Lionel Messi apart, arguably nobody has played a more prominent role in Argentina's run to the World Cup final than a 62-year-old musician and a 30-year-old teacher, neither of whom is anywhere near Qatar. Between them, though, they created the song that has become the soundtrack to Argentina's games and an earworm contracted by anyone who has been in Doha over the last month, or watched any of the tournament on television.
The song, Muchachos, Ahora Nos Volvimos A Ilusionar, has been adopted as an unofficial anthem not only by Argentina's vast army of traveling fans — around 40,000 are expected to attend the final at Lusail today — but by the players themselves: Instagram videos of their dressing room celebrations after every victory have invariably featured a joyous rendition of the song.
Its popularity, doubtless, has something to do with the fact that its two verses hit all the major notes of Argentina's campaign: it is a homage not only to Messi but to Diego Maradona; it pays tribute to the Argentine soldiers who died during the Falklands War of 1982; it draws in the country's various disappointments in international tournaments in recent years; and it goes into its key change with a taunt directed at Argentina's major soccer rival, Brazil.
But it is also a familiar tune to most Argentine fans. Various Argentine club teams have their own bespoke versions of Muchachos, Esta Noche Me Emborracho, a 2003 hit for the rock band La Mosca Tsé tsé, led by the 62-year-old singer Guillermo Novellis. A (relatively) cursory attempt to trace its genealogy would suggest that fans of Boca Juniors were the first to adapt the melody for their own purposes, in this case mocking its fierce rival, River Plate. Within a couple of years, Racing Club, a team in Avellaneda, had an interpretation, quickly followed by its rival, Independiente. In the endless round of call and response that marks Argentine fan culture, both were dedicated to denigrating the other. The most famous iteration, though, probably belonged to River Plate.
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That it became something approaching a national anthem is down, largely, to a 30-year-old teacher named Fernando Romero. Together with a friend, he changed the lyrics once more in the days after Maradona's death last year, turning it into a tribute to the player widely regarded as either Argentina's first or second greatest. When the two friends were filmed singing it outside River's Monumental stadium, during a game against Bolivia, the footage quickly went viral. Messi became aware of it: he named it, soon after, his favorite soccer chant. So, too, did Novellis, who got in touch with Romero and volunteered to record and release a version with his lyrics in the buildup to the World Cup.
Even Novellis, though, is a little surprised by its success. La Mosca has a curiously fitting relationship with soccer. Maradona was such a fan that he invited the band to play his 40th birthday party in 2000. And seven years later, another devotee asked if they would do a turn at his 20th birthday party. Messi and Novellis have been in occasional contact ever since.
Now, the song has not only reverberated around Lusail, again and again, on Argentina's way to the final, it is currently number one on Spotify in Argentina. It has been streamed 4.4 million times in just a few weeks. (The original is currently at almost 14 million.) Novellis has been interviewed by media outlets across the world; a campaign was launched to fly Romero to Qatar, though he turned it down, suggesting the country had "more important things to address." The story, as Novellis told La Nacion, is "easy to explain, but difficult to understand."
Rory Smith is The Times's chief soccer correspondent, based in Britain. He covers all aspects of European soccer and has reported from three World Cups, the Olympics, and numerous European tournaments. @RorySmith
LIVEUpdated 53m ago
For Messi, and Argentina, the (extra) wait is worth it.
Qatar got the World Cup it wanted.
Despite a historic comeback, Mbappé's quest to be considered the best becomes longer.
After spirits soared, the bars and streets of France fall silent.
Halftime: Argentina seizes control with a soft penalty and a sterling finish.
As of this summer, the Russians had forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians — mainly women — from the Ukrainian territories they occupied, including some 260,000 children. Those numbers have grown since then. Just during the Russian retreat from Kherson, for example, the attackers moved perhaps another 60,000 Ukrainians in less than a week. With their bloodcurdling Orwellian euphemisms, the Russians boast that millions of Ukrainians have "found shelter" or "been adopted" in Russia.
