Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. As promised, this letter will fill you in on what really went down at the Aspen Security Forum last week and Abby Livingston’s excellent Capitol Hill readout.

But first…

The Ukrainian intelligence directorate, or H.U.R., has not claimed responsibility for the attack, though everyone assumes that’s exactly who was behind them. (Last week, the Ukrainian military sent out a lullaby for the Kerch Bridge in Crimea; this week a Ukrainian government source, speaking about the two drones, told a Ukrainian news outlet: “all the little birdies got to Moscow.”)

While Russia pummels its cities, targeting historical treasures and grain silos, Ukraine continues to punch into Russian territory, including into its capital, the nerve center of the Russian government, military, financial sector, and what’s left of its cultural life. The point is to show the Russian people, especially the relatively affluent, detached people in Moscow, that the war their government unleashed in their name is not somewhere far, far away, fought by some rednecks from the boonies. It can come to Moscow, too. And Ukraine can hit you any time, any place.

Unfortunately, the only people who will learn about the drone attacks on Moscow will be those on Telegram (about a third of the Russian population) and those with a VPN that will allow them to access various apps and media sites that are blocked inside Russia: the topic has been completely banned on Russian state TV.

Now for a quick word on Congress…

By Abby Livingston

• The West Virginia Wars: Want to see the best illustration of the House-Senate G.O.P. divide? Consider the West Virginia Senate Republican primary race, where the perceived establishment candidate may depend on which chamber you’re talking about. Gov. Jim Justice is the Senate Republican favorite, and the subject of much recruiting. I counted about a dozen Republican senators who gave to Justice in his first, abridged fundraising quarter (he launched in late April). This bunch includes Mitch McConnell, John Thune, N.R.S.C. Chairman Steve Daines, and most notably, the state’s most powerful Republican, Shelley Moore Capito (who has maintained a famously cordial relationship with incumbent Joe Manchin over the years). These donations come on top of a fundraiser several Senate Republicans hosted for Justice at the N.R.S.C. in late June.

  But despite that support, this is not at all a cleared field for Justice. The campaign finance reports of his top rival, Congressman Alex Mooney, filed over the last seven months, tell a completely different story: Around 50 Republican House members gave to Mooney’s campaign since its launch late last year. These included nearly all of the senior leadership (Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik and N.R.C.C. Chairman Richard Hudson), high-profile Freedom Caucus members (Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Thomas Massie), and, to add to that West Virginia divide, Rep. Carol Miller, who represents the state’s first district. And there were at least two senators who donated to Mooney: Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Incumbent Joe Manchin is undoubtedly keeping tabs on all this as he makes up his mind about his future.

• Show Me the Mooney: There are few politicians I’ve covered longer than Alex Mooney. He may be a Freedom Caucus rabble rouser, but he grew up within the system as the protégé of former Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. Mooney is organized, strategic, and a bit audacious. (He literally crossed state lines from Maryland into West Virginia in 2013 to run for Congress; the Dartmouth Big Green grad’s campaign colors were coincidentally blue and gold, the color of the state’s dominant state school, WVU. It worked.)

  Mooney bolstered his cash-on-hand early in his campaign, with a transfer of nearly $800,000 from his old House accounts. And he’s in fighting condition—he defeated fellow Republican David McKinley last year in a member-member race that came about when West Virginia lost a seat in reapportionment. These Republican member receipts show he has ties beyond the Freedom Caucus, and his disbursements are mostly on payroll and digital advertising. Justice’s campaign expenses mostly involved travel and administrative costs.

• But but but…: Mooney may also be tapping out on his low-hanging fruit. He raised just over $400,000 this quarter, compared to Justice’s more than $900,000. And both were outraised by Manchin, who hauled nearly $1.3 million this quarter, and the incumbent sits on $10.7 million in cash on hand. Should he seek re-election, this money will go far toward defending himself from an expected Republican onslaught over West Virginia’s inexpensive television airwaves.

