Witkoff and Rubio Walk Away From U.K. Ukraine Talks
The Trump administration wants to set its own parameters
The U.S. throws the Quad into a bind.
A London-hosted Ukraine summit was thrown into disarray Wednesday after top U.S. representatives pulled out at the eleventh hour and Ukraine pushed back at proposals from Donald Trump's administration to recognize Russia's illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The U.K. is instead hosting dramatically scaled-back talks after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, a key American player in negotiations with Moscow, withdrew from the gathering, citing a scheduling conflict.
The pair canceled in a last-minute about-face that underscores tensions between the Trump team and its European allies over the fate of the Ukraine-Russia war.
The Ukrainians were heading to London ready to talk about a 30-day interim ceasefire proposal that France and the U.K. appeared willing to support.
But the Trump administration instead wants to focus on the president's peace deal plan, presented to Ukraine as a take-it-or-leave-it option, two people familiar with the administration's internal plans and proposal said.
Trump's peace proposal involves a potential lifting of sanctions and U.S. informal recognition of Russia's control over Crimea. The latter is a nonstarter for Kyiv — and unlikely to fly with its Western allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that Ukraine had yet to receive any official proposals from the U.S., and would never recognize Crimea or any other territories as Russian, because such a move would go against the Ukrainian constitution.
“There is nothing to talk about,” he said. “This violates our constitution. This is our territory, the territory of the people of Ukraine.” Zelenskyy warned that “discussing everything at once will only prolong" the conflict…
The ditching of talks leaves the high-level European delegations traveling to London — from France, Germany, the U.K. and Ukraine — in a bind.
The U.K. Foreign Office decided that the meeting of "the Quad" — the U.K., U.S., France and Germany — with Ukraine would now be conducted by officials instead of Foreign Secretary David Lammy hosting. Lammy will drop in on talks and still hold a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha.
What Russia gets under Trump's proposal
"De jure" U.S. recognition of Russian control in Crimea.
"De-facto recognition" of the Russia's occupation of nearly all of Luhansk oblast and the occupied portions of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
A promise that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. The text notes that Ukraine could become part of the European Union.
The lifting of sanctions imposed since 2014.
Enhanced economic cooperation with the U.S., particularly in the energy and industrial sectors.
What Ukraine gets under Trump's proposal
"A robust security guarantee" involving an ad hoc group of European countries and potentially also like-minded non-European countries. The document is vague in terms of how this peacekeeping operation would function and does not mention any U.S. participation.
The return of the small part of Kharkiv oblast Russia has occupied.
Unimpeded passage of the Dnieper River, which runs along the front line in parts of southern Ukraine.
Compensation and assistance for rebuilding, though the document does not say where the funding will come from.
Other elements of the plan
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — the largest such facility in Europe — will be considered as Ukrainian territory but operated by the U.S., with electricity supplied to both Ukraine and Russia.
The document references the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal, which Trump has said will be signed on Thursday.
The plan was drafted after Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin for more than four hours last week.
More: J.D. Vance tells Russia and Ukraine: strike a deal, or we walk away.
De-Escalating Trade War With China
White House considers slashing China tariffs.
The Trump administration is considering slashing its steep tariffs on Chinese imports—in some cases by more than half—in a bid to de-escalate tensions with Beijing that have roiled global trade and investment, according to people familiar with the matter.
President Trump hasn’t made a final determination, the people said, adding that the discussions remain fluid and several options are on the table.
One senior White House official said the China tariffs were likely to come down to between roughly 50% and 65%. The administration is also considering a tiered approach similar to the one proposed by the House committee on China late last year: 35% levies for items the U.S. deems not a threat to national security, and at least 100% for items deemed as strategic to America’s interest, some of the people said. The bill proposed phasing in those levies over five years…
Trump said Tuesday that he was willing to cut tariffs on Chinese goods and that the 145% tariffs he imposed on China during his second term would come down. “But it won’t be zero,” he said. The development was welcome news to investors who had been spooked by the White House’s aggressive moves in recent weeks.
China on Wednesday signaled it was open to trade talks with the U.S., though Beijing warned it wouldn’t negotiate under continued threats from the White House. In China’s policymaking circles, Trump’s comments Tuesday were viewed as a sign of him folding, people who consult with Chinese officials said.
The expressions of openness to a deal from both sides represent a shift from much of the past month, as the world’s two largest economies exchanged reciprocal-tariff increases and testy words, helping push stock markets around the world to their worst weeks in many years.
The IDW is at War With Itself
The Intellectual Dark Web is at war. Douglas Murray has been fighting with Joe Rogan and comedian Dave Smith over Palestine and Second World War revisionism. In response, Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin has published a video and article defending Murray’s arguments from expertise and personal experience. Kisin cites the increasingly poor quality of public debate as evidence that he was mistaken in the core “anti-woke” contention that open debate always tends toward truth. Bret Weinstein has since weighed in, lamenting that Murray and Kisin have become what they once opposed.
So with Kisin counter-signalling open debate, and Murray arguing from authority, is the IDW giving up on its core precepts? What does all of this mean, beyond the trivial insight that commentators don’t always agree among themselves? In brief: that the battle to defend the print-era worldview against its digital successor is over — and print lost.
The IDW is a nexus of commentators that emerged in the 2010s to challenge the solidifying “woke” consensus on topics such as gender and academic freedom. Usually emphasising rationality, open debate and free speech, this caucus sought to defend the classical liberal worldview in an increasingly censorious and “post-truth” climate. But this typically did not include much consideration of the enabling terms of thought or discussion itself — least of all, of the media within which these take place…
Kisin is on the right track with the title of his essay: “Podcastistan”. This implies a polity of spoken-word rather than written debate; in other words, one of secondary orality. And we can expect such a polity to hew more closely in character and outlook to oral than to literate cultures. For example, as Ong puts it, whereas writing “separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’”, in an oral culture “learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known”. Or, as Kisin says of podcast politics, “words do not have meanings, they have feelings”.
