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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: War and Peace and Lies and Art [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-02
We begin today with an editorial from The Kyiv Independent about the Zelensky-Trump meeting at the White House on Friday and what American supporters of Ukraine should do.
Let this sink in. The president of a battered Ukraine, an ally of the U.S., became the first world leader in history to be kicked out of the White House. Not a dictator, not a disgraced politician — the president of Ukraine, a country suffering from the worst invasion in the 21st century. The country that the U.S. administration swore to bring peace to. In an ugly exchange, the president and vice president joined forces to admonish Zelensky for “not being grateful” enough for the help Ukraine was getting. To that, Zelensky reminded them that he had thanked the American people multiple times, including earlier that day. But it appears that gratitude to the American peopleisn’t what Trump and Vance were looking for — they wanted him to grovel and prostrate himself in front of Trump. Kiss the ring. [...] Trump didn’t get into the same kind of arguments with other world leaders who publicly disagreed with him during recent meetings. He smiled and shrugged when French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer corrected him and Vance on their provocative and false statements about Europe.
Kiran Stacey and Peter Walker of the Guardian report that the United Kingdom and France will work on their own peace plan for Ukraine and with Ukraine.
The prime minister told the BBC on Sunday that he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had agreed to begin negotiations separate to those between the US and Russia, after a series of hurried phone calls on Saturday evening. Starmer told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “We’ve now agreed that the United Kingdom, along with France and possibly one or two others, will work with Ukraine on a plan to stop the fighting, and then we’ll discuss that plan with the United States.” [...] Starmer spent Saturday engaged in intense diplomacy after Zelenskyy’s meeting in Washington, during which the Ukrainian president was berated live on camera by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. The prime minister hosted Zelenskyy in Downing Street before calling both Macron and Trump as he sought to show solidarity for Ukraine while also repairing frayed ties between Washington and Kyiv. Zelenskyy will meet King Charles at Sandringham on Sunday, while Starmer will host European leaders, as well as those from Canada and Turkey, for a defence summit in central London.
Lorenzo Lamperti of La Stampa (courtesy of World Crunch and translator Roy Greenburgh) discusses the reverberations of the tacky shoe salesman’s Ukraine “diplomacy” with China and America’s Asian allies.
What is happening in Ukraine is in fact an ideal warning flag that Xi Jinping can wave toward his Asian neighbors of how unreliable the United States has become. The message, implicit or explicit, is rather clear: "They will arm you but then abandon you, as they did with Afghanistan first and now with Ukraine." Among the first targets of such a message is no doubt Taiwan, which observes with dismay the treatment reserved for Zelensky, and what it means for its own sovereignty as Beijing turns up the rhetoric on "reunification." But it’s also bad news for South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, which in recent years had become enormously close to Washington and are now skeptical about American commitment and stability. So much so that many predict a strengthening of the voices of those, between Seoul and Tokyo, who are calling for the development of their own nuclear arsenal, or the creation of a sort of Asian NATO to reduce dependence on U.S. assistance. China can only smile. The theory of a new U.S. thaw with Moscow to isolate Beijing seems more like a fantasy than anything else. In the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon exploited the divisions already in place between Beijing and Moscow, and were even involved in clashes along the Soviet-Chinese border.
Yanzhong Huang writes for The New York Times about cultural and academic exchanges with China before and after the pandemic.
For Western scholars of China, the era before the pandemic now feels like a distant golden age. Despite always tight Chinese information controls and opaque policymaking, academics could still visit the country, navigate archives, cultivate relationships with their Chinese counterparts and pursue research. The resulting academic findings were good for America: For decades, U.S. government agencies regularly called on scholars — and still do — to provide briefings and testimony and to mine their research for insights that were vital to informing American policy decisions. Then came the pandemic. China sealed itself off from the world, slamming the door on academic fieldwork in the country by foreign scholars as well as in-person exchanges with Chinese officials and other contacts. The Covid restrictions were finally lifted, but the landscape for scholars had been transformed: There were fewer commercial flights to China, new restrictions on access to archives and interview subjects, heightened difficulties researching sensitive topics such as the pandemic and the slowing Chinese economy, and a generally more closed-off environment. [...] Unlike during the Cold War, when the United States preserved scholarly exchanges with Moscow, academic and other engagement with China has fallen out of favor owing to geopolitical and national security concerns. The Fulbright academic exchange program in China, which sent thousands of American and Chinese students between the two countries over a span of decades until President Trump suspended it in his first term, remains inactive, and American universities are scaling back partnerships with China. Only around 1,100 American college students are studying in China these days, compared to 15,000 a decade ago. The resulting information fog forces China scholars in the West to rely on remote analysis and open sources, such as official Chinese media and social media, the very methods that proved inadequate in anticipating the change in Covid policy in late 2022.
Also from The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie uses the “L word.”
