By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said history will judge Donald Trump, but he conspicuously didn’t mention the justice system having a hand in it. “It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here,” Pence said about Trump’s possible indictment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. “And I, for my part, I just feel like it’s just not what the American people want to see.” Oh, yeah? First off, the American people are hardly of one mind about Trump. There are millions who will rejoice when he is at long, long, long last held accountable in a court of law where his guilt or innocence will be determined beyond a reasonable doubt by facts, evidence and a (hopefully) impartial jury. I think it’s safe to say that most of us in this camp hoped that his first indictment would be for something more consequential than his attempt to cover up a tawdry extramarital affair of the kind that used to automatically doom political careers. The continuous cries of “politically motivated witch hunt” from Trump and the GOP with regard to Stormy Daniels, his alleged tax evasion, attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and illegal possession of classified documents, is boilerplate hogwash. First, it is impossible to avoid politics if a politician is involved in an alleged criminal act, especially one such as the Jan. 6 riot, which has anything to do with politics. Trump and his allies are arguing that one of the most powerful Americans is out of reach of the law. It already appears that sitting presidents are off limits, and the radical wing of the GOP — the supposed party of law and order and moral rectitude — is working to undermine legitimate investigations and the legal process itself. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky went so far as to tweet that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should be jailed. Why? For daring to indict Trump. Witch hunt, you say? The evidence in each case will determine if that claim is true, but I can’t imagine any prosecutor worth his sodium chloride would at this point present the kind of tissue-thin arguments and embarrassing bushwah that Trump’s legal beagles did in their court challenges of the 2020 election results. Then again, Trump and his allies have brilliantly claimed that law enforcement agencies are controlled by shadowy “deep state” Democrats who are out to get him. This leaves Trump free to flagrantly break laws because any attempt to investigate or charge him will automatically be decried and dismissed as bogus by his supporters. If you’ve read the Mueller Report (I did, all of it), you know that the Trump campaign’s likely obstruction of justice during Mueller’s investigation made it impossible to determine his guilt or innocence. But there was plenty of probable cause for the inquiry and Mueller did establish that Trump and his people were well aware of, and hardly against, Russia’s efforts to help them by interfering in the 2016 election, so they tried hard to avoid the appearance of collusion. Republicans argue that the Stormy Daniels case would slide if anyone but Trump had been involved. Maybe. But Al Capone’s tax evasion case mattered a little more than usual because he was Al Capone. Like that infamous mobster, Trump has worked overtime to bring his legal woes upon himself. And if the parties were reversed in all of the cases now in question, does anyone doubt for a moment that Trump and his minions would be cheering the efforts of the very same legal system they are now trying to destroy? In the meantime, the right’s claim that law enforcement has been weaponized by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Manhattan D.A.’s office, among others, is tantamount to a prime suspect in a robbery complaining that cops are biased against him. Their howls of “abuse of power!” and even “Stalinist prosecution!” are ludicrous. A Stalinist system does not spend months, if not years, painstakingly building cases to present to juries that will render verdicts. It does not agree to independent special counsels who oversee or conduct investigations for the sake of impartiality. It actually abuses its power by simply hauling a suspect into court based on trumped up evidence (pun intended), providing dubious legal counsel to the defendant, and receiving a quick verdict from a transparently partisan judge. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Mar-a-Lago. Do not collect millions of dollars in donations from your supporters. Laws are laws. In a civilized, orderly, coherent society they should apply to everyone. But the notion that a suspect shouldn’t be prosecuted unless all others who have done as much or worse are prosecuted first is absurd. Trump defenders constantly hold up the violence at Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 as excusing or minimizing the carnage wrought by his supporters at the Capitol. The BLM mayhem, which occurred at some but not all of the hundreds of protests across the country, was wrong. It harmed the cause of racial justice and fair, effective policing, but there is a glaring difference between those events and Jan. 6. There are many decades of well-documented evidence of police brutality of the kind that took the life of George Floyd and many other Black citizens, so the anger and frustration of protestors was understandable while not justifiable. On the other hand, there is still no evidence that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud or subterfuge, even after 60-plus court challenges, recounts, audits, and investigations by Trump allies. There are only demonstrably false claims from the Trump camp that incited violence and continue to threaten our nation’s peace and stability. The right’s constant attempt at equivalence is disgusting, yet weasels like Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy only tepidly condemn Trump (if you want to call their words condemnation), even though he wouldn’t have batted an eye if either had been harmed by the mob on Jan. 6. Hell, Trump is now blaming Pence for the mayhem. There is a great and justifiable fear that indicting Trump for anything will unleash more political unrest and violence. The former president is warning of “death and destruction” and D.A. Bragg has received at least one death threat. Some even fear civil war, but it appears that prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters and insurrection plotters has curbed the appetite for armed conflict on the extreme right. That only a tiny handful of protestors showed up in New York City at Trump’s urging on March 20 suggests as much. I’d also like to think that at least some Republican voters are quietly hoping that prosecutions of Trump finally present an opportunity to shed the dangerous albatross he has become for their party and the country. No matter what happens, a seismic event is at hand. If Bragg is the first to indict Trump, he must have a rock-solid case that does not jeopardize other ongoing investigations into far more grave matters. But to have strong evidence of a crime and not pursue it will only deal a severe blow to the millions of Americans who still insist that no one, especially Donald Trump, is above the law. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

By Andy Borowitz | The New Yorker March 23, 2023 NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump claimed that the failure of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, to indict him thus far is “quite frankly, a conspiracy” to keep the Republican Presidential candidate from attracting campaign donations. “Alvin Bragg, who is a disgrace, should have arrested me by now,” Trump said. “He has treated me very unfairly.” Trump said that he had made repeated calls to Bragg’s office to demand that he be arrested but has received no response. “There’s something going on,” Trump said. “Obviously George Soros is telling Bragg not to arrest me. This should never be allowed to happen in this country.” Issuing an ultimatum to Bragg, Trump said that, if he is not arrested by Friday, “I will perform a citizen’s arrest on myself.” “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Trump said. “The easy way would be for Alvin to keep his promise and arrest me, but time is running out.” Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

By Bonnie Fishman / San Francisco Bay Area On April 24th 2005, I had what would turn out to be my busiest day ever at my new shop, Bonnie’s Kitchen & Catering in Bloomfield, Mich. Why? A month earlier, I had moved the site of my first shop, Bonnie’s Patisserie in Southfield to a larger, grander space. That day, we were hopping with old and new customers, sightseers, and curious folks. What was this new food service all about? Now compound that newness with the weeklong Passover holiday, which had just begun, and you’ve got a landslide of business. Cooking and baking specifically for the Passover holiday is an ordeal for many Jewish families. My shop was extra busy with orders especially on the years when Passover and Easter coincided on the calendar. Those celebrating Easter wanted cakes, too, so the demand was epic! To celebrate Passover according to religious rules, you need to adhere to strict Kosher laws with a list of dos and don’ts. When baking for this holiday, no leavening agents–yeast, baking powder, or baking soda–are permitted. Also, traditional flour is avoided and replaced with unleavened matzo cake meal and cake flour. These ingredients become available in local grocery stores the month before Passover so that observers can begin their baking rituals. For those of you unfamiliar with what this holiday means, Rabbi Faith Joy Dankowitz of Temple Emeth in Morgan Hill, Calif. explains it this way: “Passover celebrates the redemption of the Jewish people from slavery in ancient Egypt. The Passover seder is a key part of observance and involves the retelling of the story along with infusing what freedom means to us today. During Passover, it is traditional to eat only unleavened bread as the ancient Israelites did not have time for their dough to rise in their rush to leave slavery. Passover desserts have evolved through the generations and the taste of freedom can be sweet!” I might add, the “taste of freedom” for all of us is very sweet! Often, Jewish bakeries offer sponge cakes with whisked egg whites folded into the batter as the leavening agent. One inherent problem with sponge cakes, however, is that they collapse easily if the baker is not careful. It’s not a good look! Other common cakes are flourless chocolate cakes or brownies. These are fine, but, hey, let’s live a little and eat something more exciting! We had several popular show-stopping cakes at Bonnie’s Kitchen, such as Lemon Mousse Torte, Banana Nut Cake, Hungarian Walnut Torte with Glazed Strawberries, and Double Chocolate Mousse Pie. One of the easiest cakes to make is Italian Almond Torte. This is technically a sponge cake but sturdier than most. The recipe goes back decades for me, to the time I found it reprinted in Gourmet magazine from the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy. The Italians serve it as one layer dusted with confectioners’ sugar. That’s the basic, simple presentation. However, this cake can be dressed up with more elaborate finishes. We used to stack one layer on top of the other, filling the center with fresh sliced strawberries and whipped cream. We’d then iced it with more cream and garnished it with strawberries. If you are not that confident at decorating cakes (no easy feat if you can’t practice repeatedly), I recommend serving one layer, then topped with strawberries or raspberries glazed with currant jelly. A dollop of Chantilly cream on the side rounds out the dessert nicely. If you want to keep it really basic like the Italians, give it a nice dusting of confectioners’ sugar and call it a day! Let us know here at The Insider what you decide to bake for Passover or Easter. Better yet, email a photo of the finished product to editor@theinsider1.com so we can share it online! Happy holidays and good wishes for a non-collapsed sponge cake! Italian Almond Torte Yield: 10-12 Servings 4 lg. eggs, separated, room temperature 1 c. sugar 1 tsp. vanilla 2 c. finely ground almonds 1 Tbsp. + 1 tsp. cake meal Garnish: 12 oz. fresh raspberries 1/2 c. strawberry or currant jelly 1 Tbsp. lemon juice Optional: Chantilly cream on the side Line the bottom of a 9” springform pan with a parchment round. Spray the pan with pan release. Reserve. Preheat oven to 350°. