Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 11

“The U.N. is a Massive Club for Dictators” | Reason at OFF | November 29, 2022

Historic protests are happening all over the world. Meet the @HRF activists fighting authoritarian regimes. Via @jimepstein, @GoMakeFilms, @reason, & me. #ChinaUprising #IranRevoIution @AlinejadMasih @leopoldolopez @AnnaKwokFY @Kasparov63 @ThorHalvorssen pic.twitter.com/TdNywpKfqr

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) December 1, 2022

.@Kasparov63 told the audience that #Ukraine “is not just a battlefield but a frontline of the total war against freedom and tyranny.” https://t.co/ugHbc7TarX

— Francisco Taveira (@jftaveira1993) November 30, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can read the original at Reason.

By Jim Epstein, Nick Gillespie, and Danielle Thompson

“The United Nations is a massive club for dictators,” says Thor Halvorssen, the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a nonprofit founded in 2005. “The rich, powerful, and corrupt get together in Davos. Well, some of the world’s bravest people get together at the Oslo Freedom Forum.”

On October 3, 2022, the HRF convened the Oslo Freedom Forum, a one-day conference at Manhattan’s Town Hall, bringing together political activists from around the world to call attention to rising authoritarianism in China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and other countries.

There were no wonkish policy panels or PowerPoint slides cluttered with data and footnotes. The conference featured instead a series of TED Talk–style speeches, delivered without notes and designed to forge an emotional connection between the audience and the presenters.

Among the speakers: Anna Kwok, who worked as an anonymous online organizer during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests of 2019, which took place as China consolidated power over the once-free city; Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights activist and lawyer based in Kyiv; Leopoldo López, a Venezuelan human rights activist who spent five years in prison after organizing massive protests against the government in 2014; and Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iranian journalist and activist who helped bring attention to protests against mandatory hijab laws in her home country even before the murder of Mahsa Amini drew international outrage.

HRF’s chairman, former World Chess Champion and arch-critic of Vladimir Putin, Garry Kasparov, also addressed the gathering, telling the audience that Ukraine “is not just a battlefield but a frontline of the total war against freedom and tyranny.”

Reason spent the day backstage talking to the participants and organizers about the Human Rights Foundation’s mission of building a united community to counter rising authoritarianism around the globe. The speakers argued for a range of actions from free nations to expand human rights, ranging from heightened diplomatic pressure to increased military aid to sanction regimes that would cut countries such as China and Saudi Arabia off from the global economy.

“People say, ‘You oppose dictatorships, you are a neocon, you want to go to war with these dictatorships,'” says HRF’s Halvorssen. “I’m not asking for boots on the ground, I’m not asking for an invasion of any country. The problems of Venezuela will be solved by Venezuelans. The problems of Russia will be solved by Russians. What we should do is at least encourage them.” He continues, “What always occurs, there comes a point when the men holding guns at the people decide, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.'”

Produced by Jim Epstein and Nick Gillespie; narrated by Gillespie; written and shot by Epstein; edited by Danielle Thompson; post-production assistance by John Osterhoudt; audio post-production by Ian Keyser. 

Photos: Cao Sanchez/Polaris/Newscom; Yury Martyanov/Kommersant Photo / Polaris/Newscom; Kommersant Photo Agency/Kommersant/Newscom; Katherine Li/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Katherine Li/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Human Rights Foundation; Human Rights Foundation; Polaris/Newscom; Lan Hongguang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; UPPA/ZUMApress/Newscom; Abaca Press/Balkis Press/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; HO/Newscom; LONG WEI/FEATURECHINA/Newscom; TOM WALKER/UPI/Newscom; Ernesto Mastrascusa/EFE/Newscom; CRISTIAN HERNANDEZ / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EFE/Newscom; Boris Vergara / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Ukraine Presidency/SIPA/Newscom; MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EFE/Newscom; Valentin Yegorshin/TASS/Newscom; Genin-Hahn-Marechal/ABACA/Newscom; Abaca Press/SalamPix/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; Farnood/SIPA/Newscom; Stringer/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Jaap Arriens/Sipa USA/Newscom; Social Media/ZUMA press/Newscom; Rouzbeh Fouladi/ZUMA Press/Newscom; PRESIDENT.IR/UPI/Newscom; Panoramic/ZUMA Press/Newscom; April Brady/Project on Middle East Democracy, CC by 2.0, via Flickr; Depo Photos/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Saudi press Agency/UPI/Newscom; Abaca Press/Balkis Press/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; State Department/Sipa USA/Newscom; Rayner Pena/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Pavel Golovkin/Pool/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Footage: Hong Kong footage by Edwin Lee

