Latest news with #WilsonCenter
Washington Post
a day ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Ukraine's valor is reminiscent of Britain's in 1940
Ukraine's breathtaking ingenuity, the latest example of which destroyed or damaged dozens of Russia's long-range bombers on bases 2,500 miles from Ukraine, is in the service of an unflagging valor reminiscent of Britain's in 1940, when it was isolated and embattled, with the German army at the English Channel. Ukraine's resilience is inconvenient for those Americans who are eager to proclaim that the geographically largest nation entirely within Europe is inevitably doomed to defeat, dismemberment and domination. Such Americans' unseemly 'realism' has them invested in, and even eager for, Ukraine's disappearance from the map of European nations. Those Americans should remember Winston Churchill's 1941 response to French military 'realists' who had said in 1940 that Britain would soon have its neck wrung like a chicken. Said Churchill: 'Some chicken. Some neck.' Today's faux 'realism' cannot fathom what is at stake in Ukraine. Michael Kimmage can. The director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, writing in Foreign Affairs, says Putin has 'renormalized the idea of large-scale war as a means of territorial conquest.' Putin is, therefore, undoing a war aim enunciated before the United States entered World War II. In August 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting on warships in Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland, propounded the Atlantic Charter, item two of which looked to a future without 'territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.' It was to buttress this principle that President George H.W. Bush in 1991 orchestrated a broad coalition of nations for the limited but luminous purpose of forcing Iraq to leave Kuwait. It was for this principle that in 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent British forces to the South Atlantic to undo Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands. An Argentine intellectual dismissed this military event as 'a fight between two bald men over a comb.' Actually, it was a fight for a principle that again seems perishable. Vice President JD Vance uses flippancy, as adolescents do, for the fun of being naughty: 'I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.' He has dismissed as 'moralistic garbage' a distinguished historian's mildly different opinion about Ukraine's prospects. Vance wonders whether Niall Ferguson of Stanford's Hoover Institution is 'aware of the reality on the ground, of the numerical advantage of the Russians, of the depleted stock of the Europeans or their even more depleted industrial base?' Ukraine, says Vance, never had 'any pathway to victory.' Vance's ventriloquist, the U.S. president, has called Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky a 'dictator,' although it is unclear how much disapproval Trump conveys using that term. Trump has said to Zelensky, 'You don't have the cards.' But Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's minister of foreign affairs 2020-2024, writing May 30 in Foreign Affairs, says: 'In December 2023, Russia controlled approximately 42,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. In December 2024, that figure had grown only slightly, to around 43,600 square miles …. As of late May, Russia held approximately 43,650 … the country supposedly holding all the cards has gained just 1,650 of Ukraine's 233,030 square miles over the last 16 months. … Moscow has gone from occupying about 18 percent of Ukrainian territory in late 2023 to roughly 19 percent today.' Russia, which Sen. John McCain called a 'gas station masquerading as a country,' has one third of the European Union's population, one tenth of the E.U.'s gross domestic product, and last year had more than half a million more deaths than births. Writing in the Atlantic, Anna Nemtsova, a Daily Beast correspondent who covers Eastern Europe, reports: 'According to one demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years.' Although some people similar to Vance admired British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's 'realism' at Munich in 1938, Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute cautions that it is 'misleading and ahistorical' to compare Ukraine's vulnerability in coming negotiations to Czechoslovakia's in the negotiations that presaged Germany's takeover of Czechoslovakia: Czechoslovakia was not forced to acquiesce to a fatal agreement 'after defending itself successfully against Nazi military might for three years.' President Donald Trump finds Russia 'easier to deal with' than Ukraine, perhaps because he agrees more with Russia. Vance says Trump might walk away from peace talks if Putin is not 'serious' about them. So, Vance has notified Putin that simply by being unserious about negotiations, he might provoke Trump to show that among the things he is unserious about is the principle affirmed at Placentia Bay.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Ideas die in silence: Trump has quietly killed the Wilson Center
