Anne, this analysis is essential, especially the podcast with David Frum, which crystallized the stakes brilliantly. Thank you for that conversation. It connected dots that desperately needed connecting.
I just published analysis showing Venezuela wasn’t improvisation but the November 2025 National Security Strategy executed verbatim. The NSS’s “Trump Corollary” explicitly authorizes exactly what you’re describing: military force to assert “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere” and deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” access to strategic assets.
This all reveals the information architecture behind this. The sphere-of-influence model isn’t just Trump’s impulse, it’s been circulating in overlapping Russian/MAGA networks for years, exactly as you documented.
Now it’s policy.
What makes your Greenland analysis so devastating: We already have everything we need there. Denmark never blocked us. Trump needs ownership for the optics, the map, the demonstration of dominance. It’s spheres-of-influence politics as performance, with NATO alliances as collateral damage.
He doesn’t want democracy in Venezuela, he wants compliance. It was about replacing one dictator with a compliant one…excellent analysis you have given us.
The pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all. The NSS architects don’t understand this. They think documented imperial doctrine equals sustainable power. But as you’ve shown throughout Autocracy Inc., allies who share values create durable influence. Coercion creates resentment and hedging.
Kagan warned the jungle grows back. Bremmer predicted G-Zero. You’re documenting it happening in real time, the frameworks becoming kinetic action, spheres-of-influence politics returning with a published playbook.
Grateful for your voice on this, and especially for that podcast. It’s essential listening for anyone trying to understand what just happened and what comes next.
thanks. Yes I agree, it's all been laid out in advance. And this is same predatory mentality they have towards Americans: our policy is to to make money for ourselves, throw some bones to our supporters and screw everyone else
Anne, thank you for your essential work. The predatory logic is unified, whether aimed at Americans or the world, it’s the same playbook: extract resources, bypass constraints, use force when necessary. Your “throw bones to supporters, screw everyone else” nails the transactional core. No ideology, just: Does this enrich us and demonstrate dominance? They’re not hiding it because they’ve calculated no institutional force can stop them. Appreciate your voice connecting domestic authoritarianism to international fascist (for lack of a better term) expansion.
Over the past year, the United States has quietly chipped away at the liberal world order. However, recent developments have unveiled the true extent of this decline. We’re perilously close to realising Orwell’s 1984 scenario: a world fragmented into regional hegemonies, each dominating its sphere. If this path continues unchecked Europe must brace for a multipolar reality and urgently bolster its institutional and strategic capacity to safeguard democratic freedoms, at the very least within its own sphere.
You are so right about Greenland. Now is the time for Congress to make a bipartisan statement that Greenland belongs to Denmark and is not "ours". Before the next illegal fait accompli.
Who can deny that President Trump's thought process is merely that "he just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map"? That is the child like level of thinking displayed by this man, I bet he knows what percentage increase in the size of America the addition of Greenland would bring.
President Trump seems like a very old man in a hurry, with a weird bucket list that he has built up over 40 years - Canada, Mexico, Cuba... Yet this man has never demonstrated a talent for long-term planning. A number of failed hotels and casinos ruined his reputation on Wall St 30 years ago because he failed to realise that interest rates sometimes go up.
But the truth is that by neglecting the security of the Atlantic and Pacific, he leaves the US vulnerable to future attack as happened in the 1930s, which led to Pearl Harbour. How can you trust Russia and China to stay out of the Atlantic and Pacific while you are extorting wealth from the Americas with your Putin style attack on your neighbours? This man of limited intellect is turning a super power into a 2nd rate regional power. Weak, weak, weak....
As I often imagine it, the appropriate cartoon would be one of Trump as an overgrown teenage boy playing a computer variation of that old board game, Risk, with Putin and Xi as grown up gamers.
Hasn't it indeed been beautiful here in Poland with many days of snow lying on the ground. Waking up to minus 12C was a bit of shock though and I had to break up the "proper" winter jacket for my walk to get coffee today.