Music: “Seeking Truth” by The David Roy Collective via Artlist; “Passion” by ANBR via Artlist; “Take Up Your Cross” by The David Roy Collective via Artlist; “Come Back Home” by Ardie Son via Artlist; “A Perfect Storm” by Ardie Son via Artlist; “Intrepid” by Brianna Tam via Artlist; “The New World” by Ardie Son via Artlist; “A Tender Heart” by The David Roy Collective via Artlist”

Appearance on the Secret Genius of Modern Life, 3: Virtual Assistants | BBC | November 24, 2022

Another great show about how technology was invented and the history behind it! – Episode 3 with @FryRsquared with clips of @Kasparov63
The Secret Genius of Modern Life: Virtual Assistants https://t.co/MaLatB1NnS

— ScienceTCS (@corsham_science) November 25, 2022

You can watch my appearance at the BBC.

“Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, which are now found in almost half of all UK homes.

Hannah goes behind the scenes with Alexa’s chief scientist, reveals how secret technology invented to hunt U-boats led to their targeted hearing and discovers modern wireless networks’ debt to a 1940s Hollywood star”

The Time Has Come for Decisive Action against the Aggressor | The Free Russia Forum and European Belarus | November 23, 2022

You can read the original statement at the Free Russia Forum.

“Putin’s war against Ukraine has entered a new phase. Unable to defeat the Ukrainians on the battlefield, Putin has decided to starve Ukraine out by launching massive strikes against its civilian infrastructure. His goal is obvious—to leave Ukrainians without light and heat in anticipation of the onset of the winter cold, to demoralize them, to sow despondency and fear. He will not achieve his goal; he will not be able to break the people who have been resisting armed aggression for several months now, fighting for their freedom. However, this very tactic of destroying civilian infrastructure poses a threat to the life and health of millions of people, including women, children, and the elderly, who may be left without heat and light for the entire winter. In light of this danger, we can say that Putin’s strikes amount to acts of genocide against the Ukrainian people, aimed at inflicting maximum damage on the civilian population of Ukraine.

Given these conditions, it is necessary to stop diplomatic maneuvers aimed at preventing a possible escalation of the conflict. Escalation is already occurring constantly, both in the degree of confrontation and as new participants get involved in the conflict. From conventional combat, Putin moved on to threats to use nuclear weapons or to detonate a “dirty bomb.” From military actions on the front line he moved on to the bombing of civilian infrastructure. From strikes on the territory of Ukraine he moved on to strikes on the territory of NATO (if we admit the fact that the missile that hit the territory of Poland was Russian). If Putin is not stopped now, sooner or later this war will lead to a direct clash between Putin’s Russian Federation and NATO. Then it will be too late to talk about escalation.

It is necessary now to stop Putin in his cause of destroying the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine. And there is only one way to do this—the military one. Ukraine should receive the weapons that will allow it to effectively respond to rocket attacks on its territory, by hitting those military bases from which rocket attacks on Ukraine are conducted, wherever these bases are located.

