Europe's Reality Check on Ukraine

Plus SNL 50, New Yorker editors, Nixon's back, Palantir and the soul

Feb 21, 2025

Matthew Blackburn in The National Interest:

Europe’s weakness has never been so openly on display. President Donald Trump has shattered the existing framework of Western support for Ukraine. America has officially abandoned a hugely costly and failed nineteen-year quest to expand NATO into Ukraine. The commitment to ensuring Kyiv regains its pre-2014 territory is now canceled. The United States will neither send troops to Ukraine nor extend Article 5 to any Western “peacekeepers” deployed there.
Europe is now expected to foot the bill of defending and rebuilding Ukraine while America seeks to recoup some of the $175 billion it has spent on the war with a deal granting it ownership of Ukrainian rare earth minerals. According to Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg, Europe won’t even have a decisive say in the deal America makes to end the war. At an emergency summit in Paris called straight after a traumatic Munich Security Conference, Europe’s leaders could not agree among themselves on any new common position.
For Europe’s pro-Ukraine commentariat, this is nothing short of a nightmare. They, as well as most European leaders, have spent three years ignoring or outright denying every sign that the West is unable to defeat Russia in Ukraine. At every juncture, they wanted to spin the roulette wheel of escalation “just one more time” to weaken Russia.
They systematically ignored the evidence of Ukraine’s military decline and still call for yet more support. Their support for Ukraine was once encapsulated by the phrase, “We stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.” In 2024, it shifted to “Ukraine is on an irreversible pathway to NATO, and we must put them in the strongest possible negotiating position.” Now, in 2025, there is a third version: “No negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine” and “peace through strength.”
What does this new slogan entail? Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski characterizes the conflict as a “classic colonial war” that could continue for another ten years. Europe’s hardliners are quite prepared to watch Ukraine turn into a Syria-style failed state as long as Russia does not win. The moral concern to stop Putin does not, however, extend to the Ukrainian people themselves, who are to be sacrificed for the greater good of weakening and containing Russia. The hardliners are proposing a truly nightmare scenario: Europe prolongs a war it cannot win until Ukraine’s collapse opens a pandora’s box just as America walks back its security commitments.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Volodymyr Zelensky call for a rapid burst of defense spending, implying that Europe’s GDP—ten times larger than Russia’s—can be rapidly converted into an effective and deployable military force. This ignores the basic facts on the ground. The balance of power has swung in Russia’s favor. Ukraine is running out of men. Lithuania’s Defence Minister admits the Russian army is three times bigger than it was in February 2022. Zelensky reports the Russian army is about to expand by another 150,000. Meanwhile, Europe cannot ramp up defense production in time to save the situation; Russia is outproducing them.
Independent reports have established the woeful state of Europe’s leading militaries, deficient not only in trained soldiers but also in weapons and equipment, much of which has already been donated to Ukraine. Building a European army without U.S. support or leadership is an unprecedented challenge that will take a decade. The fundamental disagreement among European leaders on deploying “peacekeepers” to Ukraine points to a deeper problem. Europe can talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. Without muscle or a unified plan, Europe cannot take Russia on now; a deal is a necessity.

How the Young Right Fell for Nixon

Greg Noone.

Recent years have seen the 37th president’s social media profile transform from the familiar Tricky Dick to far more rarified heights. TikTok Nixon is a man of honour, an idealist, a preternaturally gifted statesman armed with acerbic insights into the power of the American media and eerily accurate predictions about the present-day state of Israel, Russia and China — at turns sentimental, even gossipy, but always the doughty defender of the common man.
Not that this is merely a story of some online tickers going steadily upward. On the contrary, Nixon’s social media revival matters in the grubby politics of the here and now. In an age of polarisation, and one in which the young are increasingly disenchanted with democracy itself, the growing lionisation of the only commander-in-chief to resign in disgrace is a red flag for the republic’s future.
At first glance, Nixon’s online persona is remarkably gentle. There’s a good reason for this: most clips are spliced from soft-soap post-Watergate interviews, when Dick was relaxedly hawking foreign policy tomes that, according to biographer Evan Thomas, were “moderately interesting and sold moderately well”. This is Nixon at rest, keen on sharing homespun wisdom about a life spent in service between his verdicts on Mao and the Shah. “What makes life mean something is purpose — a goal, the battle, the struggle,” he says in one such clip. “Even if you don’t win it.”
Spend time in Nixonworld, though, and you’ll quickly spot clips far more brazen in their admiration for Tricky Dick. See, for instance, the excerpts from Mad Men in which Don Draper is suddenly captivated by Nixon’s 1969 inauguration address, or when he waxes lyrical about the Republican’s hardscrabble journey to the vice presidency just six years out of the navy — all before that familiar burr interrupts our regular viewing with a series of smash cuts.
Such lionisation makes sense if you know where most of these clips come from: the Richard Nixon Foundation, the co-owner of the former president’s library in Yorba Linda, California, and an organisation for which the sentence “it was just a burglary” is considered a fair summation of his legacy. The past year has seen the institution not only become an increasingly Trumpy meeting place for the GOP’s great and good, but also such an effective proponent of Nixon across social media that it’s booted many of the spicier White House tapes off the top tier of YouTube search results — and increased its subscriber base by 236%.
For the Nixon connoisseur, this is the historiographical equivalent of seeing the ex-president’s bullfrog jowls gurning through a beachside bodybuilder cut-out. Elements of the overall image are recognisable: Nixon’s mastery of foreign affairs, for example, or his deep-seated suspicion of the media. Yet absent from the picture is the racism, the homophobia — and, let’s not forget, the crimes.
Who watches this stuff? Despite the Boomer flavour of many of the foundation’s in-person events — you, too, can celebrate “the women and girls in your life” with a Title IX fun run — the audience most receptive to the new, hunky Nixon appear to be young, conservative-leaning voters occupying an increasingly polarised media landscape. Raised on a steady media diet of diverse perspectives, fractured across multiple social media platforms (usually TikTok), members of Gen Z are more cynical and anxious than their parents. They also find mainstream news brands increasingly untrustworthy, with only 56% of 18-29-year-olds having a “lot” or “some” trust in national news organisations. That’s down from 62% in 2016, a decline that’s even more pronounced among Millennials.
That mistrust is sharper still among young Republicans, an increasing number of whom wholeheartedly trust the news they consume from social media. Among this cohort is the intellectually impressionable manosphere, for whom Nixon has become a cause célèbre, an appeal that makes sense if you consider the former president’s image of himself as a complex loner misunderstood and maligned by the liberal establishment.

