"Before I turn to either, I'm going to anticipate something that will be said in the dialogue with Helen Lewis, where she talked about one of our challenges in the face of the way modern media works is to keep rediscovering old truths. And so I wanna open this show this week by talking about an old truth. If you've been reading in the news, you [may have] seen that the NATO alliance is under even more intense pressure than ever before."
"The Russians are demanding from the Trump administration not only that Ukraine not be invited into NATO, but that NATO actually step back. And the Trump administration is very hostile to NATO, the vice president even more than the president. [Donald] Trump has often speculated about quitting NATO entirely. And the new National Security Strategy published by the Trump administration is seething with hostility to Europe and NATO allies."
NATO was created to bind North American and European security together, deterring external aggression through collective defense. The alliance provides military interoperability, political consultation, and a mechanism for allied burden-sharing. Recent Russian demands and statements from the Trump administration place NATO under unusual strain, testing allied commitments and American leadership. American global leadership underpins deterrence and stabilizes international order; isolationism invites strategic exploitation by adversaries. A proliferation of right-wing comedy podcasts channels uninformed rhetoric to growing audiences and normalizes extremist sympathies, with performers and listeners sharing complicity in empowering MAGA-style movements. Edith Wharton's Autres Temps illuminates recurring moral panics, social pariah dynamics, and historical parallels to modern cancel culture.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]