The aggressor will not rest until he meets a force equal to or greater than his own. The perpetrator will not leave his victim alone until he receives a forceful rebuff. The time for talking and appeasing dictators is over. The time has come for decisive action against the aggressor. Ukraine should urgently get the help it needs to stop the genocide of its people”

A Declaration of Cold War | The Spectator | November 21, 2022

Churchill was famous for two fingers. I have only one for Putin. Thanks to @jkirchick for attending my speech in Fulton, MO, following in the footsteps of anti-appeasement heroes Churchill and Truman. https://t.co/l70xU3IdQ9 https://t.co/QAS6T2t1qp

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 1, 2022

By @jkirchick, a piece about two speeches in Fulton, Mo., some 75 years apart. Do you know what characterized the likes of Churchill then, and characterizes the likes of @Kasparov63 now? Realism. Not as the “realists” conceive it. Real realism. https://t.co/PGgAenF1LB

— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) December 1, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can read the original at the Spectator.

By James Kirchik

“Vladimir Putin turned seventy on October 7, and Garry Kasparov was not in the mood for a celebration. The Russian dissident, author and chess grandmaster had been invited to address the community of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where, seventy-six years ago, Winston Churchill famously announced the descent of an “iron curtain” across the European continent. Seldom has a phrase so vividly captured a geopolitical phenomenon as Churchill’s clarion call about the looming threat posed by the Soviet Union. As Russia once again threatens European peace, it fell upon the shoulders of an exiled Russian democrat to issue a dire warning about the fate of what used to be called “the free world.”

Standing in the college chapel before a rapt audience, whose voices had just moments earlier joined in a stirring, organ-accompanied rendition of “Jerusalem,” Kasparov castigated the West for continually underestimating the danger posed by the revanchist regime in Moscow. “This war is decades in the making,” Kasparov said of Putin’s brutal rape of Ukraine. “Thirty years of making concessions that were intended to keep the peace but only postponed the war.” To those in the West who make the ostensibly pragmatic argument that the price of supporting Ukraine is too high, a complaint one hears these days from the nationalist right as much as from the anti-imperialist left, Kasparov had a pragmatic retort. “The price of stopping a dictator always goes up. It may seem expensive today, but it’s only going to be more tomorrow.”

Slyly making note of Putin’s birthday, Kasparov proffered a vision of the autocrat on the cusp of his eighth decade. “Somewhere in Russia, deep in a bunker, the little dictator is celebrating what has become the most dangerous, difficult year of his life,” Kasparov said, reveling in the imagined fate of the man whose war against Ukraine will define his already bloodsoaked legacy. “I bet he would not even allow there to be a knife in the room to cut the cake!”

As Kasparov had implied with his remark about Western concessions dating back three decades, the current Cold War may be an extension of the old one, in which case it never even ended.

Some trace the origins of the East-West clash to the 1947 American decision to supply arms to anti-communist forces in Greece and Turkey. Others point to the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the victorious allies essentially consigned Eastern Europe to the nascent Soviet sphere of influence. Or perhaps the 1917 Russian revolution itself was the cause, and the global contest was fore-ordained the moment Bolshevik revolutionaries with their missionary plans seized the levers of a large and powerful state.

As apposite an event as any, though, to mark the Cold War’s start is Churchill’s Fulton address, which he delivered on March 5, 1946. “The Sinews of Peace” articulated a postwar strategy for ensuring the survival of liberty; the West adhered to it for over four decades, and ultimately succeeded in prompting the peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire. Though the speech surely stands as one of the most influential of the twentieth century, few remember today just how controversial it was at the time. As voices from across the political spectrum once again counsel appeasement of a Russian regime hellbent on subjugating its neighbors, it’s worth revisiting Churchill’s speech, and the reaction to it.

Churchill was several months into his tenure as leader of the opposition when President Harry Truman invited him to the small college in his home state of Missouri. It was less than a year after the surrender of Nazi Germany, and few in the West were keen to hear a political leader, even one as widely admired as Churchill, speak of their wartime Soviet ally in the terms one reserves for an adversary. Nonetheless, when Churchill presented Truman with a draft of the speech on the presidential train to Westminster, the president was pleased. “He told me he thought it was admirable,” Churchill told Prime Minister Clement Attlee and foreign minister Ernest Bevin, “and would do nothing but good, though it would make a stir.”

