The AtlanticModify

2025-08-15 22:30:00

As I listened this week to liberal politicians and journalists wave off talk of Washington, D.C.’s heartbreaking violence as mere Republican demagoguery, I was struck by many progressives’ dispiriting inability to talk candidly about the plague of crime afflicting working-class and poor Americans. This denial opens a door for President Donald Trump to speak in a language, however cynical, that resonates with those voters.

Responding to Trump’s takeover of policing in the nation’s capital, Senator Tim Kaine, a liberal Democrat from Virginia, stated this week that crime “is at a 30-year low in D.C., making these steps a waste of taxpayer dollars.” Although that’s true of violent crime in general, the city’s murder rate was lower throughout the 2010s. The Guardian acknowledged that “violent crime is higher in Washington DC than the national average” but reassured readers that the capital is “not among the most violent large cities in the United States today.” Jim Kessler, a think-tank executive who previously worked as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s legislative and policy director, went on Fox News to advise Americans to stifle their fears. “If people are afraid to come to D.C.,” he said, “go to Disney World, get fat, eat French fries.”

I am loath to defend Trump’s takeover of policing in D.C. Reassigning FBI agents as beat cops is a dubious crime-fighting practice, as agents know little of the District’s neighborhoods and how to distinguish between the good folks and those who are pure trouble. National Guard soldiers, to state the obvious, have little training in police work.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Trump is right that D.C. has a serious crime problem]

And some of the nation’s most violent cities—such as Memphis, Cleveland, and Little Rock, Arkansas—are found in pro-Trump states.

That doesn’t mean the city is safe, or that it’s politically wise to dismiss concerns about crime. Trump’s opponents this week made much of the fact that homicides in the District fell from 287 in 2023 to 187 in 2024. That improved number in the District is equivalent in per capita terms to 2,244 homicides in New York City. The actual count there last year was 377—slightly more than twice as many homicides as in D.C., but New York has more than 12 times as many people.

When I worked for The Washington Post in the late 1990s—not long after the period when D.C. was the nation’s murder capital—I reported on the city’s tragically high homicide rates. Both then and now, that problem, like so many other aspects of life in Washington, was de facto segregated by race and class. The Post recently published a map of 2024 homicides, with tiny circles for the name and location of everyone who was killed. This becomes clear: To wander the predominately white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park and the thoroughly gentrified areas of Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard is to pass through neighborhoods with homicide rates closer to Copenhagen’s.

But across the Anacostia River in the majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, where more than 40 percent of the children live in poverty, reality is far grimmer. More than half of the District’s homicides last year occurred in these wards. Four years ago, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform released a report on gun violence in D.C. Well in excess of 90 percent of the victims and suspects were Black males, the report found, “despite Black residents comprising only 46 percent of the overall population in the District.”

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump doesn’t really care about crime]

When I arrived in Washington in 1996, the Post would print at the beginning of each week a news brief that reduced the preceding weekend’s death toll to a terrible agate of victims’ names and addresses. What I recall most from that time was talking with young men who had seen friends killed, and some of whom possessed terrifying armaments and body armor. Mothers described to me how they trained their children to roll off their bed and hit the floor at the sound of gunfire. A grieving father told me maybe it was just as well that his son, a drug dealer, had died. “If he’d made it,” he said, “the first thing that would have come to his mind was revenge.”

The intensity of that bloodletting was not easily explained at the time—and that remains the case today. The D.C. police force still has more officers per capita than New York City or Chicago, and that does not include the federal police forces patrolling Capitol Hill and the parks. Something remains terribly wrong in too many neighborhoods in the District, and no one should dismiss that just because Trump appears to be making cynical use of that misery.

I have no doubt that Trump enjoys targeting Democratic-controlled cities for embarrassment. I also have little doubt that a mother in Ward 8 might draw comfort from a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child’s school. And I try to imagine having the audacity to insist to her that the homicides and the danger that are her daily reality are somehow a phantasm.

2025-08-15 21:57:00

In Ukraine, the battle lines long ago calcified into a stalemate, with Russian invaders moving forward incrementally and occasionally getting pushed back. In the diplomatic sphere, however, the territory is shifting fast.

When Donald Trump meets Russia’s Vladimir Putin today in Anchorage, Alaska, the summit will be the latest in a series of concessions by the American president. Trump’s affection for Putin has waned—“I got along well with Putin,” he said this week, conspicuously adopting the past tense—as his frustration with the ongoing war waxes. Yet by inviting Putin to meet, he’s allowing Russia to further protract the conflict.

During the 2024 presidential election, Trump vowed that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours—or even before taking office. After those targets were far in the rearview, with no resolution in sight, he more than promised vague important developments in his trademark two-week increments. More recently, on July 28, he issued Putin a deadline of “10 or 12 days” to cease hostilities, and the following day, he narrowed that down: 10 days, or by August 8. On the day that the ultimatum ran out, Trump announced he’d meet Putin in person, despite no end to the violence.

For the Russian autocrat, this is a win in itself. Putin is a global pariah facing an international warrant for his arrest, but the United States is welcoming him to American soil for the first time since 2015. (The U.S. has never had much respect for international justice structures, but the Trump administration is particularly dismissive of them.) Without stopping his aggression against Ukraine, and despite blowing through a series of deadlines, he gets a photo op with Trump. Putin today praised what he called “quite energetic and sincere efforts” toward peace by his American counterpart, which is more than anyone can say for Putin himself.

What’s in it for the president? As my colleagues Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Jonathan Lemire reported last weekend, Trump has grand dreams of a legacy as a peacemaker—perhaps even one with a Nobel Prize. This gives Trump some reason for patience with Putin. But the expectations for this summit keep getting lowered. Initially, the White House allowed suggestions of a tentative peace deal—or at least a genuine cease-fire—to spread in the media.

Now the White House says that Trump will be in Alaska for a “listening exercise,” with Trump saying, “All I want to do is set the table for the next meeting.” He acknowledged this week that the U.S. doesn’t have many levers to pull to stop the killings of Ukrainian civilians. “I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” Trump said, referring to Putin. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street.” It was a notable acknowledgment of limitations from a leader who prefers bluster, but Trump does often respond to images he sees on the news.

Earlier this week, Trump suggested that he might push a deal that ends the conflict by swapping territory between the countries. This would be a sweetheart deal for Putin, who would acquire legal control of large swaths of rich Ukrainian land he has already seized illegally by force. The idea received an angry response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is not invited to the Alaska meeting—itself another win for Putin (though Trump has floated the possibility of Zelensky joining him and Putin in Alaska later). European leaders, who have sought to ease Trump toward their position of support for Kyiv, spoke with him earlier this week, and they said afterward that Trump would not offer any such deal.

But Trump still has little love lost with Zelensky. The men have improved their relationship since Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance berated Zelensky in the Oval Office early this year, but Trump’s interest in Ukraine is purely instrumental—a way to earn plaudits for peace—just as it was when he tried to get Zelensky to assist his 2020 reelection campaign by opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden.

Trump, meanwhile, has been embarrassingly acquiescent to Putin in past conversations. During a March 2018 phone call, he congratulated Putin on his victory in an election almost universally viewed as illegitimate, despite an all-caps reminder atop his briefing sheet that warned, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” This was just a teaser for a meeting four months later in Helsinki, during which Trump accepted Putin’s claim that Russia hadn’t interfered in the 2016 election, and indicated that he trusted Putin over the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus view. Today, Trump is meeting with Putin one-on-one, without aides who might help keep him on track.

Trump’s posture in Anchorage will go some way toward revealing how serious and durable his disaffection with Putin is. But it won’t end the war, and it may not even offer much progress toward a resolution. On Wednesday, Trump warned that there would be “very severe consequences” if Russia didn’t stop the war, but he declined to outline them: “I don’t have to say.” That’s unlikely to rattle Putin, who knows how to call a bluff. But at least it doesn’t give him another specific deadline to mock.

2025-08-15 21:00:00

One of the highlights of my first three years as a literature professor at MIT—and indeed, of my 15-year career as an educator—has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, formed an arts collective: The People’s Poetry. It began, I was told, with the first class I taught at the institute. Several students in that course, “Reading Poetry: Social Poetics,” created their own group chat, and eventually started meeting outside of class to write together. Every time I taught a new course, their membership grew. These engineers and scientists in training, hailing from across the world, were gathering to compose and critique poems outside the classroom.

Many of these young people were, in other classes, studying or even actively developing forms of technology that raise a range of questions about the purpose and power of human expression: why humans write or draw; what ethics govern our inspiration and training; how the creative act brings us together and alters our thinking. In the midst of a technological revolution, while taking on a notoriously difficult courseload, why have they chosen to devote their time to the ancient art of making poems?

These kinds of questions are not unprecedented at the institute. In the early 1960s, the reading series Poetry From M.I.T. explored the relationship between a strong technical education and the pursuit of the good and the beautiful. In service of this larger inquiry, the series organizers invited renowned writers such as Robert Penn Warren, Denise Levertov, and Richard Wilbur to campus to share their work. These events were broadcast on WGBH, a Boston public-radio station, and featured timely insights on where the practice of poetry and the future of technology might intersect. My students bring some version of this exploration into the classroom with striking consistency—most vividly in their observations of how it feels to use poetry to work through our obsessions, our dreams, in times like these. And at a place like this, no less: an elite research university where they spend most of their time working on projects that feel orthogonal to that sort of labor.

The poet W. S. Merwin once said that you know you are writing a poem when a “sequence of words starts giving off what you might describe as a kind of electric charge.” I’ve been thinking about how to place the sort of liveness Merwin describes—the sense of your body as a living circuit that the poem moves through—in a world filling up with noise, marred by misdirection and distraction. When, how, and why do we make room for the miraculous? From moment to moment. In any way we can. Because it is part of the practice of being human.

A poem is not merely a record of human activity; it is intended to preserve the complexity, richness, and granular details of our inner lives. Poems provide an occasion for us to talk with one another, creating a shared monument we can carry into the future, establishing a rolling record of our heroes, our planet, our kin. This art form keeps what we love from disappearing. In Odes, the Roman poet Horace writes: “Many heroes lived before Agamemnon / but they are all unweepable, overwhelmed / by the long night of oblivion / because they lacked a sacred bard.” He is referring to Homer’s epic The Iliad, a poem that survived by being passed down through live performance long before it was committed to paper. The preservation of the poem’s history, in this case, was a communal affair: from bard to bard, and audience to audience, across time and space.

[Read: What poets know that ChatGPT doesn’t]

In a moment marked by widespread institutional investment in the promise of artificial intelligence, we should be asking more about not only what AI can and cannot do but what drives the desire for its proliferation: what hope, what sense of longing, boredom, or emptiness. A large language model is a prediction machine. Crucially, it does not think or dream. It establishes the likeliest sequence of words based on its training data and relays it back to you. A well-crafted poem performs a nearly opposite function. It is made from original, dynamic language choices, and it lives and dies on its ability to surprise. It is a means of preserving the particular.

