Judah Grunstein
@Judah_Grunstein
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Editor-in-chief of @wpreview . Lurking here. Working here: @judah -grunstein.bsky.social.
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Last Seen Profiles
Now that everyone has moved onto something else, it’s time for the definitive take on this thread, which is of course mine.
1. What it gets right.
2. What it gets wrong.
3. Why it struck such a nerve.
Thread
King of Spain at the final day of Wimbledon. This looks great.
Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy. So let's talk about some of the reasons why it's great. 🧵
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The problem with revenge is that it’s the opposite of strategic. It’s a reaction determined by the adversary’s initiative, rather than an initiative determined by one’s own objectives. As I said yesterday, wanting revenge is understandable. Seeking it is a mistake.
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We call a man who, with great effort, successfully flouts sartorial conventions a dandy. We call a man who does so with no effort at all an Italian. Either way, style is ultimately subjective. It becomes a trend when it gains traction and a convention when it achieves hegemony.
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As the old jazz saying goes, you learn the rules to break the rules. The history of esthetic evolution is the history of transgression against the classic style that masquerades as a universal truth. This is as true in fashion as in the other arts.
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In short, not a relatable opening. But that doesn’t diminish the value of the thread itself. It’s a thorough encomium to a classic tradition, with cleverly annotated photos to illustrate every point. And it was free for everyone to appreciate, tear apart or both, as they saw fit.
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1. What it gets right. It's a thorough, informative disquisition of the esthetic principles that inform (remember that word) sartorial conventions (remember that one too). It's the fashion equivalent of harmonic theory for music or color & perspective theory for the visual arts.
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2. What it gets wrong. It confuses esthetic principles that inform sartorial conventions with esthetic principles that dictate sartorial laws. And in doing so, it presents a very classic style as a universal truth, in what is a post-postmodern world.
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Discovering these principles for the first time is often wonderfully useful for understanding our own unconscious reactions to music, art and style. They are also very valuable for understanding the basic assumptions on which highly informed observers are operating.
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3. Why it touched such a nerve. It would be very difficult to construct a sentence more charged with potential triggers than this one: Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy.
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The problem with the argument that the US had a cheap and stable footing with 2.5K troops is that, in fact, with 2.5K US troops, the Taliban prepositioned an offensive across the country, methodically flipped a political coalition of provincial leaders, and no one even noticed.
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Though he later explains that all the principles in his thread are accessible without great wealth, “this level of tailoring” is the style equivalent of “this Tuscan villa.” It reeks of inaccessible luxury.
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This is, after all, what most of us do, whether vocally or silently, when we see other people's style choices.
In short, not a relatable opening. But that doesn’t diminish the value of the thread itself. It’s a thorough encomium to a classic tradition, with cleverly annotated photos to illustrate every point. And it was free for everyone to appreciate, tear apart or both, as they saw fit.
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Following that up with “nowadays” adds a note of nostalgia for a golden age before esthetic decline and decadence set in and the barbarians took over.
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The hegemonic principles the thread presents as universal laws are just the empire against which style insurgents rebel.
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But it also implicitly posits the author as an uber-ubermensch, a priest of the mystery cult who stands above even the very wealthy.
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Every day I live in the UK offers more proof of how undeserved its reputation for bad food is.
This week it's been the cheeses I got from our local cheesemonger, particularly the Shropshire Blue, but also some others.
The homemade sausages from the local artisan butcher, too.
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One of the dangers of a DC policy consensus is that once it's formed, there are enormous market incentives for DC analysts to formulate smart-sounding ways to operationalize it, rather than question it.
We see that happening with China now.
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One would be hard-pressed to recover after that to create empathy with the common reader. Instead he barrels on with “even the wealthy,” implicitly positing the wealthy as a class of ubermensch who should be initiated into the mystery cult but no longer are.
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Be careful about one-dimensional narratives that purport to be about Africa, but are in fact about US and Western competition with Russia and China.