Make a stir it did. At Westminster, Churchill cast the world situation in stark terms. While praising the recently established United Nations, he counseled that the organization would be insufficient to the task of keeping the peace. “Courts and magistrates may be set up,” he warned, “but they cannot function without sheriffs and constables.” With the advent of the nuclear bomb, the world had changed fundamentally, for “now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell between dusk and dawn.”

Most worrisome for Churchill’s American audience was his characterization of the Soviet Union, then forcibly extending its power across Eastern Europe. “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.” As for those who would deride as shrill and bombastic his characterization of the emerging global conflict, Churchill had only to cite his record on the just concluded one. “Last time, I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.” (Kasparov, who in 2015 published Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, claimed a similar vindication. “Winter is no longer coming,” he said in Fulton. “Winter is here.”)

Truman applauded Churchill throughout his lecture, and his visage evinced no sign of displeasure at what his guest had to say. It was not the first time Churchill had invoked the image of an “iron curtain” to describe Soviet policy. Days after Germany’s surrender, he had sent a telegram to the new American president employing this exact phrase. Nor could anyone at the State Department claim to be shocked by Churchill’s warning, the essence of which had been emphasized in another, much longer secret telegram dispatched to Washington just two weeks earlier by the chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow. In that 8,000-word document, informally dubbed “The Long Telegram” and later published pseudonymously in Foreign Affairs as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” a diplomat named George Kennan outlined the Soviet threat in terms similar to those used by Churchill, counseling a Western policy of “containment.”

Though Churchill’s speech would eventually be lauded for its prescience, the overnight response from the American press was extremely harsh. “The country’s reaction to Mr. Churchill’s Fulton speech must be convincing proof that the US wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial. The Nation disparaged Truman as “remarkably inept” for offering the former prime minister a platform to add “a sizable measure of poison to the already deteriorating relations between Russia and the Western powers.” Walter Lippmann, the dean of the Washington press corps, called the oration in Fulton a “catastrophic blunder.” Joseph Stalin fumed that it constituted a “call to arms.”

At a press conference three days after the speech, Truman denied that he had read it beforehand, and insisted that his presence on the dais did not signal an endorsement of Churchill’s words. He told his undersecretary of state Dean Acheson to skip a reception for Churchill in New York, and complained to his secretary of commerce Henry Wallace that Churchill had “put me on the spot.” (Later that year, after Wallace delivered a speech declaring that the United States had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States,” Truman fired Wallace, who returned the favor by challenging him for the presidency in 1948 on the ticket of the pro-Soviet Progressive Party.) Hoping to assuage Stalin’s hurt feelings, the president sent his Soviet counterpart an invitation to speak at the University of Missouri, which Stalin declined.

Events over the ensuing year forced Truman to backtrack and acknowledge that Churchill had been right all along. In 1947, anxious at the prospect of local communist parties exploiting war-ravaged European societies, secretary of state George C. Marshall announced the European Recovery Program, an unprecedented $13 billion effort to rebuild the continent. The Marshall Plan, as it would come to be known, was directly inspired by Churchill’s call for a continued American presence in Europe. The following February, Truman answered Britain’s plea that the United States assume responsibility for supplying arms to anti-communist forces in Greece and Turkey, announcing the initiative that became known as the Truman Doctrine. “Your Fulton… speech becomes more nearly a prophecy every day,” a chastened Truman wrote Churchill.