And yet I’m led to wonder whether the hunger for connection, understanding, and astonishment that seems to characterize much of the public interest in AI derives from the same needs that poetry fulfills. The AI market thrives in part as a result of our desire for optimization, efficiency. Brevity is among poetry’s greatest advantages; a poem can be written in minutes at the bus stop, during a break at work, or in those first quiet moments after dawn. Any occasion can offer inspiration: Gwendolyn Brooks composed the classic eight-line poem “We Real Cool” after seeing a group of pool players one afternoon in Chicago; Percy Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” during a competitive exchange of sonnets with a friend. At a book-launch party years ago in downtown Manhattan, I saw Sunni Patterson write a poem on the spot, minutes before going onstage, that incorporated lines from other performers who had recited their work throughout the night. In performance, this was both a mesmerizing display of processing speed and a form of loving citation.

The sheer velocity of this kind of language bears a trace of the supernatural. The words can appear to arrive from elsewhere, produced by an elevated consciousness outside our own. A mode of technology that conceals a lack of vetting, understanding, or humanity might bear a resemblance to such a consciousness in moments, but the source of its speed is not—as with Brooks, Shelley, or Patterson—a life spent working toward competence. It does not emerge from centuries of inherited language, or a bond forged for the first time in a room full of strangers and friends. It’s worth asking where the warmth of poetry, its connective power across millennia, meets the advances and demands of our technological age.

From the invention of writing to the advent of the typewriter to the rise of the personal computer as collaborator, authors have attempted to address this quandary. Twentieth-century poets across a wide aesthetic range—Robert Frost, Sun Ra, X. J. Kennedy, Nikki Giovanni—asked us to consider “our place among the infinities,” as Frost once put it, the link between our timeless yearning for the stars and the scientific leaps that brought them closer to us. More contemporary writers, including Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Keith S. Wilson (both of whom are also programmers), have designed works that combine the human voice and the music of machines. Once you know where to look, the overlap is astonishing.

One of poetry’s greatest gifts is patience—not only with the difficulties of language but with ourselves as its vessels or makers, working to bring a new vision into the world. I see this dynamic firsthand in the form of an assignment I have been offering students for almost a decade now: the end-of-semester adaptation. Therein, I ask them to take a text we’ve studied over the course of the term and transform it using the tools of a different genre. Essays, short stories, and poems metamorphose into works of choreography, short films, and, on several occasions now, projects that pull from both the digital world and the living environment.

[Read: The best American poetry of the 21st century (so far)]

Matt, for instance, adapted a Lorraine Hansberry play, What Use Are Flowers?, into a device of his own invention called Melia, which uses a field microphone, an old physics-lab computer, and a neural-net algorithm to meld the human voice with the sounds of the natural world. To truly experience Melia, you have to go outside. You have to find a place by a river, or a grove where the cardinals are talking, or a spot where the breeze is blowing through a tupelo tree, and begin to sing. Suddenly, the voice you have always known is expanded, made new. Yasmeen, in another project, transformed Nikki Giovanni’s “Winter Poem” into a series of digital collages in which people have become flowers while remaining in familiar settings and dress (imagine a bouquet of hydrangea dressed in overalls, standing in front of a farmhouse, or a rush of rhododendron in a blue suit walking down a crowded street, and you might be close).

Elizabeth took a third approach. Inspired by a class session on art-making, AI, and human imagination, she proposed a community program: Songbirds. Since her freshman year, Elizabeth has been visiting a local hospice—playing piano for elders, going on walks with them, and learning about their lives. With Songbirds, she wanted to add another element to the visits: the collaborative adaptation of memories into works of art. For this work, she initially thought of employing various AI tools as a primary means of approach. But she eventually decided to also call upon a range of older, more familiar technologies: her trusted piano, notebooks for poems, production software to engineer instrumentals. For anyone at the hospice who might be losing pieces of the past—the story of the moment he met his first great love; the last time he saw his mother alive; the day his daughter was born, said her first word, or first ran across the living room into his arms—a memory could now be preserved, with a bit of assistance, in the form of a song or poem.

In work like this, musicians, writers, and engineers all share space. They collaborate in service of human life and the preservation of all we adore. They remind us that poetry has always been a technology of memory and human connection: a way to remind ourselves of who and what we are to one another. Which is something infinitely more than we can say with words, although we must try—and in that striving, be made more lovely, and alive.

2025-08-15 20:17:51

Carrie Bradshaw’s last episode of television ended not with a bang but with a flush, which feels appropriate somehow. “Party of One,” the series finale of HBO Max’s And Just Like That, rehashes old patterns for the show’s last hurrah, but no one’s heart seems to really be in it: Miranda tries to adjust to an unexpected pregnancy; Seema wonders if she could be happily partnered without marriage; Charlotte tells Carrie, “I’m so excited to show you my new hallway,” to which Carrie replies, pro forma, “I may be alone for the rest of my life.” The image left in my head, though, is of the toilet bowl being frantically flushed by Charlotte’s art-dealer boss, a man whose private jet can’t spare him from the gastrointestinal Thanksgiving issues of a lactose-intolerant Gen Zer. Humiliation, more than anything else, has been the theme of all three seasons of And Just Like That, a cringe comedy without comedy. (Who among us will ever forget Carrie peeing into a plastic bottle while Miranda got to third base with Che in her kitchen, or Charlotte taking a pratfall onto a Tracey Emin–esque art installation and emerging with a used condom stuck to her face?)

