Whataboutism and the Truth

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Let’s say Johnny Cash was the guy he pretended to be in “Folsom Prison Blues” and shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Now Johnny’s in Folsom Prison. One day, he sees Willie, a guy he hates, shiv another inmate in the cafeteria line. During lockdown, the guards come to him and ask if he saw anything. He says, “Maybe. What’s in it for me?”

 

Johnny works out a deal. In exchange for snitching, he gets some extra time in the conjugal trailer, a couple of years shaved off his sentence, his guitar in his cell, and a promise to keep his identity as the informant secret. (As Gandhi famously said, snitches get stitches, and all that.)

 

Now, if you’re a cop or the warden, you have lots of reasons to be skeptical about Johnny’s story. First of all, he committed a pretty heinous murder. Second, he has beef with the guy he’s dropping a dime on. Third, he has a personal, material interest in you buying his story.

 

In short, he has a lot of motivation to lie.

 

That doesn’t mean Johnny is lying. It means you should bring a lot of skepticism to his claims and ask for details or corroborating evidence that backs up his story. But the fact remains: He’s either telling the truth, or he isn’t.

 

Now, let’s say Johnny says, “What Willie did was evil. He killed that guy just because he cheated at cards.”

 

It is an unassailable moral fact that Johnny—the guy who murdered someone just to watch him die—is an outrageous hypocrite. He’s sitting there condemning someone for murdering a cheater. Cheating is not a good reason to murder someone, but it’s a lot better than murdering someone just to enjoy a stranger’s suffering and death.

 

Johnny is a very bad person. (Just to be clear: We’re still talking about the hypothetical one, not the real-world, super-terrific Man in Black.) In fact, we already knew he was a bad person because he’s a convicted murderer. He’s also a hypocrite. But as bad as hypocrisy is, premeditated murder is worse—at least according to my Judeo-Christian, Western, Anglo-American, Eurocentric tradition. Any romantic notions of him being a Byronic hero with a code are null and void.

 

He’s still not lying.

 

Hitler could say 2+2 is 4, that the Treaty of Versailles was deeply unfair to Germany, that German shepherds are great dogs, or that Benito Mussolini had terrible table manners. None of those things would be rendered false just because the person saying them was a bad person.

 

Hypocrisy mania.

 

I’m going to assume everyone already knows the basic details about the Graham Platner story. In the wake of the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine being credibly accused of rape this week, a lot of people got very defensive about their past support for Platner. I should back up and explain that, prior to this week, support for Platner varied, depending on who the supporter was. Some asserted he was a fantastic person and that his sketchy past was proof of his authenticity. Others suggested that his obvious lies, gross statements, and Nazi tattoo were regrettable, but the primary voters in Maine should not be second-guessed and/or that his flaws were minor when stacked up against the moral imperative to defeat Sen. Susan Collins and give Democrats a viable path to take back the Senate.  

 

But the rape charge was too much, and most supporters withdrew their support. I think many of these people were sincere in their condemnation, but I also think other motives were at play. His poll support was waning, and people lost confidence that there wouldn’t be more revelations yet to come, given that he’s been saying from the outset that there was nothing troubling about his past.

 

But let’s talk about the defensiveness. Progressive activist Neera Tanden insists that “[t]he absolute worst people are the Republicans who attack Dems on Platner while they cheer a President who has been credibly accused of assault by 13 women. That hypocrisy is off the damn charts.” Here she is telling former Rep. Peter Meijer he doesn’t get to “throw stones” at Democrats when “you have stood by Donald Trump.”

 

Now, I’ve had some fairly minor disagreements with my friend Peter Meijer, but it takes some chutzpah to say that to a guy who lost his seat in Congress because he bravely voted to impeach Donald Trump, particularly when Democrats spent nearly half a million dollars to boost the MAGA Republican who ended up beating Meijer in the primary. Also, not to go all Norm Macdonald, but I think the “absolute worst people” in this situation are the ones who rape or assault people, not the hypocrites who are inconsistent in their condemnations.

 

We’re all communists now.

 

Hannah Arendt argued that one of the annoying things about communists—and ex-communists who held on to their rhetorical tricks—was to dispute facts by questioning motives. When you think about it, the whole Marxist project rests on this kind of reasoning. The ruling class does and says what it does and says in order to protect its material class interests. Any talk about God, justice, or anything else is merely cover for the true motives of the elite. It’s a really clever trick because it makes you immune to any new facts or arguments.

 

The communists had a related annoying habit, commonly referred to today as “whataboutism.” When Americans criticized the Soviet Union’s brutality and oppression, the Soviets would point to America and say, “and you are lynching Negroes,” or “Over there they lynch Negroes” (“U nich negrov linchuyut”). In 1980, the great former dissident and future president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, called this one of communism’s “commonly canonized demagogical tricks.” This tactic arguably became more widespread after the fall of the Soviet Union, as former KGB agents and the like took over the country.