The three-part strategy of containing Soviet expansionism in Europe, bolstering anti-communist forces around the world, and criticizing communist ideology with strong moral rhetoric, would be inconsistently applied by American presidents over the ensuing four decades. And throughout that “long twilight struggle,” as President John F. Kennedy termed the Cold War, debate raged about its origins. On one side were those like Churchill, Truman, Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who identified Soviet tyranny as the root problem, and the triumph of liberal democracy as the ultimate goal. On the other side were Wallace and his intellectual heirs, not all of them on the left, who believed that the West was at least equally to blame, and that it needed to accept Soviet communism as a permanent feature of international affairs. When Jimmy Carter, two years after America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, diagnosed America as “now free of that inordinate fear of communism,” many of his countrymen wearily agreed.

But as Churchill wisely understood, the Cold War was not some misunderstanding between two rival superpowers, a territorial dispute that could be settled at a negotiating table. It was a profound manifestation of the eternal human struggle for freedom over bondage. Nor was the Cold War the fault of the West. If the West “chose” to enter the Cold War, it was a choice forced upon it by the Soviet Union. And it was a righteous choice at that, similar to the one Abraham Lincoln foreshadowed in 1858 when he declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and that the United States could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free.” As long as there are dictators, there will be those who resist.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and concomitant rhapsodies about the end of history convinced a new generation that this enduring feature of the human condition had taken a back seat to other, softer problems, like global warming, disease and refugee flows. There was a constant refrain during the presidency of Barack Obama that humanity had so evolved that the global challenges of an earlier era, and the tools needed to meet them, were obsolete. In his first speech to the United Nations as president, Obama declared that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” were a thing of the past. His now infamous response to Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia was America’s primary adversary — “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back” — managed to be both profoundly shortsighted and historically ignorant. After Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine two years later, Obama and his hapless secretary of state John Kerry repeatedly expressed befuddlement at how a “twenty-first century” country could have the gall to act like a “twentieth” or even “nineteenth-century” imperial power.

“We must not get into a new Cold War” has become the shared mantra of national conservatives and transnational progressives, replacing “forever wars” as the great inhibiting slogan of Western foreign policy. Insisting that our relationship with communist China need not be “irredeemably antagonistic,” former California governor Jerry Brown advocates “planetary realism,” what he defines as “an informed realism that faces up to the unprecedented global dangers caused by carbon emissions, nuclear weapons, viruses and new disruptive technologies, all of which cannot be addressed by one country alone.” The creation of an Orwellian police state, the genocide of the Uighur Muslims, the militarization of the South China Sea and threats to “reunify” with Taiwan by force, all these must be put aside because “the only path that avoids the horror of war — is to accept that China’s system is different from ours, get our own house in order and seek a decent modus vivendi.”

It’s worth asking Brown and his fellow travelers what they think Asia will look like if the American-led order there collapses and China assumes the position of regional hegemon. What will be the consequences, not only for our consciences but for the international state system, if an island democracy of 24 million people is conquered militarily? Pro-Chinese satrapies in South Korea, the Philippines and even Japan are sure to follow, perhaps not immediately, but over time.

An ethic of democratic universalism, far from perfectly applied, guided Western strategy during the first Cold War, and so it inspires us now. “New Sinews of Peace” was the title of Kasparov’s address in Fulton, a cribbing he acknowledged: “Not very original, I admit, but the threats we face and the answers we seek today are not origi-nal either.”

To illustrate his solidarity, Kasparov brought along three fellow advocates of liberty from some of the world’s most repressive governments with him to Missouri: Masih Alinejad, the outspoken Iranian women’s rights activist on whom that despicable regime has put out a warrant for murder; Abdalaziz Alhamza of Syria, a survivor of Bashar al-Assad’s dungeons; and Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan democrat who spent years languishing in jail and under house arrest. (The night before Kasparov’s address, I spoke with Lopez about his imprisonment, and one aspect of it made my writer’s skin crawl: to torture him psychologically, his jailers placed a stack of books beyond the bars outside his jail cell, just out of reach.) “If only Russian men were as brave as Iranian women!” Kasparov exclaimed, a gesture of gratitude that reduced the steely Alinejad to tears. “These values, these people, these movements — they are the new sinews of peace.”

