The Show Must Go On: Ukraine, Europe Struggle to Salvage a Path Forward

Picking up the pieces, privateers in Mexico, the woke death of the Oscars

Mar 03, 2025

Seldom in modern times has the fate of a whole nation been so dependent on a single meeting and on a single relationship. When Volodymyr Zelensky entered the Oval Office on Friday he had one job: to repair a deep and catastrophic rift between him and Donald Trump, who the previous week had called the Ukrainian president a “dictator.” Zelensky held the future of US support for his country’s defense against Russia in his hands.
But instead of a reconciliation, the meeting turned into an epochal diplomatic train wreck. So disastrous was the exchange that by the end Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington Oksana Markarova was holding her head in her hands. A planned joint Trump-Zelensky press conference was cancelled, and as Zelensky drove back to his plane for an early departure, Trump delivered the online equivalent of a kick up his departing guest’s backside with a terse message on Truth Social accusing Zelensky of being “not ready for peace.”
Where did it all go so wrong? First and foremost, Zelensky made the cardinal mistake of disagreeing with Trump and telling him that he was wrong. For instance, when Trump repeated his false claim that the US had provided more money to Ukraine than Europe, Zelensky corrected him three times. Was Zelensky right? Of course. Could Zelensky have been more politic? Also yes. Is it a good thing for the world that major policy decision are apparently being taken on the basis of Trump’s personal likes and dislikes? Probably not. Yet the fast-emerging reality of Washington politics is that government by personal whim is the new normal.
Zelensky quickly discovered just how thin skinned Trump can be — and how terrible his temper. “The problem is, I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States,” a visibly irritated Trump told Zelensky before wrapping up the meeting. “Your people are very brave. But you’re either going to make a deal or we are out.” He also accused Zelensky of “gambling with the lives of millions, you are gambling with World War Three. And what you are doing is very disrespectful to this country.” And his final words to Zelensky were “you’re not acting at all thankful and that’s not a nice thing.”
What is most surprising is that hopes were high that Zelensky would be able to exercise his famous powers of persuasion and turn Trump back into a supporter. On the day before the meeting, Trump was asked about his previous claim that Zelensky was a dictator. “Did I say that?” was Trump’s smirking response. “I can’t believe I said that. Next question?” A major deal that would have seen Ukraine exchange a stake in the country’s mineral resources for continued US financing was on the table, the centerpiece of a new phase in Kyiv-Washington relations. Crucially, the US had removed a controversial demand that it was owed $500 billion in exchange for the military aid provided during the war.
“I do deals. My whole life is deals,” Trump said of the accord on Ukraine’s minerals earlier this week. “We’re going to be signing an agreement, which will be a very big agreement.” Transactional it may have been, but the minerals deal would at least have helped attract billions of US investment in Ukraine’s shattered mining sector and given Washington a material stake in Kyiv’s future stability and independence.

Politico EU editor: Can Ukraine-U.S. relations be repaired?

Counseled by his American friends and advisers, as well as his powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy had been careful to avoid antagonizing America’s prickly President Donald Trump since his reelection. “Play along” was the advice, and considering the bad blood between Trump and Zelenskyy going back to 2019 — when the Ukrainian leader wouldn’t accede to Trump’s demand for an investigation into former U.S. President Joe Biden’s son — following that advice was crucial.
Until Friday, the strategy was clear: The Ukrainian leader needed to be seen as constructive, leaving Russian President Vladimir Putin to exasperate Trump by being recalcitrant and the first one to say “nyet.”
Keeping to that was always going to be tricky — although no one could have predicted just how spectacularly it was driven off a cliff. Question is, can the damage be undone?
Here in Kyiv, the surreal and tempestuous Oval Office brawl is largely being blamed on Vance — a longtime critic of U.S. involvement in Ukraine. He’s being accused of purposefully setting out to provoke Zelenskyy, possibly to sink a deal that would allow the U.S. greater access to Ukraine’s minerals.

Modern Day Privateers vs. Mexican Cartels?

