• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

Aspen’s World War III Rumblings

During a few days in bucolic Aspen, Beijing’s envoy to the U.S. summarily defended China’s designs on Taiwan and Hong Kong, stood up for Putin, eye-poked Biden, and scared the bejesus out of the otherwise clubby U.S. foreign policy community.

Qin Gang
Qin Gang, Chinese Ambassador to the United States. Photo: China Photos/Getty Images
Julia Ioffe
July 26, 2022

The Aspen Security Forum is the kind of national security conference where you might ask Richard Moore, the completely unguarded head of MI6, to move out of the way so you can access the water cooler. It’s the kind of place where, at a happy hour in a sunny meadow high up in the Rockies, you could, beer bottle in hand, buttonhole Mike Rogers when he was still the head of the N.S.A., or corner Mikk Marran, the head of Estonian intelligence, as he’s holding a lunch wrap on a biodegradable plate, to ask what kind of information Vladimir Putin is really getting about the war. (And reader, I’ve done all three.)