We don’t acknowledge it often enough, but the Cold War was a noble, valiant struggle that the West was right to fight and had no choice but to win. It was thrust upon us by Russian despotism and Russian predation, as is the current conflict. What sparked the war in Ukraine? A country on Europe’s eastern edge heard our rhetoric about democracy, freedom and national self-determination, and had the temerity to take it seriously. It chose a Western path — and is now being punished for it. The West is implicated in Ukraine’s life struggle, whether we like it or not.

This article was originally published in  The Spectator ’s December 2022 World edition. “

Russian Chess Legend Says War in Ukraine is a ‘Battle Between Freedom and Tyranny’ | Yahoo News | November 19, 2022

.@Kasparov63: “#Putin is attacking not just #Ukraine. He is attacking the entire system of international cooperation. Ukraine is on the frontline of this battle between freedom and tyranny.” https://t.co/4cHhJVdqQV

— Francisco Taveira (@jftaveira1993) November 19, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can read the original at Yahoo News.

By Alexander Nazaryan

“NEW YORK — Chess is a cerebral game, but legendary Soviet grand master Garry Kasparov could make it seem like a contact sport. When he was at the height of his powers in the mid-1980s, he approached the chessboard with the buzzing physical intensity of a wrestler consigned to the wrong contest.

Today, his relentless energies are directed entirely against Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Kasparov approaches with the same singular focus he once reserved for his Soviet nemesis, Anatoly Karpov — who, as it happens, now serves as a pro-Putin parliamentarian. But if the Kremlin autocrat disgusts him, nothing enrages Kasparov like Western hand-wringing over how much to help Ukraine, and for how long.

“Putin is attacking not just Ukraine. He is attacking the entire system of international cooperation,” Kasparov told Yahoo News in a recent interview. “Ukraine is on the frontline of this battle between freedom and tyranny.”

Garry Kasparov at the Congress of Free Russia in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Sept. 1. (Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)

Last week’s congressional elections in the U.S. could complicate Ukrainian aid, especially if Republican skepticism hardens into outright resistance. Speaking at a press conference last week, President Biden expressed hope that aid to Ukraine would continue — but also bristled at charges that he’d given Ukraine too much.

“We’ve not given Ukraine a blank check,” the president told reporters, alluding to a complaint about the extent of Ukraine-focused spending made by Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who will assume the role of House speaker in January. “There’s a lot of things that Ukraine wants that we didn’t do.”

That is precisely the kind of talk that frustrates Kasparov. He praises Biden’s support of the Ukrainian effort, which has been consistently supplemented by European allies, but can’t imagine its scope being scaled back. “It was much less than Ukraine needed and wanted, but much more than Putin expected.”

The war in Ukraine is closer to poker than chess, a contest of stare-downs and bluffs. On the chessboard, an opponent has nowhere to hide his pieces, but poker is by its nature a game of incomplete information, of trying to guess and then being forced to act on those guesses.

Is one of the cards Putin is holding a nuclear strike? How long can an energy-starved Europe last before folding? How long will American aid last?

Kasparov does not ignore those very real considerations, but he also refuses to become paralyzed by the infinite varieties of geopolitical speculation. For him, the war retains an unignorable moral clarity. “I believe Ukraine can and will win,” he says. “I think it’s inevitable. It’s a matter of the cost. And every day of delay, of giving Ukraine what it needs to win, simply is pushing this cost up.”

Russia President Vladimir Putin at a videoconference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow on Monday. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Utterly unpalatable to Kasparov is the argument that Ukraine should sue for peace, not because the war is going badly for Kyiv but because it is expensive for Washington, London and Berlin.

That was the widely understood subtext of a letter sent on Oct. 24 by House progressives to Biden, urging him to “pursue every diplomatic avenue” while pointing out — not incorrectly — that the war is “fueling inflation and high oil prices for Americans in recent months.” A furor followed, and a day later the letter was recalled, but not without the Russians having noticed growing American reluctance to fund the Ukrainian resistance.

