Aspen’s World War III Rumblings

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!

It’s been a while since I’ve brought you an update on the war in Ukraine, which is now in its sixth month. In part, this is because the war has become a nightmare, the kind that recurs nightly but never really changes much. Russia has slowly chipped away at Ukrainian territory, seizing essentially all of the Luhansk region (where the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic was anchored) and has made some headway in the Donetsk region (ditto for the Donetsk People’s Republic). Since then, the Russian army has essentially halted its advance, either to regroup or because the Ukrainian military is using American-provided long-range artillery (HIMARS) to pummel Russian supply lines. (Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a former C.I.A. officer, just returned from a CODEL to Ukraine and noted that the Russian military immediately moved back, just out of range of the HIMARS.) In the meantime, the Ukrainian army is counter-attacking and trying to retake Kherson, which was one of the first regions to fall in the war and which the Kremlin is now trying to annex.

Still, the consensus among military analysts is that it will be exceedingly difficult—if not impossible—for Ukraine to claw back much of the territory it lost to Russia. And Russia continues pounding civilian areas...

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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.

JULIA IOFFE

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.)

It’s the kind of forum where former defense secretary Robert Gates just shuffles by you on a footpath, alone, looking not at the mountains ringing the forum, but at the pavement before him. It’s the kind of place where New York Times reporter David Sanger takes his administration sources fly fishing between panels. It’s where you can catch Glenn Simpson, the man who commissioned the Steele Dossier, drinking white wine and bitching familiarly to a very sympathetic David Ignatius, the Washington Post grandee, about yet another lawsuit Donald Trump has filed against him. In fact, the Aspen Security Forum is so disconcertingly chummy that, every year, the multi-day meeting kicks off with a dinner at Jane Harman’s chalet during which the disconcertingly avuncular John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., typically entertains the guests—a collection of national security policy makers, think tankers, and journalists—with magic tricks...