Anne Applebaum
Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone - it had been cleared of all people after the accident - together with some local environmental activists.Collection: Environmental
Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie - it's to make people fear the liar.Collection: Fear
Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader - the tribal chief - to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values.Collection: Relationship
The relationship of Trump to Russia has been reported on, and the activity to change the Republican platform happened openly, and Trump's support for Russian policy - Russia's views of Europe and its views of NATO - have been stated. So it's not like this is secret.Collection: Relationship
The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.
Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.
What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.
At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.
Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.
In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.
Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.
The Brexit campaign was transformed from a fringe eccentricity into a mass movement by a handful of people who decided to make it into an argument about identity.
All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil.
There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?
Nationalism has nothing to do with democratic values: Authoritarians can be nationalists; indeed, most are.
Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.
The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.
There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.
Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.
At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.
Democracy in some ways is a very illogical political system. When you win an election, you have to preserve the institutions that would make it possible for your political enemies to win next time. If you think about it, that's almost antithetical to human nature.
Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.
The so-called cancel culture on the Internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses and newsrooms, and the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight.
For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.
Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue.
For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.
The most important funder of the British Brexit campaign had odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers in Poland's supposedly anti-Russian, hard-right government, elected after a campaign marked by online disinformation in 2015.
Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are taken in by Russian tactics.
The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use.
Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions.
Just shouting about 'facts' will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.
Inside the noisy and chaotic modern information sphere, the message doesn't matter nearly as much as the messenger.
Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.
Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.
False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.
Military force can't defeat ideology.
Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.
America's international broadcasters are an important part of the face we present to the world.
Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity.
One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.
Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world.
We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.
Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant - whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all.
Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values.
Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.
Like SARS or Ebola, COVID-19 seems to be another disease that has jumped from the animal kingdom to the human and then traveled quickly because of trains, cars, airplanes, and people clustering in public places.
Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare - these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.
Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.
As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary?