Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 33

The West is paying dearly for cozying up to Russia over 25 years

Looking back over the past quarter-century, it isn’t easy to name a Western policy that can truly be described as a success. The impact of Western development aid is debatable. Western interventions in the Middle East have been disastrous.

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China’s explanation for the Hong Kong protests? Blame America.

More than 50,000 people have filled the streets of Hong Kong in the past few days, and at times the number has climbed higher. The photographs of these gatherings have shown a remarkably calm, remarkably disciplined crowd. Students do their homework on the sidewalk. Others stack up plastic bottles for recycling and sweep the streets.

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Scotland sends Europe’s elites a warning

LONDON

In Aberdeenshire, more than 87 percent of people voted on Scotland’s independence referendum; in Clackmannanshire, the number was above 88 percent; in the Western Isles, it was close to 90 percent. One remote Highland peninsula actually achieved a 100percent turnout — meaning that all 98 residents showed up to vote.

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War in Europe is not a hysterical idea

WARSAW

Over and over again — throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels — I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and w...

Obama’s legacy could be a revitalized NATO

Not long ago, someone asked me about President Obama’s foreign policy “legacy.” I was startled by the question. There are two whole years left, I told my interlocutor; it’s way too early. She seemed surprised that I was surprised: “Can he really do anything significant in only two years?”

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Russia’s blow to globalization

While it lasted, globalization was a beguiling tale we told ourselves about the future. The world is interconnected and therefore getting not just richer but more peaceful. The technologies of international capitalism — outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring — would not only make the world’s businesses more profitable, they would make people less quarrelsome. We would play chess online with Indians, and thus become more like them. We would buy software from China, and thus never go to war with t...

Russia’s message to the E.U.: Money talks

David Cameron, the British prime minister, led the attack: It would be “unthinkable” for the British to sell a warship to Russia, he declared. Almost immediately, the French president, François Hollande, confirmed his intention to do precisely that: He would, he said, deliver a Mistral amphibious assault ship to the Russian navy, as contracted — and then he hit back hard. “This is a false debate led by hypocrites,” one of his party colleagues declared. “When you see how many [Russian] oligarc...

The Malaysia Airlines crash is the end of Russia’s fairy tale

Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political and military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane.

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Welcome to Free Kiev

WARSAW

Last month, Andrei Kuznetsov left his native St. Petersburg and flew to Ukraine. When he arrived at the Kiev airport, he asked for political asylum. The bemused guards, unaccustomed to any sort of asylum-seekers, let alone Russian asylum-seekers, couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Finally, he told a Radio Liberty reporter, “they let me in as a tourist and gave me the link to a U.N. site with procedures for applying for asylum.”

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The last democratic World Cup?

Like a time-honored ritual, the run-up to any world-class sporting event is always the same. A few months before, the stadiums aren’t ready and the hotels have no hot water. The highways are dirt tracks and the athletes have nowhere to sleep. The local newspapers predict calamity. Will the beach volleyball final not be held for lack of a net? Will the qualifying match between Paraguay and Ivory Coast be abandoned because the referees couldn’t land at the unfinished airport?

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