Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Not Doomed Yet: The Can of Fanta in the Mariana Trench
This is ‘Not Doomed Yet,’ The Atlantic’s newsletter about global warming. It lives here in the science section; you can also get it in your inbox: Enter your email address powered by TinyLetter It’s been a little more than two months since I last sent a newsletter. Friends are starting to write in, concerned: “Rob, are we...
Donald Trump’s Crimean Gambit
Donald Trump’s call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails Wednesday resulted in widespread criticism. But his comments on Crimea, coupled with ones he made last week on NATO, are likely to have greater significance if he is elected president in November.The question came from Mareike Aden, a German reporter, who asked him whether...
What If Russia Invaded the Baltics—and Donald Trump Was President?
In 2014, shortly after Russia forcefully intervened in Ukraine and admitted Crimea into the Russian Federation, Richard Shirreff stepped down as NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe, one of the highest-ranking positions in the military alliance. The British general proceeded to do something highly unusual. He criticized the...
Donald Trump Has Turned the Republicans Into the Party of Russia
The first excuse for Donald Trump’s amazing press conference on Wednesday, in which he called on the Russians to hack and publish the 30,000 emails wiped from Hillary Clinton’s home server, was: He was only joking.That excuse almost immediately dissolved. When Trump was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta whether he would call on Vladimir...
What’s NATO For, Anyway?
Donald Trump shocked foreign-policy professionals and observers when he remarked to The New York Times that if he were president, the United States might not come to the defense of an attacked NATO ally that hadn’t fulfilled its “obligation to make payments.” The remark broke with decades of bipartisan commitment to the alliance and, as...
Trump Time Capsule #57: Russia, and Taxes
Donald Trump yesterday in North Carolina. (Carlo Allegri / Reuters)When something goes wrong, I start with blunder, confusion, and miscalculation as the likely explanations. Planned-out wrongdoing is harder to pull off, more likely to backfire, and thus less probable.It is getting more difficult to discuss the apparent Russian role in the DNC...
A Bernie Voter, From Ukraine, on the Putin Story
I think this is very interesting: a reader who knows Russia and Ukraine, on how he reads the unfolding “Putin angle” news. I’m a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, now a naturalized citizen of the United States. I also was a Bernie Sanders voter in the primary, who will be voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election. This is probably the...
Trump Time Capsule #56: Russian Quids and Quos
Strong man. (RIA Novosti / via Reuters)Suspicions about foreign interference in U.S. politics have arisen before. In 1980, the Ayatollah’s Iranian government may have delayed the the release of American hostages as a way of punishing Jimmy Carter in his race against Ronald Reagan. If you’d like a whole new field of inquiry, you can...
The Muscovite Candidate?
Sometimes a conspiracy theory can be true. Or, to put it another way, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.Take the burgeoning email leaks scandal that hit the Democratic National Committee on Friday. A searchable cache of 20,000 emails showed up on WikiLeaks. The dump arrived about five weeks...
The Logic of the Political Purge
The attempted coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016, could have been a promising moment, one that encouraged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pursue a decidedly more democratic path. He could have used the opportunity to educate his citizens on the merits of electoral, rather than military, solutions to political conflict. After every major opposition...