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the yolks, sugar, and vanilla until light and lemony colored. Fold in the almonds and cake meal. Whip the whites on high speed until soft peaks. Fold one third egg whites into batter. Fold in remaining egg whites. Empty into prepared pan. Bake 25-30 minutes. Cool. Put the jelly and lemon juice in a small saucepan. Melt over low until there are no more lumps. Bring to a boil; boil for 1 minute or until glazy. Invert the cake onto a serving plate. Peel off the parchment round. Brush the cake with a thin layer of glaze. Arrange the raspberries in concentric circles beginning with the outside and working your way into the center. Brush the glaze carefully on the berries, filling in the holes with glaze. Chill to set. Serve at room temperature with Chantilly cream if desired. Bonnie Fishman attended the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London. Later, she owned and operated Bonnie’s Patisserie in Southfield, Mich. and Bonnie’s Kitchen and Catering in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She has taught cooking for over 35 years and created hundreds of recipes. She is now living in Northern California.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs Allama Iqbal Lecture 2023 Oxford-Pakistan Program Oxford University March 2, 2023 Text of the lecture: I wish to thank the Oxford-Pakistan program for the great honor of inviting me to give this year's Allama Iqbal lecture. I am very moved by the invitation and I want to thank everyone here for the chance to think together, reason together, question together, and brainstorm together on some of the truly challenging and sometimes frightening issues of our time. I am very grateful to students on campuses across Pakistan for joining us online. I hope that tonight’s lecture will be the beginning of ongoing discussions with young people on these issues, because you will very soon be the leaders of this world. You are going to receive the world in a very fragile condition. The world will need your wisdom, cooperation, and collaboration to salvage the transcendent human values to which Allama Iqbal aspired. International Relations as a Prescription for Peace We are in the midst of an extraordinarily dangerous and destructive hot war in Ukraine, and there is now daily talk about the prospects of a US-China war in Asia, perhaps over Taiwan. Such an expanded war is too horrific to contemplate, and yet it is has become the casual discourse of US op-ed columns almost daily. The people who write these columns are not thinking straight, are not knowledgeable, and indeed are utterly irresponsible. We cannot afford a continuation of the current war, and we cannot afford a war between the US and China. That would be the end of civilization. There is also the idea that the Ukraine war will not spiral into a nuclear war. The English-speaking media, especially in the UK and the US, tells us not to worry, that it is unlikely that Putin will use nuclear weapons. The media tell us not to be afraid. Let me tell you: Be afraid. The world is not in safe hands right now. The governments in the United States, here in the UK, and around the world, are truly dangerous to our health and wellbeing. It is our responsibility to think clearly, because our lives depend on it. I have been thinking a lot about the Ukraine war, and I am very concerned. This is a war that is extraordinarily dangerous and should never have happened (see the Addendum). This is not simply a war that Putin decided to launch, unprovoked, on February 24, 2022. That is nonsense for anyone who has been around. I was an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev; I was an advisor to President Boris Yeltsin; I was an advisor to President Leonid Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine; and to others. What you're being told about this conflict and others is simply not true. I say that based on firsthand experience of more than 30 years. We are here this evening to reflect on international relations. Geopolitics is part of the field of international relations, or IR. International relations theory studies the interaction of states, especially regarding war and peace. There are many sound and good ideas in IR theory, but I want to make a basic proposition. International relations theory should involve not only a description of the causes of war, or a prediction of future wars, but also a prescription of the pathways to peace. International relations theory should be a normative, that is, a healing field, not only a positive field aiming for description and prediction. It is not good enough for IR to explain wars. We don't have medical schools merely to explain diseases; we have medical schools to cure diseases. We don't have schools of public health merely to explain epidemics; we have schools of public health to prevent and control epidemics. These disciplines, as well as economics and international relations, should be moral disciplines, in the sense that they should aim to improve the world, not merely to explain or predict it. The field of IR, in particular, should be a field to prevent and end wars. President John F. Kennedy, the greatest US president of my lifetime, said a very important thing in his Inaugural Address (January 20, 1961) that we should keep in mind. He eloquently and succinctly described the existential reality of our time, declaring, "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life." This truth remains our overwhelming and existential reality. We have technologies now that are so remarkable that if we put our mind to it, we can end poverty; education can be made accessible to every child in the world; and healthcare coverage can reach every person. We can provide every young person with the tools for a productive life. All of this is within reach in a very practical and affordable sense. Yet the same powerful technologies, the same breakthroughs in semiconductors and atomic physics and other areas that enable us to end poverty, also make it possible to deploy thermonuclear weapons that can end humanity, or that power the massive destruction of the physical environment and climate system on which global civilization depends. Kennedy came into his presidency more sensitive to the opportunities and perils of technology than any president of modern history, yet he nearly stumbled into full-scale nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. This fact is very telling for us. The world is complicated, and even if a leader has great wisdom, blunders, lies, and political pressure can bring the world to the brink of destruction. Kennedy made terrible blunders in the first year of his government, especially in agreeing to the CIA-led invasion of Cuba (the so-called Bay of Pigs invasion). The subsequent reactions of Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, who thereafter placed offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba, brought the world to within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis sixty years ago shows us vividly how dangerous our world really is.1 If you are not afraid, you are not getting it. We need to pull back from the brink of nuclear war in the ways that I am going to speak about this evening. [The most remarkable, accurate, and chilling account of the Cuban Missile Crisis is in Martin Sherwin’s book, Gambling with Armageddon (2020).] A Challenge to the Inevitable Tragedy of Great Power Politics John J. Mearsheimer, a learned and distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, has written one of the most powerful books of international relations of our time, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). In recent years, he has also been one of the wisest scholars explaining how the Ukraine War needlessly emerged in no small part through the provocations of the United States. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is one of the most important books of recent decades, yet it does not meet the standard that I have set for international relations: to be a moral field. Mearsheimer’s book is powerfully descriptive. It talks about the tragedy of great power politics and the unnecessary, tragic, and devastating wars that we therefore fight. Mearsheimer writes that tragedy is an inevitable fact of life of great power politics, yet I do not believe that we can afford to accept tragedy as our fate, especially in the existential conditions that John F. Kennedy described. Tragedy in the past meant World War I or World War II; tragedy in the future could well mean the end of the world because our modern technologies, especially nuclear weapons, make possible the destruction of the world at human hands. We cannot accept the tragedy of great power politics as the conclusion of international relations. We should view the tragedy of great power politics as the starting point of international relations, because we need to find a solution to the tragedy. We need great power peace, not great power tragedy. The words Mearsheimer wrote in 2001 are very powerful: "The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon–that is, the only great power in the system.” Mearsheimer argues that there are three features of the international system that lead to that. The first feature is the absence of central authority leading to international anarchy; in other words, the lack of a global Leviathan, in Hobbesian terms, leaving only anarchy at the top, with great powers thrusting for survival and dominance within that anarchic system. The second feature is that states have offensive military capability, so states must be aware that another state can launch a surprise attack, or first strike, which could potentially be devastating. And third, states can never be certain about the intentions of other states. Therefore, Mearsheimer argues, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon because no other state can seriously threaten such a mighty power. We can easily see the tragedy that results when all major powers try to be number one. The struggle to be the hegemon means endless strife, as it is impossible that every nation, or indeed any nation, achieves global hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, the world is condemned to perpetual great