Why women and children, in particular? So that the women will bear "Russian" rather than "Ukrainian" babies in the future, and the children will forget they were ever Ukrainian and become Russian instead. That rhymes with one rationale President Vladimir Putin has given all along for his invasion. In his telling, Ukraine isn't a country at all, just a region of Russia suffering from the "false consciousness" that it is a nation. It follows that Putin must destroy Ukraine as a culture, polity and people. One way to do that is to move Ukrainians out, and Russians in.
If that sounds like an attempt at ethnic cleansing, it is.
Read the whole article on The Economist here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-25/russia-s-mass-abductions-of-ukrainian-women-and-children-are-a-form-of-genocide
New York has put itself in this situation due to being the only big city in the nation that is required by law to give shelter to anyone who asks.
About 7 million refugees and migrants have left Venezuela, a country of 29 million people, as of September.
About 100 Venezuelans were apprehended annually at the border between 2015 and 2018. More than 150,000 were apprehended between October 2021 and the end of August.
The NY Times looks at this peculiar situation.
What to Know About the Migrant Crisis in New York City
Since the spring, thousands of migrants have been arriving regularly at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, most of them Venezuelan families escaping the country's economic collapse.
Many lack ties in the city and have sought housing in the city's homeless shelter system. But officials have struggled to find enough room. The population in the city's main shelter system broke a record set in 2019 after it exceeded 62,000 people in early October. Of that number, about 12,700 were migrants.
Mayor Eric Adams has declared a state of emergency, as the flow of newcomers has yet to slow down. New York officials say 18,600 migrants have arrived in the city since April.
About 7 million refugees and migrants have left Venezuela, a country of 29 million people, as of September, according to Response for Venezuelans, a joint effort between the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It's the second largest external displacement crisis in the world, according to U.N.H.C.R.
Economists said that Venezuela's economic decline has been among the most drastic they have seen, other than in war. The country's finances have teetered under an authoritarian socialist government. In 2019, the Trump administration also imposed sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company as a way to cripple the administration of President Nicolás Maduro — a strategy that was briefly eased under President Biden.
The vast majority of Venezuelans are staying in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. But many Venezuelans have been making the long and dangerous trip to the United States with the knowledge that the U.S. government cannot send them home because it does not have a diplomatic relationship with the Venezuelan government, which severed ties with Washington in 2019.
About 100 Venezuelans were apprehended annually at the border between 2015 and 2018. More than 150,000 were apprehended between October 2021 and the end of August.
After crossing the southern border, thousands have made their way to New York with the help of officials in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott has sent hundreds in a campaign to provoke outrage and force the federal government to tighten border security. But El Paso, a Democrat-led city, has also sent as many as 7,000 new arrivals to New York at the migrants' request, officials there have said.
The city's response to the influx of migrants has been fragmented and reactive as the shelter system has become more strained.
New York City is the only big city in the nation that is required by law to give shelter to anyone who asks. But the city failed to immediately offer beds to 60 single men this summer as the shelter population grew by about 20 percent over the course of four months, and Mr. Adams has suggested the city reassess its unique "right to shelter" policy.
The city has once again turned to hotels to house homeless people around the city. One hotel near Times Square, the Row, will be turned into an intake and assessment center for about 200 families with children. Over the summer, the city opened about two dozen shelters in six weeks.
In early October, Greglin Salas, a 24-year-old from Venezuela, visited an American Red Cross center in Manhattan that had been set up to assist migrants.
"I'm not working," Ms. Salas said. "I was here asking for help because we don't have money and it's been five days since we arrived here. I got a ticket from them for food and medical insurance."
Mr. Adams has also seriously considered housing migrants on cruise ships. And the city began construction on tent shelters to house about 500 adults on Randalls Island, after the initial location for the tents at the Orchard Beach parking lot, in the Bronx, flooded in the rain.
The winterized tent shelters are not meant to be long-term housing — residents are expected to stay for only four days before they are moved to other shelters.
Some of these options have sparked criticism from elected officials and advocates for homeless people, who say the city should instead reduce red tape so people in shelters can move to permanent housing faster.
Roughly 14,000 migrants are still living in shelters and hotels across the city as of Sunday. About a third of the people who have entered the shelter system don't want to stay in New York, said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor.