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Addendum 3:
And for the copy editors out there, esthetic is an accepted U.S. variant of aesthetic, but it saved me a character in a couple tight posts.
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Quick addendum for
@dieworkwear
's fans who discovered this thread via his reply: I enjoy his work and thinking about style in general.
I wasn't accusing him of being elitist, but doing a textual analysis of one sentence to explain why so many people assumed he was.
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The paradox of Macron's presidency is that he will have put France on a sounder footing on almost every policy area, but will leave behind a dangerously atomized political landscape whose institutions have lost legitimacy in the eyes of a wide swathe of the public.
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Specifically, what Israel is doing in Gaza right now is guaranteeing a generation of supporters in Gaza and around the region for Hamas or whatever more violent group takes its place. It’s not that this will end badly. It’s that this will never end, badly.
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A realist is a liberal internationalist who's tried to get a toddler out of the house.
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So after a week of hearing how insufferably French the French are being for opposing the appointment of an American to a sensitive EU position, I learn about the law requiring EU citizenship for the position that the EU is waiving in order to appoint her.
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I want a job where I can screw up, resign in disgrace, then pivot to a lucrative career diagnosing how I screwed up, repeating the explanations of why I was screwing up that I ignored when I was screwing up.
This piece is so bad, it's embarrassing.
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This one's pretty easy, folks.
The monarchy, which many of us object to for all sorts of good reasons, does not deserve our sympathy.
A 96-y.o. woman who has been a model of duty, dignity and solidarity does.
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I'm less and less impressed by the Biden forpol/natsec team.
Managing the Ukraine crisis as well as they have means their legacy is secured.
But on MENA, it's back to the future.
On Asia it's half-baked and phoned in.
And on LatAm and Africa, it's asleep at the wheel.
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@b_judah
I'd be careful about assuming a speech on the Senate floor reveals any senator's true thoughts about anything.
That said, what did he get wrong besides the claim that neither France nor Germany had attempted to unify the continent in the previous 200 years?
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This is perhaps the most thoughtful, empathetic and compelling explanation I've heard of this phenomenon.
"We all like to think that we would never go off and believe in QAnon. . ."
CNN's
@donie
tells
@KatieGHannon
that loneliness and lack of community are what drive people toward conspiracy theories.
LISTEN in full:
@rtenews
|
#RT
ÉUpfront
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@b_judah
What I called the "new normal effect" here, and something we've seen in Syria, Libya, Yemen and even Ukraine since 2014.
I still tend to think attention won't drop off as entirely, but will wax and wane with inflection points on the ground.
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But what I've outlined is a strategic pathway forward.
What Israel has chosen is revenge.
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What might Israel have done instead? Declare a period of mourning, during which the nation could come together, grieve and get over the shock, even as military preparations were being made.
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There's something gripping -- a horrified but can't look away feeling -- about watching Putin destroy the Russian state based on nothing but pique and caprice.
By this I don't mean his regime is doomed to fall or the country will collapse into chaos, though both may happen.
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France's tragedy is that it was a generation ahead of its time on European strategic autonomy, and a generation behind on structural reforms.
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In addition to everything else, Berlusconi was also a trailblazer in what is now a ubiquitous feature of populism: turning politics into a form of entertainment, in which the willingness to court outrage and scandal becomes a superpower.
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Take immediate steps toward improving conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank & reining in the settler movement as confidence-building measures, & endorse one of the many roadmaps for a just resolution of the conflict, even if that gives the impression of rewarding terror.
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@yuanyi_z
@ericfarns
Seems like a reasonable first step would be to try to get him his benefits back...
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This smart piece by
@PatPorter76
,
@BH_Friedman
and
@JustinTLogan
will likely be misrepresented. So I'll summarize my reading of it.
1. Ukraine sets its terms.
2. The West sets its limits.
3. Ukraine should know the West's limits to wisely set its terms.
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Issue an extended deadline for Hamas to release the elderly, children and injured hostages, using the good graces of those same regional govts as intermediaries.