 

The canonization has metastasized. Whataboutism has gotten into the American bloodstream. (This shouldn’t be too shocking. Lots of KGB projects have taken root here. For instance, the deceitful idea of “Zionism = Racism” was a Soviet invention. Ironically, given how the Soviet Union discriminated against “lesser” populations, the whole tactic was ripe for some whataboutist comebacks.)

 

Here’s the thing: The Americans criticizing the Soviet Union were right about the Gulag, the repression, torture, censorship, etc. And the Soviets were right about the evil of lynching (however much they exaggerated the claim that this was U.S. policy, particularly in the late 20^th century). Indeed, one of the reasons a lot of Cold War intellectuals argued for civil rights reforms was to inoculate ourselves against Soviet propaganda around the world. It wasn’t the primary reason, but it was definitely part of the case.

 

It is absolutely true that many Republicans making hay about Platner’s alleged abuse of women are hypocritical—or, if you prefer, inconsistent. After Platner won the Democratic primary in June, The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell wrote that Republican critics of Platner had “no moral authority” to criticize him. She made a very solid case, running through the whole parade of horribles in GOP ranks that Republicans have turned a blind eye to.

 

But, I ask, so what?

 

It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer depends on what we’re arguing about.

 

If the argument is about the moral rot in the GOP, that’s one thing.

 

If the argument is about Graham Platner—which it was!—that’s something else. One can concede all of Longwell’s points about the GOP—you don’t have to, but I’m fine with it for these purposes. How is any of it a justification for, say, Platner’s Nazi tattoo? Or manhandling women? Or any of the rest of his long, gross record?

 

I often have to appear on TV with Republicans who feel the need to defend Donald Trump’s corruption. Last month, I mentioned that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself. A former GOP congressman snapped back, “Are you talking about Hunter Biden?”

 

Hunter Biden was a corrupt leech on his father’s presidency. How is that an exoneration of Donald Trump?

 

I’ve attributed this form of reasoning to the communists, but that’s probably because I have communism on my mind these days, having spelunked into the cave networks of the Democratic Socialists of America.

 

But the tendency is broader than that, even if it was refined by the Marxists. C.S. Lewis called it “Bulverism” in a 1941 essay of the same name. This is the practice of declaring that the person is wrong while ignoring the arguments that person is making. He wrote:

 

In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

 

Lewis’ example above speaks to the riot of identity politics in our culture. The sum of the triangle’s sides are dismissed as a “male perspective” in much the same way defenses of Israel are dismissed as Jew talk, defenses of meritocracy are dismissed as white male talk, etc.

 

But in America, partisanship has become a kind of identity. If a Republican says a true thing, it is dismissed because partisan Democrats start from the assumption that Republicans are wrong. If a Democrat says a true thing, Republicans dismiss it because they start from the same assumption about Democrats. If I say something about Trump, it’s because I am anti-Trump, and therefore the conversation can end there.

 

Yes, partisanship can make people lie. Some lies are obvious: “James Talarico is a gay vegan.” Some lies are lies by omission: “I care deeply about respecting women and condemning sexual abuse and that’s why Graham Platner should withdraw,” says the man who forgives or ignores exactly such things from members of his own team. This lie isn’t a lie about Platner, it is a lie about the person speaking. And that’s basically what hypocrisy boils down to: a lie about yourself, what you believe, and what you care about.

 

In other words, just because partisans lie doesn’t mean everything a partisan says is a lie. In my both-sides-y Remnant ghetto, I go most days listening to Republicans saying a lot of true but hypocritical things about Democrats and to Democrats saying a lot of true but hypocritical things about Republicans. I also hear a lot of lies. But there’s no transitive property. Lies are not made true when spoken by people you agree with, and truths are not made false when uttered by hypocrites.

 

Much of our civilization—democracy, liberalism, science, the rule of law, free markets—depends on the ability to make arguments and refer to facts independent of the moral status of the people making the arguments. If everything depends on the moral status of the messenger, no true message will survive contact with the human ear.

The Blind Spot

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust. But we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.’”

 

That was the vice president speaking to CNN in mid-June after the White House struck a peace deal with Iran. To hear J.D. Vance tell it, not only was the war (tentatively) over, a new age of better relations between our two nations had dawned. Now that we’re almost a month in, it’s time to ask: What does this era of “trying something else” look like so far?

 

It looks exactly like the old era of not trying something else, it turns out.

 

“We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people, and they were nice to deal with,” Donald Trump said of Iran’s current leadership days after the deal was signed last month. “They were strong people, smart people.… They’re not radicalized and they’re looking to help their country.” With a kinder, gentler, more diplomatic-minded cabal now in charge of the Iranian terrorist regime, rapprochement was in the air.

 

Less than a month later, Iran has resumed shooting at Gulf nations and ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. has resumed bombing Iranian targets and sanctioning Iranian oil. The Iranian diplomats who negotiated the ceasefire are under threat at home from hardliners, to the point that Iran’s president “had to be rescued from an angry crowd by his security detail” during Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession.