Recently, a federal judge temporarily blocked one of President Trump's efforts to fire federal employees. Similarly, independent agencies, one after another — including, most recently, the U.S. Institute for Peace — have been successful in court in blocking attempts to dismantle congressionally chartered institutions. The one glaring exception is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. For reasons only he can explain, Mark Green, the president of the Wilson Center when Elon Musk's DOGE arrived, walked away without a fight. Founded by President Richard Nixon and supported by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the Wilson Center was created to be part of the 'Republic of Letters.' It was a window into America's psyche at a time when the nation believed it would shape the world of ideas and win the global intellectual debate against communism. Great Republicans built the Wilson Center, and leaders from across the political spectrum sustained it. Admittedly, the work of the Wilson Center isn't quite as tangible as that of, for example, U.S. Agency for International Development. The destruction of the center, however, marks the end of an ambitious, decades-long project to shape public debate and support unique scholarship worldwide — the slow-motion death of ideas. The Wilson Center helped shape the intellectual trajectory of thinkers who are now viewed as among the greatest of all time. Mario Vargas Llosa reimagined Brazil's only historical famine, bringing Canudos to a global stage. 'The War of the End of the World,' among his other books, helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature — a recognition for Vargas Llosa, but also for the idea that scholarship can shape national memory. John Lewis Gaddis, already a Cold War historian of note, decided that the Wilson Center would house his exploration of different perspectives on that long struggle. With the Cold War International History Project, he searched high and low for primary-source documents behind the Iron Curtain that would enlighten and educate Americans on how others saw and explained the same events — altering our understanding of the Cold War and challenging our impulse to navel gaze. The Wilson Center saved lives — literally. When Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program and a renowned Iranian American scholar, was held in solitary confinement in Iran's Evin Prison in 2007, the center mounted a campaign to free her. President Lee Hamilton reminded the world of who she was and what she meant — to the U.S., to Iranian scholarship, to human dignity. A year later, the ayatollah himself relented and Esfandiari was freed. The center wasn't just where great thinkers came to work — it was where many staged their launch. When a young Tom Friedman returned from the Middle East, where he was the first Jewish correspondent for the New York Times in the region, he found a home at the center. There, he wrote 'From Beirut to Jerusalem,' the book that set the stage for a new era of foreign affairs journalism. Decades later, a 20-something Ben Rhodes honed his craft at the center. Hired by Hamilton, he worked on the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group Report. In the years to follow, Rhodes would come to reinvigorate American foreign policy and American values a few blocks up the street — at his desk inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as an Obama speechwriter and a deputy National Security Advisor. And then there were the women of the center: Gloria Steinem; Madeleine Albright, when she was still a scholar, not yet a diplomat; former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who served as the center's president; and Nina Jankowicz, one of the most vocal and visible intellectuals against disinformation. Each left her mark and carried forward the Wilsonian ideal that scholarship and public service are not opposing callings, but one and the same. The Wilson Center's demise under a second Trump administration was never a foregone conclusion. It operated primarily on private funding, costing the government a negligible amount. What's more, the center has never been one to go gently into the dark night. In 1998, the House slashed its budget to the brink of closure, but the Senate stepped in. Ideas prevailed. And yet, this time is different. Without a leader to defend it in court, as many other congressionally chartered institutions have done, the Wilson Center is slowly being dismantled and picked for parts. Other think tanks in Washington are attempting to keep the center's scholarship alive by absorbing some of its programs. The private funding that supported it — tens of millions of dollars — will mostly end up in the Trump administration's coffers, because donors are too afraid to ask for it back. Those donors who paid for programming that can no longer be implemented and asked for their unused funds back have been refused. With the dismantling of the Wilson Center and the threats to universities across the country, the future of American scholarship is now uncertain. The impact of unrecognized talent, policy unpursued and unshared ideas will be felt most acutely in the coming years. But this much we do know — the Wilson Center's quiet dismantling is not just the story of one institution's fall, but a warning about what we lose when we stop defending the spaces that nurture inquiry, elevate dialogue and believe in intellectual leadership. The lesson of the Wilson Center is that American global and intellectual leadership won't end in a dramatic way, all at once. It will fade away into the background, unsupported. Ideas die in silence. And this time, silence won. Jana Nelson is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere. She worked for the Wilson Center as an intern, research assistant and consultant between 2008 and 2010. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Ideas die in silence: Trump has quietly killed the Wilson Center