And now to Aspen…

At this annual gathering where the national-security set decamps from Washington to escape the swampy summer and to catch up with old friends—and network to make new ones—Qin had disrupted the chummy atmosphere, terrifying them with ominous warnings, and, exactly one year later, he was gone without a trace. In December 2022, Qin was promoted to foreign minister and was replaced in May 2023 by Xie Feng, who sat across from Semafor’s Steve Clemons last week for a fireless fireside chat and had to punt, awkwardly, on the question of what happened to his predecessor, who had vanished from public view a month ago.

Into the breach stepped Xie, who offered essentially the same message (that the deterioration of U.S.-China relations was all America’s fault), but in different words. He smiled, he encouraged everyone to hold hands and come together for peace, he made the audience laugh with a joke about Speedos, and then made them scratch their heads with a metaphor of China as the peony and America as the rose. And where Qin had gotten stunned silence, Xie got a big round of applause. To be fair, I cracked up when Xie was asked what redeeming qualities Beijing saw in Vladimir Putin, and he responded that, well, George W. Bush had looked into his eyes and seen his soul, and determined that “he’s dependable!” And then Xie couldn’t stop laughing at his own words.

This, it was obvious, was the better line to take with earnest Americans: a charm offensive. In the meantime, it seemed to go unnoticed that Xie’s floral formula for U.S.-China cooperation consisted only of a list of demands for the U.S. side; that he said Chinese democracy was more authentic because the Beijing government regularly gets 90-plus percent approval ratings; and that Clemons completely let him off the hook with his wildly contradictory answer about why China doesn’t condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That said, one participant told me she worked in the nuclear industry and knew exactly what the Chinese government was up to, installing all kinds of sneaky, intelligence-gathering capacities into hardware. “It was all bullshit,” she said of the ambassador’s dulcet performance, “like a guy sweet-talking you in a bar.”

By Tuesday, the Chinese government issued a terse statement: Qin Gang was officially out. No reason was given.

This provided the perfect opening question for the generalists interviewing the principals, who all led with the same vague, open-ended question about the deep fractures before settling for vague answers: Putin is obviously weaker, Prigozhin said out loud that the war was based on a false premise, and his mutiny showed, in the words of C.I.A. Director Burns, “does the emperor have no clothes or… why is he taking so long to get dressed?’”

Burns, a career diplomat, is skilled at saying nothing while talking plenty. But he was once ambassador to Russia and is one of the foremost experts on the place, and just hearing his insights on Putin and what he thinks is happening inside Russia was fascinating. As Prigozhin marched on Moscow, Burns said, the security services seemed “adrift,” while the elites wondered if Putin was no longer the arbiter—or their protector from each other. As for why Prigozhin is still alive and getting meetings in Moscow, Burns said, “Putin hates, in my experience anyway, the image that he’s overreacting to things.” Putin, Burns said, “is trying to buy time as he considers what to do with Wagner and Prigozhin himself.”

While he does that, he “is trying to settle things as much as he can” and that he’s going to “separate Prigozhin from what’s of value in Wagner.” Prigozhin has been to Belarus in the meantime, Burns continued, but, as he told the forum, “I’m not sure he has any plans to retire in the suburbs of Minsk.” Burns also had a warning: “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold, so he’s going to try to settle the situation to the extent he can. But, again, in my experience, Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback… so if I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster.”

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly also managed to ask Burns a more specific question: Where is General Sergey Surovikin, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since June 24, the day of Prigozhin’s mutiny? “I don’t think he enjoys a lot of freedom right now,” Burns said, shrugging and laughing as Kelly tried to press him for more. Later, standing by the cooling breakfast burritos, Colin Kahl, who just stepped down as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and who was effectively in charge of getting weapons to Ukraine, told me of Surovikin, “I think he’s handcuffed to a desk somewhere.”

I later caught Burns as he stood in the shade and asked him why he thought Prigozhin choked and turned back. “Some of his men started getting cold feet,” he explained. “This wasn’t what they had signed up for.” Prigozhin, Burns had said in his panel, was “making it up as he went along” on June 24. But, as he told me, he only had 5,000 men marching toward Moscow, not nearly enough to take a city with mined bridges and armed with Putin’s praetorian guard.

