How Does Diplomacy Work Now?
Thus British writer and politician Arthur Ponsonby offered a critique of the work of the diplomat in his 1915 book Democracy and Diplomacy: A Plea for Popular Control of Foreign Policy. This assessment is all-too true of so much writing about international relations: Scholars, in the cloistered calm of academic aloofness, present diplomacy as primarily the work of bureaucrats operating in a rigid system, who guard the interests of their nations with mounds of dispatches and memoranda.
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Boston Globe
11 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Pressley calls Trump's federal takeover in D.C. ‘racist and rogue,' compares it to Boston's Stuart murder case
Pressley compared Trump's federal operation in Washington to the Stuart case, the 1989 killing of Carol Stuart, a pregnant white woman whose husband, Charles Stuart, falsely told police that a Black man had attacked them while they were driving in Mission Hill. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up During the search for the suspect, police carried out aggressive raids in Mission Hill, breaking down doors without warning and putting residents to stop-and-frisk searches. Advertisement 'And what is happening here in D.C. and, then the targeting of Black men and Black youth, in particular, which to me is very reminiscent of Boston after the Charles Stuart case, is very reminiscent of New York under [former Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani with stop-and-frisk,' Pressley said. In November of that year, after Charles' brother Matthew told police he was responsible for Carol's death, Charles leapt from Boston's Tobin Bridge and died. Pressley described the heightened tensions in the D.C. community, saying, 'You know, my God children who live in the city, they're young Black boys. And they're afraid to go to their summer jobs. They're fearful of what it's going to be like, their walk [to] school.' Advertisement 'And again, don't think that anything Donald Trump has done, whether it's his targeting of sanctuary cities or the militarization of D.C., this has nothing to do with public safety, [it] has nothing to do with law and order,' she added. Pressley then referred to the arrest of Tufts PhD student 'When you are disappearing people from the streets of Somerville, when you are targeting people in this way, it's terrorism,' Pressley said. 'And that terror, that fear that you're stoking, makes us all less safe.' Alyssa Vega can be reached at
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘Nearly two million more casualties': The numbers that show Russia is years from victory
Donald Trump's message – or rather, the message he transmitted from Vladimir Putin – to Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on Monday was stark: accept the deal Russia is offering, because otherwise you'll lose the war. But if Moscow appears strong now, Ukraine and its European allies believe, it's partly because Trump's choices have made it stronger – namely, his decisions to curtail US military aid, interrupt intelligence sharing and, above all, accept Putin's insistence on a peace deal before a ceasefire. And in fact, Russia is far from battlefield supremacy. Just hours before the Oval Office discussions, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) declared it would take 4.4 years of fighting at current rates of advance for Russia to capture the remainder of territory it has 'annexed'. It would also, according to the MoD calculations based on Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties, cost Russia an additional 1.93m killed and wounded to achieve Putin's goals. That would be on top of the more than one million casualties it has already sustained. In other words, Russia could be headed for breaking points of its own. How long can Russia last? All of which raises the question, if Trump chose to throw his weight behind Ukraine, could he change the tide? Should the US president be asking not how much Ukraine must surrender, but how long Russia can last? Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King's College London, points to two potential Russian breaking points: the military and the economic. Predictions about when either will come has become something of a mug's game, he cautions. Nor should we underestimate Russia's capacity to keep going. 'But eventually they do reach a pinch point: there are strains on the economy. There are strains on the military. A breaking point will come,' he says. 'Because Trump is in a hurry, Putin has the ability to sort of shift that sense of emergency, so that, all of a sudden, it feels like this sort of political breaking point for the West – whereas, if there was a little bit more strategic patience and consistency from the White House, the opposite would actually be true.' The British Defence Intelligence assessment about the Russian rate of advance is meant for public consumption rather than real strategic analysis. Applying the same crude logic to British military performance in the First World War, one might have said in early 1918 that the Allies were decades from victory. By the end of that year, Germany had suffered a devastating defeat, and arguing about rates of advance and attrition in the previous four years were not much use to German negotiators at armistice talks. 