Recently, a federal judge temporarily blocked one of President Trump's efforts to fire federal employees. Similarly, independent agencies, one after another — including, most recently, the U.S. Institute for Peace — have been successful in court in blocking attempts to dismantle congressionally chartered institutions. The one glaring exception is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. For reasons only he can explain, Mark Green, the president of the Wilson Center when Elon Musk's DOGE arrived, walked away without a fight. Founded by President Richard Nixon and supported by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the Wilson Center was created to be part of the 'Republic of Letters.' It was a window into America's psyche at a time when the nation believed it would shape the world of ideas and win the global intellectual debate against communism. Great Republicans built the Wilson Center, and leaders from across the political spectrum sustained it. Thank you for signing up! Subscribe to more newsletters here Admittedly, the work of the Wilson Center isn't quite as tangible as that of, for example, U.S. Agency for International Development. The destruction of the center, however, marks the end of an ambitious, decades-long project to shape public debate and support unique scholarship worldwide — the slow-motion death of ideas. The Wilson Center helped shape the intellectual trajectory of thinkers who are now viewed as among the greatest of all time. Mario Vargas Llosa reimagined Brazil's only historical famine, bringing Canudos to a global stage. 'The War of the End of the World,' among his other books, helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature — a recognition for Vargas Llosa, but also for the idea that scholarship can shape national memory. John Lewis Gaddis, already a Cold War historian of note, decided that the Wilson Center would house his exploration of different perspectives on that long struggle. With the Cold War International History Project, he searched high and low for primary-source documents behind the Iron Curtain that would enlighten and educate Americans on how others saw and explained the same events — altering our understanding of the Cold War and challenging our impulse to navel gaze. The Wilson Center saved lives — literally. When Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program and a renowned Iranian American scholar, was held in solitary confinement in Iran's Evin Prison in 2007, the center mounted a campaign to free her. President Lee Hamilton reminded the world of who she was and what she meant — to the U.S., to Iranian scholarship, to human dignity. A year later, the ayatollah himself relented and Esfandiari was freed. The center wasn't just where great thinkers came to work — it was where many staged their launch. When a young Tom Friedman returned from the Middle East, where he was the first Jewish correspondent for the New York Times in the region, he found a home at the center. There, he wrote 'From Beirut to Jerusalem,' the book that set the stage for a new era of foreign affairs journalism. Decades later, a 20-something Ben Rhodes honed his craft at the center. Hired by Hamilton, he worked on the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group Report. In the years to follow, Rhodes would come to reinvigorate American foreign policy and American values a few blocks up the street — at his desk inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as an Obama speechwriter and a deputy National Security Advisor. And then there were the women of the center: Gloria Steinem; Madeleine Albright, when she was still a scholar, not yet a diplomat; former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who served as the center's president; and Nina Jankowicz, one of the most vocal and visible intellectuals against disinformation. Each left her mark and carried forward the Wilsonian ideal that scholarship and public service are not opposing callings, but one and the same. The Wilson Center's demise under a second Trump administration was never a foregone conclusion. It operated primarily on private funding, costing the government a negligible amount. What's more, the center has never been one to go gently into the dark night. In 1998, the House slashed its budget to the brink of closure, but the Senate stepped in. Ideas prevailed. And yet, this time is different. Without a leader to defend it in court, as many other congressionally chartered institutions have done, the Wilson Center is slowly being dismantled and picked for parts. Other think tanks in Washington are attempting to keep the center's scholarship alive by absorbing some of its programs. The private funding that supported it — tens of millions of dollars — will mostly end up in the Trump administration's coffers, because donors are too afraid to ask for it back. Those donors who paid for programming that can no longer be implemented and asked for their unused funds back have been refused. With the dismantling of the Wilson Center and the threats to universities across the country, the future of American scholarship is now uncertain. The impact of unrecognized talent, policy unpursued and unshared ideas will be felt most acutely in the coming years. But this much we do know — the Wilson Center's quiet dismantling is not just the story of one institution's fall, but a warning about what we lose when we stop defending the spaces that nurture inquiry, elevate dialogue and believe in intellectual leadership. The lesson of the Wilson Center is that American global and intellectual leadership won't end in a dramatic way, all at once. It will fade away into the background, unsupported. Ideas die in silence. And this time, silence won. Jana Nelson is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere. She worked for the Wilson Center as an intern, research assistant and consultant between 2008 and 2010.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Iran has ‘sort of' agreed deal on nuclear programme, says Donald Trump