power competition and repeated wars. That is realism in international relations theory, and there is nobody that has developed that theory more effectively and cogently than Mearsheimer. Incidentally, Mearsheimer’s powerful book was written two decades ago when the US had seemingly normal relations with China and with Russia. It seemed, at the time, to be an American-led world, with the US was the sole superpower. Nobody at the time was talking about great power tragedy. The concern was about terrorism, not great power conflict. To his enormous descriptive and predictive credit, Mearsheimer presciently wrote that the period of calm would not last and that the world would return to a period of conflict. He correctly predicted that China’s rise would lead to dire US-China tensions, and perhaps to outright conflict. His realist ideas proved to be powerful and predictive, yet also tragic. They are powerful, yet not powerful enough, because they do not give us the power to surmount the tragedy of great power politics. I want to talk about peace as the avoidance of war. As a non-IR specialist and as an economist who has been engaged in global economic diplomacy for 40 years, I want to talk about international relations and war as I see it from my professional vantage point, while also acknowledging that I would like to see solutions emerging from the field of international relations as a prescriptive theory of peace. Three categories of war We should start by differentiating the kinds of wars that we are aiming to avoid, because wars are not all in the same category, so there are also different kinds of peace that must be achieved. While all categorizations are oversimplifications, and my categories are surely an oversimplification, I believe that a three-way classification of war can be useful. I distinguish three categories of war. The first kind are wars of empire, or wars of plunder. The second kind are the great power conflicts. And the third kind of war are inter-ethnic conflicts, including many civil wars. I believe that these three distinctive categories require not only distinctive descriptive theories, but also distinctive prescriptive approaches for stopping these wars. What are wars of plunder? Wars of plunder include the British conquest of the Indian subcontinent; the European conquest of Africa at the end of the 19th century; and the United States' destruction of Native American nations, especially during the 19th century, which are a series of genocides that are not even recognized today as genocides because hegemonic powers don't have to explain their actions. History is written by the victors after all, especially when genocides lead to the destruction of whole nations. The United States killed, enslaved, and kept under apartheid millions of African Americans, Native Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities. Such are wars of imperial plunder. Great power wars are wars of hegemonic competition in Mearsheimer’s sense. We can go back to the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens from 431 to 404 BCE, or the wars between Persia and ancient Greece about which Herodotus wrote in The Histories. World War I and World War II are clearly great power conflicts. We must be clear that there are also proxy wars that function as hegemonic wars. For example, the Vietnam war was not really a war between the United States and North Vietnam, but between the United States and the communist world, especially the Soviet Union and China, with Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) as the battleground. Similarly, the Ukraine war is not mainly a war between Russia and Ukraine, despite what you read every day. It is primarily a war between Russia and the United States, and it needs to be understood in those terms. (It is not even a war between Russia and NATO, since the US utterly dominates NATO in military, political, and economic terms.) The great enthusiasm of the British press for the Ukraine war is mainly due to nostalgia for the Crimean War, another hegemonic war in which Britain and France fought Russia between 1853 and 1856. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson surely saw himself as today’s Lord Palmerston, the imperialist leader of Britain during the Crimean War, whose aim was to smash Russia, in part to prevent Russia from challenging Britain’s imperial domination of South Asia. The third type of war is inter-ethnic war. The Israel and Palestine conflict is an example of that. So too is the Ethiopian war that has now reached a ceasefire and may mercifully be ending. The IndiaPakistan wars are complicated, of course, but to a significant extent, are also inter-ethnic wars. This category of war is distinctive. These wars are clashes of cultures, of societies, and of religions. Wars of plunder are wars of the strong versus the weak; that is, wars of injustice. Wars of great powers are wars of the strong versus the strong; that is, wars of hegemonic competition. Wars of inter-ethnic conflict are wars of the weak versus the weak; that is, wars of mutual fear. Economic and technological changes as causes of war In 2020, I wrote a book called The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (Columbia University Press), in which I described how technological and institutional changes, as well as physical geography, interact to produce long-term global changes across many different ages of globalization. One of the notable facts of that study is that each new epoch, driven by technological and institutional changes, was typically accompanied by wars, as technological changes in various ways led to changes of relative economic and military power. Changes of relative power lead, in turn, to the kind of wars that I have described. Technological divergence occurs when the more technologically advanced countries gain further decisive advantages over less technologically advanced nations, leading to wars of plunder. Imperial wars are basically wars in which a more powerful adversary has more powerful economics and underlying military technologies that allow it to expand it geopolitical power. Technological convergence, on the other hand, means that poorer countries are catching up with the richer countries. Perhaps surprisingly, technological convergence is also conducive to war, typically to wars of competition, as poorer countries narrow the gap with richer countries, thereby threatening the hegemonic power of the dominant nations. Periods of technological convergence therefore tend to be periods of wars of competition, and to the tragedy of great power politics. I believe that we are in an age of technological convergence giving rise to new and tragic hegemonic conflict. Finally, shared vulnerabilities of various kinds, including economic vulnerabilities such as poverty, and environmental vulnerabilities such as droughts and floods caused by long-term climate change, are conducive to rising fear and intensified inter-ethnic violence. For populations with higher income levels, less hunger, and longer life expectancy, inter-ethnic or intergroup struggles tend to diminish in fervor. The dire facts of poverty and competition for basic economic resources, on top of usual inter-group stresses due to religion, ethnicity, or culture, are therefore conducive to this third kind of war. I will provide a few quick examples of technological change as the driver for imperial war. The great cause of 19th century divergence was the invention of the improved steam engine by James Watt at the University of Glasgow. The steam engine is probably the most important invention of the last 500 years in both economics and geopolitics. From the point of view of economic power, productivity, industrialization, inter-ocean transport, and military force, Watt’s steam engine was a critical development, and Britain used it to become the first industrial society. Britain over-powered the rest of the world in economic, financial, and military might, which led to the so-called Second British Empire of the 19th century and one of the great turns of history. Figure 1 shows the shares of world output of Asia and the North Atlantic regions between 1820 and 2019, as measured by the late macroeconomic historian Angus Maddison and his team. As late as 1820, Asia had 60% of world output, and the Indian subcontinent was still the textile center of the world. Asia’s share of population was also roughly 60%, with per capita incomes still relatively equal around the world. Around 1790, however, the new Watt steam engine was first connected to a belt to move power looms and spinning jennies, and Britain soon became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. India was soon relegated to providing raw cotton to the industrial mills of Lancashire, Manchester, and Liverpool in England. Of course, the Indian sub-continent soon fell under Britain’s imperial rule, formally by 1858. The industrial age was therefore a momentous era of divergence. The rich countries, notably in the North Atlantic (England, continental Western Europe, the US, Canada, and very few others), gained enormous industrial strength and rising output per person in the 19th century. The poor countries, notably in Asia and Africa, succumbed to North Atlantic imperial domination. Latin American countries were somewhere in limbo, no longer the imperial possessions of European powers, but also not industrialized. During the 19th and early 20th century, the North Atlantic became the dominant geopolitical force of the world, the global hegemon. Britain dominated the North Atlantic till around the 1870s, but then was challenged increasingly by US and German industrialization. By the early 20th century, the rise of Germany had given rise to the tragic wars of hegemonic competition with Britain, alongside the ongoing wars of plunder by the North Atlantic countries in Africa and Asia. Still looking at Figure 1, the largest gap between the North Atlantic and Asia occurred in 1950, after which the outputs started to converge again. It is extremely important to understand this timing. In 1947, India and Pakistan become independent countries, and in 1949, the People's Republic of China became a newly independent country after decades of invasion and civil war. That independence provided the basis for the subsequent era of convergence. More generally, 1950 marked the end of North Atlantic imperialism, and the rapid spread of independence in Africa and Asia. Broadly speaking, therefore, the period from 1800 to 1950 was a period of technological divergence and growing power of the North Atlantic relative to the rest of the world. It was the period of European high imperialism, and the conquest of large areas of Africa and Asia. The period after 1950, broadly speaking, was a period of technological convergence. The most important reason for convergence is sovereignty, and sovereignty means the beginning of mass education. In 1950, Pakistan and India had illiteracy rates of around 90% because there was no mass education under the British Raj. The essence of empire was to deny even basic education, because illiteracy of the masses facilitated subjugation of the masses. Therefore, independence was fundamental for the economic divergence becoming economic convergence. The end of World War II, and the beginning of independence across the world from European empires enabled the beginning of mass education and led