 

At the burial, numerous banners were unfurled explicitly promising to kill Trump in retaliation for Khamenei’s death. They meant it, too: Israeli intelligence recently informed the White House of a new Iranian assassination plot against the president, causing Trump to ditch the luxe new jet he received from Qatar and fly home from this week’s NATO summit on the old Air Force One because of its superior missile defenses.

 

By Wednesday of this week, the president’s opinion of Iran’s stronger, smarter leadership had changed. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people,” he told reporters. “And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, [the peace deal is] over. There’s something wrong with them, they’re cuckoo.”

 

Reportedly he’s begun considering a return to “all-out war” in the name of “finishing the job,” as some officials put it to the Wall Street Journal, but what that would mean is no clearer today than it was a month ago. “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not f—ing around,” one Trump deputy said to Axios about the latest American strikes on Iran. The U.S. spent months doing that this spring, though, only to end up with the peace agreement that’s left us in the present limbo.

 

Plus, Trump continues to show the Iranians that he has no appetite for sustained escalation, especially with global oil reserves precarious. “Anything that happens is going to happen very fast,” he said Wednesday after a new round of American strikes. “We’re not looking for a long time.” If America’s military were capable of “finishing the job” quickly and with little risk to U.S. troops, the president presumably would have ordered it to do so already. As it is, with Plan A (bombing) and Plan B (diplomacy) both having failed to reopen the strait, what’s Plan C?

 

The new era with Iran looks dead on arrival, a figment of Trump’s and Vance’s nationalist imaginations. Which is ironic, because their provincial ignorance about nationalism abroad is what got us here in the first place.

 

When bribes don’t work.

 

The White House arrived at this point because its strategy toward Iran was the same as its strategy toward all adversaries: Everyone has their price.

 

The latest hostilities reportedly arose from a disagreement over how to interpret Paragraph 5 of the memorandum of understanding that was supposed to end the war:

 

5. Upon the signing of this MoU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and de-mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussions with other Persian Gulf Littoral States, in line with applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

 

U.S. officials read that language as Iran agreeing to reopen the strait to free transit by oil tankers for 60 days while the two sides worked out a long-term deal. The Iranians, however, read it as the U.S. conceding Iran’s hegemony over the strait going forward in partnership with Oman.

 

So when Oman and the U.N. International Maritime Organization devised a new route through the strait that would hug Oman’s coastline, passing exclusively through Omani waters with help from the U.S. Navy, the Iranians felt betrayed. Having seemingly acknowledged Iran’s authority over the “safe passage of commercial vessels” in Hormuz, the United States was now undermining it by steering ships away from Iranian waters.

 

That’s why Iran began firing at passing tankers again. They were losing leverage that they believed had been granted to them under the memorandum and chose to regain it the hard way.

 

And not only was that foreseeable, it was foreseen. According to mediators who spoke to the Journal, U.S. and Iranian negotiators realized at the time that their understandings of Paragraph 5 differed but stuck with the agreed-upon language in the interest of finalizing the deal, “figuring they could assert their interpretations afterward.” The White House had every reason to know that the disagreement might quickly imperil the ceasefire, in other words. So why did they move forward without resolving it up front?

 

Because they believed that everyone has their price.

 

Team Trump’s One Neat Trick to get Iran to accept its interpretation of Paragraph 5 was to offer the Iranians the fattest envelope America could stuff. U.S. diplomats led by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff proposed a trade-off to the enemy, per the Journal: “Relinquish its claim to control the strait and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of unfrozen funds.” Some $100 billion in Iranian money is being held around the world; dangling it at the regime if they’d let go of the strait was tantamount to treating Hormuz as an income-producing Iranian asset that the United States hoped to purchase.

 

If the price was right, a rational actor would happily sell, no? And remember, that $100 billion is the tip of the iceberg under the memorandum: $300 billion in new investments from private interests is waiting for Iran if it complies fully with the terms of the deal, including meeting U.S. demands on its nuclear program. That’s almost as much as the country’s GDP last year. Bribes don’t get much sweeter.

 

Trump’s fat envelope should have worked. After all, everyone has their price. Don’t they?

 

Too weak.

 

It’s always been strange that a nationalist would have such a blind spot for how national pride and ideological commitment motivates his adversaries. I wrote about that more than a year ago, in fact, but Trump’s failed attempt to buy off Iran has brought the subject back into vogue.

 

Alexander Burns marveled at it in a piece last month, calling the president’s obliviousness to foreign nationalism “the most surprising miscalculation of [his] second term.” Walter Russell Mead flagged it as well after the peace deal was signed. “Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of people who mean what they say,” he wrote. “His failure to understand the power of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the struggle regardless of cost.”

