and the impact they have had far beyond the fjords, forests, and lakes of their homelands.

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Germany after Merkel

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The coalition-building that follows a German election can take quite some time, but regardless of who becomes the country’s next chancellor (almost certainly the Social Democratic Party’s Olaf Scholz), one thing is undeniable: The descent of the center-right CDU/CSU to its lowest-ever share of the vote puts two defining characteristics of outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel — tactical brilliance and strategic blindness — into uncomfortable perspective.

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Turning the Corporate Left's Own Tools against It

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To say that tackling woke capitalism will not be easy is an understatement. Its ascent is the product of, among many other factors, the political challenge posed to free markets by a misunderstood financial crisis, the relentless leftward drift of our institutions, and, as always, the jockeying for power — and its prizes — among our elites. And then there is the manner in which anxiety over climate change — a key contributor to the current effort to redefine the nature and purpose of a corporation — is being used to overturn many of the economic and political assumptions on which our society is organized, thus intensifying what is already a perfect storm. Oh yes, there is also the small matter of the Democrat several months into his term in the White House, and the kind of president that he is proving to be.

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Meat and Its Enemies

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Alarmed by chatter that Joe Biden was plotting to take my burgers away, I hurried online for reassurance. A journalist in the Guardian wrote that this was just scaremongering and along with the Washington Post traced the burger panic back tothe Daily Mail, which had run speculation (with caveats) that “Biden’s climate plan” could limit Americans to “just one burger a MONTH.” This was based on a single academic study, but the Mail was given its opportunity by what was described in the subheadline of a recent story in Vox as a “burger-shaped hole” in the president’s climate proposals.

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Good Fences, Bad Neighbor

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In the aftermath of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, there were widespread fears that the Baltic states, notwithstanding their membership in NATO, might be next. As Aliide Naylor relates in The Shadow in the East, those fears have since eased, but extreme vulnerability (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia could be overrun in days) and constant low- and not-so-low-level Russian aggression against the Baltic trio continue to keep nerves on edge.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has forced NATO to relearn the power of symbolism. Several thousand troops from other NATO allies are now present in the Baltic states at any time, a reminder that the guarantee contained in Article 5 of the NATO treaty (an attack on one NATO country is to be treated as an attack on all) also extends to the alliance’s northeastern marches. Their numbers are tiny: no more, Naylor explains, than “a tripwire, unable to resist Russia’s military might in the event of a full-scale invasion — but thus far they have served as an effective deterrent.”

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Hitler Revisited

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Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the century have stood the test of time very well. Nevertheless, as Brendan Simms, a professor in the history of international relations at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, demonstrates in the introduction to his Hitler: A Global Biography, the research grinds on. In his case, he has used a basic cradle-to-ashes format (Simms does not pretend to depict “the ‘whole’ Hitler”) as a frame on which to hang an intriguing — if not always convincing — reexamination of Hitler’s thinking.

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Crass Capital

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In an age when cultural appropriation is “problematic,” the EU is a repeat offender. Not content with stealing a continent’s name and rewriting its history, the engineers of “ever closer union” have spent years squeezing centuries of art into a “European” (as they abuse that term) straitjacket, a maneuver anticipated by General de Gaulle during a press conference over half a century ago. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand, he agreed, “belonged to Europe” insofar as they were Italian, German, and French. But they would not have done much for Europe had they lacked a nationality and written in some sort of “harmonized Esperanto or” — and here de Gaulle reinforced mockery with erudition — “Volapük.” 

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Boris Johnson Is Being Prosecuted over a Campaign Slogan

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Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

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Before There Was Thatcher

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If you can remember the 1960s, many are said to have said, you weren’t really there. But if Britain fails to remember the 1970s, it may soon find itself in a place where it really should not want to be. Towards the end of the latter, infinitely less entertaining decade, a good number of those at the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition Labour party made their political debut as members of a hard Left that was far less of a fringe than it deserved to be. They have come a long way since, but their thinking has not, and with the Conservatives being broken apart by a botched Brexit, Corbyn’s own ’70s show could be playing in Downing Street soon.

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