After Venezuela and threats to Denmark over Greenland, and further the demotion of Mr Mark Kelly for stating the absolute obvious that soldiers should resist illegal orders yesterday, I commented to a friend that trump has become like Sauron from the Lord of the Rings. Once its evil eye is upon you, you are doomed. Seems to be how trump operates. He gets an idea and then he needs to make it happen. The pure narcissist that he is must achieve his stated goals so as not to have looked foolish at stating it in the first place. At this stage, I am betting on him simply taking Denmark. Whats to stop him? I don't see ANYONE, still, in the USA doing anything to stop what is happening.
However, if he does take Denmark, I think this might be a line in the sand for many countries around the world that America might like to call friends.
Oh and another thing, that lady suggesting Russia is a world power!!!! That has got to be a joke I suspect? 🤣🤣
Hi Anne, thanks for your excellent books and articles. From Australia: I'd like to add another line of enquiry. Maybe Trump is simply running a massive extortion racket? Kidnapping rich drug lords, then pardoning them if they pay him a few million, or cut him into a trafficking deal? An earlier example is former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted then pardoned. Now it's Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump has bragged of further targets, so bribes could already be landing. (Why else would a suspect's wife be kidnapped - er 'arrested' - as well?) I've considered all the other explanations, but they make no sense anymore. Rebutting them now, point by point:
If regime change were the goal for Venezuela, Trump would have let its democratically elected leader take charge. Instead, he's just handed power back to the old regime.
If it's about narcotic terrorism, why did he pardon the Honduran drug lord?
If it's a distraction from the Epstein files, there are hundreds of easier ploys available.
If it's about oil extraction, why are energy companies denying that he contacted them (as he'd claimed)? Is he secretly playing them off against each other for bribes, too?
It could be about blocking oil supply to China, yet why disrupt China's trading partners such as Saudi Arabia, which already paid billions to the Trump family?
It could harm Russia's war effort in Ukraine, thankfully, but I doubt this is a motive given Trump's longterm servile attitude to Putin.
Spheres of influence? Then why the threats to Iran? That is not in America's region, especially an isolationist America. It might suit Iran's foes, Israel and Saudi Arabia, far as they can line Trump's pockets. Nothing to do with helping Jewish or Islamic people.
Greenland? If America were worried about Arctic access, it'd do better to continue collaborating with Denmark, rather than making another enemy.
Canada is in America's sphere. But a Venezuelan-US oil deal could be harmful to Canada. Is that what this is really about? More threats?
Cuba (Marco Rubio's legacy itch), Columbia, Panama: 'Pay up, or you're next'.
Then there's the ultimate threat, the one to America's own people: 'See how I can make my army do whatever I want!'
Extortion is the most credible motive in every case. The leader of the free world is a mobster.
The story about Greenland is jaw dropping. Trump should not have any allusions about an invasion like Putin did about Ukraine. Greenlanders will not welcome the USA troops with open arms and flowers. The local population is well armed and Denmark is shipping in. reinforcements.
“…since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Adam Klasfield from All Rise News posted an interview with ex-FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi ("Ex-FBI Agent Breaks Down Why Top Charge May Not Hold") questioning whether DOJ was even able to match the charges to the very real crimes Maduro committed. Notably, by going with the more sensationalist (and PR-friendly) charge of "Narco-terrorism," they may have boxed themselves in with a word that has a narrow definition in the law... one that Maduro isn't guilty of. An example of narco-terrorism, as Figliuzi posited, would be more like growing fields of opium poppies to fund a terrorist group like ISIS. Maduro's business model made him something that sounds much less sexy to the DOJ: Drug dealer.
That may blow up in their faces worse than Lindsey Halligan's disastrous attempt at cosplaying as a prosecutor to vindictively prosecute Jim Comey. Unlike today's leftover DOJ lawyers -- the ones who were unable or unwilling to flee the DOJ -- Maduro's lawyers are almost overqualified. The fact that Maduro is being prosecuted in the same court that convicted former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whom fellow convict Trump pardoned, is going to be that much harder to square.
In any case, the 1984 scenario of 3 spheres of influence has a fatal flaw: The three superpowers will never be able to abide the continuing survival or success of the other two and will always feel threatened and envious of the other two.
Thank you. Yes, very much true. However much Xi Jinping and the PLAN try to push around small countries like the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, etc., nobody has forgotten 1979 Vietnam, or that almost none of the CCP's adventurism turns out well for them. Russia's economy is unrecoverable, which should scare everybody, since I imagine the only messier than an imploding empire is one with nukes on a deadman's switch.
