Fiona Hill: Autocracies see the state as strong and society as irrelevant. Individuals have no real role.
The fundamental difference with democracies is that societies still matter and in Ukraine, society has shown extraordinary resilience. 1/
Hill: In Ukraine, strong society is beating strong state.
The state was weak and messy, but society mobilized, networked, flattened hierarchies and worked with the military. That is the opposite of Russia’s vertical, top-down system. 2/
Hill: Putin is afraid of his own society. Ukraine’s innovation comes from mobilized citizens working with the military.
Russia’s system runs vertically through Putin. That gives Moscow control, but it also makes Putin’s choices narrower and darker. 3/
Applebaum: What binds Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is not religion or ideology.
China is communist, Russia nationalist, Iran theocratic. What binds them is fear of liberal language: rights, rule of law, separation of powers and independent courts. 1/
Applebaum: Ukraine has changed how the war is fought. The front is now a 20-mile transparent zone where Ukrainian drones can see almost everything.
Every Russian truck, car or soldier entering that zone can be identified and hit. 2/
Applebaum: Russian losses of around 1,000 killed and wounded a day, roughly 30,000 a month, come from Moscow still throwing people into a zone Ukraine can see and strike.
Russia kept advancing by mass, but now that movement has stopped. 3/
Applebaum: Trump is not handling the Iran war strategically. He is not asking what is good for Americans, Iranians or the Middle East.
He is asking: how is this good for me? How do I emerge as the winner? He is chasing applause, not solving the problem. 1/
Applebaum: Trump has never made clear why America is fighting in Iran. Is it because he failed to destroy all nuclear facilities?
Because he wants Netanyahu’s approval? Nobody knows. This is not a problem of democracy, it is a problem of why this war exists. 2/
Applebaum: Iran wants frozen assets, sanctions relief and maybe compensation.
But if Trump offers that, it looks like Obama’s nuclear deal, so he backtracks. Then he returns to “absolute surrender,” regime change or a show that he is the greatest leader. 3/
Applebaum: The Trump administration often seems uninterested in human beings, not Americans facing inflation, not Iranians under bombing, not Epstein victims.
It is focused on clips, engagement, visuals and what the online world will say. 1/
Applebaum: This is beyond ordinary political spin. Spin doctors used to spin real events.
Trump’s world tries to create new realities, stories that may or may not have happened, shaped for screens and algorithms rather than for truth. 2/
Applebaum: You can take one horrible incident, distort the facts and turn it into a political story about an entire country.
That is how online narratives around migrants work: isolated tragedies are twisted into hatred, riots and real-world violence. 3/