To be fair to the series, which is more than it deserves, Sex and the City was also often about mortification—the indignity of putting yourself out there as a single woman time and time again, only to be rewarded with funky spunk, porn-addicted dates, pregnancy scares, STDs, men who can’t ejaculate without shouting misogynist slurs, envelopes full of cash on the nightstand. When it debuted on HBO in 1998, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King’s show seemed determined to puncture the fantasy of single life in post-feminist Manhattan. “Welcome to the age of un-innocence,” Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie narrated in the pilot. “No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7 a.m. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.”

[Read: And Just Like That is a far cry from Sex and the City]

Over the course of six seasons and two movies, the show’s thrillingly cynical core got smothered by cloying commercialism—a fixation on both wide-eyed romance and flamboyant luxury. What stayed consistent, though, was the disgust the show seemed to manifest anytime it was forced to think about the corporeal bodies beneath the characters’ clothes: Carrie’s horror at Miranda’s postpartum nipples and Samantha’s disgust at her unwaxed bikini line, Charlotte’s refusal to look at her own vagina, Anthony’s appalled proclamation—when Samantha returned from Los Angeles approximately three pounds heavier—of “Mother of God, what’s with the gut!”

And Just Like That has been a lot of things since its debut late in 2021: an apologia for the sins of the past, a lookbook, a backdrop for cameos from the two most Machiavellian men on reality television. But it’s consistently been oddly squeamish about both sex and human physicality—almost pathologically so. During the first season, critics winced at the heavy-handed flagellation of the characters for their unconscious bias and uptight middle age; during the second, the show’s lack of purpose and stakes crystallized into excruciating storylines about strap-on sex toys and, in one case, an unsolicited octogenarian dick pic that rudely interrupted a fundraiser with Gloria Steinem. The third season, set in the more genteel location of Carrie’s new Gramercy Park townhouse, seemed nevertheless stuck on the idea that anyone still tuning in must be watching with the sound off, cackling at the visuals of their favorite characters being ritualistically shamed for the crime of aging.

And so: We had not one but two stories about Harry’s penis—first a brief examination of something called “ghost sperm” that troubled Charlotte during sex, followed by a multi-episode storyline about prostate cancer that left Harry impotent and peeing all over his raw-denim jeans. Seema’s armpits occupied a variety of scenes, culminating in the gardener she began dating recommending a crystal deodorant that failed her during a crucial business meeting. Charlotte’s sudden struggle with vertigo left her staggering all over Manhattan like a toddler on a boat. Miranda, cursed on this show like no one else, had sex with someone who turned out to be a virgin nun, accidentally flashed Carrie, became a meme after a disastrous appearance on live television, and eventually found love with a woman who’s strikingly weird about her dogs, even for a Brit.

[Read: We need to talk about Miranda]

And Just Like That, as Jake Nevins wrote in July, “feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves.” The pie shoved in Anthony’s face by his lover, Giuseppe, felt like a neat distillation of how crudely the series seemed to clown its characters, week after week after week. Earlier this year, I wrote about television’s current obsession with extreme wealth, and how shows such as And Just Like That suffer from the diminished stakes that come with easy abundance. When you’re insulated from calamity, maybe, the worst thing that can happen is physical degradation—a reminder that no matter how big your closet, how exclusive your couture, we all share the same basic bodily functions, which can fail and shame us in all the same discomfiting ways. Still, the casual cruelty with which And Just Like That treated its cast’s bodies as punch lines and visual gags seemed to suggest a deeper unease with what it means to age—to be undeniably, messily human.

The show occasionally expressed the same kind of disgust toward poverty, or toward any evidence of how rising inequality in New York has left many people to live. In the finale, Carrie visits her old apartment, now occupied by a jewelry designer named Lisette, and is horrified to see that Lisette has divided the studio into two claustrophobic spaces with a temporary wall, presumably because she can’t afford roughly 600 square feet on the Upper East Side all by herself. The moment reminded me of a plotline in Season 2, in which Miranda went home with a voice actor who was her dream date, only to be repelled by the woman’s cramped space: the cat-litter tray, the unmade bed.

No one wants their fantasies to be punctured so abruptly, and yet both scenes demonstrate how out of touch these characters have become, and how hard it is for us to empathize with them in turn. Anthropological curiosity used to define Carrie’s work as a columnist; now, in her 50s, she’s happier behind the walls of an inward-facing fantasy land, posing for no one in her pre–Gilded Age living room, and turning her romantic misadventures into a god-awfully mawkish historical novel. It’s not the ending I would have chosen, but it sure does make it easier to say goodbye.

2025-08-15 20:00:00

2025-08-15 18:00:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

[Music]

Garry Kasparov: I was born on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. When I visited Ronald Reagan’s Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, California, in 2016, they had a big piece of the wall Reagan helped tear down on display. I joked that I didn’t recognize it because I had only seen the other side.

Back in 1987, I was speaking at an event in West Germany, and I told people that I was sure that the collapse of the Berlin Wall was inevitable and would happen very soon. They looked at me like, Okay, that’s crazy. But he’s young, 24, and he’s just a chess player. What does he know? And they stopped listening. This was before Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin, which was around a month later.

Another famous four words from a U.S. president also concerned Berlin. President Harry Truman said We stay in Berlin, to promise that U.S. forces would protect and supply West Berlin during Stalin’s siege of the city in 1948: the famous Berlin airlift. Not to put myself in the company of U.S. presidents, but I was inspired by Reagan and Truman in my own Berlin speech at Aspen Institute on October 14th, 2015.

