Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe, and there’s a reason my newsletter used to be called Tomorrow Will Be Worse.

Tonight’s main event, in addition to Abby’s report on the McConnell succession games, is Vladimir Putin’s 57th presidential inauguration.

But first…

9 Thoughts on the campus protests: People keep asking me for my thoughts about the campus protests. My main thought is: Many things can be true simultaneously. Here are a few things I believe to be true.

1. People have a right to protest. The violent dispersal of these largely peaceful protests is both abhorrent and counterproductive. Even if you disagree with the protests, you can’t not see that breaking them up with force has only caused them to spread. And it hasn’t gotten any of these schools the peaceful commencement ceremonies that ostensibly justified all of this.
2. Not everyone protesting Israel and its war in Gaza is an antisemite or believes antisemitic things. A lot of these people, probably most of them, are (understandably, justifiably) horrified by Israel’s scorched-earth campaign and the suffering it has unleashed in Gaza. At an event last week, a former very senior Biden administration official, and one who is quite pro-Israel, said that Netanyahu’s approach in Gaza has been tantamount to the “collective punishment of Palestinians” and that it is “unacceptable.” I agree.
3. A lot of that suffering has been caused by Hamas, which openly brags about its strategy of racking up a high Palestinian death toll to put pressure on Israel (“We are a nation of martyrs,” their leadership has said), and sometimes even commandeers aid shipments. Jake Sullivan and other senior members of the administration have repeatedly spoken about the added burden the Israeli military faces in going after an enemy that purposely hides behind civilians. One senior administration official told me that, if the U.S. military were facing what the I.D.F. was facing in the Al-Shifa Hospital, the U.S. would have gone in too.
4. This isn’t Charlottesville, with its concerted chants of “Jews will not replace us.” The antisemitism that wafts from these protests is of a far more subtle type. A lot of people protesting are, intentionally or not, treading into antisemitic waters because a lot of anti-Zionism, especially when espoused by non-Jews, is arguably antisemitic. Not everyone agrees with that, but I do, and I wrote and spoke about this here.
5. American Jews who are anti-Zionist are, on one hand, tapping into a rich old tradition (one that predates the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948) of Jewish anti-Zionism.
6. They are also, perhaps unwittingly, being more American than Jewish, inured by the Jewish experience in America that, over the last two to three generations, has become the glaring exception to the rule of 4,000 years of Jewish history. In the last 50 years, American Jews have become largely indistinguishable from the white, privileged majority, leading many young American Jews to think that the problem of antisemitism has been solved by the project of representative, liberal democracy. It’s something many idealistic Jews have thought throughout history, seduced by our version of the end-of-history argument: after the French Revolution, after the Bolshevik Revolution, in Weimar Germany. In fact, this was the foundation of Jewish anti-Zionism.

   But something inevitably happens that upends that notion and the sense of security—and the privilege and idealism—it provides. Which is why the Holocaust, of course, largely killed off the vibrancy of European Jewish anti-Zionism. (Before the Holocaust, my great-grandfather Isaak was an Odessan anarcho-syndicalist who studied Esperanto and turned his nose up at Jewishness and Zionism. After World War II, he became an ardent Zionist who, locked in the Soviet Union, tried to learn Hebrew as an adult.)

7. Most of these protesters are kids who are learning who they are and what they think, and may evolve away from these views as they get older and learn more. How many of us still believe what we believed at 20? I was in college AIPAC back then, for example. At 18, when the Second Intifada was raging, I fantasized about joining the I.D.F. Let’s just say I have drifted far, far from all of that, and I am so glad I’m not that person anymore. Luckily, though, there was no social media to preserve my youthful insanity in digital amber. I had the antediluvian grace to be able to evolve and grow and develop a more balanced and humane view of the situation—and to become more skeptical of Israeli government messaging.
8. The focus on these undergrads and Ph.D. students completely overstates the power they have. They can seize a building on campus. They can set up tents. They can make themselves loud enough that the Biden administration, which is ostensibly on their side in the broader political sense, takes their discontent into account. But they do not sit in Congress or in powerful institutions. They do not have guns. They are not even all that well organized. They are just kids at elite American universities trying to do what they think is right. The Israeli government, including Bibi himself, has equated their actions to the Nazi takeover of universities in Germany in the 1930s. Come on. They’re studying poetry “through a Marxian lens” and asking for “humanitarian aid”—i.e., snacks—to be brought into their temporary encampments. These are hardly brownshirts.
9. It’s not an accident that the protesters have sometimes equated Jewish students with the state of Israel. Israel is the only Jewish country in the world. There are lots of Muslim countries, lots more Christian countries, lots of multi-confessional countries, but only one country in the world that is a Jewish state. It’s why treading the line between being anti-Zionist and antisemitic is damn near impossible. It is also why, I believe, this war and this issue gets people fired up like nothing else. No one comes out like this for Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed and maimed in two years of war. No one came out like this for Syrians when they were being slaughtered and tortured by the hundreds of thousands or washing up dead on European beaches. No one came out for the genocide of the Rohingya or the Uyghurs, the Yemenis or the Muslims of India. The singular, obsessive focus on the sins of Israel, in my opinion, speaks volumes.

• M.T.G.’s diminishing returns: Republican insiders are convinced that the further M.T.G. takes her threats, the more she puts her very real power and leverage at risk. Their impression is bolstered by the fact that Johnson has shown more sangfroid toward her and the other right-wing rebels than Kevin McCarthy ever did. (Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz tweeted today that Trump effectively greenlit his takedown of McCarthy in October.)