If we follow Trump's lead, we will be as stuck in our inevitable decline as Russia, China, and every other empire that ever existed. The one thing we had going for us was our ability to reinvent ourselves, but autocracies can't do that: Their fates are predetermined through simple cause and effect.
No discussion, no attempt to prove the facts—you're just a liar.
Yesterday, I watched Congressman Jim Jordan being interviewed, during which he said, “The poor people in his Ohio district appreciated Trump for taking action.” My thinking was, why only the poor people? He was able to present falsehood after falsehood, and the commentator said nothing.
Consider the definition of a lie: “to say something known to be false with the intent to mislead.”
Trump is a compulsive, sick liar, no discussion, just facts.
Trump, you're lying; he's always lying; he's been lying his whole life.
The news media should admit that it is a lie, no rebuttal, just acknowledgment that it is false. Rubio can stand there, keep a straight face, and lie to the camera. Members of Congress lie constantly, never admitting that they are Trump's agents. The truth doesn't seem to exist in Congress or in the press.
Considering all the false claims about the invasion of Venezuela, three months ago, Trump moved the aircraft carrier and other military assets to the Caribbean Sea, claiming it was to fight drug smuggling, when he was plotting to invade Venezuela and take its oil for his billionaire friends.
Lie after lie, and no one says he is lying; he is a liar. Half of Congress constantly lies, and they are never called out for it. What would happen if, after a congressman made a statement, a Democrat said, "You are lying, you are a liar?"
The new stations are contributing to dishonesty by filling the airwaves with filler discussions, allowing some congressmen to come on and lie. The interviewer knows they are lying and does nothing. The right of free speech should let the commentator say that you are lying, nothing more—just that you are lying.
To be a liar, I must know that what I am saying isn't true, but I say it intending to deceive others. This is different from saying something I believe to be true or denying the truth; instead, I present these as facts rather than admitting that what I say is wrong, which would be stupidity, not lying.
Very grateful for your clarity and your unwavering commitment to sharing it as far and wide as possible. Just finished watching you with Wajahat Ali to day as well. I appreciated the ending note of what we can all do . . . And as a pediatrician who has seemingly more and more “informed refusal” conversations with every shift, it does often feel like shouting into the wind. I appreciate the call to continue even if one feels one makes no progress. It’s fascinating and somewhat terrifying that people can have such different perceptions and assessment of risk and consequence, and this phenomenon sometimes feels characteristic of our modern culture . . . I try to be as pleasant and sympathetic and also as up front as possible about what parents are taking on. It is your right to make this decision for your child, certainly. That also means it is your responsibility. You have no right to sue either me or my institution if the decision has consequences that you don’t foresee or welcome . . . Sometimes I think Americans live in a peculiar denial about downside risk, and of course it is human to suppress feelings of guilt for bad outcomes . . . Our cultural optimism is such a strength, and, sometimes I wish we prioritized and prized accountability for downside risk a bit more broadly. (Also, I find your photos, always, to be beautiful and soul-soothing! Thank you for sharing.)
I think it's natural for Americans not to have much inkling about how murderous individuals and institutions can be or how thngs can change dramatically for the worse, having the relative benefit of la dolce vita post WWII. Notwithstanding a pandemic and Great Recession.The re-election of trump demonstrated we the electorate ain't doing well (fill in your own definition of that) and I still struggle to fully wrap my head around the implications and the best way forward. But it's clear our information environment is an open sewer so how could there not be negative consequence to that. Unwarrarnted dangerous lies broadcast by major media, allowed under the banner of "free speech " has always been the soft underbelly of American democracy which foreign and domestic adversaries of democracy have been able to take advantage of in this digital info age chiefly because of illusions maintained about humans. Throw in a short-term profit horizon economy.
Anne, this analysis is essential, especially the podcast with David Frum, which crystallized the stakes brilliantly. Thank you for that conversation. It connected dots that desperately needed connecting.
I just published analysis showing Venezuela wasn’t improvisation but the November 2025 National Security Strategy executed verbatim. The NSS’s “Trump Corollary” explicitly authorizes exactly what you’re describing: military force to assert “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere” and deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” access to strategic assets.