I titled it “Four Words to Change History.” I said, “We must remember that societies do not have values. People have values. If we want our values to succeed, we must protect the people who hold them wherever they are, whoever they are. And if I may finish with my own four words here today: Fight for our values.”

From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.

[Music]

My guest is Mathias Döpfner, joining me from Berlin. He’s a journalist who is now the CEO of the multinational media and technology company Axel Springer. He leads dozens of publications in many countries, including Politico and Business Insider in the United States and Bild and Die Welt in Germany, among many others. He is German, and it is a German perspective I was after from him. Many around Europe and the world are waiting for Germany to lead. So will it?

[Music]

Kasparov: Hello, Mathias. Thank you very much for joining our program.

Mathias Döpfner: Hello, Garry.

Kasparov: Quick question. Are you at your office now?

Döpfner: Absolutely, at my office in Berlin.

Kasparov: So I want to let the listeners know that this office, that was built by the founder of your company Axel Springer, if I’m correct, in 1966, it’s literally next to the former Berlin Wall that divided—physically divided—the free and unfree world back during the Cold War. So it was standing on the edge of democracy and autocracy. Not anymore, now. But not to put too fine a point on it: It is precisely what this show is about. So from this perch, tell me—what do you see as a principal threat to democracy in Europe? And what is Europe’s place in this ever-changing world today?

Döpfner: Yeah; thank you, Garry. So sitting here in our kind of historic headquarters building, it’s a golden skyscraper right at the edge of the former wall and death strip. Just to illustrate that: When we literally cross the street in order to get to the new part of our headquarters, we cross a row of cobblestones, and these cobblestones are marking exactly the spot where the wall used to be. So this building literally was built as a lighthouse of freedom, as the founder called it. It turned out to be the new center of a reunified Berlin and a reunified Germany, with a lot of euphoria around the idea that freedom prevails, the open-society model prevails.

And at the moment it looks quite different, and it looks different from a factual base. If you check the results of Freedom House analysis and other comparable analyses of the state of freedom, then you see a freedom recession globally for many years. There’s never been such a significant downgrading of formerly free countries to partly free and formerly partly free countries to unfree. But also most of the centrist democracies are in relatively weak shape, whereas autocratic authoritarian systems pretty systematically achieve their goals and gain ground.

So it’s quite a challenging time for the open-society model. And on top of that, we have internal issues. I think we should not only look at the external threats and the autocrats and dictators, we should also look at ourselves and what we need to do differently in order to succeed.

Kasparov: Agreed. So let’s look deep inside. Let’s start with Germany. So 35 years ago there was a reunification. Many believed, you know, it would be beyond our wildest dreams and it would never happen. It did happen. Has unification happened in minds as well as geographically and politically?

Döpfner: Well, Garry, I’m not a diplomat, so I speak very openly. Also if it’s about my own country. I remember very well when the wall came down. A prominent publisher here in Berlin, Wolf Jobst Siedler, said it’s going to take at least a generation until we will see real integration of mindset, and until we see real unification psychologically and mentally. I thought this was totally exaggerated, that it was going to be a question of two, three, five years. It’s now more than a quarter of a century, and still there is quite a significant divide. There is still an East and West Germany, and you see that on many levels also politically. At the same time, we also have to realistically see that all together—with regard to management and the economy—the reunification was a success and went well, and there is a lot of prosperity. And if you go to the East German cities and compare them, how they look like 30 years ago—uncomparable. And there is so much progress and wealth and positive development that we should also not be too negative about it. We should be also a bit thankful.

On the third level, and that I think is the most important one, Germany has developed, for many various reasons, a degree of complacency that I find more and more dangerous. And I think we have to really take that as a warning call to do things differently. And here, of course, there is a lot of hope with regard to the new government that is in place and that could, with strong leadership, solve the problems—most importantly, the problem of an economic turnaround. And with regard to migration, we also need a very significant shift conceptually and with regard to execution. I think those are the two most important topics, but that requires really bold decisions in leadership.

Kasparov: After unification, Germany has become the largest country in Europe, and it’s a driving engine of the European Union. But considering the, historical, call it liabilities or historical baggage, so, is Germany ready now—after so many years, 80 years since the end of World War II—is Germany ready to overcome this sense of historical guilt and to become a positive force to take a lead?

Döpfner: That’s a very interesting question, Garry. Because truly I think this phase of German history during the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and everything that led to this unparalleled horrors have deeply traumatized the country and in a way discredited the term leadership and the idea of leadership and even the idea of excellence, to a certain degree. The unfortunate misunderstanding of this chapter of German history is that not only you should never be involved in any form of military conflict; pacifism is a naive idea. The second horrible misunderstanding is that leadership and excellence is almost something negative. It associates with Germany needs to lead the world and needs to dominate the world. And the irony is that almost everybody in Europe and in the entire world is waiting for German leadership and thinks Germany needs to lead it—needs to lead Europe together with other countries. And that leads me to the second element of your question. Are we able to overcome the traumas? Hopefully not in the sense that we forget about it. I think what happens should never be forgotten and we should learn from that. But we should learn the right lessons.

And the right lessons are always: Do everything to defend the free-and-open-society model. And if we lead with good intentions and in the spirit of partnership together with others, then I think that is the most credible and the most successful mindset. I think apart from a right value set and system of coordinates, the most important thing that the new German chancellor needs to prove and needs to have is courage. To move fast, to act and not only speak, and to really tackle the two biggest priorities: economy and migration.

Kasparov: Yeah, I think of one of Winston Churchill’s famous phrases: that no success is final, no failure is fatal, what counts is the courage to continue. Because he has challenges both domestically and internationally. So you mentioned economy and migration. Now, do you consider energy independence as a part of the economy?