 

Mike Nelson also considered the point here at The Dispatch yesterday. “In his campaign to coerce Tehran into compliance, he completely misread the motivations and desires of the Iranian regime,” he said of Trump. “This is in part because the president tends to view others as acting the way he acts himself—transactional and generally without a guiding worldview…. Trump is amoral whereas the Iranian regime is immoral, but they are immoral actors in the pursuit of long-term goals, enshrined in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”

 

No amount of resistance appears capable of convincing the president that foreign nationalism usually can’t be broken by buying, bullying, or bombing it into submission. Occasionally, it can: The predators who rule Venezuela rolled over meekly when Trump demanded fealty. But Ukraine fought on after the U.S. cut off military aid. Canada began organizing a western counterweight to U.S. power after Trump challenged its sovereignty. And Denmark continues to defy White House threats to sabotage NATO if it doesn’t cough up Greenland.

 

The president may have assumed that Iran would be different because, unlike in those other examples, he’d be bringing military firepower directly to bear. Wrong again: The battered Iranian regime seems willing to bear any burden to protect the leverage it’s gained for Shiite supremacy by seizing control over the strait.

 

Not everyone has their price, it seems. People motivated by nationalism (and adjacent passions, like Islamism) often can’t be bought. Why has Trump’s blind spot about that persisted for so long?

 

I think it’s because his own sense of nationalism is too weak and too strong.

 

It’s weak in precisely the way Nelson describes. For all of Trump’s flag-hugging pretensions, the story of his second term is that he most assuredly has a price and the interests of his nation do not supersede it. Patriotism is an irrational impulse insofar as it implies that one should be willing to make great sacrifices for the good of one’s country, and the president is an eminently rational actor. (In the economic sense of the term. No other.) He’s a draft-dodging mobster, not Nathan Hale. Naturally he assumes that the Iranians are too.

 

On top of that, his nationalism has always been intellectually vacuous. Ask him to define the essence of American greatness and I’m sure he’d point to some conspicuous manifestation of national power—the biggest economy, the strongest military. But there’s no deep conviction that seems to drive the patriotism he claims to feel so passionately; traditional American ideals like freedom, equality, and “melting pot” cultural dynamism are reliably absent from his rhetoric.

 

In a war like the one in Iran, led on one side by someone who believes in nothing and on the other by people who believe fervently in crazy things, which is more likely to misjudge the other’s willingness to persevere toward strategic victory rather than be bribed to quit?

 

Too strong.

 

What the president lacks in intellectual foundations for his patriotism, he makes up for in raw chauvinism. That’s what I mean by his nationalism being “too strong.” He plainly revels in leading the most powerful country in the world because it’s the most powerful country in the world. That people abroad might feel similar pride in their own lesser nations is hard for him to grasp, I’m sure. What do they have to feel pride about?

 

Without chauvinism, what is patriotism worth?

 

Consider the term “America first.” Superficially it’s a simple statement of nationalist priorities: Americans should place the welfare of their own country and their own people before the welfare of others. No more nation-building abroad. No more foreign aid, even to close allies like Israel. American interests come first.

 

But it can also be read as a statement of American supremacy, granting the White House moral license to impose its will on pipsqueak nations that lack the ability to resist. That certainly seems to be how Trump understands it. From Greenland to Venezuela, from Cuba to Iran, imperial America’s pursuit of its own interests entitles it to unapologetically assert those interests whether the people on the other side like it or not. America first.

 

In his piece last month, Burns detected an evolution in Trump’s nationalism over time. “Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024,” he wrote, “Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.”

 

Is there really a contradiction, though? The president still supports other nations ruthlessly advancing their national interests against toothless leftist Euroweenie institutions like the U.N.. What he does not support is them asserting those interests when the mighty United States, led by him, demands that they set them aside and serve the White House instead—or else. Might makes right. America first.

 

Needless to say, the second understanding of “America first” conveniently serves Trump’s preposterous narcissism. But it also leaves him unprepared and likely confused when people abroad decide that not only do they not like the world’s strongest power pushing them around, they’re willing to do something about it. Why would they insist on defending their “sh-thole country”? As Trump himself (allegedly) said in a different but not entirely unrelated context, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”

 

He’s offering a revolutionary messianic Islamist regime $100 billion, and potentially as much as $400 billion total, to reopen the strait, give up its nuclear ambitions, and be a normal country that plays nice with its Sunni and Israeli neighbors. They won’t take the bribe. I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?

 

The most one can say for all this is that the president’s version of nationalism might be slightly better than J.D. Vance’s. If Trump’s brand is egocentric, vacuous, and chauvinistic, Vance’s is ethnotribalist, ideologically postliberal, and naive. More so than the president, I suspect his hope for a new era in which the U.S. and Iran might “try something else” beside conflict is driven by dogmatic isolationism and the belief that America could learn a thing or two from liberalism’s “sh-thole” enemies. How lucky we are to have the two of them at the helm.

Putin Has Lost the War in Ukraine

By Gregory W. Slayton & Sergei Ivashenko

Saturday, July 11, 2026

 

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine assuming that Kyiv would fold in a week, that its president would flee or be killed by one of Russia’s hit squads, and that a soft, divided West would issue a strongly worded communiqué and get back to buying gas from Russia. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. Four-and-a-half years later, his military has been humiliated, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge, and the West — despite some tenuous moments — has bankrolled the methodical destruction of much of the Russian military. Putin may yet hold a ribbon of scorched Ukrainian soil when the guns fall silent. He has already lost this war; the only question is what the endgame will look like.