This all reveals the information architecture behind this. The sphere-of-influence model isn’t just Trump’s impulse, it’s been circulating in overlapping Russian/MAGA networks for years, exactly as you documented.
Now it’s policy.
What makes your Greenland analysis so devastating: We already have everything we need there. Denmark never blocked us. Trump needs ownership for the optics, the map, the demonstration of dominance. It’s spheres-of-influence politics as performance, with NATO alliances as collateral damage.
He doesn’t want democracy in Venezuela, he wants compliance. It was about replacing one dictator with a compliant one…excellent analysis you have given us.
The pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all. The NSS architects don’t understand this. They think documented imperial doctrine equals sustainable power. But as you’ve shown throughout Autocracy Inc., allies who share values create durable influence. Coercion creates resentment and hedging.
Kagan warned the jungle grows back. Bremmer predicted G-Zero. You’re documenting it happening in real time, the frameworks becoming kinetic action, spheres-of-influence politics returning with a published playbook.
Grateful for your voice on this, and especially for that podcast. It’s essential listening for anyone trying to understand what just happened and what comes next.
—Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
thanks. Yes I agree, it's all been laid out in advance. And this is same predatory mentality they have towards Americans: our policy is to to make money for ourselves, throw some bones to our supporters and screw everyone else
Anne, thank you for your essential work. The predatory logic is unified, whether aimed at Americans or the world, it’s the same playbook: extract resources, bypass constraints, use force when necessary. Your “throw bones to supporters, screw everyone else” nails the transactional core. No ideology, just: Does this enrich us and demonstrate dominance? They’re not hiding it because they’ve calculated no institutional force can stop them. Appreciate your voice connecting domestic authoritarianism to international fascist (for lack of a better term) expansion.
Old, not well I see apathy and fear. Since I read your book in 2015: which I gave to a new college student, I’ve wondered how we can wake up?
Anne applebaum as always standing up against tyranny with the truth
Over the past year, the United States has quietly chipped away at the liberal world order. However, recent developments have unveiled the true extent of this decline. We’re perilously close to realising Orwell’s 1984 scenario: a world fragmented into regional hegemonies, each dominating its sphere. If this path continues unchecked Europe must brace for a multipolar reality and urgently bolster its institutional and strategic capacity to safeguard democratic freedoms, at the very least within its own sphere.
You are so right about Greenland. Now is the time for Congress to make a bipartisan statement that Greenland belongs to Denmark and is not "ours". Before the next illegal fait accompli.
Thank you for such a clear and thoughtful post.
Who can deny that President Trump's thought process is merely that "he just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map"? That is the child like level of thinking displayed by this man, I bet he knows what percentage increase in the size of America the addition of Greenland would bring.
President Trump seems like a very old man in a hurry, with a weird bucket list that he has built up over 40 years - Canada, Mexico, Cuba... Yet this man has never demonstrated a talent for long-term planning. A number of failed hotels and casinos ruined his reputation on Wall St 30 years ago because he failed to realise that interest rates sometimes go up.
But the truth is that by neglecting the security of the Atlantic and Pacific, he leaves the US vulnerable to future attack as happened in the 1930s, which led to Pearl Harbour. How can you trust Russia and China to stay out of the Atlantic and Pacific while you are extorting wealth from the Americas with your Putin style attack on your neighbours? This man of limited intellect is turning a super power into a 2nd rate regional power. Weak, weak, weak....
As I often imagine it, the appropriate cartoon would be one of Trump as an overgrown teenage boy playing a computer variation of that old board game, Risk, with Putin and Xi as grown up gamers.
Hasn't it indeed been beautiful here in Poland with many days of snow lying on the ground. Waking up to minus 12C was a bit of shock though and I had to break up the "proper" winter jacket for my walk to get coffee today.
After Venezuela and threats to Denmark over Greenland, and further the demotion of Mr Mark Kelly for stating the absolute obvious that soldiers should resist illegal orders yesterday, I commented to a friend that trump has become like Sauron from the Lord of the Rings. Once its evil eye is upon you, you are doomed. Seems to be how trump operates. He gets an idea and then he needs to make it happen. The pure narcissist that he is must achieve his stated goals so as not to have looked foolish at stating it in the first place. At this stage, I am betting on him simply taking Denmark. Whats to stop him? I don't see ANYONE, still, in the USA doing anything to stop what is happening.