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Use that time to rally international solidarity and support, particularly among the regional govts that have normalized ties or are seeking to with Israel.
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Every country has its internal contradictions.
Among France's, two have always stood out to me: a resistance to change alongside a modernist embrace of innovation; and a social conformism alongside an unruly lack of discipline.
Both seem to be at play in the current crisis.
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Then, and only then, address the fact that there is no co-existence with Hamas, but do so in a way that does not reproduce the same war crimes, but from a distance and at an industrial scale.
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Macron is taking heat unfairly for reopening the Normandy 4 format on the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
As long as all diplomatic channels are coordinated, a division of labor and even of roles does no harm and also offers Putin more options for not invading and still saving face.
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Well, I was wrong, and it's important to admit it.
I wrote Saturday, "The U.S. will likely never fully trust India enough to transfer the kinds of defense technology New Delhi seeks in its arms deals."
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Just got off the road from an offline Christmas weekend to see the sad news about Archbishop Desmond Tutu's passing.
I had the good fortune to have interviewed him as a high school student panelist just after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The impression he made was indelible.
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One can argue if any of these steps were possible given the current circumstances, which include the passions unlocked by Saturday's attack, but also the conjunctural configuration of Israeli leadership/govt and the path dependencies of decades-long policy toward the conflict.
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This is the best presentation of the Russian position I've seen so far, in terms of the security guarantees Moscow seeks and why it is choosing now to press for relitigating the post-Cold War European security architecture.
By
@m_suchkov
at
@WarOnTheRocks
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Something tells me the leaders of Mali's military junta might be reconsidering their life choices right about now.
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@sethharpesq
@OlufemiOTaiwo
This is a bit disingenuous. Tactical decisions are never on the ballot. But US voters elected presidents who promised to pursue the war on terror and reelected Obama knowing about his drone wars.
And Nigeriens elected presidents who promised to improve security w/ US support.
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My military analyst timeline seems evenly split between:
1) the Russian invasion is fatally doomed, all the Ukrainians have to do is hold out for a week and it will collapse by itself; and,
2) the advance in the south is slow but steady, and mass will win the day in the north.
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The use of massacre & atrocity in civil wars and liberation struggles is functional. Its purpose is to remove any possibility of common ground or co-existence.
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Very thoughtful reply to my thread that I highly recommend for anyone who reacted negatively to
@dieworkwear
's initial thread of tailoring.
This is a good thread. I just want to clarify something. People often mistake my love for classic tailored clothing as a belief that either everyone should dress this way or that this is the only legitimate aesthetic. This puts things into a false dichotomy. 🧵
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I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the red tie. I should have worn the
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It's good to see the tone shift in US-France relations after the Biden-Macron call. But just as there was a great deal of exaggeration over the potential long-term impact of the spat, there is now just as much exaggeration of the significance of the reconciliation.
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It's more that he is shredding the social contract, both within the country and between the country and the world, in ways that will be irreparable regardless of how the war or Russia's internal politics play out.
The Russia we knew pre-Feb. 24 simply no longer exists.
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The Will Smith-Chris Rock incident demonstrates the impotence of the norms- and rules-based order in deterring and preventing a determined aggressor.
But it also illustrates the limits of a realist approach to the use of force in achieving political and strategic objectives.
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It's another way Macron so often exemplifies my favorite aphorism: that in politics, as in marital disputes, being right is overrated.
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This one might not age well.
But I think we just officially entered the period that will test the proposition of a weak China being more dangerous than a strong China.
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A bit late to this one, by
@michaelxpettis
, but it's a really concise and accessible resume of the macroeconomic challenges and dilemmas China will be facing in the coming years.
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Putin seems intent on bringing the whole house of cards down with him.
One of the things I pointed to in December for why an invasion would be a mistake was the fragility and instability throughout the post-Soviet space.
Putin is only exacerbating it.
Belarus is on the cusp of sending troops to Ukraine. A quick thread of this development's significance /1
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Experts on tanks: The West should deliver tanks to Ukraine!