 

Consider what “winning” now looks like from Moscow. In June, after months of grinding assault, Russian forces seized perhaps a dozen square miles of Ukraine — a patch smaller than Manhattan — and paid for it with something close to 40,000 casualties. The Institute for the Study of War reckons the exchange at roughly 1,300 Russian dead and wounded for every square kilometer taken, up from 68 the year before. That is more men lost in a month than the Kremlin can recruit, despite ever-higher signing bonuses and the clearing out of prisons. For Russia, the war has become a meat grinder, and Putin keeps feeding it his own people. With Ukraine’s drone advantage constantly growing both in numbers and sophistication, the eventual outcome is now clear.

 

To grasp the scope of Russia’s impending defeat, it is helpful to remember Putin’s original goals included halting NATO’s expansion; instead, he frightened Finland and Sweden into the alliance and roughly doubled the length of Russia’s NATO frontier. He also invaded to prove Ukraine was not a real nation; instead, his “special military operation” has forged a fractious, partially Russophone country into a proud and patriotic people who will hate Moscow for at least a century. He invaded to shatter Western unity; instead, he provoked German rearmament, revived the NATO alliance, and reduced his own country to a resource colony of Beijing.

 

Diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Putin has spent four years proving the maxim true about his own regime. The Kremlin is now so panicked about the direction of the war it is reported to be resorting to biowarfare: dumping dead, anthrax-infected cows in fields near residential areas in Kherson. Perhaps worst of all for Putin, his beloved Crimea, which he took by force in 2014, is now under a state of emergency, with Russians fleeing by the thousands back to Russia. In fact, Crimea is at risk of being retaken by Ukraine in part this year and eventually fully as the Russian military continues to falter. Such a defeat would be Putin’s Waterloo.

 

President Trump always wants to be on the winning side, and even he and his team now see that Russia “doesn’t have the cards.” His comments on July 8 at the NATO summit encouraging Ukraine to strike targets deep in Russia marked strengthening of U.S. support for Ukraine, another bad sign for Putin. In fact, the summit itself was a complete about-face from last year’s, with allies openly discussing the Kremlin’s rapidly worsening military situation.

 

The economic realities are, if anything, more damning. Sanctions were never a guillotine; they were a slow puncture, and the tire is finally going flat. Oil and gas revenue — the lifeblood of the Russian state, some 40 percent of the federal budget — fell by roughly a quarter last year. The National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves have dropped by 61 percent since the Russian invasion and now holds mostly hard-to-sell Chinese yuan and gold bullion, which Moscow continues to sell aggressively to finance the war. Growth has collapsed from the wartime “sugar rush” of 4 percent to something the Kremlin’s own ministers now admit was near zero for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy actually contracted. It appears Q2 was more of the same. The Russian government now spends close to 50 percent of its resources on the war, crowding out spending on education, health care, infrastructure, and everything else not war-related.

 

To plug the ever-expanding national deficit, Putin has raised the value-added tax and expanded taxes on small businesses. As a result, a quarter-million small businesses have closed. Prices for basic food items were up 20 to 30 percent in Moscow in just the month of January. Interest rates remain in the punishing mid-teens and in truth are only available for companies in military-related industries. And with Ukrainian drones and missiles damaging Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure nightly, average Russians are furious about the kilometer-long gas lines that are the new normal in most areas. Russian social media channels reflect widespread frustration with Putin and the war, scenes that were nonexistent just a year ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, Putin himself is showing signs of severe stress. In a recent interview with a Russian journalist, Putin spoke at times incoherently about battle plans for Ukrainian towns and cities that do not exist. Russian elites are increasingly convinced Putin has led Russia into a death trap and has no credible plan to bring the war to an end.

 

Some in the West — wary of the costs and suspicious of every foreign entanglement — will object that Russia still holds Crimea and much of the Donbas, that Ukraine’s counteroffensives have stalled and that this looks less like victory than a bloody stalemate. The truth is that Russia is increasingly unable to supply or support its troops in Crimea. With a kill rate in the Donbas estimated at 10:1 in Ukraine’s favor, Russia is bleeding with an actual net loss of territory in June. A great power that sets out to subjugate its neighbor and, four-plus years on, cannot take a single fortress town without spending whole battalions has proven it cannot win. It has advertised the hollowness of its own threat. Putin wagered the future of Russia — its men, its treasury, its standing, its access to the modern world — on a quick imperial restoration. He got a frozen, ruinous quagmire and a NATO twice as long as the one he feared. Since 2022, he has even lost many of his former global allies such as Syria, Venezuela, and Armenia, with Iran and Cuba on the edge. And now he is losing his own people, who see with their own eyes that the war has come to Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention their gas stations and grocery stores.