James Holmes writes in The National Interest

Inquired Utah Sen. Mike Lee on X in late January, “What are letters of marque and reprisal and how could they be used to weaken drug cartels?” Lee then went on to answer his own question, stating the case for empowering private citizens to make war on cartels running drugs into the United States. Then, on February 13, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett introduced the “Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025” in the House, in concert with Indiana Rep. Mark Messmer.
Endorsed.
The draft legislation would authorize the U.S. president to issue letters to private shipowners, private military and security firms, or both, to go after substate malefactors. As the draft language puts it, “Cartels present an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Such is the gravity of the threat, Reps. Burchett and Messmer remind fellow lawmakers, that President Donald Trump designated a group of cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” as one of his first acts as president.
To meet this menace, they say, Congress should authorize and request that the chief executive “commission, under officially issued letters of marque and reprisal,” as many “privately armed and equipped persons and entities” as needed, “with suitable instructions to the leaders thereof, to employ all means reasonably necessary to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any individual whom the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization” guilty of aggression against the United States.
Privateering Has a Constitutional Basis
Despite what pundits with more attitude than historical literacy may say, lawmakers are not concocting some “crazy plan” to unleash “pirates” against drug traffickers. Pirates are private predators out for private gain. Privateers are not. As the draft legislation indicates, they operate with state sanction—and under state oversight.
University of Tennessee law professor and blogger Glenn Reynolds reviews the proposed turn to private counternarcotics and counterterrorism from a legal perspective over at Substack and the New York Post. As Professor Reynolds points out, the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) expressly grants the president the power “to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water” (my italics). There’s that phrase, prominent in the supreme law of the land.
So much for government-sponsored lawlessness.
Because of its historical legacy, we typically associate the practice with naval warfare. Privateering took place on the high seas in the past. It’s an artifact of the age of sail, when governments commissioned private ship crews to prey on hostile shipping—chiefly mercantile shipping, as few privateers could afford ships and armaments able to outgun purpose-built men of war. But nothing in the Constitution forbids terrestrial operations under this construct. Nor do the founders confine the concept to geophysical operating domains. For instance, Reynolds notes that from time to time proponents have espoused “cyber letters of marque and reprisal” for going after hackers. That may or may not be wise, but it doesn’t appear unlawful.
Under a letter of marque and reprisal, observes Reynolds, private actors wage war against designated foes, state or nonstate. However, the phrase “marque and reprisal” conflates two different types of conduct. Under a letter of marque, the privateer brings a capture to a prize court and, if the court deems the seizure lawful, the crew gets to sell it, keep the proceeds, and pursue fresh prizes for as long as the government wants to keep up the campaign. Privateering pays. A letter of reprisal confers more limited authority: it allows a private citizen or citizens wronged by a foreign entity to seize enough property from that entity to make up their losses. At that point, their government charter ceases.
In reality, then, what lawmakers are contemplating is a letter of marque that bestows the authority to execute an open-ended maritime campaign under supervision from Washington DC.

Emilia Perez and the Death of The Oscars

Sasha Stone writes in Tablet

Emilia Pérez was a French movie about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to become female. And did I mention it was a musical? It was the living embodiment of what we call “wokeness.” It had it all, even a love scene with the transgender actress who would make history with nomination after nomination, up to and including the Oscars.
We all knew to prepare for the first transgender actress to make history. We have all been trained to go along with the ritual of cradling a nominee like a precious egg all for the sake of preserving the necessary messaging by the industry that they are all good people doing good things. It was an inevitability that the Cannes jury, led by Greta Gerwig, gave its Best Actress prize to all of the actresses in Emilia Pérez, including its star, Karla Sofia Gascon.
Netflix snapped up the film, sensing it would be a major Oscar player. A Best Picture win for Netflix was so close they could almost taste it. Their whiz kid Oscar strategist, Lisa Taback, had left the Weinstein Co. before the scandal hit: She’d been helping them land a Best Picture contender every year, bringing in wins like The King’s Speech and The Artist. Netflix hired her to work the same magic for them, and she did. She was bringing in one, sometimes two Best Picture contenders every year, but so far, a win had been just out of reach.
When Emilia Pérez won Best Picture in musical/comedy at the Golden Globes, beating Anora was all the hype Netflix needed to take their campaign to the finish line. When the Oscar nominations were finally announced, Emilia Pérez led with 13, joining such historic Oscar juggernauts as From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, and Oppenheimer. Netflix finally had a bona fide winner on its hands, even though most of us barely noticed that Netflix was about to cross the threshold and finally earn that coveted stamp of approval from the industry, clanging the bell that they were not just a streaming site that had killed movie theaters: They were a genuine movie studio.
As the front-runner, Emilia Pérez had the expected target on its back. Netflix was deflecting slings and arrows from every direction. Mexicans hated that it was a French movie that got Mexico wrong. The transgender community didn’t like its depiction of a trans person. Film fans thought it was terrible, one of the worst films ever made. How could it have gotten 13 nominations?
And then there were people like me who braved even more treacherous waters by calling out the system that pushed out veterans who had worked their entire careers to win a spot in the Best Actress lineup. It was an unfair advantage, yet again, because the only reason Karla Sofia Gascon was nominated was because she was transgender; the idea that her performance reached any high level of art equivalent to that of the world’s best actresses was plainly a joke.
But none of that would have brought down Emilia Pérez. For those thinking the “woke” thing is over in Hollywood, know this: It is more profound than a trend. It is, by now, a deeply held collective belief system. Oscar voters live in their own universe. Almost nothing gets in or out unless the publicists want it to. They are protected and insulated, like the French aristocracy before the Revolution.
What finally destroyed the Best Picture chances for Emilia Pérez was the titular star herself, Karla Sofia Gascon, whose thinking ran a little hot, shall we say. Some journalist found a trove of her old racist, bigoted tweets just sitting there in plain view on X, albeit in Spanish. It’s not that no one in studio offices speaks Spanish—although that might help. No one had bothered to do a pre-Oscars background check on Gascon, since she was by definition the incarnation of Hollywood’s collective virtue. After all, she was a darker-skinned transgender person—and thereby the embodiment of the left’s identity-politics ideology. Emilia Pérez, the trades announced it, was to be an ultimate “fuck you” to Donald Trump. Who would dare vote against that?
Well, let’s just say it didn’t go that way. In fact, the whole pot of cozy, inbred assumptions blew up in their face. Gascon’s tweets read more like MAGA trolling than the appropriately saintly thoughts of the first transgender person to be nominated in the Best Actress category. The tweets mocked the virtue signalers at the Oscars, saying they looked more like a “Black Lives Matter protest” or an “Afro-Korean film festival” than an awards show. She also complained about the rise of Islam in Spain.
The consequences for Gascon’s ancient thought-crimes were swift and immediate. Netflix refused to pay for her travel expenses. They told her to disappear. Instead, the actress went rogue and appeared on Spanish CNN, crying through the interview and comparing herself to Rosa Parks. It was a wildfire, all right, and it was burning through Netflix’s best chance to win Best Picture.
Netflix would strip her name and face from all of the advertising. She would be ordered not to attend any award shows. Now, after the smoke has cleared, Netflix has announced they will pay for Gascon to attend the Oscars after all.
The story of Emilia Pérez’s trip to the Oscars would make a better movie than almost every movie Hollywood has put out in 10 years, but there are no filmmakers brave enough to tell it. Had the film instead won Best Picture, however, it would have been a depressing indication of an industry that had given up on itself.

