Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Julia Ioffe. While New Hampshire votes, let’s talk about foreign policy.

First off, 20 Days in Mariupol was nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar today. I can’t say I’m surprised; it is brutal, necessary viewing, especially these days, when people are so quick to dehumanize each other, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in the United States. Absolutely go watch it, and read my interview with the brilliant and thoughtful videographer Mstyslav Chernov, one of the three A.P. journalists who made the film.

Second of all, my girl Tina Nguyen’s book came out a week ago today. The MAGA Diaries chronicles her exit from the conservative movement that hoovered her up in college, as well as the Republican Party’s descent into its current fugue state. It’s kind of like a former Scientologist writing about the cult. Tina is a witty, punchy writer, and if you read her, you’ll understand everything you need to know about the American right and what the fuck happened to it.

But first, before we get to the meat of today’s letter—another American arrested in Russia—some thoughts on the continuing war in Gaza...

• Bibi vs. Biden, The Latest: Yesterday was the deadliest day for Israeli troops in Gaza, with the deaths of 24 soldiers seeming to underscore yet again that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is not going as well as Jerusalem would have hoped. Hamas’s tunnel network is far more extensive than Israeli intelligence anticipated—some 5,700 shafts leading to 450 miles of layered, stories-deep labyrinths—and its fighting force has proved incredibly resilient.

  After over three months of punishing war, according to U.S. intelligence, Israel has only destroyed about 30 percent of Hamas’s forces, and much of its top leadership remains intact. Meanwhile, more and more Israeli hostages are dying or being executed in Hamas captivity, and their family members are fed up with their prime minister prioritizing the war over their loved ones’ return. They are storming the Knesset, pouring fake blood on the road in front of Bibi Netanyahu’s residence in Caesarea, and generally making clear that the hostages need to be his priority.

  Bibi, on the other hand, is busy publicly attacking Joe Biden’s stated policy of pursuing a two-state solution. He has said, among other things, that he is proud of preventing the creation of a Palestinian state and that Israel intends to control all the land west of the Jordan River. He stuck to this even after Biden called him on Friday to discuss the issue and, ostensibly, to tell Bibi to chill the fuck out. This intransigence may be popular among many Israelis who are still reeling after October 7 and see mortal danger in the prospect of a Palestinian state, but it infuriates a key part of Biden’s base, American progressives, who point out, not without merit, that this is a hell of a thing to hear from an ally that takes billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money only to tell the U.S. president to shove it.

  I’ve spoken about this to senior members of the Biden administration, as well as to people very close to it. And though they were definitely pissed, their responses were predictably far more measured than those of the activists and leftist media personalities on social media. This was just Bibi posturing for domestic consumption, they told me privately, and what does he have left now that his promise to guarantee Israel’s security is null and void? It was also, they argued, classic bluster from a government that also said not one calorie nor one drop of fuel would enter Gaza—only to allow in thousands of aid trucks. In other words: Bibi’s opening bargain would likely not be his final offer, at least that’s the hope.

  That said, many senior members of Biden’s foreign policy team got their start under Obama, and they remember well how Bibi went after their former boss, and how he made support for Israel a viciously partisan issue. They know Bibi has no love for Democrats and that he would love to survive long enough to welcome back Donald Trump, a man who would have no qualms about letting Bibi and Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza. “They know he doesn’t actually want Dems to survive,” says a source close to the administration. “Him baiting people on the two-state solution is the most clear evidence yet of him trying to turn everything partisan, and saying ‘Fuck you’ to pro-Israel Democrats. He’s leaving them almost no corner.”

  But the Biden national security world also knows that Bibi is holding on for dear life in Israel, and they like to point out that Biden is far more popular there than Netanyahu. And while Biden hasn’t done anything to put his thumb on the scale of Israeli politics—at least not the way Bibi has in the U.S.—some officials warn that may not always remain the case. At the very least, a political lifeline will not be forthcoming.

Of course, both parties badly want this seat. For Republicans, the stakes are immediately material: A win would give Speaker Mike Johnson, whose party holds a tenuous six-seat advantage in the house, a little more buffer room for votes. Democrats, meanwhile, want revenge. There is so much pent-up ire over all the censures, sideshows, and general House chaos (despite some public optimism that Hakeem Jeffries might have a shot at the gavel before November) and flipping the seat would go a long way toward alleviating it. A few more notes on the evolving state of play:

• Democrats are massively more invested in Long Island than Republicans. On TV alone, Dems have spent about $8 million compared to Republicans’ $2.7 million. But a game-changer arrived last week, when G.O.P. leadership-aligned super PAC the Congressional Leadership Fund launched its own spending campaign, pouring $2.3 million into the race, with $1.5 million going to television ads.