However, if he does take Denmark, I think this might be a line in the sand for many countries around the world that America might like to call friends.
Oh and another thing, that lady suggesting Russia is a world power!!!! That has got to be a joke I suspect? 🤣🤣
Thanks again Anne.
Damien
Hi Anne, thanks for your excellent books and articles. From Australia: I'd like to add another line of enquiry. Maybe Trump is simply running a massive extortion racket? Kidnapping rich drug lords, then pardoning them if they pay him a few million, or cut him into a trafficking deal? An earlier example is former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted then pardoned. Now it's Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump has bragged of further targets, so bribes could already be landing. (Why else would a suspect's wife be kidnapped - er 'arrested' - as well?) I've considered all the other explanations, but they make no sense anymore. Rebutting them now, point by point:
If regime change were the goal for Venezuela, Trump would have let its democratically elected leader take charge. Instead, he's just handed power back to the old regime.
If it's about narcotic terrorism, why did he pardon the Honduran drug lord?
If it's a distraction from the Epstein files, there are hundreds of easier ploys available.
If it's about oil extraction, why are energy companies denying that he contacted them (as he'd claimed)? Is he secretly playing them off against each other for bribes, too?
It could be about blocking oil supply to China, yet why disrupt China's trading partners such as Saudi Arabia, which already paid billions to the Trump family?
It could harm Russia's war effort in Ukraine, thankfully, but I doubt this is a motive given Trump's longterm servile attitude to Putin.
Spheres of influence? Then why the threats to Iran? That is not in America's region, especially an isolationist America. It might suit Iran's foes, Israel and Saudi Arabia, far as they can line Trump's pockets. Nothing to do with helping Jewish or Islamic people.
Greenland? If America were worried about Arctic access, it'd do better to continue collaborating with Denmark, rather than making another enemy.
Canada is in America's sphere. But a Venezuelan-US oil deal could be harmful to Canada. Is that what this is really about? More threats?
Cuba (Marco Rubio's legacy itch), Columbia, Panama: 'Pay up, or you're next'.
Then there's the ultimate threat, the one to America's own people: 'See how I can make my army do whatever I want!'
Extortion is the most credible motive in every case. The leader of the free world is a mobster.
The story about Greenland is jaw dropping. Trump should not have any allusions about an invasion like Putin did about Ukraine. Greenlanders will not welcome the USA troops with open arms and flowers. The local population is well armed and Denmark is shipping in. reinforcements.
“…since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/thucydides8.html
Adam Klasfield from All Rise News posted an interview with ex-FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi ("Ex-FBI Agent Breaks Down Why Top Charge May Not Hold") questioning whether DOJ was even able to match the charges to the very real crimes Maduro committed. Notably, by going with the more sensationalist (and PR-friendly) charge of "Narco-terrorism," they may have boxed themselves in with a word that has a narrow definition in the law... one that Maduro isn't guilty of. An example of narco-terrorism, as Figliuzi posited, would be more like growing fields of opium poppies to fund a terrorist group like ISIS. Maduro's business model made him something that sounds much less sexy to the DOJ: Drug dealer.
That may blow up in their faces worse than Lindsey Halligan's disastrous attempt at cosplaying as a prosecutor to vindictively prosecute Jim Comey. Unlike today's leftover DOJ lawyers -- the ones who were unable or unwilling to flee the DOJ -- Maduro's lawyers are almost overqualified. The fact that Maduro is being prosecuted in the same court that convicted former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whom fellow convict Trump pardoned, is going to be that much harder to square.
In any case, the 1984 scenario of 3 spheres of influence has a fatal flaw: The three superpowers will never be able to abide the continuing survival or success of the other two and will always feel threatened and envious of the other two.
also, Russia doesn't dominate Europe and China doesn't control Asia
Thank you. Yes, very much true. However much Xi Jinping and the PLAN try to push around small countries like the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, etc., nobody has forgotten 1979 Vietnam, or that almost none of the CCP's adventurism turns out well for them. Russia's economy is unrecoverable, which should scare everybody, since I imagine the only messier than an imploding empire is one with nukes on a deadman's switch.