  Indeed, in recent days, frustration with Greene and the prospect of further chaos seems to have boiled over. It’s been an enlightening study in Capitol Hill power, but everything will change come November. After that, given this session’s wave of retirements, the leadership elections will involve a very different House Republican conference, and Johnson’s survival will depend on Republicans holding the House. If Republicans lose the gavel, the G.O.P. will give up a slot at the leadership table, and that means two Republican leaders will face off against each other. That, or somebody will step down.

• John vs. John: As for the other Republican leadership race, over on the Senate side, I’m hearing that Senate Minority Whip John Thune hit the fundraising circuit in Dallas on Monday. Obviously, Dallas is a Mecca for any Republican playing at the national level with major fundraising obligations. But given that Thune’s top opponent to succeed Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, insiders have noted that it feels more than a little mischievous to be fundraising in his backyard…

The televised ceremony had cameras catching Putin in his Kremlin office, looking stiltedly at one last document before walking the interminable, carpeted lengths of the Kremlin residence—“austere” and “laconic,” according to commenters on state TV—to a waiting Aurus limousine, which took him a few steps to the grand and gilded Kremlin palace, already crowded with eager guests. Though Putin swore on the Russian constitution to protect the Russian people, there were none of them there today. There were no crowds of supporters, no glad-handing with well-wishers. At no point did Putin leave the walls of the Kremlin, which was designed and built as a fortress, punctuated regularly with archery towers. Today, the walls were made even taller with long poles covered in the Russian tricolor. Beyond them were the trees and the Moscow River. The people’s palace this was not.

When I lived in Moscow, a Russian political observer once compared the nation’s politics to the Russian Orthodox Church liturgy, where, unlike in Protestant churches, the transfiguration of the wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ happens out of sight, behind the wall of icons, the iconostasis. In Russia, political decision-making is also an elite ritual, a mystery to be performed out of sight of the people, who are allegedly too unenlightened to understand it anyway. They are simply presented with the result and expected to venerate it.

This was also true of today’s inauguration: a Russian Orthodox Church service. And indeed, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church, was seated closest to the altar where Putin gave his homily. (After the inauguration ceremony, Kirill and Putin would retreat to one of the many churches inside the Kremlin complex, where the patriarch would perform a special liturgy, blessing the Russian leader.) As is customary in a Russian church, no one sat, everyone stood, the bloated, shiny faces of the Russian elite singing praise to the “holy Russian state” in the national anthem while their czar stood stone-faced and resolute. For once, his face showed wrinkles—on his forehead and around his eyes—signs that the Russian leader has perhaps decided that showing his subjects his age, his wisdom, and the personal toll of his responsibilities is more politically advantageous than a face so famously made taut by Botox and filler.

In his inaugural address, Putin stressed the “unity” and “cohesion” of the Russian people, the need for them to stand like a pillar against the greatest danger they could possibly face—political volatility and infighting—all so they could take on the belligerent West together. This was not the speech of Putin of 20 years ago, when he was still trying to dilute a nascent Russian democracy, not obliterate it entirely. This was the speech of a wartime, nationalist dictator, a man who talked about “our historical lands” (that is, parts of Ukraine) rejoining “their Motherland,” about the thousand years of Russian history and the glorious deeds of “our ancestors,” who, in Putin’s words, had made Russia into a great power and “whose feats inspire us to this day.” This was not the speech of a soft authoritarian; it was the speech of a fascist.

It was also the speech of a man who knows he is winning—a man who beat the odds yet again to come out on top, further proving his superiority above his subjects and thus his divine right to rule them as he sees fit.

The most dizzying feat of Putin’s forebearers, after all, was often the ability to drown the enemy in Russian corpses, to overcome all strategic, tactical, and technological failure on the battlefield through sheer indifference to human life. Because if, in the West, the state is expected to serve its people, Russia has proudly refused to evolve away from the feudal idea that the people exist to serve their state.

And if the West had sought to topple him, to cut his country off from its bustling financial markets, to starve the Russian economy for invading Ukraine, well, he has proven them wrong there, too. Despite the overwhelming sanctions, the Russian economy is thrumming, having grown 3.6 percent last year. Russians have more money than they’ve ever had, and the poorer they are, the more they are benefitting from their czar’s decision to go to war and to put nearly the entire economy on a wartime footing. Despite the oil price cap, Russia is making more from oil now than it did before the invasion—thanks, in part, to American ally India buying up loads of it. And sure, analysts and observers say that the Russian economy can’t possibly keep going at this rate, but they also predicted the Russian army couldn’t keep going at this rate—and here we are.

Russian oligarchs, meanwhile, found no safe harbor in the West, where their disgust and shock at the war was not rewarded, only punished. They quickly realized that their fate was with Putin, in Russia, at home. Their fortunes, once diminished by the war and sanctions, have rebounded robustly. Russia now has more billionaires than it did in 2021, the year before the full-scale invasion. Businesses that have managed to survive the initial shock of 2022 and to figure out a way around import bans and sanctions have found themselves making record profits. The bans and the sanctions now make their businesses more lucrative, not less. And they are only alienated by what they perceive as the West’s collective punishment of them for one man’s decisions, a grievance which drives them only deeper into Putin’s suffocating embrace.

For years, Putin’s strategy has been to survive until the following day. Kick the can down the road a little farther, white-knuckle it a little longer, and hope that something breaks his way in the end. So far, it always has. Washington is, once again, distracted by the Middle East. His enemies are vanquished—dead, in prison, or exiled. Everyone else is too scared to speak up or believes that he, their czar, privy to what really goes on behind the iconostasis, surely knows better than they, mere mortals, do. Or they truly support him. It’s all hard to suss out, given how savagely repressive the holy Russian state has become in the past two years. But it hardly matters. Putin is still czar, secure on the throne, having proven to his subjects once again that only he has the nerves of steel necessary to guide them through a Russophobic, changing world.

Julia