  The D.C.C.C. and its leadership-aligned House Majority PAC, however, have had millions of dollars worth of reservations on the books for weeks. In the super PAC era, House Democrats buy early and cheap. The C.L.F., meanwhile, likes to watch and wait. It remains to be seen whether last week’s ad buy is the just first in an escalating campaign that could eventually match the Democrats’ spending.

• Because of New York City’s sky-high advertising rates, everybody is looking for a bargain. That’s another reason why candidate quality matters so much in this race. Tom Suozzi, the Democrat, is responsible for just under $1 million of the party’s TV ad spending, whereas Republican Mazi Pilip has contributed about $200,000 to her own ad campaign, and has also made a joint buy with the N.R.C.C. While we don’t have fresh F.E.C. reports available, it seems obvious based on this information that Suozzi is a good fundraiser—and good fundraisers tend to run solid campaigns on other fronts, too.

  A final note on TV bargain-shopping: It’s my understanding that C.L.F.’s reservations include a hefty inventory of 15-second ads, which get more bang for the buck than the traditional 30-second ads.

• What happens here will be the talk of the political class, likely eclipsing (at least for a day or two) whatever is happening in the presidential race. A G.O.P. loss could demonstrate that messaging on abortion, combined with a high-quality candidate, can staunch Democratic bleeding in a region that’s been trending purple. A Democratic loss might signal that the immigration/border issue will likely hurt them in races elsewhere in New York and across the country. My colleague Tara Palmeri forecasted this scenario many, many months ago.

Woodland was born in Russia, in 1991, in a small, impoverished village in the Perm region. After Woodland’s teen mother, who drank, was beaten by his father so badly that she landed in the hospital, baby Robert was taken by child protective services, put in an orphanage, and, in 1993, adopted by an American couple. In May 2020, with the help of Russia’s state-owned Channel One, he returned to Russia to find his biological mother. They were reunited on the air, a perfect piece of propaganda for the Kremlin, which accuses Americans of killing the Russian children they adopt. (In 2012, Russia banned American adoptions in retaliation for U.S. sanctions on certain Russians.) After the reunion, Woodland added his birth last name, Romanov, and moved to Russia, where he spent his time learning Russian and teaching English in a small town outside of Moscow.

It is not clear whether the drugs were actually Woodland’s or if they were planted on him—a favorite technique of Russian law enforcement. Given the fact that Woodland is an American citizen and that Russia has clearly been banking American hostages for future prisoner swaps, it’s not totally out of the question. But according to a White House official I spoke with last week, the State Department has not yet made a determination about what exactly happened and whether or not Woodland was wrongfully detained. “It’s still very early in the process,” a senior State Department official confirmed, adding that they were still gathering information—which, they added, was remarkably hard to come by. Another administration official, however, told me that there wasn’t more to this case than met the eye and that it was unlikely that Woodland would get the “wrongfully detained” label that kicked a negotiating process into gear for Griner.

This would make Woodland less like Griner and a lot more like Marc Fogel, another American arrested on drug charges in Moscow. Fogel, who was picked up with cannabis at the same airport as Griner just six months earlier, is now serving a 14-year sentence for the offense. And though his family and a bipartisan group of senators have lobbied the Biden administration to label Fogel as “wrongfully detained,” the State Department has resisted. Instead, the administration has been trying to get Fogel out on humanitarian grounds, because, in general, if you’re an American who is caught with drugs in a foreign country, you might get some consular visits, but otherwise you’re basically shit out of luck.

The White House official, however, pushed back when I asked them about this frustration, saying that the idea that the U.S. government will rescue its citizens abroad “has always been baked in.” That said, the official added, Biden’s approach is different. “The president has prioritized it because it’s the right thing to be doing, regardless of the flak we get,” the official said. “We’re always going to get the criticism that it’s a price too high to pay, but our argument is that there is no price too high when you’re talking about someone who is innocent, or if they are a U.S. citizen being used as a political pawn.”

Whoever the White House has offered up, though, has not sparked much of a response from Moscow. “We don’t have anyone in our custody that would be of particular interest to them,” the White House official said, noting that they are also working to make sure that Paul Whelan is part of any exchange. “We just don’t have anything that has cracked the code yet.”

When it comes to Woodland, however, his situation is complicated by the fact that he also has Russian citizenship. There is only so much the U.S. government can do for one of its own to begin with, but someone who is also a Russian citizen essentially becomes a Russian subject on Russian soil. This is also the case for arrested journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who is facing five years in prison for not properly registering as a foreign agent. “They’re both dual citizens,” said the White House official. “That doesn’t mean we won’t keep working it, but it does present a greater challenge.”

Good night. Tomorrow will be worse,
Julia