The city is connecting those individuals with organizations that can help them move to another state, he said.
Migrants who are pursuing asylum can continue their cases from wherever they choose to live, said Hasan Shafiqullah, interim attorney-in-charge of the Immigration Law Unit at the Legal Aid Society.
"If they've chosen to stay here, their case will be heard at the federal building in Lower Manhattan," he said. "But they're not trapped here. So, let's say they wanted to move to Illinois or Florida because they have friends or family, they could seek to change the venue of their immigration court case to the Chicago court or the Miami court."
To apply for asylum in the United States, an applicant needs to physically be in the country and the application needs to be submitted within one year of arrival.
The city has case workers who connect with newly arrived asylum seekers in the first days to help them enroll their children in school and find immigration attorneys, Mr. Levy said.
Depending on which immigration judge applications are assigned to in New York City, cases can take three to four years before a final decision is made, Mr. Shafiqullah said. And cases can be complicated and full of delays.
Applicants can apply for temporary employment authorization 150 days after successfully filing their asylum application, but are not eligible to receive a work document until then.
"If they came today, they had all their ducks in a row and they applied today for asylum, then they would be waiting at least six months before they could get their work permit," Mr. Shafiqullah said. "If everything went like clockwork."
Julie Lopez, a 35-year-old Venezuelan migrant who has been living with her husband and son in the Skyline Hotel in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan for the past three months, said she was happy her son had been enrolled in school, but that she was ready to start working.
"I give thanks to God and the president for giving us the opportunity to enter the country safely," she said, and "to the mayor of New York for giving us shelter and not leaving us on the street."
On Tuesday, it was reported that the Biden administration is considering a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelans in an effort to discourage those fleeing the country from crossing into the country illegally. The program would be similar to one established for Ukrainians and would require Venezuelans who apply to have someone in the United States able to financially support them for up to two years.
But the plan would also allow the government to expel migrants to Mexico if they do not have sponsors in the United States, which would limit the number of people crossing the border.
On Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mr. Adams said they were pleased with the Biden administration's new plan.
"We now have a path," Ms. Hochul said. "We're going to start seeing the flow of individuals stemmed."
Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Juan B. Garcia and Jasmine Sheena contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-migrant-crisis-explained.html
"It was a light-bulb moment for me," Christopher Schroeder, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a father of two boys, told me. His son Jack had been accepted to Beauvoir, the National Cathedral Elementary School, in Washington, D.C. But "it was clear to the school that Jack should wait a year," he said—not because of his academic ability, but to give him more time to become socially and emotionally prepared. "My view was that smart kids should be pushed forward as fast as possible," Schroeder recalled. "But as I laid out my case to the head of the school, she listened patiently, waited a moment, smiled at me, and said, 'What's your rush?' "
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Jack started at the school a year later and ended up flourishing, largely, his father thinks, because of the decision not to rush him. When it was time for Jack's younger brother, Ben, to attend the school, he also started a year later—at his parents' insistence. "By then we were thinking, Why not? " Schroeder said.
The idea of a delayed school start—often referred to as "redshirting," a term borrowed from athletics—got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests and in life generally.
The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call "the gift of time," is an open secret in elite circles. And it's a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I've interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, "There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls."
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Nationally, delayed entry is uncommon. Before the pandemic (which seems to have caused a surge in the practice), about 6 percent of children waited an extra year before beginning kindergarten. But here, too, some children were much more likely to be held back than others: specifically, those with affluent or well-educated parents, and who were white, young for their year, and male. Among summer-born boys whose parents have bachelor's degrees, the rate was 20 percent in 2010.
The reason little boys wear almost all of the red shirts is not mysterious; the fact that boys mature later than girls is one known to every parent, and certainly to every teacher. According to a Rand survey, teachers are three times more likely to delay entry for their own sons than their own daughters. The maturity gap is now demonstrated conclusively by neuroscience: Brain development follows a different trajectory for boys than it does for girls. But this fact is entirely ignored in broader education policy, even as boys fall further behind girls in the classroom.