 

Putin has failed in each of his pre-war objectives and has lost the upper hand in the war. Without the use of nuclear weapons, which would risk a retaliation that could easily wipe out his entire regime and much of Russia’s major cities, Putin has lost the war in Ukraine.

 

The task before the West is clear, but it is not easy. We must keep our nerve, keep Kyiv armed, and let the brutal math finish its work — as a bankrupt state bleeds money and men faster than it can bear. As in the Cold War, the U.S. must lead this effort. Signing the Russian Sanctions Bill courageously passed by the House recently would be a strong step forward.

 

Ronald Reagan grasped what Kennan taught: Against a brittle tyranny, time and pressure accomplish what armies cannot without unacceptable costs. The only question for Putin now is how many more Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians he will kill before he admits defeat or is removed from power by those he has led into this disaster. He has already lost 1.5 million Russian soldiers, killed or left homeless tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and kidnapped more than 20,000 innocent Ukrainian children. It is time Putin ends the insanity or is removed from office. Continued strong Western support for Ukraine will hasten that blessed day.

A Minor Assassination Attempt Between Partners in Peace

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Well before the conflict with Iran, this newsletter and quite a few other places pointed out, over and over and over again, that the Iranian regime had broken just about every treaty it had ever signed. One of the difficult lessons of this life is making decisions based upon what people do, not necessarily upon what people say.

 

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal and CNN reported that Israeli intelligence warned the U.S.  government that the Iranian regime devised a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump. . . while that allegedly peace-inducing Memorandum of Understanding is in effect. (This may well have been a factor in President Trump’s use of an old version of Air Force One to fly back to Washington; more on that below.)

 

This is at least the third time the Iranian government has been tied to a plot to assassinate Trump. The first was Pakistani national Asif Merchant in July 2024; the second was alleged IRGC operative Farhad Shakeri in November 2024; and now, this one. (These are separate from the assassination attempts against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and at Mar-a-Lago; no ties to Iran or any other foreign power have been found in those cases.)

 

The plots to kill Trump are separate from the Iranian plots to assassinate former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook, former CENTCOM commander General Frank McKenzie, and former Secretary of Defense Mike Esper.

 

Whether or not you believe our 80-year-old president retains all his marbles, our commander-in-chief did not help himself when, at the G7 summit in France, he emphasized how rational, nice, strong, and smart and “not radicalized” the current leadership of the Iranian government is:

 

We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. I mean, they were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.

 

There is a good chance that, while Trump was telling the international press about how great the Iranian mullahs were, they were plotting to kill him.

 

A few days ago, the often-sharp Logan Dobson asked why people were surprised that Trump is hyperbolic and exaggerates: “When he’s negotiating with someone and trying to get to a deal, he says over-the-top nice things about them, and when he feels someone has wronged him/America, he says over-the-top mean things about them.”

 

But I don’t think people are surprised that Trump says things like this. They’re saying it’s not good for Trump or the country for him to say things that are objectively not true with the whole world watching. He sounds naïve and foolish when he sings the praises of the Iranians one week, then later comes back and says everyone who doubted their trustworthiness was right all along.

 

Follow-Up Number One: The New Qatari-Donated Air Force One

 

Yesterday’s Corner post noted that President Trump flew out of Turkey on Wednesday night on the old Air Force One, instead of his new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran.

 

I know certain readers of this newsletter may not trust the reporting of the New York Times, but the fact that Trump switched planes is a proven fact. The two planes look quite different. And it’s highly unusual for the president to travel to a foreign country on one plane and return on a different one, so something out of the ordinary must have occurred.

 

This morning, the Times followed up and has two named sources indicating that the new Qatari-donated jet is not as secure as its predecessors.

 

The new Air Force One, which President Trump flew on earlier this week to Turkey, lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.

 

Experts say the absence of those capabilities on the Boeing 747-8 aircraft, which was donated by Qatar, creates potential risk in using the jet abroad, a dynamic underscored by the abrupt decision on Wednesday for Mr. Trump to leave Turkey on the old Air Force One at the urging of the Secret Service.

 

. . .

 

“Time didn’t permit all the normal Air Force One modifications, so some mix of security, communications and support is missing,” said Frank Kendall, the former Air Force secretary who was in charge of the department as it tried to push Boeing to accelerate its long-delayed contract to deliver two new Air Force One planes.

 

“With the Iran situation, this could be of concern,” Mr. Kendall said. “Frankly, I’m surprised to see this plane used outside the U.S.”

 

Andrew P. Hunter, the former Air Force assistant secretary who was in charge of the Air Force One program during the Biden administration, also said that a true retrofit of a 747 jet to prepare it to become Air Force One would require more than a year of work.

 

The Times also notes that a U.S. Air Force statement from last month about the new plane states, “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

 

Now, you can argue that you don’t trust the New York Times, or former Air Force secretaries, or assistant secretaries. But there’s still that inconvenient fact that, if the new Qatari jet is every bit as secure as the old model, then why didn’t Trump fly back on it from Turkey? Once again, watch what people do, not what they say.

