Random Notes: U.S. Decline, Populism’s Bright Spot
The U.S. is apparently “unimpressed” with Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan for victory over Russia. This sage judgment coming from a country that has been involved in several major wars over the past sixty years, and has lost every single one of them due to inept planning, cowardly leadership, lack of moral purpose, and a world-historical genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in ways one would never have imagined possible before seeing the post-WWII United States of America in action. For the U.S. government, of all entities, to judge Zelensky’s plan as unimpressive may be the highest endorsement his strategists could ever receive.
President Zelensky — a president, for all his imperfections, unlike anything the United States has seen at home since 1988, and certainly unlike anything she is likely to see in the next century or two — has become increasingly non-neutral regarding the current American presidential campaign. His reasons, needless to say, are entirely based on his own national interests, as one would expect, and as one can hardly criticize, from a leader whose country is fighting for its survival under the relentlessly grinding assault of an expansionist tyrant. Also needless to say, Donald Trump and his bootlickers in the populist authoritarian wing of the Republican Party and the mainstream media (if Fox News isn’t mainstream, then what is?) are leaping in without hesitation to slam Zelensky’s “election interference.” This very rich accusation coming, of course, from a campaign that is practically reciting its talking points in Russian these days.
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has become a stronger and more consistent defender of “right-wing” principles than any of the global populists with whom she is supposedly aligned. And yet, unlike Kremlin puppets from Orban to Farage to Trump, she has maintained an equally principled stance on Ukraine’s right to exist and to defend itself. In short, she is currently serving as a model — the model on the world stage at the moment — of how one can be both an advocate of Western liberty and a staunch opponent of anti-Western dictatorship. Strange, is it not, that the coexistence and complementarity of those two positions should no longer seem self-evident, but rather should appear to be a minority stand. But there you have it — we live in the strangest of times.