Read: Beyond the pros and cons of redshirting
On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it. Public schools usually follow an industrial model, enrolling children automatically based on their birth date. Administrators in the public system rarely have the luxury of conversations with parents about school readiness.
But public-school kids should have the same opportunities as private-school kids, and public-school officials should be able to have those conversations. As a matter of policy, the public schools that aren't already flexible about school start should be made so—and I believe that, as the default, all states and school districts should enroll boys a year later than girls.
A proposal to give a boost to boys may sound odd to some, given the inequities that many girls and women still face. But I am betting on our ability to think two thoughts at once. There is much still to be done to promote female representation in politics and corporate leadership, for example. But as to education, boys and men are the ones who need the most help. And it's not an issue only for them. When schools fail boys, those boys grow into men lacking the skills to flourish in the workplace, to be strong partners, or to be good providers for their children. Giving boys the gift of time will help create a better society not just for men, but for women and children too.
In the span of just a few decades, girls and women have not only caught up with boys and men in the classroom—they have blown right past them. Half a century ago, the landmark Title IX law was passed to promote gender equality in higher education. At the time, there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor's degrees going to men compared with women. Today, the gender gap is a little wider—15 percentage points as of 2019—but the other way around. For every three female college students, there are only about two men. The trend worsened during the pandemic. College enrollment as a whole declined in 2020—but that decline was seven times greater for male than for female students.
These differences on college campuses reflect gender gaps that open up many years earlier. According to a 2012 Brookings Institution study by Julia Isaacs, for instance, American girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be "school ready" at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. That's a bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or those who attend preschool and those who do not. The gap is mostly driven by social and emotional factors, or what social scientists label "noncognitive skills," rather than academic ones.
Once boys begin school, they almost immediately start falling behind girls. A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade. In a study drawing on scores across the country, Sean Reardon, a sociologist and education professor at Stanford, found no overall gender difference in math in grades three through eight, but a big one in English. "In virtually every school district in the U.S., female students outperformed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests," he writes. "In the average district, the gap is … roughly two-thirds of a grade level."
By high school, the female advantage has become entrenched. The most common high-school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B. Twice as many girls as boys are in the top 10 percent of students ranked by GPA, and twice as many boys as girls are among those with the lowest grades. It's an international pattern: Across economically advanced nations, boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science. In the U.S., almost one in five boys does not graduate high school on time, compared with one in 10 girls—the rate for boys is about the same as that for students from low-income families.
The basic trend is clear—at every age, on almost every educational metric, across the world, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Among many of the parents I know, a shorthand explanation has developed to explain the struggles of an adolescent child to stay on track, especially academically: "He's a boy."
What is going on here? There are many potential explanations. The feminization of the teaching profession—three out of four K–12 teachers are now women—is not ideal for boys. Neither is the rigid rhythm of the school day, with gym class and recess squeezed out. And the focus on narrow academics rather than vocational learning puts many boys at a disadvantage as well. All true, and all worth addressing.
But I believe the biggest reason for boys' classroom struggles is simply that male brains develop more slowly than female brains—or at least those parts of the brain that enable success in the classroom. The gaps in brain development are clearly visible around the age of 5, and they persist through elementary and middle school. (As Margaret Mead wrote of a classroom of middle schoolers: "You'd think you were in a group of very young women and little boys.")
The brain-development trajectories of boys and girls diverge further, and most dramatically, as adolescence progresses—with the widest gaps around the age of 16 or 17. I hardly need to say that these are crucial years for educational achievement.
Adolescents are wired in a way that makes it hard to make good choices. As the joke goes, when we are young, we sneak out of bed to go to parties; when we get old, we sneak out of parties to go to bed. Laurence Steinberg, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Temple University, has shown how adolescence is essentially a battle between the sensation-seeking part of our brain (Go to the party! ) and the impulse-controlling part (I need to study tonight). During the teenage years, the sensation-seeking part is quite powerful. Our impulse control develops later.
The problem of self-regulation is much more severe for boys than for girls. Flooded with testosterone, which drives up dopamine activity, teenage boys are more inclined to take risks and seek short-term rewards than girls are. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, and future orientation are mostly in the prefrontal cortex—the so-called CEO of the brain—which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.
