The Nation May 2/9, 2022

RUSSIA’S DECISION TO WAGE A WAR IN UKRAINE, AND TO CONTINUE THAT WAR even after the International Court of Justice in The Hague has ordered a halt, is manifestly illegal. Under international law, Russia’s invasion has no justification: It is not self-defense, has not been authorized by the UN Security Council, and serves no humanitarian purpose. Quite the opposite. It is a war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for those who are prosecuting it: Vladimir Putin, his inner circle, the financiers, and all others who have contributed materially to the direction taken. This crime entered the lexicon of international law at the Nuremberg trials, introduced by a Soviet jurist, Aron Train in, who described “crimes against peace.” The Nuremberg judges called it “the universal crime,” from which all…

THE AMAZON LABOR UNION WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY for its vote to unionize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on April 1. But now the real fight begins. Under byzantine US labor law, winning the union election is only step one. At present, the ALU is not even legally certified by the National Labor Relations Board. Without a legally certified union, the employer does not have to commence negotiations. On April 8, Amazon filed objections. This is the standard union buster’s playbook: to delay and outlast the workers, to prevent certification and the ability to get to contract negotiations. To see how an employer uses the objection process to destroy the hopes and dreams of workers, consider Smithfield Foods in North Carolina. Beginning in 1992, the company waged a stalling strategy…

ELON MUSK, THE BILLIONAIRE TESLA CEO NOTORIOUS for posting asinine tweets to his 80 million–plus Twitter followers, has purchased himself a position of power within the platform itself by becoming the company’s largest shareholder. For a few tumultuous days, it seemed he’d also become a vocal board member, promising to help implement “significant improvements.” That decision was reversed, but even without an explicit advisory role, Musk can still exert his agenda by shaping the discourse around Twitter’s future. As if to underscore this point, Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, made clear following Musk’s sudden reversal that “We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.” It’s difficult to…

THE EVIDENCE THAT DONALD TRUMP COMMITTED crimes is all around us. We have evidence that the Trump Organization manipulated financial disclosures to inflate or deflate his assets as needed, because his former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, testified to that scheme. We have evidence that his company engaged in financial crimes, because his company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has been indicted on those charges. We have evidence that he tried to tamper with a federal election, because Trump is on tape asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes to put him over the top. We have evidence that he engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct Congress on January 6, 2021, because he urged people to do so on live television and spent weeks beforehand trying to overturn…

CANCEL CULTURE—WHICH I’M LOOSELY DEFINING HERE as a climate that encourages disproportionate social and/or work-related punishment for speech—doesn’t exist. Well, OK, it exists on the right: Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick and that assistant principal in Mississippi who read the picture book I Need a New Butt to his students. Conservatives are always canceling people. But on the left? That’s just people holding you accountable for some awful thing you said. What could be wrong with that? Besides, no one is seriously, irreparably hurt. Look at J.K. Rowling: Despite the best efforts of Twitter, she’s still a billionaire and one of the most popular writers ever. Those who argue that cancel culture is a myth claim that no one has really been injured by…

Yes DAVID KLION BEFORE RUSSIA’S CRIMINAL INVASION of Ukraine in February, the argument that NATO expansion over the previous 30 years had been a policy failure and a provocation was neither new nor partisan. It had been put forward by right-leaning realists in the US foreign policy mainstream, including George Kennan, William Burns, Fiona Hill, and John Mearsheimer, and it was also a common position among doves on the left, including me. Among Russia experts, it’s become conventional wisdom that President George W. Bush erred in 2008 when he insisted on an open-ended commitment to someday bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, likely triggering Russia’s war with Georgia a few months later and eventually its conflict with Ukraine, which began in 2014 and escalated this year. And among left-wing critics…