 

Accepting and using the Qatari jet was a terrible idea. Many people said so at the time, and the administration overruled all of them.

 

Follow-Up Number Two: Is Graham Platner Certain to Withdraw?

 

Here’s an often unwelcome assessment I’ve given to female friends in long-term relationships who are waiting for their boyfriends to propose: When a man wants to do something, he does it. He rarely sits around waiting for just the right moment to do it, and he even more rarely waits a long time. If he doesn’t want to do something, he will find all kinds of reasons to delay and procrastinate.

 

Axios: “Graham Platner privately told staff that he is planning to officially file paperwork to end his Senate campaign on Monday — the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race.”

 

In his released video, Platner made it abundantly clear that he does not want to withdraw from the race, and he is only doing so because everyone else in the Democratic Party was pulling their support. As of this writing, he has not formally withdrawn from the race; he has only said in the video that he intends to do so. The Maine Democratic Party has no way to make him withdraw from the race. As noted earlier this week, Maine law only covers what is done when a candidate withdraws or dies. (You think they’re watching for anybody carrying a briefcase to Platner campaign meetings?)

 

How certain is it that Platner will actually keep his promise to formally withdraw from the race?

 

One last time: Watch what people do, not what they say.

 

ADDENDUM: At midweek, the New York Times informed its readers that Graham Platner “lived largely off  government benefits.” In their first article about Platner, they described him as an oyster farmer and quoted him as saying, “I’m a waterman who works in the ocean with his hands.”

 

Also in this week’s article, the Times shared some new details about how Platner was recruited as a candidate.

 

The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.

 

Mmm. You know who else was a historical figure, seen as a hero of his movement and leading a revolution?

 

Credit this very astute observation from progressive Platner critic Magdi Jacobs: “This really gives the game away. None of these people care about governing or legislation or actual change. Their entire theory of  politics revolves around celebrity and thrill seeking.”

Graham Platner, Classy to the Last

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, July 11, 2026

 

It’s finally over. Graham Platner has filed papers with the state of Maine confirming his withdrawal from the race for the Democratic Senate nomination. So allow me to celebrate the End of an Error with this small coda to National Review’s recent immersion in the esoteric gnostic details of “Platneriana.” Many questions remain unanswered, alas: We will never know just exactly how he got expelled from an ultra high-class boarding school that doesn’t expel anyone, save for the gravest of violations, after his first semester in high school. (Or why his parents felt the need to send him there in first place.) Nor have we ever heard the opinions of anyone who ever served in any capacity with him overseas. Wonder what we’d find out?

 

I’m pretty sure that this, more than any fundraising leverage the DNC might wield, is what ultimately drove Platner out; there are still sins he would prefer to keep blessedly unknown. And because men without dignity are not in the habit of late-acquiring it, even Platner’s resignation was ultimately undercut by his own sheer trashiness.

 

When Platner announced his formal exit from the Maine Senate race last night, he also sent it out to America via tweet, as a farewell. And it was a perfectly brown note upon which to exit, yet more mush from a bleating, braggart wimp. (“On June 9, 156,084 Mainers voted for a new kind of politics,” he begins, ignoring the reality that he was the only remaining serious candidate on the ballot by then.)

 

He continues on about this “new kind of politics”:

 

[It] is representative of people in the real world – not billionaires, oligarchs, or the political establishment. Mainers voted for Medicare for All; to ban billionaires from buying elections; and for an end to taxpayer-funded genocide and forever wars. They voted for time and dignity; for strong unions and jobs they can raise families on; for the hope of buying a home; for the chance to retire with grace.

 

People are desperate for change. For this broken system to be righted. For the American experiment to be furthered. Over the past eleven months, thousands and thousands of Mainers poured their hearts, time, and talent into a movement to deliver that vision. I will be forever grateful to them. And in submitting this letter today, I seek to further the movement we have built together, and the future we believe in.

 

My name may have been on the ballot, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. As such, please consider this notice as my official withdrawal from consideration for this office.

 

All nice and reasonably professional, you might think, as far as campaign communications go. Yes, it’s larded with nonsense and cant, but such self-pitying rationalizations are inevitable in bitter defeat, and should be accordingly discounted. In fact, one might even suspect it was written for him by someone else.

 

Particularly because the real Graham Platner – the anti-social, privileged, communist failson mouthing slogans – finally emerges from behind all that professionally crafted guff right at the end. Platner’s final sign-off:

 

 “F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the hearts.”

 

Ah, now that’s more like the scumbag I know. Of course, because this is Platner, my first thought is: when he said “f*ck ICE” did he mean that in a gay way, or more like a viking? And I don’t even want to know what “up the hearts” even means – no offense, but it sounds like some kind of commie gobbledygook to me. But as for “free Palestine” being Platner’s final sign-off? That’s a tell. That explains why he was recruited by his handlers in the first place. The Democratic Socialists of America may talk its programmatic game about fully automated luxury communism and whatnot, but what ultimately animates this movement, putting the steel in its spine, is the emotional charge of an enemy to unite against.