Other relevant centers of the brain follow suit. The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in "emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities," according to Gokcen Akyurek, an expert on executive functioning at Hacettepe University, in Turkey. It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Similarly, there are sex differences linked to the timing of puberty in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that contributes to memory and learning.
These baseline biological facts are consistent with survey evidence on attention and self-regulation, where the biggest sex differences occur during middle adolescence. "In adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about two to three years," Frances Jensen, the chair of the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, told School Administrator magazine in a 2017 interview.
It is important to note that we are talking averages here. But Jensen's point won't shock many parents. I have three sons, now grown. When they brought home female friends during their middle- and high-school years, the difference in maturity was startling. (We delayed the school start for one of our boys by a few months, but given his struggles, we wish we'd done so for a full year.) The typical 15-year-old girl and boy don't seem like different sexes; they seem like different species.
There's a heated argument today over the extent of biologically based differences in adult male and female psychology. For what it's worth, I think both sides—one asserting large, consequential differences and the other denying any real differences at all—overstate their case. But almost entirely overlooked in this debate is the uncontroversial evidence for differences in brain maturation. By far the biggest sex difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The relationship between chronological age and developmental age is different for girls and boys. From a strictly neuroscientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favor of girls.
This was never the intention, of course. After all, the education system was mostly created by men. The gender bias was just hard to see when girls were discouraged from pursuing higher education and careers. But now that these barriers have been lowered, girls' advantages in school have become more apparent with every passing year. An unexpected result of feminism has been to reveal the ways in which education is failing boys.
Would a delayed start for boys meaningfully narrow, or even eliminate, the gender gap? I don't know for sure. This kind of proposal demands a series of pilot programs before widespread adoption by school districts or states. But the evidence already available on the benefits of an extra year of maturity for boys makes me hopeful. Studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention during elementary school, lower chances of being held back later, higher test scores, and higher levels of life satisfaction.
One striking study, by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern and Elizabeth Cascio of Dartmouth College, drew on data from Tennessee to study the impact of a delayed school start. The children in their sample were allocated randomly into different classrooms. They were disproportionately from poor homes and were racially diverse: Half were getting free or reduced-price lunch in kindergarten, and a third were Black.
Overall, Schanzenbach and Cascio found that being a year older had a positive impact on eighth-grade test scores, reduced the risks of repeating a grade before high school, and improved the chances of taking the SAT or ACT. The benefits for boys were at least twice as big as for girls on all measures through eighth grade. By high school, only boys were seeing any gains.
Cascio and Schanzenbach also found that lower-income students benefited most from redshirting. The risk of being held back a grade is massively unequal by race, gender, and economic background: One in four Black boys has repeated at least one grade before leaving high school. Redshirting boys from the outset greatly reduced that risk.
Lastly, they found that the younger classmates of redshirted children suffered no negative consequences. If anything, they wrote, there were modestly positive spillover effects. That's one reason to believe that girls would only be helped by this shift—having more mature boys in classrooms would likely improve the learning environment. In schools with high rates of delayed school entry for boys, such as the private schools in the D.C. area that I examined, the girls appear to be doing very well.
Cascio and Schanzenbach's research is the most robust to date, but their findings have been confirmed by a number of other studies. And related research has shown that redshirted boys are happier, too. Suzanne Stateler Jones of Collin College interviewed summer-born boys and found a much higher level of life satisfaction among those who had been redshirted compared with their peers. Among those who started school at the prescribed age, she has said, a common refrain was "I'm always trying to keep up." But she said the overall message from the older boys was "They loved it, liked being older, no problem with it, can't think of any way it's hurt, it's only helped." Jones also interviewed parents and asked them what they would do if they had another summer-born son. Overwhelmingly, they told her, "We would redshirt."
Redshirting has the virtue of simplicity. Changing the default school-starting age would be much easier, for example, than moving toward single-sex schools, which don't appear to help boys (or girls) very much in any case, and may introduce social distortions by segregating boys from girls throughout childhood. Boys and girls don't need to go to different schools, but rather to the same school at different times in their life.