The problem for IDW members is that their core paradigm always presupposed the culture enabled and propagated by mass print literacy. But that culture has essentially been killed off by the digital medium within which many (now arguably ex-)IDW figures such as Kisin and Murray continue to thrive, along with sense-makers native to the new secondary orality, such as Rogan.
The tragedy of the IDW is that what its members stood for was, at the time of the group’s formation, already in the process of disappearing. This spate of infighting reveals which of its members have grasped this — and which are still defending a position whose ground is dissolving beneath them.
In Canada, It’s Boomers v. The Young
Stephen Daisley in The Spectator:
What might have been a fleeting moment of political bravado has been immortalized by Canada’s millennial and Gen Z Tories as the embodiment of boomer liberalism.
Yes, I said millennial and Gen Z Tories. Electoral dynamics are a little topsy-turvy in the True North. As I noted last year, a significant segment of young’uns trend rightwards in Canada while the olds are the backbone of the center-left vote. The election, which takes place on Monday, is forecast for a Liberal victory, with Carney’s Grits polling at 43 percent to 37 percent for Poilievre’s Tories. The crosstabs, however, reveal a stark generational divide. If the franchise was limited to 18-to-34 year olds, the Conservatives would narrowly win the contest; if only over 65s could vote, the Liberals’ victory would be even mightier.
What’s that all about, then? In a word: boomers. The boomer, born roughly between 1946 and 1964, is the bête noire of Canadian right-wingery. He is a retired government employee on a generous public pension who came of age in times of plenty, bought his spacious house on the cheap, then pulled the ladder up behind him. He imagines himself to be an aging hippie but grew up in North York in the Sixties where the closest he got to the counterculture was buying The White Album from Sam the Record Man.
He watches, listens, streams and surfs the CBC. The progressive-minded public broadcaster is the source of all his independent thinking and Facebook the soapbox from which he regurgitates chapter and verse of last night’s edition of The National. If the CBC were a church, he would be a lay preacher. The Carney boomer reckons the young are lazy and entitled, Tory voters racist and stupid, and Americans crazy and tacky. He believes above all in the three most important Canadian values: peace, order and asset-hoarding.
And his grandchildren have had it with gramps. As a young man, in the 1970s, he was hosed down with public spending and services by Trudeau père, and in the past decade, in his golden years, by Trudeau fils. His idea of paying it forward was to vote to ramp up immigration, stymie housebuilding, and shift the tax burden onto young workers. Between 1972 and 1976, at the height of Trudeaupia, housebuilding kept pace with demography, with annual population growth of 298,864 and annual housebuilding starts of 249,045.
Compare this to 2022-24, the final years of Trudeaupia II, when the population shot up by 1,006,142 per annum — mostly thanks to immigration — but housebuilding starts languished at 249,161. (No, you’re not misreading that. Canada, with a population today of 41.5 million, is building the same number of houses per year as it did when the population was 23 million.) In 1980, the median family income was $23,894 in Canadian dollars and the median house price $47,200 but while the median family income hit $96,220 in 2020, the median cost of a house soared to $336,900. Little wonder that homeownership is going backwards: while 44.1 percent of 25-to-29 year olds owned a home in 2011, that figure was down to 39.6 percent by 2021. If only they hadn’t splurged so much on avocado toast.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
National Interest: Ceding Crimea Would Be a Disaster
Telegraph: Ukraine’s final holdout in Kursk fails
UnHerd: Can Netanyahu Survive Yet More Corruption Allegations?
Tablet: No, China Can’t Go It Alone
Domestic
National Interest: Should Trump Fire Pete Hegseth? Absolutely Not
NY Post: Pentagon employees were fired due to “turf war”
Axios: Trump’s Economic Team Eyes Tariffs and Powell
Semafor: Markets Rise After Trump Walks Back Powell Threat
Politico: Tesla’s Revenue and Income Plummet in First Quarter
WSJ: Credit Card companies brace for economic downturn, delinquencies rise
Politico: Gingrich Says Proposals to Raise Income Taxes Are ‘Dead’
Politico: Andrew Cuomo’s Pitch: Competence
Washington Examiner: Supreme Court Weighs California Power Ban on Gas Cars
City Journal: Trump, Harvard, and the Tax-Exemption Race to the Supreme Court
NY Post: Texas Lottery Exec Ryan Mindell Resigns Amid Jackpot Scrutiny
Media
Mediaite: Ryan Lizza's Exit From Politico Gets Hostile
Mediaite: Tapper Rips CBS Owner After 60 Minutes Shakeup
Semafor: Shari Redstone Kept Tabs on 60 Minutes Segments on Trump
The Spectator: NPR begs for its professional life
Health
Politico: RFK May Pull COVID Vaccine Recommendation for Kids
The Spectator: A new academic push against alcohol
Tech
Axios: Driverless Trucks Hit Texas Highways
Religion
Telegraph: Could Cardinal Robert Sarah Be the Next Pope?
Ephemera
The Spectator: Cockburn: “Senate twink” lands in Oz
Games Radar: Everything we know about the Oblivion Remastered edition
Variety: ‘Thunderbolts’: Florence Pugh Shines
Hollywood Reporter: ‘Sinners’: Ryan Coogler’s Unique Movie Deal
Hollywood Reporter: ‘Andor’ Season 2 Premiere Scene Sparks Nazi Comparison
Hollywood Reporter: Best ‘Bluey’ Merch and Gifts… for Adults
Quote
“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”
— Buckminster Fuller