If we follow Trump's lead, we will be as stuck in our inevitable decline as Russia, China, and every other empire that ever existed. The one thing we had going for us was our ability to reinvent ourselves, but autocracies can't do that: Their fates are predetermined through simple cause and effect.
Indeed Europe is beautiful, thanks Anne
Maybe the point about invading Greenland is to break up NATO and do Trump’s buddy Putin a big favor.
yes, that might be the goal of some of the people around Trump. I don't think Trump himself thinks strategically at all
YOU ARE A LIAR! NO DISCUSSION, JUST YOU ARE LYING
Mr. President, you are lying.
Congressman, you are a liar.
Just point your finger and say, “You are a liar.”
No discussion, no attempt to prove the facts—you're just a liar.
Yesterday, I watched Congressman Jim Jordan being interviewed, during which he said, “The poor people in his Ohio district appreciated Trump for taking action.” My thinking was, why only the poor people? He was able to present falsehood after falsehood, and the commentator said nothing.
Consider the definition of a lie: “to say something known to be false with the intent to mislead.”
Trump is a compulsive, sick liar, no discussion, just facts.
Trump, you're lying; he's always lying; he's been lying his whole life.
The news media should admit that it is a lie, no rebuttal, just acknowledgment that it is false. Rubio can stand there, keep a straight face, and lie to the camera. Members of Congress lie constantly, never admitting that they are Trump's agents. The truth doesn't seem to exist in Congress or in the press.
Considering all the false claims about the invasion of Venezuela, three months ago, Trump moved the aircraft carrier and other military assets to the Caribbean Sea, claiming it was to fight drug smuggling, when he was plotting to invade Venezuela and take its oil for his billionaire friends.
Lie after lie, and no one says he is lying; he is a liar. Half of Congress constantly lies, and they are never called out for it. What would happen if, after a congressman made a statement, a Democrat said, "You are lying, you are a liar?"
The new stations are contributing to dishonesty by filling the airwaves with filler discussions, allowing some congressmen to come on and lie. The interviewer knows they are lying and does nothing. The right of free speech should let the commentator say that you are lying, nothing more—just that you are lying.
To be a liar, I must know that what I am saying isn't true, but I say it intending to deceive others. This is different from saying something I believe to be true or denying the truth; instead, I present these as facts rather than admitting that what I say is wrong, which would be stupidity, not lying.
Very grateful for your clarity and your unwavering commitment to sharing it as far and wide as possible. Just finished watching you with Wajahat Ali to day as well. I appreciated the ending note of what we can all do . . . And as a pediatrician who has seemingly more and more “informed refusal” conversations with every shift, it does often feel like shouting into the wind. I appreciate the call to continue even if one feels one makes no progress. It’s fascinating and somewhat terrifying that people can have such different perceptions and assessment of risk and consequence, and this phenomenon sometimes feels characteristic of our modern culture . . . I try to be as pleasant and sympathetic and also as up front as possible about what parents are taking on. It is your right to make this decision for your child, certainly. That also means it is your responsibility. You have no right to sue either me or my institution if the decision has consequences that you don’t foresee or welcome . . . Sometimes I think Americans live in a peculiar denial about downside risk, and of course it is human to suppress feelings of guilt for bad outcomes . . . Our cultural optimism is such a strength, and, sometimes I wish we prioritized and prized accountability for downside risk a bit more broadly. (Also, I find your photos, always, to be beautiful and soul-soothing! Thank you for sharing.)
I think it's natural for Americans not to have much inkling about how murderous individuals and institutions can be or how thngs can change dramatically for the worse, having the relative benefit of la dolce vita post WWII. Notwithstanding a pandemic and Great Recession.The re-election of trump demonstrated we the electorate ain't doing well (fill in your own definition of that) and I still struggle to fully wrap my head around the implications and the best way forward. But it's clear our information environment is an open sewer so how could there not be negative consequence to that. Unwarrarnted dangerous lies broadcast by major media, allowed under the banner of "free speech " has always been the soft underbelly of American democracy which foreign and domestic adversaries of democracy have been able to take advantage of in this digital info age chiefly because of illusions maintained about humans. Throw in a short-term profit horizon economy.
Thank you, Ms. Applebaum.