The policy could be phased in gradually, starting with the youngest boys and then expanding each year until all boys are covered. Parents should be at liberty to override the default, for both sons and daughters, just as they can at many schools in the current system.
There is one major drawback: Delaying school entry would put pressure on parents to provide child care for another year. This is no doubt one reason low-income parents are less likely to redshirt their children now. In my view, any large-scale redshirting program would need to be paired with public investments in child care and pre-K. But these investments are much needed in any case—and if I'm right about the benefits of redshirting, they will almost certainly outweigh the costs.
Those benefits are of course lifelong, and they extend well beyond the fortunes of any particular boy. Boys who fail at school grow into men who are likely to struggle in life. Poorly educated men face a brutal labor market, as job opportunities in traditionally male, blue-collar occupations evaporate. Among men with only a high-school education, one in three is out of the labor force. For those who have a job, typical earnings are $881 a week, down from $1,017 in 1979.
Read: Where have all the men without college degrees gone?
The social consequences of these economic woes are profound. The marriage rate of men ages 40 to 44 with a high-school education or less has dropped by more than 20 percentage points over the past 40 years (versus 6 percentage points for those with a four-year college degree). One in five fathers lives apart from his children, and these fathers are disproportionately less educated. Rates of "deaths of despair," from suicide, alcohol, or an overdose, are almost three times higher among men than women.
Boys from affluent families are generally doing okay, in part because their parents have the time and resources to help them out—including by having them start school a year later. And men at the top of the earnings distribution have seen a steep rise in wages in recent decades. It is working-class boys and men—and disproportionately Black boys and men—who are at the sharp end of the stick.
It's hard for some people to get their head around the idea that in many areas of life, and above all in education, boys and men are now the ones who need the most help. We have a National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, but no equivalent for men. Thousands of academic scholarships are aimed at young women, almost none at young men. This lag is understandable, given the dizzying speed with which the gender gap has reversed. But we can start to address this new gap—right now, at the very beginning of the educational journey—simply by giving boys an extra year to mature.
"We were incredibly lucky to have been given this opportunity to give our boys this chance to go at their own pace," Christopher Schroeder told me of his sons' delayed start, a gift of time made at the urging of their school. "Why can't everyone have that?"
This essay is adapted from Richard V. Reeves's forthcoming book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. It appears in the October 2022 print edition with the headline "Redshirt the Boys."
Vlad the Great?
Photographer: Mikhail Metzel/AFP/Getty Images
Deliver us from evil. The line is among the most familiar, in one of the oldest Christian prayers. Most of us are wary about using the E-word, because grown-up people know that few issues, or indeed people, can rightfully be characterized as either wholly good or the other thing, but instead exist somewhere between.
Yet it seems hard to consider Russian President Vladimir Putin as anything other than a force for evil. He is personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Ukraine through an act of unprovoked aggression, designed to fulfill a vision of national and personal greatness that has no foundation in law or morality.
At least as appalling, through his strangulation of Ukrainian grain shipments he is inflicting hunger and threatening starvation upon a growing portion of the Southern Hemisphere.
This is why it hurts to say that it is hard to see an outcome of the catastrophe that punishes Putin and his nation as they deserve. Or one that restores to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's people the security and prosperity to which they are entitled.
In Britain today, emotions are running higher than in any other European country save Poland and the Baltic states. People like me, who assert skepticism about the prospects of Ukrainian victory, are widely derided as at best "ultra-realists" — not intended as a term of flattery — and at worst as appeasers. We lie awake nights, searching hearts and minds about whether the evidence indeed justifies our grim forecasts.
In a famous, or rather notorious, address to a committee of the Prussian parliament in 1862, Otto von Bismarck said: "Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided" but by "Blut und Eisen" — blood and iron. We like to believe that civilized 21st-century societies have advanced beyond such brutish doctrine. Yet Putin is attempting to demonstrate that he can exploit extreme violence to secure a vastly larger role on the world stage than Russia's economic and political stature confers.