Kasparov finds such talk exceptionally dangerous. He thinks of the conflict in the Manichaean world of chess, where there is only black and white, defeat or victory. Either the West defeats Putin, or Putin defeats the West. “If we capitulate today in light of Putin’s nuclear blackmail, who’s to say that he won’t use the same exact blackmail five years later, six years later?” Kasparov wonders, his tone and expression suggesting this is far from an idle musing.

“And who’s to say,” he continues, “that other dictators around the world won’t look at this and say, ‘Oh, look at that. The West is willing to capitulate to nuclear blackmail? Why don’t we do the same thing?’ And for countries that don’t have nuclear weapons today? Why shouldn’t they have nuclear weapons if nuclear weapons are effective, and helping them get what they want?”

In a photo released on Oct. 26, a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile is test-fired as part of Russia’s nuclear drills in Plesetsk, northwestern Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

That dark scenario is most likely to be realized in Taiwan, with an emboldened Xi Jinping looking to fully and finally assert China’s control over the island.

Kasparov was especially dismayed — and, characteristically, infuriated — by Elon Musk’s “peace plan,” which would effectively cede vast swaths of Ukraine to Russia. Kremlin propagandists instantly embraced the idea, pointing to condemnation from the American political and media establishment as evidence that Musk (who did not respond to a Yahoo News request for comment sent over Twitter) had spoken some forbidden, consensus-shattering truth.

“He’s buying Russian propaganda points,” Kasparov says of Musk. “It’s very, very damaging.”

Kasparov left Russia in 2013, disgusted by the ever-deepening repressions of the Putin regime. In 2015 he published “Winter Is Coming,” an urgent warning to Western policymakers about Putin, whom he called “clearly the biggest and most dangerous threat facing the world today.”

Never especially shy or circumspect, Kasparov blames President Barack Obama for trying to “reset” relations with Putin shortly after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, in what was the first incursion by the Kremlin into a sovereign nation since the fall of the Soviet Union. Later, Obama warned that if Russia crossed a “red line” in Syria and used chemical weapons in support of Bashar Assad’s regime, “there would be enormous consequences.”

Putin and President Barack Obama at a bilateral meeting during a G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, in 2012. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Then Russia did use chemical weapons. “And Obama blinked,” Kasparov laments, charging the president with “weakness.” It’s not clear, however, what Obama — already managing two costly conflicts, in Afghanistan and Iraq — could have done to stop Putin, short of a military intervention that likely would have been unpalatable to the American public. A representative for the former president did not respond to a request for comment.

No development emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, Kasparov argues, like the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. “I wouldn’t call it withdrawal. It was a stampede,” he told Yahoo News. “And it was a disaster. And undoubtedly, it added to Putin’s confidence.”

Today, the 59-year-old New York resident — who is retired from professional chess but still teaches a class on MasterClass — runs the Renew Democracy Initiative, a nonprofit that closely coordinates aid efforts with not-for-profit relief organizations working in Ukraine, which RDI executive director Uriel Epshtein says ensures that supplies and funds get to the right people, in the right places, instead of being squandered or lost.

“It’s our responsibility to give them what they need not merely to survive, not just enough to survive, but enough to actually win the war,” Epshtein, the son of Soviet immigrants who settled in New Jersey, told Yahoo News. He also described efforts in what has come to be known as the “information space,” which the Kremlin has tried to flood with its own propaganda.

Kasparov on MasterClass. (PR Newswire via AP)

RDI works with retired U.S. Gen. Ben Hodges to produce short, polished videos that explain the state of war in digestible terms. It has also solicited and published essays by dissidents from around the world in partnership with CNN, part of a series called Voices of Freedom. Contributors have included, among others, the Egyptian-American dissident Mohamed Soltan and the Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, who was recently the target of an assassination attempt in New York.