to global changes. Figure 2 is a semi-serious, semi-facetious map from the book All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To (2012) by Stuart Laylock. The countries in white (there are 22 of them out of 193 UN member states) never were attacked by Britain. Britain was the most militaristic country in the world in the 19th century, and the United States, in my estimation, has been the most militaristic country in the world after 1950. It goes with the territory of being the hegemon. Yet, Britain and the US are also supposedly liberal democracies. The basic point is that liberal democracy has little to do with peaceful foreign policy. Foreign policy is about relative power. Britain used its vast relative power advantage to conquer large parts of the world, and for the parts that it didn't conquer, it invaded at various times. We should not confuse democracy at home with peace abroad. What are the main solutions to wars of plunder? I propose that there are two main solutions. The first is technological convergence to narrow the gap so that the rich can't exploit the poor. The second is collective security to protect the weak from the strong through collective security mechanisms such as the United Nations. The end of European imperial rule led to a shift from divergence to convergence, and that fact did diminish the frequency of wars of plunder. There was a trailing edge of roughly 30 years (1950-1980) of the final stages of imperialist wars, a prime example of which was the Vietnam War, which raged until 1975 as a war of independence from France later taken over by the United States. Similarly, there were the late imperial wars in Algeria, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Yet the shift from divergence to convergence eventually reduced the frequency of wars of plunder. Great Power Wars Technological convergence reduces wars of plunder, but it also is conducive to more great power conflict. That is the Mearsheimer tragedy: as countries converge in economic and military power, they begin to compete more aggressively for domination. Rising powers fear that they'll be held back by incumbent powers. That was Japan's fear in 1941, and that was Germany's fear in 1914. This is also China's realistic assessment now that the United States is explicitly trying to contain China's rise. Incumbent powers fear they will be overtaken by rising powers. Graham Allison at the Kennedy School of Government wrote a widely read book called Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Thucydides’s Trap is an analogy to Athens’ rise in power in the fifth century BCE that, according to Thucydides, triggered a hegemonic contest between the leading military power, Sparta, and the rising power, Athens. Although Sparta technically won the contest, both Sparta and Athens were exhausted by decades of war and Sparta was soon toppled from regional influence. Athens’ heyday of democracy and even independence ended in the fourth century BCE. The Peloponnesian War, like so many tragic wars of hegemonic competition, was a negative sum war. Today we are in a similar situation. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China overtook the United States in total output in 2011, measured in purchasing-power-parity prices (Figure 3). This means that China is now the larger economy compared to the United States. This should be expected, as China has four times the population of the United States. Of course, China will be a larger economy, except if China for some reason remained perennially poor, or technically, remained at less than 1/4 the per capita income of the United States. Why wouldn’t China rise in economic terms? China is enormously productive, creative, innovative, hardworking, and has an excellent education system. As Mearsheimer uncannily predicted in 2001, China’s rise led to the onset of US-China hostility. I was certainly wrong about this. I've been engaged with China for 40 years now, and many of my students are senior officials or academics in China. I could never have imagined in 2001 that we would currently have US-China tensions, simply because China is not a threat to the world. It is only in our imagination that China is a threat to the world. Yet, what Mearsheimer said came true. As China got bigger, China became an enemy. Mearsheimer is predictively right. Convergence brings threats, counter-threats, a dramatic escalation of rhetoric, daily opinion columns about a coming war, and then, yes, finally there will be a self-fulfilling tragedy. Note, too, that the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa– now have a larger combined output than the G7 countries (Figure 4). This is rather remarkable because it means that economic convergence is taking place far more generally than China. The North Atlantic is being pushed from its perch in the age of technological convergence. The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of Great Power Politics I include a moment of game theory here to say that the tragedy of the great power politics is reasonably well depicted, at least at first pass, by the famous Prisoner's Dilemma, which is the game theory concept developed in 1950 to show the possible anti-cooperative outcomes of a social dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma Game features two parties who can either cooperate with the other party or cheat on the other party. Even though cooperation is mutually beneficial compared with mutual cheating, they often end up cheating, which is a tragedy as both parties end up worse off. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is conventionally presented as a 2-by-2 game, with possible outcomes depicted as four quadrants. In the game depicted in Figure 5, the US choices are depicted as rows, while the Russian choices are depicted as columns. The first number in each quadrant is the payoff to the US, while the second number is the payoff to Russia. (Of course, these are the payoffs to the leaders in each country, which may or may not represent the real payoffs to the average citizen of each country.) In this game, each side can choose to escalate or to de-escalate. Suppose that both sides de-escalate. They avoid war and the costs of an arms race. Their payoff is 5 to each side. Suppose that both sides escalate. They end up bearing the heavy costs of war, with payoffs each of -5. But suppose that the US de-escalates while Russia escalates. That is akin to unilateral disarmament. Russia can come in and swoop up the prize, such as geopolitical and resource dominance over Ukraine and other countries. In this case, Russia wins big-time (payoff of 10) while the US loses big-time (payoff of -10). The punch line of the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma is the possibility, or indeed, the likelihood according to game theory, that the players will each choose “escalate,” ending up with payoffs of -5, instead of de-escalate, ending up with payoffs of 5. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a Mearsheimer-type tragedy. To see why the tragedy occurs, consider the US strategy. If Russia chooses to escalate, the US clearly should choose to escalate. But if Russia chooses to de-escalate, the US should again choose to escalate, walking away with the big prize of 10 (and leaving Russia with -10). Therefore, the dominant strategy for the US is to escalate. By symmetrical reasoning, the dominant strategy for Russia is to escalate. Both sides choose to escalate and both sides end up with payoffs of -5. Hence, the tragedy. Mearsheimer's point is that escalation is the rational action to take if each side is playing for its own advantage, taking as given what the other country is doing. In the case of the war in Ukraine, both sides escalate, and both sides lose, while Ukraine, the site of the US-Russia proxy war, of course, loses the most. In practice, the US pushes NATO enlargement and Russia pushes war in Ukraine to stop NATO enlargement. This ends up with a disaster for both sides. Instead, both countries should realize that this non-cooperative outcome is working badly for both sides. They should both de-escalate. The US should stop trying to expand NATO. Russia should go home and let Ukraine be, secure that NATO will not expand to fill the void. This approach – NATO non-enlargement and Russian withdrawal – would leave both nations better off, and would save Ukraine. International relations theory should provide answers on how to get both sides to de-escalate, rather than being a theory that explains the tragedy of escalation. Yet we are in the tragedy of great power politics, and the situation is getting worse, and fast. As Mearsheimer rightly says, we are not in a static situation with payoffs of -5 for both sides. We are in a situation of continuing escalation, the end of which could be nuclear annihilation. If Ukraine were to be armed by NATO for a successful invasion of Crimea, there would very likely be nuclear war. We would be no doubt be instructed by the mainstream media not to worry, just moments before annihilation. My advice, once again, is to worry. We need to move urgently from the bottom right cell (escalate - escalate) to the top left cell (de-escalate - de-escalate) because it's mutually beneficial, and can avoid Armageddon. We do not yet have an adequate international relations theory to accomplish this, but that is what we are searching for. I believe that the first answer to the crisis is to negotiate. John F. Kennedy also made this point in his Inaugural Address, when he declared, "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." There is a famous and frequent finding in game theory that if the people playing the Prisoner's Dilemma are allowed to speak with each other before they play, even without any way to reach a binding agreement, they will cooperate most of the time (in some experimental settings, cooperation with preplay communication rises to 90%). (For a recent discussion, see Kagel, John, “Cooperation through communication: Teams and individuals in finitely repeated Prisoners’ dilemma games,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018, vol. 146, issue C, 55-64, accessible here.) The mere human touch of negotiating changes the game fundamentally, even though there is no binding mechanism to the talk. Yet how many times has President Biden spoken with President Putin since February 2022? The disastrous truth is that the two leaders have not spoken even one time. The second key point about the Prisoner’s Dilemma is one that Ronald Reagan emphasized: “Trust but Verify.” A mutual agreement on de-escalation need not be based on trust alone. The idea is to trust but verify through observable measures, such as peacekeepers, demilitarization, third-party guarantors, risks of sanctions triggered by non-compliance, inspection regimes, etc. There is a closely related game to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, sometimes called the Game of Chicken or the Hawk-Dove Game. In that game, the escalate-escalate outcome is so dire (e.g., nuclear war) that each party prefers to play de-escalate (“surrender”) if the other side insists on playing “escalate.” In this case, there are multiple possible outcomes, including each side scaring the other into submission, or each rolling the dice (a “randomized strategy”) with the possibility that both dice come up with “escalation,” leading to Armageddon. In some