The Russian leader contemptuously defies the guiding spirit of such nations as Germany, industrial giant of Europe, which has long renounced Bismarckian principles: It has identified itself as a so-called "civilian power," forswearing credible armed forces.
Against this avowed pacifism, Putin is waging a new kind of asymmetric warfare. In the long term, a clumsy exertion of force cannot substitute for economic and social success. A critical difference between Bismarck's Prussia and Putin's Russia is that the former's army was backed by a rising industrial nation, while the latter's is yesterday's superpower. The combined GDP of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations is nearly 30 times that of Russia's, and their defense spending is 15 times that of the Kremlin's.
Yet to meet Putin's aggression, Europe needs to liberate itself from Russian energy bondage and to rearm. Both these measures require time, during which Putin's soldiers are advancing in the Donbas region. As of now, even the best-armed, or least weak, European allies — Britain, France and Germany — would require months to put into the field a single battleworthy division.
The might and commitment of the US are indispensable. R.D. Hooker Jr., a former dean of the alliance's defense college, wrote recently: "NATO must have the will to compete, and the US must lead and encourage."
In the immediate term, Putin's blood-and-iron policy seems likely to succeed, because even a blundering Russian army is stronger than the Ukrainian one. My friends now serving in the military predicted weeks ago that Zelenskiy's forces should be able to prevent an absolute Russian conquest of Ukraine. They have always also argued, however, that the chances of Kyiv ever retaking the occupied Donbas are "zero" — a general's word, not mine — no matter what weaponry the West supplies.
Russia is fortifying the territories it has seized. Despite its army's stunning losses and poor morale, Putin still has at his disposal an inventory of unused weapons, some of them horrible. Only direct Western military intervention offers a prospect of tilting the odds decisively against Russia.
There is a case for US and allied warships to escort vessels carrying Ukrainian grain to and from Odesa, defying Putin to fire on them. At present, however, President Joe Biden's administration seems wary of taking this step, which might precipitate general war. It is almost unthinkable that US forces will be directly committed.
Many Americans, not all of them Republicans, think that their country is already staking too much in Europe, when China remains the more dangerous adversary. The frustration of national objectives over two decades in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan makes the skeptics unwilling to see the US again commit to a messy struggle in a faraway country that costs blood and treasure, while securing little glory.
The domestic politics of another unsuccessful American war look terrible. Putin, thinking long as usual, is surely calculating that the 2024 presidential election will return to the White House either former President Donald Trump or a Trump clone, opposed to deeper entanglements — perhaps to any entanglement at all — in a European showdown with Russia.
A US retreat from Europe would leave Ukraine dependent on European military, political and economic support, a grim prospect indeed, because the US supplies more than 80% of its aid. Most of Europe is embarrassingly desperate for a settlement that will defuse its energy crisis before winter comes.
Whatever expedients are adopted to preserve a façade of continental unity against Putin, there is no sense of real steel behind the rhetoric of most European governments.
Britain sacrificed almost all influence upon the continent's leaders when it quit the European Union, an act we know significantly emboldened the Kremlin, because it highlighted European weakness and division. France appears extraordinarily unwilling to break decisively with Russia.
Five years ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was hailed as Europe's foremost statesman. Today she is widely criticized for having embraced Russia as a reliable partner and energy supplier. It is hard to dispute her folly, having also renounced nuclear power in the cause of green virtue, making one of the greatest industrial nations of the world a hostage to Moscow.
Then there is Putin's lightly veiled threat to resort to the worst weapons of all. Some bold spirits argue that we cannot indefinitely allow ourselves to succumb to a Russian or Chinese nuclear bluff. We must instead fight; if necessary, commit our own soldiers, defying the nuclear-armed bullies to do their worst.
The case certainly seems unassailable for stationing credible NATO forces in Poland and the Baltic states permanently, to deter and if necessary resist further Russian aggression.
Some of us, however, still flinch from challenging the Russians to use their nuclear weapons by going further. Whatever long-term expedients are adopted to bolster NATO, it remains hard to identify means to frustrate Putin's immediate objective of reducing the rump of Ukraine to a failed state.