Donald Trump says Iran has 'sort of' agreed to the terms of a deal on the future terms of its nuclear programme. On a visit to Doha, the US president said: 'I want them to succeed. I want them to end up being a great country. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. It is very simple really. It's not like I need to give you 30 pages worth of details. It is only one sentence – they cannot have a nuclear weapon.' Referring to the possibility of a US attack on Iran, he added: 'We are not going to make any nuclear dust in Iran. I think we're getting close to maybe doing a deal without having to do this. You probably read today the story about Iran. It's sort of agreed to … the terms.' Trump's remarks add credence to reports that Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, gave the Iranian negotiating team in Oman at the weekend the outlines of a proposal that Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, took back to Tehran. Araghchi has been urged by mediators to accept zero uranium enrichment for up to three years to build trust. This period would end with Iran reverting to enriching at 3.75% purity, the level set out in the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump quit in 2018. In the meantime, Russia could provide Iran with uranium for its civil nuclear programme. Ali Shamkhani, a senior political, military and nuclear adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested Iran was willing to compromise and a deal was possible if Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did not influence the process. He said Tehran would commit to: never making nuclear weapons; getting rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium; enriching uranium only to levels needed for civilian use; and allowing inspectors to supervise the process – all in exchange for the immediate lifting of economic sanctions. Mohamed Amersi, of the Wilson Center thinktank in Washington, said 'as a compromise Iran could be persuaded to stop enriching to the levels to which they are entitled for a mutually acceptable timeline before resuming once trust has been built by both sides'. He added: 'Alternatively, Iran could consider inviting Saudi Arabia and even the US to invest in Iran's nuclear programme.' Trump praised the role of Qatar and made reference to Israel's belief that Iran's nuclear sites should be attacked, saying: 'Iran should seriously thank the emir of Qatar, because there are others who want to deal a hard blow to Iran, unlike Qatar.' The president's tone indicated his personal desire to reach a deal but both the US and Iran have large constituencies that distrust the other side and it is not clear that an agreement is secure. For Iran, the benefits of lifting sanctions on a broken economy may outweigh the ingrained distrust of the US. No date has been set for a fifth round of talks. Araghchi's aides are to brief European officials from France, Germany, the UK and the EU on Friday setting out the progress of the talks. Some Iranians have portrayed Europe as angry and fearful at being excluded from the process.
India.com
03-05-2025
- Politics
- India.com
Pahalgam terror attack: Is US' statement a setback for India when it is preparing a war with Pakistan? Experts explain
Pahalgam terror attack: Is US' statement a setback for India when it is preparing a war with Pakistan? Experts explain The US has given India the freedom to operate inside Pakistan after the Pahalgam attack. An US expert has said this in his analysis after the latest statement of Vice President JD Vance. The US expert said that Vance's statement has made it clear that America has no problem with India's retaliatory action as long as it does not provoke war. That is, US supports India's small-scale operation inside Pakistan. Vance had advised India to be cautious while reacting to the Pahalgam attack. Vance clarified US stand on tension 'Vice President Vance has made the US position on the India-Pakistan crisis somewhat clearer,' Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center, wrote on X. He further wrote that Vance 'in his latest comments appears to acknowledge India's counterterrorism imperatives and suggests that the US will not oppose India's response unless it is excessively aggressive.' What did Vance say? Vice President JD Vance has said that US hopes that India will respond to the Pahalgam terrorist attack in a way that does not lead to a 'broader regional conflict' and expects Pakistan to 'cooperate' with New Delhi to 'hunt down' militants sometimes operating from their soil. 'Our hope here is that India responds to this terrorist attack in a way that doesn't lead to a broader regional conflict,' Vance said on Fox News's 'Special Report'. 'And we hope, frankly, that Pakistan, to the extent that they're responsible, cooperates with India to make sure that the terrorists sometimes operating in their territory are hunted down and dealt with. That's how we hope this unfolds, we're obviously in close contact. We'll see what happens,' Vance said.
