Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are at their best when they disagree, and I enjoyed their discussion about the disastrous exchange between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky at the White House. Both agree that the U.S. is right to push for a negotiated settlement, which involves pressuring Ukraine to acknowledge its precarious position. However, they diverge on how this pressure was communicated and its potential repercussions. Glenn argues that Trump and the vice president rightly prioritized American interests by applying pressure on Zelensky, while John takes the opposite stance, framing his argument within a broader critique of the U.S. president and his administration.
Read MoreLast week, I questioned how seriously we should take the initial direction of Mr. Trump’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine—an approach that involves openly conceding to Russia’s demand for territorial annexation and a binding commitment to block Ukraine from NATO membership. This was followed by a bizarre attack on Zelensky on X, where the U.S. president accused his Ukrainian counterpart of being a dictator and of instigating the war. On Friday, scenes at the White House made it abundantly clear: we should take it very seriously indeed. On first glance, Noah Smith and Niall Ferguson were right, and I was wrong. The fates of the key players in this drama are deeply intertwined and will converge soon enough, but it’s worth examining them separately.
Read MoreNoah Smith, an American columnist and Substacker, and historian Niall Ferguson both made the mistake last week of attempting to rationalise the Trump administration’s fumbling attempts to get Ukrainian peace talks underway.
Niall Ferguson appears to be making a completely reasonable point—one echoed by numerous other observers last week—that it was a mistake for the U.S. to publicly acknowledge that Ukraine can never become a full member of NATO and that the country must cede territory to Russia as part of any peace deal, even if both positions are widely accepted on the Western and Ukrainian sides of the negotiations. This, of course, was before Mr. Trump went on one of his ill-advised social media rampages, effectively accusing Ukraine of starting the war and labeling its sitting president a dictator.
Read MoreMillennials, according to the internet, are people born between 1981 and 1996. That's a bit of a gap, so it will be useful to narrow down the definition of our protagonist somewhat. This is a story about a relatively old Millennial, born in 1984. It is not at all inconceivable that this person will have a different perspective from a namesake born in the middle of the 1990s. This is a bias that we must accept such as it is. Even more specifically, this is a story about European millennial, born in Denmark, who has ended up in the United Kingdom. He is married to a Canadian woman of Guyanese, and ultimately Indian, descent, who is now a naturalised English citizen. The melting pot is real, and millennials are sizzling in its cauldron.
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