ways, the Ukraine War is better described as a Game of Chicken rather than as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The West wants to scare Russia into accepting NATO enlargement. Russia wants to scare the West into the risk of nuclear war. Both sides want to prove their toughness, and so both “randomize,” giving the possible outcome of escalation to nuclear Armageddon. As with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the escape from this tragedy, perhaps the ultimate tragedy, is for both sides to play “de-escalate.” Inter-communal violence and the social structures of fear The third kind of war is inter-communal violence, which is a special kind of war governed by the social structures of fear, notably fear of the “other.” This type of conflict is amplified by group identity in which there is little or no peaceful communication between the two identity groups. There is instead open hostility, typically long lasting, with very high fear on both sides. Both sides are typically prisoners of history. As my wife quips, reversing Santayana’s famous aphorism, “Those who can't forget history, are condemned to repeat it.” This is opposite to the usual idea: when groups are stuck in inter-communal conflicts, if they cannot forget past wrongs by one side against the other, then they may be too fearful to find a path to peace. There are very few structures of protection for communities in inter-ethnic settings, so fear runs very, very high. There is no well-developed jurisprudence or political structure for group rights. In the United States, the law focuses on individual rights, not on group rights. US law is (supposedly) “racially blind” even after centuries of slavery and racial discrimination and persecution. This blindness of the law to group protection leads to heightened inter-ethnic fear, and indeed, inter-ethnic and inter-racial violence. The world community, including the UN system, does not have adequate concepts as to how to ensure the rights of different communities in a diverse, multi-ethnic society. The Ottoman Empire was a multiethnic community with the so-called millet system, in which there was a measure of self-jurisdiction of non-Muslim populations, including the rights to practice other faiths. These non-Muslim populations were not of the social stature of the Muslim populations in the Ottoman realms, but they had autonomy and a governance structure. This system thereby maintained important group rights. Yet our current constitutional designs do not generally include the search for effective and workable group rights, and this makes inter-communal conflict more likely and persistent. Fear is a deep driver of this. There are powerful studies by psychologists, social psychologists, neuroscientists, and conflict resolution specialists emphasizing the role of fear as a subcortical, fast reactive kind of decision making. To move from the lower right cell (escalate, escalate) in conflict to the upper left cell (de-escalate, de-escalate) in cooperation is a cognitive act, not an emotional act. Fear derails that kind of cognitive act. As Maria Jarymowicz and Daniel Bar-Tal have written, “[F]ear is an evolutionary safeguard to ensure survival in view of potential threats and dangers. It is a component of a fundamental survival mechanism. But at the same time, because of classical conditioning or due to the irrational thinking evoked by fear, it often has extremely mal-adaptive consequences. [“The dominance of fear over hope in the life of individuals and collectives,” Maria Jarymowiczi and Daniel Bar-Tal, European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 367–392 (2006)] Therefore, some potential partial answers to resolving these kinds of conflicts would include group rights, especially for minority groups within a multi-ethnic political setting; the search for universals in ethics (this is where Allama Iqbal plays an important role); an ethics of tolerance, which is a special kind of ethics; intergroup dialogue; social and political structures of mediation; and shared culture, including arts, sports, music, and literature. I disagree fundamentally with the call, for example, of excluding Russian athletes from the 2024 Olympics or to stop playing Tchaikovsky or to stop Russian ballets. This is the opposite of what we need to find peace in the world. Ancient wisdom to find solutions I believe that ancient wisdom can help us to find solutions, whether it is Confucius, the Buddha, Aristotle, Averroes, or the prophet Isaiah. There is a commonality of views across the great faiths that I think is what Allama Iqbal was searching for, and that is vital, if we're going to find an end to this kind of conflict. There are at least six shared pillars of ancient wisdom across the Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions, the Islamic faith, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other ancient wisdom traditions. First, they are all based on virtue ethics, which teaches that to achieve well-being we must build our characters. This was not the dominant form of ethics in the English and Germanic world of the last three centuries, but it is making a very strong comeback. I think virtue ethics is the right form of ethics, more than deontological or utilitarian ethics, because it puts ethics as the core of individual responsibility. Second, these six ancient wisdoms emphasize that humans struggle between lower urges, such as cheating to take advantage, and the higher callings, including cooperation. Virtue ethics call on reason of various kinds as fundamental to reaching that higher calling. Virtue ethics say that we need a vision of perfection, which is where spirituality or religion are fundamental. From Plato and Aristotle through the various faiths, God or the first mover or the idea of the ideal form are the sense of perfection, and humans have a responsibility to strive for something better. Iqbal emphasized that science and the spiritual are conjoined, and ancient wisdom strongly emphasizes this point. The idea that religion and science are antithetical is a modern idea, not the idea of ancient wisdom. Finally, virtue ethics supposes that there is a single human family. The modern genetics of Homo sapiens proves this, rooted in our knowledge of the single human family in the migration from Africa around 70,000 years ago, as well as the idea that we can find a common spirit as the basis of our shared humanity, despite our distinctive faiths and cultures. This is a shared view of all of these ancient wisdom traditions. Iqbal, as a great thinker and philosopher, as well as a poet, offered the goal of Islam as a message for all humanity, not just a message for the believers. He argued that we need to search for rational foundations in science and Islam. Iqbal quotes the Prophet as saying, "God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!” (Iqbal, Allama Muhammad. Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Kindle Edition, p. 2) and he says, “The main purpose of the Qur’an is to awaken in man the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and the universe” (p. 5). In this spirit of a geopolitics of peace, Iqbal wrote in his New Year’s Message in 1938 on the eve of World War II, "[I]n every corner of the world, the spirit of freedom and the dignity of man are being trampled underfoot, in a way to which not even the darkest period of history presents a parallel," anticipating what was to come, but calling for a world of universal human dignity. He wrote, "That only one unity is dependable, and that is unity of the brotherhood of man which is above race, nationality, color or language, so long as men do not demonstrate by their actions that they believe that the whole world is the family of God, they will never be able to lead a happy and contented life, and the beautiful ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity will never be realized." This is the single human family. Resolving our differences for our common interests We still have the makings of the single human family, but they are extraordinarily fragile. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which is the closest we have ever come as humanity to expressing a common shared ideal. The UDHR was brought to fruition by Eleanor Roosevelt, who assembled philosophers, theologians from all faiths, and leaders from across the world to forge the UDHR, which is based on the idea that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. As I have laid out, there are different kinds of conflicts that need different kinds of remedies. We need different kinds of institutional approaches. I believe that the United Nations remains indispensable for our survival, even as its fragility is evident in the face of great power politics, private greed, and state impunity. The world is very difficult now, and the UN has a very difficult time functioning in a difficult world. But it remains, in my view, our best hope for the universal human family. Let me close with the words of President John F. Kennedy from his Peace Speech, given on June 10, 1963. This speech is so powerful and inspiring, and practical in its beneficial effect, that I wrote a book to extol it and describe its place in history, To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013). In this wondrous speech, Kennedy asks the American people to change their attitudes towards the Soviet Union, because as JFK argued, the Soviet people are also human beings who also want peace. At the very height of the Cold War, just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, an American President told the American people of the importance of empathizing with the Soviet people in the interest of world peace. When Nikita Khrushchev heard Kennedy’s speech, he immediately summoned the American envoy in Moscow, Ambassador Avril Harriman, and told Harriman that Kennedy’s address was the finest speech by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt, and that Khrushchev wanted to make peace with Kennedy. Just six weeks later, the partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. Kennedy and Khrushchev demonstrated how to get from the lower right quadrant to the upper left quadrant, with empathy, decency, and communication with each other as fellow human beings. I close tonight’s lecture with President Kennedy's eloquent and wise words from his Peace Speech: "So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." Addendum on the war in Ukraine I have seen a lot of the history of the conflict in Ukraine firsthand, going back 30 years. This is a provoked war because the United States acted in a way that Russian leaders understandably viewed as deeply threatening to Russia’s security. Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance of the Soviet Union and sought peace between the Soviet Union with United States and Europe. This was an unimaginable dream, but it happened. I attribute a great deal of it not to the Soviet Union's weakness or need for reform, though that was undoubted, but to the extraordinary decency of Gorbachev and his search for a peaceful way forward. Here is a case where a leader made a decisive difference for peace. As Gorbachev made his move towards peace, the United States and Germany (which was interested in German reunification) made very clear to Gorbachev that the West would not take advantage of the Soviet's unilateral action by expanding the NATO alliance eastward. US neoconservatives, however, took a different view. Starting in 1992, after the demise of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives, now in charge of US foreign policy, took the view that the US was now the only superpower and could do what it wanted. More specifically, the US should aim to be the global hegemon. The authors of this unilateral strategy were from both political parties. In the Republican Party, these included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld; in the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, President Biden, and others. The doctrine of neoconservatism is also the doctrine of US exceptionalism and US unipolarity (that is, the US as the world’s sole superpower). The neoconservative aim is dominance, what is sometimes called “full-spectrum dominance,” meaning military, technological, and economic dominance in every major region of the world. In the mid 1990s, there was a huge fight inside the US government between those who said that NATO should not be expanded as that would wreck relations with Russia, and those who said that the US should do what it wants. In the end, Bill Clinton followed the "we do what we want" school of thought, and the first NATO expansion took place, to Poland, Czechia, and Hungary. That raised tensions with Russia, and one of the greatest statesmen and scholars of US-Russian relations in our modern history, George Kennan, said in 1997 that this would lead disastrously to a new Cold War. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Bill Perry, thought about resigning in protest he was so upset with the decision to expand NATO because he regarded it as a basic violation of promises as well as a basic provocation to Russia. The first expansion was taken badly by Russia, but it did not lead to this war. The next step was in 1999, when for a variety of reasons, NATO bombed Serbia 48 straight days to break Serbia and to break Kosovo out of Serbia. This intervention was unacceptable in my opinion, and in violation of the UN Charter. It was also the first major war in Europe since World War II (not the Ukraine war as we are often told). The US took aim at Russia's close ally. That raised the temperature even higher. Then came 9/11. President Putin immediately offered help and cooperation to the United States, showing that cooperation between the two sides was indeed still possible. Yet the US quickly made a few terrible decisions. First, the United States unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. This was seen as a direct threat to Russia because it meant the possibility of the United States looking for first-strike capability against Russia. Then in 2003, the US launched the unprovoked Iraq War on false pretenses and phony intelligence. Again, that raised temperatures further. In 2004, the United States expanded NATO seven times, to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This was like the water rising around Russia: the bombing of Serbia, the ABM Treaty withdrawal, NATO expansion to the Black Sea and the Baltics. Finally, in 2007 at the Munich Security Summit, Putin warned the US to stop, as the US was crossing Russia’s red lines. In 2008, the US announced that NATO would expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. The clear, if unstated, goal was to surround Russia in the Black Sea region: Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia would all be NATO members. Russia would no longer be able to project power in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. At the time, European leaders said to me privately, "What is your president doing? This is completely reckless." Of course, European leaders don't say this publicly. This is part of the deception that goes on. 2008 was a watershed moment, a breakdown of cooperation. One of the results of the push of NATO to Georgia was the Russo-Georgian War. Even then, US policy makers refused to heed Russia’s red lines. In 2011-12, President Obama instructed the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government to work with regional powers in the Middle East to overthrow Bashar Al Assad in Syria. This was yet another US regime change operation. There would have been no Syrian War but for the United States. In 2012, the UN negotiated an end to the Syrian war, but the UN initiative was rejected by one country – the United States – because the US insisted that Assad must go in any peace deal. You will not find this in the media, because by 2012 the mainstream media had stopped reporting inconvenient truths. In 2014, the United States helped to overthrow the Ukrainian government. We can even listen to the February 6 tape of Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, speaking to the US ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, about the formation of the new government that would come to power through a coup two weeks later. The United States helped to pay for the Maidan protests. The evidence suggests that the violence, including shooting into the crowds, came largely from the protestor side, not from the security forces of Yanukovych. These were indeed the first shots of the Ukraine war, as part of a US-supported overthrow of the Ukrainian government. What was Yanukovych doing in 2013 that was so upsetting to the US? He was pursuing neutrality. He was against NATO enlargement. The US helped to overthrow the government and then immediately backed a Russophobic, highly nationalistic government that came into power the next day. The new government quickly dropped neutrality and even passed a law outlawing the Russian language, though the law was not implemented. A few weeks later, Russia retook Crimea, and many pro-Russian forces in the Ukrainian military broke away from the Ukrainian military and started an insurrection in Eastern Ukraine (the Donbas). The United States sent billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine during the 2014-2021 to build and modernize Ukraine's army, which is why Ukraine’s army could so effectively fight during this past year. The fortifications and the heavy armaments were funded by billions of dollars in support of the antiRussian regime that the US had helped bring to power. None of this history is recounted in our media, in our politics, or in our public discussion. Our mainstream media say that the war was wholly unprovoked and was launched because an evil and delusional Vladimir Putin believes he is Peter the Great. In fact, the war has causes dating back 30 years. The United States should not have tried to move its military alliance right up to Russia’s borders. At the end of 2021, President Putin put forth three demands. The first was Ukraine’s neutrality; the second was that Crimea should remain a part of Russia, as Crimea has been the home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since 1783; and the third was that the Minsk II agreement should be implemented as Europe and Ukraine had promised, but then reneged upon. Yet the Biden Administration refused to negotiate. I do not mean to justify the invasion and the killing, but to help understand it. Most importantly, we should understand that there is a way for this war to end. The way for this war to end, in my view, is for President Biden to pick up the phone and tell President Putin that NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and in return Russia should end the war and withdraw the military. Of course, there are many other issues, but NATO enlargement is at the center. Most world leaders believe this is a war of NATO expansion. They believe, as I do, that this is a US-Russia proxy war. If it is not, then the United States should prove it quickly and clearly, by stating publicly that NATO expansion is off the table as part of an overall peace agreement. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d59c0bdfff8290001f869d1/t/6409875a55644c1ff7ce2b8c/1678346075089/The+Geopolitics+Of+Peace_Allama+Iqbal+Lecture+2023_March+2+2023.pdf

By Laurence Lerman / New York City John Wick: Chapter 4, the fourth installment in the action-thriller film series fronted by Keanu Reeves, was aiming for a franchise-high opening this past weekend, having opened in 3,855 theaters across North America on Friday. Industry analysts’ very healthy projections of between $65 million and $75 million were right on target as Reeves and company blew away the competition with $73.5 million at the domestic box office as of Sunday night, March 26. The movie also debuted around the world over the weekend, coming in at No. 1 in each of the 71 countries where it opened and bringing the total global box office gross to a mighty $137.5 million. The plot continues to thicken for Keanu Reeves’ legendary assassin in John Wick: Chapter 4, Wick having left the cozy confines of his retirement two movies ago to avenge the killing of his beloved puppy Daisy (!) by a group of no-goodnik Russian gangsters. After committing an unauthorized killing of a crime lord in the second film, Wick then survived a series of increasingly dangerous situations in the third movie after a legion of hitmen set out to claim a bounty on his head. Wick lived to tell the tale with some help –and occasional hindrance—from series regulars portrayed by Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick. Seriously banged up by the opening of the new film, Wick isn’t so badly bruised that he can’t work his way around the world to exact revenge on the members of the “High Table,” a council of 12 high-level international crime bosses. Rambo may have smashed the Viet Cong, the Terminator taken on Sarah Connor and an apocalyptic future, and John McClain wiped out the baddies at Nakatomi Plaza, but none went to town on his enemies with such detached coolness—and focused fury—as the guy who hit the vengeance trail because of what they did to his dog! Over the past decade, beginning with 2014’s John Wick, the series’ first entry, the darkly captivating world of Mr. Wick has grown from one small, independently produced action flick co-directed by pair of experienced stunt and action choreographers, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, and starring a leading man whose other movies had been underperforming, to a sprawling, multi-movie global sensation. There were several carefully devised production plans injected into the moviemaking, beginning with an extensive preproduction training regime for Reeves, who was familiar with the drill from his action-filled days starring in The Matrix and its sequels. And for the actual shooting, the filmmakers focused on carefully choreographed, long-take, full-body action sequences, mostly eschewing the usual rapid-cuts and close-ups found in most contemporary action fare. Then there was the work of distributor Lionsgate, who cleverly marketed the film not as disposable action entertainment but rather a highly stylized, prestige event featuring good ol' Keanu, everyone’s favorite, affable leading man. (This is the guy who made the jump from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to The Matrix and John Wick. Enough said.). John Wick was budgeted at $20 million and earned $86 million worldwide, making it a modest success, while also earning positive reviews for its cool style and action sequences. Reeves’ physicality and acting work were also praised, as was the film’s unique mythology of a shadowy, ritualistic