'The problem is, wars are not linear,' points out Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert in the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. Nor are they boxing matches to be decided on points. Nonetheless, Russia's advance is indeed painfully slow. Even a recent 10-mile infiltration near Dobropillia, while initially alarming for Ukraine, failed to achieve an operational breakthrough. It ended instead with hundreds of Russians being captured or killed. 'Limitless manpower is a myth' In the Oval Office, the US president led Zelensky over to an easel holding a large map of Ukraine showing the current line of control. The implication: to stop the conflict, the map will have to be redrawn. There was little progress on Monday, however, partly because Zelensky and his allies see that map in a very different way. Speaking after the talks Emmanuel Macron said that in the past 1,000 days of war Russian forces 'took less than one per cent' of Ukrainian territory. 'Those who are saying… 'The Ukrainians are lost. They will lose'. It's total fake news,' the French president said. As the Institute for the Study of War has pointed out, Russian forces are currently struggling to complete the encirclement or envelopment of Kupyansk despite 22 months of offensive operations. It took them 14 months to cover the 6.4 miles from the eastern to western outskirts of Toretsk, and 26 months to advance 6.8 miles from western Bakhmut to the western edge of Chasiv Yar. And yes, says Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and veteran watcher of the Russian military, it is true to say that Russia faces increasing risk as the war goes on. 'The question is not how much territory is Russia gaining per day. The only question that's actually being tested in the fighting in 2024 and 2025 is which proposition is more likely to be true: is Russia able to sustain its offensive effort and eventually put Ukraine in an untenable position? Or is Ukrainian defence more viable and more likely to exhaust Russian offensive potential, if not this year then next?' he says. 'This is what both parties are looking at to try to inform their decision on the questions of how much time they have and whether they can hope to attain a better and different outcome.' At the moment, Kofman says, time seems to favour Russia. Ukraine is not facing either imminent defeat or a collapse of the front line that would force it to sign a humiliating surrender, but the Russians are accelerating. Year-on-year, their pace of advance has picked up in 2025 compared to 2024. And while Ukraine has serious problems with manpower, Russia still has a steady supply of men to replace battlefield losses, which, according to Britain's Defence Intelligence, currently stand at 1,060,000, including 250,000 killed or missing presumed dead. The recent Russian infiltration at Dobropillia shows that Ukraine's drone units, despite their remarkable effectiveness, cannot stabilise the front alone in the absence of sufficient infantry. For now, however, the Russians are struggling to translate their dominance in infantry into decisive advantage. 'Russia's vulnerability is simply that they are far too slow and they don't have the force quality, nor do they employ the tactics, to achieve a major breakthrough. So their overall approach is deeply inefficient and costly in terms of manpower,' says Kofman. 'The political leadership doesn't care about this, but Russia does not have limitless manpower either – that's a myth. It also does not have limitless time. That's another myth.' Russia 'on the verge of recession' There are other constraints on Russia too, Kofman argues. 'The reality is that the war is a significant strain on the Russian economy. Despite outwardly projecting the ability and willingness to keep fighting for many more years, if the war enters 2026 and Russia doesn't appear to be winning decisively on the battlefield, it is eminently unclear that they, too, will not run into significant sustainability problems that could force them to a much weaker negotiating position,' he says. That explains why Putin may be keen to seal a deal now: he feels comparatively strong, but knows the moment of apparent dominance may not last. For two years, Russia's economy appeared to defy gravity, turning massive military spending into rapid GDP growth despite Western sanctions. But the sugar high appears to be over. And the signs of the comedown are everywhere. In June, Maxim Reznikov, the minister of economic development of the Russian Federation, warned the St Petersburg economic forum that the country was 'on the verge of recession'. The following month, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, the country's second largest steel producer, reported a 21.1 per cent collapse in profits and a sharp drop in output that it attributed to high interest rates and a general slowdown in the Russian economy. Indeed, at the end of July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its 2025 growth estimate for Russia to 0.9 per cent, down from an initial 1.5 per cent forecast it made in April. Even that was a dramatic drop from the 4.3 per cent growth the IMF estimated in 2024. And inflation has prompted the ministries of agriculture and of trade and industry to draft a law for price caps on vegetables, poultry and dairy products, according to a report in Kommersant, a Russian business daily, earlier this month. 