Editing The New Yorker

Janet Lepore.

Bill McKibben was a senior at Harvard when he got a call at the Crimson offices. It was Shawn, offering him a job. McKibben was sure it was a Lampoon prank, so he said, “Fuck off,” and hung up the phone. Six months later, Shawn called back, and McKibben took the job. (“The mark of our relationship is that neither of us ever felt the need to bring up that first phone call,” McKibben says.) Writers bring in new writers, too. In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: “Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.”
Being adored by the editorial staff of The New Yorker does not mean that love will last. Very little protects writers, and even less—until the forming of the New Yorker Union, in 2018—protected others at the magazine. (Certain writers have also been notoriously hostile to collective action. “Dostoyevsky didn’t have a dental plan,” a writer whom no one can definitively name complained, in the nineteen-seventies, when magazine employees tried to improve their lot.) You lose your talent, or you lose favor, or you lose both. In 1927, Harold Ross wrote to Dorothy Parker, “The verses came and God Bless Me! if I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff. Tearful thanks.” Thirty years later, William Maxwell sent Parker a rejection: “I cannot bear this kind of disappointment to writers whose work means as much to me as yours does. We all felt that, in spite of wonderful things which no one but you could have written, the people do not quite come alive.”
“You are fast getting to be our favorite poet,” Katharine White had written to Ogden Nash in 1930, when he started submitting whimsical verse to the magazine. But the magazine changed and Nash’s powers waned, and by the nineteen-sixties, when Roger Angell—White’s son—was Nash’s editor, the situation was different. “It is a dark day here when we have to turn down an Ogden Nash poem,” Angell wrote Nash, in 1961. There followed many more dark days. Nash wrote back, “In my 32 years of writing I have never protested an editor’s decision. Disagreed with, yes; protested, no. This letter is proof that I am heart-sick, bewildered, frustrated.” He closed, “The New Yorker has always been my parent and my nurse.” Updike later wrote to Angell with his own worries about being put out to pasture, citing the sorry rejections sent to Nash: “One of the less happy tasks of an editor must be holding the hand of a coddled old contributor as he loses his fast ball, curve, and sinker.”
Updike never saw that pasture. “I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,” he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. “They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.” He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.

Why SNL Doesn’t Resonate Any More

I write at The Spectator:

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what’s anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live‘s fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars.

Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison. It’s hard to read this as anything other than an indication of how much comedy has moved on from SNL. Just like every other Democratic-run institution, the age of its top brass has become a major defect — Lorne Michaels is just shy of the age of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. And the fact that even recently popular people like Bill Hader wouldn’t make time for it is telling: there’s just an absence of comedy from the nation’s most prominent comedy show.

It would be easy to dunk on SNL for being out of touch or drowning in leftist pablum, incapable of navigating a genuinely absurd era in American life after swinging so far away from the average comedy viewer during 2016 — climaxing in the horrendous and still widely mocked “Hallelujah” performance by Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton. But there’s something else going on here which traditionalists and conservatives shouldn’t welcome as a good thing: the degradation of the American monoculture.

The truth is that Saturday Night Live as an institution was not all that much kinder to George W. Bush than it was to Donald Trump, nor is it as screechingly unfunny and out of touch as the plethora of white male late night hosts from Jimmy to Seth to Stephen to Jon to John and back to Jimmy again. And SNL is willing to allow some hosts to say things none of those other showrunners will, thanks to the stature of people like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler — and the newest talent who became so popular he couldn’t be denied the role, Shane Gillis.

The point is that as with so many things, the decayed nature of a cultural institution, even one that still has much to offer an audience, requires that it change, adapt and bring new leadership instead of just getting stuck in a generational rut. We’re well past the point where Tina Fey should have brought a Gen X perspective to the show. The message here is the same as the message for Star Wars and James Bond and all these other big languishing cultural properties: boomers just need to retire already. Why do we have a vice president who’s four decades younger than the man in charge of the biggest show in comedy? It’s ridiculous.

This isn’t ageist. It’s about being willing to try new things instead of just sticking with the safetyism of old dull slow-moving retreads. It’s incredible to see this finally taking place in politics before it takes hold in culture (and the reasons why are worth considering). But for all the talk of disruption and new eras in content creation, SNL will remain on its slow path of cultural irrelevance so long as they’re still trotting out Tom Hanks front and center and putting Tim Robinson in the background. Please, Lorne, can’t we just try something new?