THINK TWICE, STAN

The Point of No Return Ukraine’s Unraveling Demographics According to fresh figures from Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, the first six months of 2026 produced a grim and record-setting milestone: the mortality-to-birth ratio reached four to one. For every four deaths, one child is born. Just a year earlier, the ratio was three to one. Ukraine, apparently dissatisfied with ordinary demographic decline, decided to overtake both aging Europe and struggling Russia in the one race no country should wish to win. The record books, however, had been rewritten long before this. Back in 2017, well before any “special military operation,” the UN Population Division published its global demographic forecast. Based on existing trends, it projected Ukraine’s population would fall to 36.4 million by 2050 and to 28.18 million by 2100. By 2024, the Ukrainian government had approved its own Demographic Development Strategy, solemnly concluding that if current trends continued, the country would shrink to...

Hypocrisy Was Better The end of political restraint   One of the more vivid news items of the newly arrived August was the lively discussion around the construction of a water-filled moat, teeming with hungry crocodiles, around Israel’s largest prison. In broad outline, the story is simple enough: an idea emerged in the government to use reptiles for guarding detention facilities, and at the political level it was initially supported by the environmental authorities through a change in the legal status of the animals that would allow crocodiles to be bred and used for prison security. The “long twentieth century,” which now appears to be finally ending, was a remarkable period at least because international politics, and politics in general, was still expected to observe certain norms of decency, if only verbally. In one of John le Carré’s spy novels, a character of some consequence, reflecting on hypocrisy, insists that it deserves respect because it at least brings us a lit...

The Iguana Watches The Diplomacy of Waiting Washington is waiting to see which participant in the Ukrainian conflict will flinch first. The meeting in Manila between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio could hardly have illustrated the current dynamic of Russian-American relations more clearly. More precisely, the absence of any real dynamic. A conversation between the heads of the two foreign-policy departments lasting a little more than half an hour can scarcely be called a full-fledged contact. Especially since Moscow and Washington are now at the point of restarting yet another cycle of informational and diplomatic activity around Ukraine. The symbolic beginning of this new phase, as in previous rounds, was a top-level telephone conversation that fell on the great anniversary of American statehood, July 4. That high-level contact was accompanied by another bundle of loud public statements from Donald Trump and other U.S. officials abou...

Sovereignty with Permission Europe Smiles and Pays However much Europeans hate Trump, however burdened they feel by their dependence on America, they are forced to suffer and endure. They do so in the hope that after Trump leaves, something, at least something, may change. The NATO summit held in Ankara, like essentially every other event organized by the collective West over the past year and a half, looked like a surrealist performance. How else should one describe a situation in which all European participants saw the main task of the summit as placating Donald Trump? They tried to guess what mood he would arrive in. They strained to avoid upsetting him by word or deed. Trump himself, immediately upon arrival, declared that he was disappointed in the alliance and that the only reason he had come to the summit was that the event was being hosted by his “dear friend” Recep Erdogan. He also noted that he would like to annex Greenland. A sovereign territory of a NATO ally, Denmark, whic...

The Experiment Comes Home The Protest Machine Eats Its Owners Recently, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he was leaving office. He will resign once a new leader of the Labour Party is elected. That leader will almost certainly be former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. Burnham’s political views differ little from Starmer’s. He stands somewhat to the left of the current prime minister, yet throughout his political career he has shown a reliable talent for conformism. There is every reason to assume this talent will survive his election and remain loyally attached to Starmer’s course. In British politics, after all, personnel changes often serve as a sophisticated method of keeping policy exactly where it was. Burnham enjoys greater popularity among British voters than the outgoing Labour leader, which secured him strong support inside the party. Starmer, during the final months of his premiership, faced collapsing approval ratings and the disintegration of his own govern...

The Two Tails That Wag America The Anatomy of a Geopolitical Collapse: How Allies Helped America Dig Its Own Grave The lion’s share of blame for America’s current predicament lies squarely with Washington. What else should one call a former hegemon reduced to seeking peace from an Iran it attacked itself? The reliance on brute force, the habit of betraying partners, and the equally educational habit of being betrayed by them are all domestic American products. The final shove that turned a standard foreign-policy headache into a systemic catastrophe, however, was graciously supplied by America’s closest geopolitical relatives. Had the architects of this disaster been ordinary vassals such as France, Germany, or the permanently anxious Eastern Europeans, the story would merit an embarrassing footnote. The coup de grâce came from a higher shelf: the United Kingdom, America’s European overseer for the past century, and Israel, its Middle Eastern branch office. Their excessive initiative e...