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised the moon. He promised he would not cut Social Security. He vowed to protect Medicare. He promised free in vitro fertilization. He disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and promised that he had “nothing” to do with it. He promised he would lower the cost of housing, groceries and other necessities. He promised cheaper eggs. [...] He promised, he promised and he promised. But the president is not known for his honesty. Just the opposite: He is notorious for stiffing people and reneging on contracts. And true to form, almost none of the promises Trump made to the American people — the promises he made to win a second term in office — were truthful. Virtually all of them were lies. [...] Trump lied. Actively and without remorse. He misled the entire country. And in the alternate scenario in which he told the truth — where he was forthright and honest about his plans for the United States — there is a strong chance that he would have lost the election, given the staggering unpopularity of his current agenda.
Sergio C. Fanjul of El País in English wonders if there is still anything to be said about notions of “progress.”
The world is always getting better. We are moving on to greater levels of well-being, respect, happiness. This idea, the idea of progress, has seemed natural to human beings for the last three centuries. It is embedded in our psyche and we have a daily way of thinking about it: children will always live better than their parents. But the idea of linear and ascending progress has not always existed, nor does it have indisputable benefits, nor does it seem to hold up in times of abolished futures, when civilization hits a wall. Children, we discover with alarm, will be worse off than their parents. The menu of daily apocalypses never seemed so full at a time when Donald Trump has returned to the White House leading a wave of far-right populism that threatens democracy, as wars drag on in Ukraine and Gaza, and the shadows of the climate crisis and runaway technology loom over the future. It is difficult to imagine a future at all. And even more difficult to imagine an appealing future. Does it make sense to think about progress today? [...] The world today is founded on the injustices and destruction of that vision of the enlightened man who excluded, dehumanized and dominated everything else, armed with the weapons of reason and science. The palpable end of progress, for its critics, isthe atomic bombs, the extermination camps, the destruction of the planet. In the 20th century, then, the idea of progress entered into crisis and Scheidler points out an irony: those who have fought against this type of progress are those we now call progressives. Because, as Scheidler points out, there is no single way of understanding the term: on the one hand, there is economic and technological progress that pursues greater production and domination; on the other, progress in the way that progressivism understands it: the attainment of greater levels of social justice and common welfare. These are often contradictory visions. “Progress in the sense of economic development is over; we have entered an era in which all economic expansion implies a deterioration of ecological conditions. What we need is a redistribution of wealth without eco-destructive expansion. But we know that this cannot happen because the paradigm of accumulation and profit prevents it,” reflects via email the Italian thinker Franco Bifo Berardi, author of books such as Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. It is a dead end: Bifo does not see either of the two faces of progress as possible, neither the one that promises the abundance of growth, nor the one that promises a better life.
Finally today, Samara Angel and Jonathan Katz of the Brookings Institution looks at what’s happening to America’s cultural institutions in the wake of Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center.
Trump’s February 7 Truth Social post announcing his intention to install himself as chairman at the Kennedy Center specifically referenced future censorship of drag shows aimed at youth. Targeting the LGBTQ+ community in cultural censorship has been a global trend. In Kenya, for example, any “film, poster or program” that shows homosexuality is restricted. In Russia, Article 6.21 of the Code of Administrative Offenses prohibits disseminating “propaganda” that “create[s] nontraditional sexual attitudes” or makes them “attractive.” The law was documented by FreeMuse as the cause of approximately 75% of artistic freedom violations against LGBTQ+ artists in the country between 2018 and 2020, and Trump’s reference to drag shows would be consistent with this global trend. [...] Argentina presents a particularly interesting example. Following the 1976 military coup in Argentina, the Argentine Public Information Secretary (SIP) issued directives aimed at the “reconstruction of the national being” through films, theater, and other artistic productions. Specific plays were prohibited, and many artists were individually targeted. Scholars have termed much of the pullback of the arts scene “autocensura” (self-censorship) in the years of the dictatorship. However, artists such as Argentine author Héctor Lastra have pushed back on this idea, with Lastra saying in 1986 that “self-censorship does not exist. What exists is censorship.” It is clear from the Democracy Playbook that the reality of self-censorship is likely somewhere in between. Though censorship pressures are very real, so too is self-censorship and “anticipatory obedience.” [...] As we explained in the Democracy Playbook, democratic power in America derives from the consent of the governed. Freedom of expression and diversity of opinions are fundamental to our democracy and our country. It is essential to avoid following the path of artistic and cultural censorship that we have seen take root in autocracies around the world.
Argentina...one Argentine artist that was not targeted and was, instead, massively celebrated was author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, in turn, supported Argentina’s military dictatorship for a time. According to Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges, that support of Argentina’s coup and military dictatorship cost Borges a well-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature.
The right path in life is very narrow, but it is important to find it. You can understand it, as well as we can understand it, as a walkway of wood built across a swamp; if you step off it, you will plunge into the swamp of misunderstanding and evil. A wise man returns to the true path at once, but a weak man plunges further and further into the swamp, and it becomes more and more difficult for him to get out. An unattributed quote in Count Leo Tolstoy’s March 2 entry of A Calendar of Wisdom.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
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