Everyone on Twitter: Yes, yes, the West should deliver tanks to Ukraine!
Experts on tanks: Good lord, smh, now everyone on Twitter is an expert on tanks.
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For everyone who followed me because of the tailoring thread, you're going to get a lot more global affairs posts in your timeline than you might have bargained for.
And if you thought my take on tailoring was bad, wait til you see my takes on topics I know something about.
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One thing to keep in mind when assessing Putin's nuclear "threats."
The war in Ukraine has very publicly eradicated Russia's conventional defense capability.
For a country whose strategic culture is so infused with paranoia, that must be extremely unnerving.
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That's a pretty complicated chalkboard equation to explain why they needed 39 months.
8 months since coup which saw Alpha Condé removed from office, head of Guinea’s military government has announced a 39 month roadmap towards civilian rule.
(Burkina Faso had approved 3 year roadmap &
@AbdoulayeDiop8
has just clarified that Mali put forward roadmap for 24 months)
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I can't help but think that Putin's thinking on invading Ukraine was colored by the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which is perhaps the most decisive instance of war successfully accomplishing political objectives in the past 50 years.
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I'm still struck by the refusal to recognize Black French critics' Frenchness & the framing of intellectual exchange as "infiltration" of "foreign" ideas, especially by a country that claims a universal human rights mission & given the long history of such exchange btw US-France.
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In other words, West African govts and populations didn't need clumsy Russian disinformation campaigns to turn on France.
France did that all by itself.
All Russia is doing is offering West African govts an alternative.
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As is often the case, I'm struck by how much the narrative about China has changed in two key ways. The first is more longstanding: the shift toward a hawkish "China as threat" lens. The second is more recent: the idea that we're witnessing "peak China."
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Again, to suggest that China's ties with Africa are all a big scam played on naive and incompetent govts is to deny African govts' agency and expertise about their own needs, especially given the range of options that have been available to them in the past two decades.
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Pretty much says it all:
"By 2011, at the height of the war, the base had ballooned into a small city, with two runaways, tens of thousands of occupants, shops and a U.S. military prison that became notorious for its use as a C.I.A. black site."
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The same holds for China. African govts and populations have enormous development needs, and until China's inroads on the continent began to make Western policymakers uneasy, no one in the US or Europe paid any attention to Africa.
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Addendum 2:
I'd have edited these annoying parentheticals out in a second pass: "that inform (remember that word) sartorial conventions (remember that one too)".
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This summer marks WPR's 15th anniversary.
15 years. Wow.
It's a somewhat mind-boggling accomplishment: not only surviving, but thriving over such a challenging time for online media.
I'd like to celebrate by thanking some of the people I most associate w/ my 13 years at WPR.
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Having followed this debate, it seems that folks like
@BrunoTertrais
&
@GerardAraud
have won the battle over the appointment, but lost the war when it comes to shaping the narrative.
This was not about being open vs closed, but rather sharp-eyed vs naive.
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The unrest in France has gone from protests to riots. As a result, public opinion is polarizing, and understandably so. To put it in as simple terms as possible, you can’t expect people to sympathize with indiscriminate violence and destruction.
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@LitAnscombe
@OlufemiOTaiwo
@postingwhilegay
@AtriusTal
Educational programs on culture, philosophy and politics, too. Standard practice for almost every 20th century revolutionary and anti-colonial movement.
There's a huge and criminally underserved demand for knowledge.
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To compete well with Russia and China in Africa will take engaging with the Africa that actually exists, not the one that simply serves as a backdrop to and arena of great-power competition.
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It's worth noting that this plan is similar to what we'd typically see in a Western-led peacemaking/peacekeeping effort in the Global South.
So what the Global South will hear in the West's reflexive rejection of it is that what's good for them isn't fit for Western consumption.
General Prabowo Subianto proposes a peace plan for Russia-Ukraine war. 1. Immediate ceasefire. 2. Withdrawal by 15 km of troops from both sides, creation of a demilitarized zone in between. 3. Immediate UN peacekeeping deployment. 4. UN referendum in occupied territories.