Feature

The New Yorker: Will Harvard Bend or Break?

Items of Interest

Foreign

Semafor: U.S. tariffs set for Canada, Mexico

The Spectator: Will there be a second phase to the Gaza ceasefire?

Politico: U.S. aircraft carrier arrives in South Korea after North Korea missile test

The Telegraph: Starmer’s bridging approach is right but the gulf is wide

WEx: Rogan: Iran-China and why Elbridge Colby must be confirmed

Axios: Hegseth scales back anti-Russia cyber operations

Domestic

WSJ: Trump legal challenges tracker

WSJ: Trump’s push to lower prices amid inflation concerns

Politico: Trump’s ‘Doge’ political gamble

Politico: GOP governors embrace ‘Doge’ and Musk

Punchbowl News: Trump and the GOP’s three crises

Punchbowl News: Todd Young works on rebuilding Trump relationship

Politico: Cuomo enters NYC mayor race

Politico: Crowds protest JD Vance at Vermont ski resort

Health

Fox News: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the measles outbreak

City Journal: Marty Makary’s book critiques the agency he’s about to lead

Media

The Spectator: The woke cathedral is finally falling

Mediaite: Trump spokeswoman puts Zelensky on blast

Tech

UnHerd: Skype’s death marks the end of a simpler digital age

Religion

The Spectator: Strangely moving vigil for Pope Francis

Ephemera

WSJ: Major League Baseball’s new ESPN TV deal

Hollywood Reporter: Sean Baker's Oscar history

The Telegraph: How Netflix screwed up their trans Oscar bait

Hollywood Reporter: How Anora won, and Demi Moore lost

Hollywood Reporter: Conan O’Brien rights the Oscars ship

The New Yorker: ‘I’m Not a Robot’ wins a 2025 Academy Award

Quote

“If I could change the tone for just one second. I’m going to do this right now. The people of Los Angeles have clearly been through a devastating ordeal, and this needs to be addressed and should be addressed. In moments such as this, any awards show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous.

But what I want to do is have us all remember why we gather here tonight. Okay? Yes, we will honor many beautiful and talented A-list stars. But the Oscars also shines a light on an incredible community of people you will never see. Craftspeople. Artisans. Technicians. Costumers.

That’s right. I can’t name them all. There are too many. Hardworking men and women behind the camera who have devoted their lives to making film. Now, yes, many people we celebrate tonight are not famous. They’re not wealthy, but they are devoted to a craft that can, in moments, bring us all a little closer together.

Now, for almost a century, we have paused every spring to elevate and celebrate an art form that has the power at its very best to unite us. So yes, even in the face of terrible wildfires and divisive politics, the work which is what this is about, the work continues.

And next year and for years to come through trauma and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here. I will not. I’m leaving Hollywood to run a bed and breakfast in Orlando. But. And I’d like to see you there. But then the magic, the madness, the grandeur and the joy of film worldwide is going to be with us forever.

So without further delay, let’s get things started.”

— Conan O’Brien at last night’s Oscars

The Transom