While Russia continues to devastate Zelenskiy's country — by the latest estimates, it has inflicted over $100 billion of infrastructure damage, and counting — Putin's own domain remains inviolate. Indeed, the Kremlin makes dire threats about consequences if Ukrainian forces or the Western powers make serious strikes at targets on Russian soil.
It is monstrously unjust that one side in a conflict should exercise a license to wreak havoc on the other, while itself remaining physically impervious. But this is an element of Russia's war-making that is challenged only by Western economic sanctions. Putin can characterize any assault on Russian property as representing an existential threat, which would justify his unleashing weapons of mass destruction.
In the emotional climate currently prevailing in Britain — much more so than in the US, where the struggle seems more remote in every sense — much of what I have written above is reckoned to constitute an ignoble defeatism. The optimists say: With more Western arms, the brave Ukrainians may yet reverse the tide; Putin could be deposed; continental European governments may yet display more guts than I give them credit for.
As a historian of World War II, I am mindful of the number of smart people, including generals and ministers, who, in the summer of 1940 after the military disaster at Dunkirk, concluded that Britain had no choice save to cut a deal with Hitler, because there was no rational prospect of defeating him militarily.
The Duke of Bedford wrote to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George on May 15, asserting that peace should be made "now rather than later" because Hitler's strength was "so great … it is madness to suppose we can beat him." This view was shared by his correspondent, who had led Britain's government in victory in World War I.
Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, told Winston Churchill (then first lord of the Admiralty) that if Italian dictator Benito Mussolini could broker terms with Hitler "which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them."
During the Dunkirk evacuation, Britain's director of military intelligence told a BBC correspondent: "We're finished. We've lost the army and we shall never have the strength to build another." Many Americans became convinced that Britain was doomed.
Those pessimistic people were absolutely right, rationally. But today we can see, and celebrate, Churchill's higher wisdom, in grasping the fact that Nazism represented such an absolute evil that there could be no compromise with its leaders; they must be fought to the last gasp, even against the tide of reason.
Since I asserted initially that Putin too represents evil — and now also megalomania, given his comparison of himself with Tsar Peter the Great — there is a principled argument that we should follow the example of 1940, by continuing to insist that nothing less than Russia's defeat and expulsion from Ukraine can constitute an acceptable outcome. People whom I respect, in Britain and the US as well as Kyiv, adhere to this view.
Among them is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who believes that Ukraine and its allies must fight on until Russia succumbs to the immense economic pressure being exerted against it, and/or Putin is toppled from power by his own people, appalled by the cost of his aggression. The West "must uphold a critical international norm: that borders cannot be altered by force."
Yet Haass's analysis makes plain that he, too, sees no prospect of Russia either being driven back by Ukrainian forces to their pre-war positions, or of sanctions obliging Russia to yield.
Unfortunately, much of the world remains indifferent to the struggle. India is conspicuous both for its willingness to buy Russia's cheap oil and refusal to condemn the Kremlin. China continues to support Moscow and is likewise buying its sanctioned energy.
Putin has almost certainly relinquished his initial objective of extinguishing Ukraine as a sovereign state. But he seems likely to fulfill his hopes of achieving its de facto partition. He remains convinced that the soft West will sooner or later decide that its creature comforts, and above all its energy needs and fear of his nuclear weapons, will compel acquiescence.
The historic challenge for the West is to prove this calculation mistaken, because its success would deal a shocking blow to the cause of democracy, freedom and justice in the 21st century. Zelenskiy must rely upon Churchill's dogged policy: KBO ("Keep Buggering On") and pray that something will turn up. The West must continue to provide him with arms and economic support, not merely for as long as Kyiv keeps fighting, but far beyond.
Today, we must acknowledge how slim the prospects are of delivering Ukraine from evil by military means alone. But for tomorrow, or next year or next decade, if Putin's blood and iron strategy triumphs, the historic success of the Western European democracies will become hollow indeed.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
See the whole piece on Bloomberg here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-19/russia-ukraine-war-putin-is-winning-but-the-us-and-europe-must-act
To contact the author of this story:
Max Hastings at mhastings32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
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