#SLD23
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The more I think about it, the more it seems that ChatGPT's tendency to invent things to support its arguments and confidently proclaim nonsense to be true might be its most human qualities.
Might be ready for a columnist position at a major daily, in fact.
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I've gone from being optimistic on EU defense & analytically in favor; to pessimistic & analytically in favor; to pessimistic & jury's out until the EU decisively wins its battle with illiberalism.
But
@APHClarkson
makes a strong case for optimism here.
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With all the focus on what an Marine Le Pen victory would mean for France and NATO, it's worth noting that she has so far proposed only reversing Sarkozy's 2009 decision to fully reintegrate the command structure. (France never left NATO.)
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The Warnock & Ossoff victory is part of a 50-yr movement that also explains why white supremacists were reduced to storming the Capitol. Before they were already inside as elected officials: Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd. Two inseparable sides of US democracy.
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But the story doesn't begin or end there.
France had a century-long colonial history in West Africa and decades-long neocolonial ties after independence. In that time, it has consistently propped up corrupt and authoritarian rulers for its own interests.
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It's a flawed alternative that will certainly fail. But to suggest that West African govts and populations have no agency in the matter, and that France has no blame, is to perpetuate the causes of the problem.
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@arisroussinos
@b_judah
One of my most pleasant surprises as an American expat who moved to the UK after ~20 years in France has been how good English/Scottish food is. The reputation is entirely undeserved.
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Twitter has lots of downsides. Then again, I "met"
@Illustrious_Cee
when I opened my account a few months ago. He was gracious enough to engage w/ some of my comments. And now he wrote this for us about what
#EndSARS
means for Nigeria & beyond.
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For all the flaws in China's economic engagement with Africa, it has been central to many of the development advances that African countries have achieved for themselves in the past two decades.
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From discrete incidents to a commonly accepted term for a global phenomenon.
Great survey of the efforts to mobilize national and international responses to transnational repression, by
@PrachiVidwans
, with quotes from
@nateschenkkan
and
@AlinejadMasih
.
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Another great piece by
@PedderSophie
, this time on Macron's foreign policy and vision for European strategic autonomy.
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Two years ago, I wrote a piece titled The Dangers of Groupthink on China.
Since then, the "tough on China consensus" that I described as groupthink has gathered momentum.
But so has the recognition that this is a problem, and the thoughtful challenges to that consensus.
Has Washington's hawkish consensus on China created a more secure world for Americans and others?
Or are we moving down a path that takes us toward decades of arms races, crises, perhaps even war?
My take:
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And the best antidote to these one-dimensional narratives of Russia and China in Africa is to learn more about Africa.
It will be an extremely important region of the world in the next century for many reasons. But it is a region with agency and options.
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Western aid to Ukraine has been disparaged as just enough not to lose, but not enough to win.
What if that's a feature, not a bug?
What if no arms package the West delivers to Ukraine is enough to break the strategic stalemate, due to Russia's ability to counter with mass?
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I'm late to this great write-up of the Biden administration's new Africa strategy, by
@MssZeeUsman
, but it's worth a read. I hope
@JDevermont
has taken a look, as it fits nicely with his approach.
The delays in issuing visas is such an unforced error.
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To get a real sense of the danger facing French democracy in the medium-term horizon, consider that the top four candidates for next week's first-round presidential election all represent personalist political formations that don't exist outside their candidacies.
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For what it's worth, 1) seems to be the consensus among the logistics folks, and 2) seems to carry the day with the strategists.
So this might end up being a test case for the old saw about amateurs talking strategy, professionals talking logistics.
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Reported protests in Behbahan, Iran, yesterday are no surprise: "the social contract between Iran’s regime and the population at large is coming apart as the reformist project has run out of steam,"
@vahid_yucesoy
wrote for us in November
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And every mistaken step along the ill-advised path was predictable and predicted.
Like I said, gripping, in a horrifying way.
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