Döpfner: Very big issue. Here, the elephant in the room is nuclear energy. Will this government go back to nuclear power plants? That is the big question that everybody is asking at the moment in Germany, because an energy policy that is based on windmills or only solar is not going to solve the problems and is not going to provide the energy that you need, also with regard to excellence in artificial intelligence, so—

Kasparov: But let us again remind our audience that Germany made the decision to walk away from nuclear energy. What, back in 2011, yes?

Döpfner: Yeah, I remember. I can share an anecdote with you. I remember very well. I was invited to the Russian Embassy by the Russian ambassador with a group of editors of Axel Springer for lunch. And it was a coincidence that the lunch took place on that very day, and each person had a glass of vodka at the table. And before we started, the ambassador was raising the vodka glasses and said, Let me cheer to the German chancellor. The decision to drop out of nuclear energy will be very good for Russian energy and for the Russian economy. And people looked a little bit irritated and basically thought it’s a joke, but then they realized it was the—

Kasparov: It was greatest gift to [Vladimir] Putin.

Döpfner: Right, exactly.

Kasparov: Because that made Russia the sole supplier or this major supplier of energy to Germany—and via Germany to many other European countries.

Döpfner: I personally think it was one of the most irresponsible decisions of German governments in postwar history, because not only did it create the biggest damage to the German economy and the German energy sector, but more importantly, it has basically strengthened and financed the Putin that we have to deal with since then—and the Putin who then invaded Crimea and who then invaded Ukraine. And the money is the main resource that has funded that war. It’s quite a sad case, and it shows again why trade policy, economic policy, is so directly intertwined with geopolitics and security politics. And that’s why this whole decision to drop out of nuclear energy is way, way bigger than just a topic in the context of coalition scenarios or energy policies. It goes way beyond it.

Kasparov: Now, the German political map today—again, I’m old enough to remember when Germany was in a classic two-party system, you know, social Democrats on the central left, and Christian Democrats on the right. Now it’s a mess. But the danger is that we could see in Germany as everywhere, both in America and Europe, the growing strengths of the radicals on the far left and far right. So the German political map today has a great number of MPs and growing strength of both AfD—Alternative für Deutschland, far right—and also two far-left groups. So how do you describe this new—the political realignment? And how dangerous is the threat of these combined attacks on democracy from the far right and far left? Obviously the far-right group is much bigger. They won more than 20 percent in the last elections, and I think now, their popularity level stands at nearly 25 percent. So just give us just a little bit of a sense of this very dispersed political field. So the political map is quite messy for the traditional two-party system.

Döpfner: This phenomenon, I think it is simply the result of failed and unsuccessful centrist policies and the lack of credibility of centrist political leaders. So if we tackle that problem, we should first look at what did the centrist parties, what did the older parties, the political establishment do wrong? And why feel people, the need to look for alternatives and shift more to the extremes? Why are they seduced by the easy solutions? And I think that is also a pretty global phenomenon where the extremes are getting stronger. The center has made mistakes and should start with self-criticism. Now, concretely to Germany, both extremes are very dangerous and have some ideas that are very anti-constitutional and particularly dangerous with regard to geopolitics and the future of open societies.

Kasparov: Yeah. I want to just talk a bit more about AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. Because the other far-right groups and parties like in France—Marine Le Pen’s—or Nigel Farage [and the] Reform Party in Great Britain—they refuse to deal with AfD. They believe it’s too far right and it has an open nostalgia for Nazi Germany. So can you tell us more about the nature of this party and the threat it can represent to German democracy and to European integration? Because it’s, of course, it’s against a united Europe.

Döpfner: I think indeed the foreign-policy concepts, the geopolitical consequences, of that are by far the biggest threat that this party provides. The admiration for strongmen and autocratic countries—like almost Russia, but also China and others—reflect a totally different idea of society, a different idea of leadership. And also the consequences geopolitically would be horrific, I think, for the open-society model and the world order that we are discussing today. That’s why I find it particularly hard to understand why this movement is so much more popular in the eastern states of Germany than in the western part of Germany. And that is actually counterintuitive, because you should think like other Eastern European countries—who basically experienced Soviet communism and the ruthlessness of that system—that should lead to a lot of realistic and skeptical expectations with regard to future relationships with Russia, and the future influence of Russia or dealing with China. But the opposite seems to be true. And that is, for me, very hard to explain. Honestly, Garry, I have no very convincing explanation for that.

Kasparov: Let’s talk about sympathy to AfD not from the east, but from the west. Actually the far, far west—in D.C. So it seems there are quite a few fans of AfD in Trump’s administration. Definitely it’s J. D. Vance, who openly supported not just AfD but almost every far-right political group in Europe that was fighting in the elections to get into power. So how do you explain that?

Döpfner: I think it would be particularly negative for the United States, because in large parts of the party there is a deeply rooted anti-Americanist approach, a deeply rooted anti-capitalist approach. And I would be curious how that would play out with regard to the transatlantic relationship. I mean, just take the very concrete request or proposal: no American weapons on German ground. That’s funny. Putin will like that, but that’s not good for Germany. Now, maybe some people in America may say, Well, that’s nice for America, because we have lower expenses in that context. But I think the price that the United States would pay in the long term for that would be enormous, would go up, definitely. Because a Putin that is encouraged by such a move would not stop in Ukraine. He would go further.

Kasparov: So am I hearing you saying that without America, without American leadership, the global democracy will be in peril and may collapse?