Did he see Putin as a procrastinator, who just needs to get through one more week, one more month, one more year, I asked? Burns agreed with that characterization: “He will dither and stall as long as possible,” he said, hoping for something to come along and save him. “He’s not a master strategist,” Burns added as a nervous press officer started creeping closer. “But he’s lost some of his tactical finesse.”

It made for quite the bizarre conversation, with MacCallum asking Cleverly about sources of disinformation and, later, Cleverly waxing philosophical about why more Americans don’t support Ukraine, as if a representative of one of the main outlets undermining that support—and sowing disinformation—weren’t sitting right next to him. (Republican Senator John Cornyn, for what it’s worth, told me that he didn’t see support for Ukraine slipping among his constituents. “Texans support it,” he said, “but there’s a lot of crazy people out there, like Tucker Carlson, who’s just dangerous.”)

Former Defense Secretary Mike Esper was stalking the grounds with a sour expression and his own praetorian guard, but participated in a panel on new technology as if he were a totally normal former defense secretary, one who hadn’t posed with Donald Trump at Lafayette Square or overseen the military’s use of combat helicopters hovering low on the streets of D.C. to scatter peaceful protestors. Mike Pompeo spoke on a panel about rare earth minerals and their implications for national security (the panel was called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”).

But unmentioned was the fact that he was on this panel because he is on the board of USA Rare Earth, which was a financial sponsor of the forum. “There’s something very special about not just hearing not just from U.S. officials, but also our friends and competitors, and to do so in a calmer, less stressful environment that lends itself to real convo rather than posturing,” said Anja Manuel, executive director of the forum, when I asked her about it.

And then there were the interviews, which could be so friendly as to be pointless. How, when you have the director of the C.I.A. on stage with you at a foreign policy conference for a very limited amount of time, do you ask him, “Is there any aspect of your job that’s fun?” How do you have the Secretary of State for a one-on-one interview, and with all that’s going on in the world, ask him extensively what he thinks about women’s soccer? Then again, it’s how you demonstrate to the principals that they will be treated well here, like the humans that they are, nothing too mean or challenging, and that they should come back next year. Which, given the Aspen Security Forum’s aspirations to become the American version of the Munich Security Conference, would make sense.

But beneath this thick schmear of civility, there was, of course, drama. Susan Glasser tore out of a journalists’ meeting with Cleverly (on the indoor basketball court) to take an urgent call with shaking hands: the Stanford president was resigning, thanks to a series of investigative pieces written in The Stanford Daily by Theo Baker, her and Peter Baker’s 18-year-old son.

After the meeting, when it became clear that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal had broken the story before the Stanford paper, David Sanger tried to make her feel better by repeating his now oft-used joke: in a household with Baker, Glasser, and Theo, only one of them had won a Polk Prize—and it wasn’t either of the adults. (Then Sanger, the unofficial mayor of this conference and a man who doesn’t blush at repeating stories, told us about the time a bear went into the Aspen Meadows gym while Michael Chertoff was on the treadmill and blocked the only exit. What did he do? “He kept running!”)

Just outside, NBC colleagues were hugging a furious Andrea Mitchell. (Mitchell, who is 76, is a kind of doyenne of foreign policy journalists—in part because, despite her stature, she still acts like a hungry cub reporter one-third her age—and conducts most of the highest profile interviews at Aspen.) A minute earlier, having absolutely no idea what was going on and just saying hihowyadoin to her, Mitchell frowned deeply and said, “bad” and gestured to all this. Right at that moment, newly minted NBC natsec editor David Rohde stepped in with comfort. “I’ve never been angrier in my 45 years” in the business, Mitchell fumed.

The reason for her fury, it turned out, was that she was supposed to conduct the interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, billed as a special anonymous guest, on the conference’s last day. But Zelensky’s people insisted on having CNN’s Fareed Zakaria do the interview and the Aspen people didn’t back Mitchell up, even though NBC was a financial sponsor of the forum—and CNN wasn’t. Said one fellow journalist, shaking their head, “You just don’t do that to Andrea Mitchell.”

Julia