'The economy is an interesting thing because there's an objective standpoint to it, which is, frankly, that they do have considerable fiscal and monetary headroom, and they remain very good at managing the economy, albeit at increasing cost,' says Greene. 'But eventually they do reach a pinch point.' 'If you remember back to January, the very last thing the Biden administration did was to impose some new sanctions, somewhat unexpectedly, on the Russians. And that sent Russian markets into a tailspin for two or three weeks. If the West were interested in manufacturing those sorts of moments of unpredictability, then it would bring some very real risks, including near-term risks, for the Russian economy.' 'They're playing with fire' None of these factors mean Russia is facing imminent collapse, says Ian Bond, deputy director for the London-based Centre for European Reform. There is no sign that the casualty rate or the economic strains of the war have created any kind of serious domestic political challenge to Putin so far. 'But Russia is strong until it's not. It looks mighty, and then mental fatigue sets in, and things fall apart quite quickly,' he says. 'Is that going to happen this time? We simply don't know,' Bond adds. But, he argues, it is a reason for Europe and Ukraine to resist acquiescing to a bad deal – like surrendering Donbas – that would leave them much more vulnerable. These are the considerations that Russian, Ukrainian and European leaders will be weighing up as Trump shepherds them into more negotiations in the coming weeks. In the final analysis, 'war is very much an uncertain business, and even though some things may be in Russia's favour, there's a great deal of uncertainty', says Kofman. 'And keep in mind the external factors: at the end of the day, much for Russia depends on things, like the price of oil, that they can neither predict nor control. The longer things go on, the more they're playing with fire.' Solve the daily Crossword
San Francisco Chronicle
41 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Microsoft employee protests lead to arrests as company reviews its work with Israel's military
REDMOND, Wash. (AP) — Worker-led protests erupted at Microsoft headquarters this week as the tech company promises an 'urgent' review of the Israeli military's use of its technology during the ongoing war in Gaza. A second day of protests at the Microsoft campus on Wednesday called for the tech giant to immediately cut its business ties with Israel. The police department began making arrests after Microsoft said the protesters were trespassing. 'We said, 'Please leave or you will be arrested,' and they chose not to leave so they were detained,' said police spokesperson Jill Green. Microsoft late last week said it was tapping a law firm to investigate allegations reported by British newspaper The Guardian that the Israeli Defense Forces used Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform to store phone call data obtained through the mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 'Microsoft's standard terms of service prohibit this type of usage," the company said in a statement posted Friday, adding that the report raises 'precise allegations that merit a full and urgent review.' The company said it will share the findings after law firm Covington & Burling completes its review. The promised review was insufficient for the employee-led No Azure for Apartheid group, which for months has protested Microsoft's supplying the Israeli military with technology used for its war against Hamas in Gaza. In February, The Associated Press revealed previously unreported details about the American tech giant's close partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, with military use of commercial AI products skyrocketing by nearly 200 times after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The AP reported that the Israeli military uses Azure to transcribe, translate and process intelligence gathered through mass surveillance, which can then be cross-checked with Israel's in-house AI-enabled targeting systems. Following The AP's report, Microsoft acknowledged the military applications but said a review it commissioned found no evidence that its Azure platform and artificial intelligence technologies were used to target or harm people in Gaza. Microsoft did not share a copy of that review or say who conducted it. Microsoft in May fired an employee who interrupted a speech by CEO Satya Nadella to protest the contracts, and in April, fired two others who interrupted the company's 50th anniversary celebration.