Döpfner: Yes. I think it’s a very nice but slightly naive idea that now the big historic opportunity is, since America is sending a lot of disturbing and surprising signals, Europe could do it alone or could do it better. It’s not going to work.

[Music]

Döpfner: The challenges of China, the challenges of Russia, and the challenges of Islamist dictatorships are much too big in order to be solved by Europe alone, and I would even go that far— they are also way too big than being solvable by the United States alone.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Kasparov: But let’s look at this geopolitical chess board: The United States, China, and of course Russia is still there. So it’s a relatively small economy, but you have nukes, [an] army, you have a crazy dictator who made war as an engine of his power. And what is Europe here? Because I think one of the problems between Europe and America and now the way, I think, the Trump administration is viewing Europe is—Europe is divided, is too weak. And Germany is not ready to play the leading role to unite Europe—and to make it speak with one voice that could put Europe at this negotiating table and make, you know, European opinion, European power, to be counted. Do you believe that Europe still has its potential, again led by Germany, to make herself relevant?

Döpfner: The short answer is yes. Europe is a sleeping beauty. It’s just a great continent with wonderful countries and a beautiful, probably the most attractive, lifestyle in the world. But it’s also sleeping. It’s sleeping because it developed a very dangerous degree of complacency. Now the question is: Can that be changed? And here, my take is more optimistic. I think what is happening at the moment in the world is very disturbing. And it can be the beginning of the end—it can be the beginning of the end of the open-society model, of the idea of a free rules–based society, of democracy, of the rule of law, of human rights. And we will have a very different world order. Now, being at the verge of that, seeing the dangers and facing a lot of volatility in the United States and a lot of rigor and aggression in nondemocratic superpowers like China, I think it has the potential to really be the healthy wake-up call—the healthy wake-up call for democracy in the open-society model, and the healthy wake-up call for Europe. And then I think that would be a reawakening of Europe. aAnd suddenly in 10 years, the world can look completely different. People may say, Wow, what a shift of labor, excellence, know-how, value creation to European countries. What a different world where these open societies stick together and build strategic alliances in the economy, but also in the field of defense and security. So I truly think we are at a pivotal moment where both is possible: the beginning of the end, or the healthy wake-up call that starts a new decade, a new century, where Europe plays a more important and a better role.

Kasparov: You said, I think, sleeping beauty. For me, that doesn’t constitute any strength. So it is basically waiting for a courageous prince to wake her up with a magic kiss. Is it a sleeping beauty or a sleeping giant?

Döpfner: That’s a very good point. It’s a beautiful giant, let’s call it. But in any case—

Kasparov: That’s an interesting mixture.

Döpfner It’s—in any case, we definitely agree that it’s sleeping at the moment, but I also agree with your criticism of beauty is not enough. And I think with the right injection of energy and ambition and aspiration, it can be a new player, a new giant.

Kasparov: Three and a half years of war in Ukraine. You can hear them from Berlin. Was it not enough to wake Europe up? So how come that in three and a half years, Europe—Europe!—has provided less help for Ukraine than North Korea for Russia? You’re still contemplating your next moves. You don’t want to see that Putin is at war with Europe. It’s a kind of hybrid war. He has been openly interfering in elections in Germany, in Romania, in France, in Britain. So everywhere. What else do you need to wake up? And let’s again go back to Germany—can Germany just take a lead? Three and a half years have been lost, so what does come next?

Döpfner: First of all, Garry, I totally agree with your analysis. Secondly, I don’t have a very good answer why it’s still sleeping. I wrote a text a few days after the invasion in Ukraine and said, This is now a moment where the West has to act, where NATO members have to act. Whether it’s under Article V or not. But this is the moment where we have to show strength, because only strength and military deterrence is avoiding an escalation and is avoiding a bigger and long-lasting conflict. And if we don’t do that, the price is going to be higher. I was criticized as a warmonger; I was criticized to risk a nuclear escalation. And so on.

So from today’s perspective, it feels quite sad, because I still think—and I’m still deeply convinced—had we acted faster and more determinedly, we could have avoided a large degree of what has happened since then. And now we are in a much worse place. Nevertheless, I think it is not too late, and if you just take a percentage of budgets that NATO members and the West is basically investing in order to stop Putin, it is so minor. It is so minimal compared to what Putin is investing. And that leads me to the very simple result: If we would want to stop that, we could stop it. And there is, I don’t know—it’s a mix of opportunism and naivety. And also a wrong narrative, that only if we are nice to Putin and if we are not focusing too much on military force, only then we can calm him down, which is so wrong. It is misreading so much the mind of almost all totalitarian leaders, and particularly of Putin, who is basically testing the West and always seeing how far can he go. And the further we let him go, the more he will do, and the higher the price is going to be. So it is already late. It’s not too late, but we wasted a lot of time.

Kasparov: Again, realistically, so whatever we say about NATO and its historical role, the role has played over 75 years. I mean, it’s dead now. It’s not functioning. And definitely, the next three-plus years, while Trump is in office, nobody expects NATO to be what it used to be—the organization that we relied upon for decades. I share your optimism that, you know, eventually there will be some kind of new alignment or realignment in European-American relations. The global democracies will get together. But that’s in the future. But currently, we have the war. So can Germany, in your opinion, lead this new defense alliance as the prototype for the future version of NATO—to make sure that this war can be won, or at least Ukraine can survive the Russian onslaught? And, what are the limits for Germany in building such an alliance? How realistic is it to envision the German role as an engine for this defense coalition?