“They have the credibility to break through our partisan shields,” Epshtein says, “to remind us that America is a force for good, and it can remain a force for good.”

That argument has been challenged by Putin’s dark tirades against what he has described as a West whose colonial bloodlust, in his telling, has been married to an anti-Christian progressive agenda. As the war has gone ever more poorly for Russia, these anti-Western screeds have grown ever more sharp.

“Putin’s Russia is on a steep decline,” Kasparov says. “I don’t believe that by next spring Russia will be able to conduct this war.” Recent military advances by Ukraine, including most recently the liberation of Kherson, do give hope of an eventual Ukrainian battlefield victory.

Here Epshtein intercedes: “It’s up to us,” he says.”

Quantum Computing Summit 2022: Kasparov on the Future of AI | Quantum Business News | November 14, 2022

“#AI presents a new chapter. Advancements in #tech have made us stronger, faster, allowed us to live longer. We need to embrace this to ensure a brighter future.”

Strong message from @Kasparov63 echoing his remarks at 2022 #Regulation4Innovation https://t.co/ZDusTQ9JTF

— Eva Maydell (Paunova) (@EvaMaydell) November 15, 2022

This article is a reprint. You can read the original at Quantum Business News.

By Berenice Baker

“Speaking at The AI Summit Austin, co-located with The Quantum Computing Summit, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov spoke about the 1997 chess match against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer and how human-machine relations have shifted from competition to collaboration.”

 

Should You Be Concerned with a Nuclear War | Renew Democracy Initiative | November 11, 2022

Putin is using the fear of nuclear war to blackmail Western democracies into halting support for #Ukraine. Listen to @general_ben & @edwardlucas‘s expert analysis on the #Russian nuclear threat in the latest episode of our video series with @newdebateinc. https://t.co/01WAcsHByo

— Renew Democracy Initiative (@Renew_Democracy) November 11, 2022

 

Cold War 2.0? Russia, Ukraine, and the Western World | Nixon Foundation Grand Strategy Summit | November 11, 2022

Live now! https://t.co/wIXapD3jpW

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) November 11, 2022

The World Liberty Congress | Vilnius, Lithuania | November 10, 2022

1/The World Liberty Congress was kicked off.
The idea was born when I realized how the dictators of the world like Khamenei, Putin & Erdoğan
support each other but we, the freedom fighters, are fighting alone even though we have a common dream.#MahsaAminipic.twitter.com/cL0Q6HASlU

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) November 10, 2022

The #WorldJurist proudly sponsored the World Liberty Congress, launched by Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan freedom activists @AlinejadMasih, @Kasparov63 and @leopoldolopez , aiming at “uniting oppositions of various countries against dictatorships” pic.twitter.com/qPOZiVWvra

— World Jurist Association (@worldjurist) November 10, 2022

Americans, vote! I’ve spent the last few days in Vilnius with other Russians, @leopoldolopez of Venezuela, @AlinejadMasih of Iran, and other citizens of dictatorships without the blessing of meaningful elections. Use it or you will lose it.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) November 8, 2022

Visit the World Liberty Congress’s website to learn more about their work.

Rethinking Russia? Keynote on the Global Endgame | Invesco Eyes on 2023 | November 10, 2022

Great event by @InvescoEMEA “Eyes On 2023”.

A special highlight was the exciting talk with @Kasparov63. Well moderated from @BarbaraLuethi.

“Dictators lie about their past but they always tell what they are going to do – you just have to listen to them.”#UkraineRussianWar pic.twitter.com/1dkgVhRFDx

— Adriano Sbriglio (@SbriglioAdriano) November 10, 2022

Time flies while talking to Garry Kasparov. @Kasparov63⁩- «Dictators lie about their past but they always tell what they are going to do – you just have to listen to them.” Why didn’t we? pic.twitter.com/fs8enWmWFu

— Barbara Luethi (@BarbaraLuethi) November 10, 2022