international criminal underworld and its archaic code of honor. Impressively, each film in the John Wick franchise has outgrossed its predecessor while expanding the Wick universe with other bold-name performers and even more ambitious action scenes. John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), added Fishburne, Ruby Rose, Common and Peter Stormare to the mix and grossed $173.3 million around the world; while John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum featured Asia Kate Dillon, Mark Dacascos, Anjelica Huston, and a brutally efficient Halle Berry and rang up $328.3 million at the global box office. John Wick: Chapter 4 arrives with a price tag of approximately $100 million, a chunk of it going to the film’s dozen-plus action set pieces, two of them memorably staged on Paris’s famed Rue Foyatier staircase and in the traffic circle surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. And with martial arts superstar Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård and Natalia Tena added to the cast and a running time of nearly three hours, the film already looks like the action saga of the year. With a fourth entry that’s so flamboyant and overstuffed, it’s easy to forget that the genesis of John Wick is actually nearly as entertaining as that of the franchise’s ever-growing mythologized universe and growing scale. It dates back to the original John Wick spec script that screenwriter Derek Kolstad wrote in 2012. According to a 2014 interview with the film blog Flickering Myth, the up-and-coming Kolstad admitted he had never written a “revenge movie” but was inspired to give it a shot after he saw “a couple of disappointing entries.” “Who doesn’t love a good one?,” he says he asked himself. Kolstad’s original story centered around the character of John Wick, a long-retired hitman somewhere between his mid-60s and mid-70s who is forced back into his former life. Upon reading Kostad’s script, originally entitled Scorn, producer Basil Iwanyk pondered the possibilities, reasoning that it would be fun to watch a 75-year-old kick back into action after being retired for 25 years. The first names of possible stars that came to Iwanyk’s mind for the project were Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford. While talking to an agent at CAA about the potential of taking the script to the next level, the agent asked Iwanyk if he had any action movie stories he could possibly pitch to his client Keanu Reeves. Though Reeves wasn’t 75—not even in the ballpark—Iwanyk liked the idea of the likeable Reeves bringing his own interpretation to the role. More importantly, by the time Reeves read the script, he was so fascinated and drawn to the character that he began to inject his own ideas into the scenario and angle it towards his own impressions of what Wick could be. Or, as Kolstad remembers it, Reeves “got his talons into the script and made it his own.” And with the arrival of that first movie in the summer of 2014, both Reeves, director Stahelski and a formidable team of stunt performers and effects experts made what was soon to be one of Hollywood’s wildest and stylish franchises that didn’t revolve around superheroes or sci-fi-themed storylines. Oh, and one of the Wick’s most defining elements was in place as an integral narrative plot point from the get-go: Kolstad’s original script included the death of Wick’s dog (and a reference to the earlier death of his wife, who had given the dog to him). “I found myself asking the random question of myself: “what would you do if someone did something to Loki or Isis (my two mutts)?,” said Kostad. “And the answer? Terrible, terrible things…” Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. Intended to mean social awareness, “woke” is now being used — like communist, socialist or pedophile — by the radical right in such absurd instances that it ceases to have any clear meaning to anyone who does not smother their brain under a MAGA hat. And even to some who do. The latest eye-roll-inducing example: arch-conservative stalwarts such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. James Comer of Kentucky blaming the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on “woke” things like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, and (presumed) investments in green technology. The dust was still in the air from the bank’s collapse when these scapegoats were already in the GOP’s crosshairs. “I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with D.E.I. and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis told — who else? — Fox News. Um, I’m really supposed to believe that the bank’s directors were so impaired by trying to be fair and responsible that they were unable to effectively perform their primary jobs? How exactly did their supposed obsession with wokeness manifest itself? Has anyone cited even one example of a competent (presumably white) person who was passed over in favor of an incompetent minority who played a consequential role in the bank tanking? Is it really not possible to be socially responsible and make money at the same time? The folks at Conscious Capitalism would dispute that notion. Yet, DeSantis pushes legislation like the bill President Biden just vetoed that would have forbidden managers of retirement funds to consider climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments. Never mind that people with actual knowledge of the industry cite far more likely culprits in the panic that has now rattled regional and world banks: among them, over-investing in long-term Treasury bonds, which took a beating as interest rates rose. Dalliance with dicey cryptocurrency along with a rollback of the measures and oversight that prevented risks of the kind that caused the 2008 financial crisis may also have played a role, as did undue customer anxiety and a venture capitalist herd mentality. Apparently, if your cereal grows soggy in the bowl it’s because the manufacturer is woke. Then again, whenever the right cries “woke,” whatever it alleges tends to crumble when given even a modest amount of thought. As usual, matters such as this investment mess are a bit more complex than meets the politically angry eye. But GOP leaders like DeSantis bank on their followers permanently checking their minds at the door, as the MAGA minions have done with their belief that the 2020 election was stolen despite a constant glaring lack of evidence and Fox News’ admission of lying about it. Do I need mention Tucker Carlson’s pathetically blatant attempt to portray the violence of Jan. 6, witnessed by millions on TV, as peaceful? To hear the radical right tell it, any concern about racism (historical and current, especially with regard to police brutality), sexism and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, climate change, the threat to democracy, income inequality, and the inhumane treatment of refugees is “woke madness” and political correctness run amok, even a kind of derangement that precludes the ability to do anything else but pompously hector and lecture. When former Vice President Mike Pence made a derisive, homophobic joke about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short responded to the Biden White House’s objection by saying the administration “should spare America the faux outrage” and that it “would be wise to focus less on placating the woke police and focus more on bank failures, planes nearly colliding in mid-air, train derailments, and the continued supply chain crisis.” It’s not surprising that simple decency, consideration and empathy are automatically seen as phony by people who fly “F—k your feelings” flags and welcome being lied to by the likes of Carlson, Donald Trump, George Santos and more in their world of transparently expedient “alternative” facts. You may also have noticed that the right also has its own woke police and cancel culture. It’s seeking to dictate what is taught in schools, ban books, and even forbid doing business with socially and environmentally responsible companies. These intrepid folks are quick to disparage “snowflakes” and “crybabies” while loudly voicing their own grievances. They are constantly being told by Carlson and his ilk that liberal “elites” look down on them. Well, is it any wonder? “What I say to people when they start talking about woke is, well what’s the opposite, sleep? You’d rather be asleep?” civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton told MSNBC. Whether things like DEI and green energy initiatives are effective is a matter of valid debate and best taken case-by case. But to those who see them as a tyrannical denial of their rights (to do what, discriminate, insult and pollute?), all I can say is we wouldn’t need inclusivity efforts and laws against discrimination and a host of other ills if more people were and had been fair and responsible throughout America’s often ugly history. How about blaming the ones who created and still defend these conditions, not the ones who are trying to level the playing field so America lives up to its lofty ideals? If the radical right is trying to convince anyone other than its hardcore ranks that awareness is bad, it is failing miserably. According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 56% of Americans surveyed (including 44% of Republicans) find “woke” to be a largely positive term that means "to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices." Radical Republicans might want to get woke to the reality that insulting people’s intelligence is not the smart way to win them over. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

By Eric Green / Arlington, Va. History doesn’t always end well for big mouths like the former president. If Donald Trump wants to get elected President again (heaven forbid), not to mention avoid being sentenced to prison (heaven please), he might take to heart a little history about your friendly next-door dictators who apparently didn’t know the meaning of when to keep their traps shut. In the latest iteration of his never being shy about calling attention to himself, Trump announced he expected to be indicted on Tuesday (March 21) by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged 2016 hush-money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. No such showdown occurred, as the canny prosecutor chose not to play by the Trump handbook. In a replay of his call to supporters to protest the 2020 presidential election that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, the Donald called for mass protests if he was led on a perp walk to be formally arrested for falsifying business records. In mid-December 2020, Trump called for protesters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6, tweeting, “Be there, will be wild!” What message would he give to his minions now? How about, “Let’s really burn down the Capitol this time!” Wouldn’t it be nice comeuppance for all of his transgressions if Trump, in his role as potential prisoner #10022 at the Rikers Island Detention Center in the Bronx, were seen being led on a frog march into the Manhattan courthouse in handcuffs? Perhaps his big yap is one reason why he’s in the pickle he finds himself in. Trump is just the latest of many other motormouths in autocratic history who loved to hear themselves talk. Exhibit A was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who would fulminate to his disciples