Döpfner: Can Germany do that? Yes; Germany can do that. Will Germany do that is more complex. And here I think there is one psychological reason why there is a risk that is not happening. And I mentioned that already. It is history. It is a bit this fear of taking military leadership. I mean, the world was fearing for decades, for good reasons, for German military initiatives, for military ambitions, in a way for military leadership. And I think that is also a very, very kind of poisoned ground.

And that may lead to more reluctance than we need, and that could be a reason why it’s not happening or why it’s not happening fast enough. But if I may, let us also not forget the possibility that something happens that may be surprising from today’s perspective, but psychologically not unlikely. And that is the more Putin plays with Trump, the more he publicly embarrasses Trump—gaining time, not making real concessions, not sticking to agreements, the more Donald Trump could feel provoked. And if Putin continues to do that, then I think Trump could surprise everybody by really changing his mind completely. And then we could have a totally different situation, not only psychologically, but also militarily.

Kasparov: Oh, I’m afraid you’re a dreamer, Mathias.

Döpfner: Maybe I am a dreamer, yeah. But do you really think that it’s realistic that Trump leaves the field as the loser, having been kind of outsmarted by Putin and basically saying, Okay, I resign. You won, Vladimir. I just leave the battlefield as a loser. For me, it’s also hard to imagine, simply psychologically.

Kasparov: Yeah. But Trump’s psychology, it’s just, it’s always to turn any failure into a victory. Okay then; now just going to the end of our conversation. So let’s concentrate on what Germany could, should, and hopefully will do. So will Germany move on with the rearmament plans? So investing heavily in its military-industrial complex, building new weapons, and becoming a military powerhouse once again?

Döpfner: I think the likelihood is very high, if you just look to the kind of changes in social behavior. Just a few years ago, people from the weapon—from the defense industry were not even invited to dinner parties. Today, they are stars of dinner parties. Everybody talks to them. They are perceived as heroes. They are perceived as guards of freedom and democracy. So the mindset has really fundamentally changed. And also the number of start-ups that are dealing with drones, and dealing with new technologies of defense, is skyrocketing. People are preparing for that, and everybody sees the need for that. So the likelihood that that mindset changes is pretty high.

Kasparov: So do you think that it’s realistic that Germany will also build its strong army that will become the core of this military barrier against potential Russian aggression?

Döpfner: Mmm, that’s a long shot. I don’t know how developed the willingness of German people is to defend their country. I think it’s already tough to defend our country, and even tougher to defend Europe. But maybe I have a slightly—maybe my take is too negative here.

Kasparov: Yeah. No, but it’s very important to hear—because I’m afraid, you know, I share your pessimism here. All these guns, all these shells, all these drones: They are not too effective without the willpower behind it. Without manpower behind it. And it seems to me that Germany is yet to cross this road. So it’s like from West Berlin to East Berlin. So just from this historical guilt, you know, from this peace-mongering to war reality. Can you imagine just, you know, that as a part of this coalition, Germany may develop nuclear weapons to deter Russia?

Döpfner: Unlikely.

Kasparov: Unlikely. So that means that Germany will always depend on other countries, because the successful deterrence is not—against Russia—will not work without a nuclear umbrella. So who will provide the nuclear umbrella during Trump’s years? France, Britain? How do you think Germany will manage it?

Döpfner: Maybe France and Britain will play a bigger role. That’s a possibility. But again, I think without America, it’s going to be very tough. That’s why it is in our very vital interest to keep a healthy relationship with America, regardless whether we like the government or not. It’s an overarching paradigm, I think, for Europe and for Germany.

Kasparov: So just a very final question. So you just give us the next three years, just for the next three years of the Trump administration: What will be the ideal outcome? So for us to dream about 2028— from the German perspective?

Döpfner: Strong German leadership leads to conceptual priorities. One is to lead Europe in military strength and support in Ukraine, in defense, in order to limit Putin’s aggression. That will impress the United States, because a stronger Europe will be taken more seriously. And a Europe that does more for its own defense will be more credible as a partner to negotiate deals on other levels.

And the second thing will be changed in Germany and in Europe. And that is: that we reach out to America, agreeing on a mutual strategy, trade strategy, toward China, defend that strategy together at the negotiation table. Achieve a much, much better deal with China that strengthens Europe and America. That weakens Putin, that limits China, that strengthens the democratic world. That will be the beginning of a new, prosperous era for America. America First from an American perspective, and a stronger Europe, Europe First, from a European perspective. But based on mutual values excelling together. That would be the most optimistic outcome that would strengthen the open-society model and freedom and democracy. But Garry, honestly, that is the ultimate degree of optimism that I can develop at this stage. Let’s work on that. Let’s hope for it. But let’s not count on it. Prepare for the worst in order to get positively surprised.

[Music]

Kasparov: Yes, we can prepare for the worst, but it’s very important to have a vision. And thank you very much for laying down this positive vision, Mathias. And I hope that at least part of this vision will be realized soon.

Döpfner: That would be something.

Kasparov: And first of all is, of course, you know, for Ukraine A) to survive, B) to win. And eventually the Putin regime to collapse and Europe to become a real geopolitical player: to wake up from its sleep and to become, as you said, a beautiful giant on the world stage.

Döpfner: Wonderful. I totally agree.

Kasparov: Yes. Thank you very much, Mathias; thank you.

Döpfner: Thank you, Garry.

Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen: We are an example that a country can live. It can have a great standard, can have free speech, can have human rights in quite a short time. And I think that is the painful thing for the Kremlin. They do not want to see successful countries from the former empire. Because it might lead their people to think that there is another way. There is another track for their country, as well. And that is definitely very scary for the regime.

Kasparov: I’m Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.