Where’s the Contradiction

By Noah Rothman

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Here’s a revealing admission from progressive commentator Emma Vigeland, a co-host of The Majority Report:

 

 “You know, I’ve said this before,” she confessed during an interview with Vox.com’s Astead Herndon, “I don’t really care if, say, like, Bernie Sanders or AOC go home, and they’re a secret Nazi, but they vote for the right things.”

 

As defenses of the disgraced Graham Platner go, it’s slim pickings out there, so maybe you have to take what you can get.

 

What Vigeland is saying is that a  politician’s character doesn’t really matter as long as he robotically pulls all the right levers in office. Maybe, in observance of their policy priorities, she’s discovered new wells of sympathy for the Republican voters who looked past the “fascist campaign” that Donald Trump ran in 2024.

 

Still, when it comes to her preferred Israel policies, Vigeland seems to think that she’s articulating a contradictory philosophy. She’s not.

 

If Vigeland had her way, she would have a U.S. government that would not only cut off all financial and military support for Israel but impose economic sanctions on it as well. But beyond that, she also argues that Jerusalem should surrender its nuclear arsenal. “We should denuclearize across the board, and Israel shouldn’t have one,” she said. “Neither should Iran.” Of course, Iran has resisted denuclearization, and Israel, given its history, would as well. That policy would have to be coercive.

 

So, in other words, disarm the Jews.

 

She also backs a so-called one-state solution, in which the Israeli state would incorporate the Palestinian territories — adding about 5.5 million Arabs to the 2 million Arabs in Israel (about 21 percent of the population already, all of whom enjoy the full rights of citizenship), presumably with the aim of neutralizing Israel’s character as a Jewish state. This, she argues, is the only way to force Israel to abandon the “apartheid” policies she insists pertain inside Israel (they don’t).

 

So, in simpler terms, strip the Jews of their right to self-determination.

 

She argues that condemning the alleged “genocide” that Israel has supposedly been engineering in the Palestinian territories for generations now — incompetently, we must assume — is a political litmus test. “It’s powerful to use the word and to democratize its power,” she said. Proving the existence of said genocide has been a struggle, but evidence of the charge apparently doesn’t matter if you repeat the accusation enough. The “word” itself has the “power” to impute guilt.

 

So, demonize the Jews.

 

In sum, Vigeland’s preferences include sanctioning and pacifying the Israelis, denying them self-determination, and accusing them of crimes they did not commit. It’s hard to see why she would object to candidates who maybe weren’t so “secret” about it.

Heedlessly Elevating Socialist Firebrands Has Downsides

By Judson Berger

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

When they go low, we seize the means of production.

 

This appears to be Democratic primary voters’ attitude this year toward the excesses of the Trump era. But fighting recklessness with recklessness has its own costs, as the party is learning the hard way in Maine.

 

“Today, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues,” Noah Rothman writes of that Senate campaign meltdown, after a sexual-assault allegation against Graham Platner at last compelled his most prominent supporters, including Bernie Sanders, to pressure him to exit the race ahead of Monday’s drop-out deadline. In a lengthy and blame-casting video posted late Wednesday, in which he again denied the accusation, Platner suspended his campaign.

 

Other attention-getting and problematic Democratic congressional candidates don’t appear to have nearly the record of normally disqualifying personal sins that Platner has, but the red flags (emphasis on red) are obvious to all but the most ideologically committed. As John Fund writes, Democrats’ “hatred of Donald Trump has driven them to search for and embrace lots of extreme and questionable candidates this year.”

 

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the party’s candidate for New York’s 13th congressional district, can’t articulate a circumstance in which a murderer should go to prison for murdering. Melat Kiros, the Democrats’ pick for Colorado’s first congressional district, struggles to call out deadly antisemitism. AOC-backed Abdul El-Sayed, running for a Senate seat in Michigan, has campaigned with streamer Hasan Piker, who has said America “deserved 9/11,” favors Hamas over Israel, and has expressed comfort with an array of crimes; Mallory McMorrow dropped out of that race last weekend, leaving a binary choice between El-Sayed and the more moderate Haley Stevens. Noah is not hopeful going into Michigan’s August primary: “Democratic primary voters are not casting safe ballots. They are voting with their hearts, and their hearts are with the socialists.”

 

The takeaway from the Platner saga — a truth reinforced in countless elections this century — is that voters and operatives are willing to look past awful flaws for the sake of partisan allegiance. “Now they are paying the price,” NR’s editorial observes.

 

The stakes for other races might not be as high right now as the balance of power in the Senate. But continuing to elevate candidates whose contempt for country and the notion of private enterprise is palpable will lead U.S.  politics down an ever-darker path. As with Mamdani and AOC, each newly minted socialist celebrity can become a kingmaker in his or her own right, committed to expanding the movement’s influence in the Democratic mainstream — a sort of chain migration for socialists into the halls of power. It shouldn’t take sexual-assault allegations for the party to reconsider these choices.