from the balcony for hours on end and never knowing when to stop. Those listening down in the audience must have been afraid to nod off or leave the rally because they were afraid something fun might transpire involving Mussolini’s Fascist Party Blackshirts, who probably were paid at least 25 lira an hour to sit there and hear their idol yammer on. Il Duce’s big mouth contributed to his countrymen, sick of Benito’s blathering into eternity, deciding to string him up with piano wire upside down from a metal girder. One reason perhaps that dictators like Mussolini gave long speeches is because, as Robert Service, a professor of Russian Studies at Oxford University, said, “the speaker doesn’t have to worry about the audience running away.” Speaking of windbags, Mussolini’s old buddy, Adolph Hitler, was himself not shy about holding forth for hours on end. If you happened to lose interest during the blatherthon and showed signs of leaving the Hitler rally because it started to sound old, his Brownshirts might have a nice little surprise for you too. But, of course (though not soon enough), Hitler and those Brownshirts got what was coming to them as well. Imagine poor Eva Braun having to hear all of her fiancé’s ranting and raving about backstabbers and griping that nobody liked or appreciated him anymore for all the “great things” he had done for his people. His nonstop talking only got worse when things started going south for his Nazis and the lovely couple had to move to their new honeymoon suite at an undisclosed underground bunker. The bunker, as we all know, is where life turned rather darker and gloomier for the Fuhrer, Eva, and their German Shepherd, Blondi, who must have asked what she did wrong for Hitler to send her to the dog pound in the sky. We mustn’t forget Cuban maximum leader Fidel Castro, who holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations: a windy hours and 29 minutes, in September, 1960. But he was only warming up. His longest speech on record in Cuba was seven hours, 10 minutes in 1986 at the III Communist Party Congress in Havana. Maybe El Presidente’s long-windedness had something to do with what he himself claimed were the more than 600 attempts on his life, which reportedly included poison pills, a toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, a chemically tainted diving suit and powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity. We don’t necessarily want to throw her in the same noxious category as Hitler, Mussolini, and Trump as far as being “wonderful servants” to their people. But a few years back, former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner gave a nearly four-hour speech to the Argentine Congress defending herself against charges of a criminal coverup. TV might have shown the audience falling asleep or even worse (or better) walking out during her harangue. As ridiculously long as the speech lasted, maybe it could explain why things didn’t exactly work out so well for Fernández because she later ended up, despite her Richard Nixon-sounding “I am not a crook” rambling, being indicted for corruption. Fernández’s Eva Peron-style Don’t Cry for Me Argentina pity party serves as a reminder of what can happen to world-class blowhards who never know when they’re trying the patience of their captive audiences. But let’s not minimize Trump’s standing as the contemporary leader in the clubhouse for authoritarian types who feel every word they utter is a pearl. The MAGA standard-bearer  recently gave an hour-and-a-half speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference, which he started with a nice little opening that certainly reminded everyone of Abraham Lincoln: “As we gather today, our country and our movement, the greatest political movement in the history of our country, as nobody going to even question it, even the fake news media, that’s a lot of fake news back there…” Blah, blah, blah. Notably, Trump got booed as he prattled on and on about being cheated out of being re-elected as President and who knows what else since he probably sent half his audience to dreamland. As one of his many defense lawyers by now has surely advised his garrulous client, “Donald--please shut the f--k up.” Sure, like he’d ever listen to anybody. Eric Green has had many former incarnations. Topping the list is news writer for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Information Agency, newspaper reporter in Maryland, press aide to a U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill, and ESL teacher in Washington, D.C. Presently a freelance writer, his articles have appeared in such places as the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Highbrow Magazine. In an attempt to be a latter-day Art Buchwald or Erma Bombeck, he writes satirical pieces about political figures and celebrities that appear on various humor websites. He is the author of several books, including Temporary Insanity: Costa Rica: My Way and My Penciled-in-Life, A Hoosier Pens a New Story in D.C.

By Andy Borowitz | The New Yorker March 21, 2023 ORLANDO (The Borowitz Report)—Offering a vehement defense of Donald J. Trump, Representative Kevin McCarthy told reporters that the former President should not be indicted because “most if not almost all Americans” pay porn stars. “What you use your personal money for is your own personal business,” the Speaker of the House said during a break at a G.O.P. retreat. “If you want to pay for a haircut, fine. If you want to pay for a car wash, also fine. And, if you want to pay a porn star, well, that’s fine, too, and pretty much every American does it.” Asked if he had ever paid a porn star, McCarthy said, “You know what? I don’t think I have. But, because of the way George Soros has weaponized this prosecution against Donald Trump, I think I’m going to start paying porn stars to show my solidarity with an innocent man.” Although McCarthy’s words drew support from many within the G.O.P., he received pushback from one prominent House Republican. “Only an idiot pays for porn,” said Representative Matt Gaetz. Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

Perfect! Flawless! Impeccable! Debra Turner, the winner of our third annual Oscar competition, is the first Insider contestant to have ever submitted an entry with no wrong answers. That puts her ahead of the professional prognosticators in the film and media industries. Debra, a freelance writer and blogger, is modest regarding her gifts as a movie clairvoyant. “I don’t think I really have any special expertise,” she says. “I have watched the Academy Awards each year, and of course, when the nominations come out, I see the same press that everybody else sees and watch a lot of news and current events.” Debra originally hails from Louisville, Ky. She got a summa cum laude BA in history and political science from Bellarmine University, then made the northward trek to New York City, The differences between her hometown and the Big Apple were immediately obvious: “What was weird to me was that people would shoot you a question and continue walking and sometimes get into the elevator before you had a chance to answer it.” How did ruder-than-rude native New Yorkers react to her Southern twang? “I may have been too naïve at that time to pick up that people were making fun of me,” admits Debra. “I was super nice and didn’t always pick up on cattiness until I had been here for a couple of years.” Debra has now lived four decades in New York City, where she has been everywhere professionally and done everything. For over 20 years, she worked in the editorial departments of Time, Fortune, Money, People and Real Simple, plus did a stint at Warner Bros. Inc, in the film publicity department, as well as at Warner Bros., Atlantic and Electra Records. Fourteen years ago, Debra started The Savvy Shopper, a popular lifestyle blog. “We tend to cover six topics: beauty, health, fashion, food, home and entertainment. It’s about smart decision-making. There are items we have to buy, even if we believe ourselves to be minimalists.” Here at The Insider, we are actually best described as hardcore materialists. In that spirit, we are thrilled to award Debra a $100 Amazon gift card. But we can’t help but think that she would have been smarter (and richer) if she had submitted her Academy Award predictions to a bookie. Maybe she should take her fortune-telling skills to Louisville's own Kentucky Derby on May 6th!

By Laurence Lerman / New York City For a fellow who died in 1485, Richard III is having a good run. Lately, the controversial last king of the House of York seems to be everywhere. Shakespeare’s Richard III made a couple of appearances on New York stages in 2022—once via the SoHo Shakespeare Company’s production at the Flea Theater in Tribeca last fall, and another time as part of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park offerings in Central Park at the Delacorte Theater. Both productions offered contemporary portraits of the 15th century king. The Public Theater’s adaptation featured Black Panther’s Danai Gurira, offering her own juicy, leather-clad interpretation of the much-storied royal. Richard returns to the city this month with the arrival of the film The Lost King in select U.S. theaters on March 24. The British production premiered in September at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, and it opened to a positive reception in U.K. theaters the following month. It is not another Shakespearean take on the material, but rather a fascinating look at the 2012 search for the remains of King Richard. The monarch was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field near the end of the War of the Roses and hastily buried without pomp at the site of a former church, the exact location lost to time. Or so the story goes. Directed by Stephen Frears and co-written by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, The Lost King is based on the true story of amateur historian Philippa Langley. The research she conducted led to the discovery of Richard’s remains beneath a parking lot in Leicester on August 25, 2012, 527 years to the day after he was killed in battle. The years-long run-up to the archaeological excavation found Langley, the divorced, chronically exhausted mother of two, clashing with Britain’s most eminent historians and academics. Many of them, the film shows, were dismissive of and patronizing towards her—before attempting to claim the credit when her research ultimately proved to be correct. "At every turn they marginalized her, edged her out, because she wasn't cut from the right cloth," said co-writer Coogan in an interview with BBC Radio 4. Coogan co-stars in the film alongside Sally Hawkins, who portrays Phillippa Langley. The intrepid Ms. Langley co-wrote the 2013 book The King's Grave: The Search for Richard III, upon which the film is based. The movie also features Mark Addy as Richard Buckley, the real-life University of Leicester archaeologist who was initially supportive of Langley, and Harry Lloyd as an actor who stars as the king in a staged performance of Richard III that Langley attends and whose Richard appears to Langley in visions—not as the deformed and wicked villain that Shakespeare imagined, but rather a misunderstood and damned good-looking guy. It’s no surprise that he helps inspire Langley in her search. Langley’s story of her search for the lost king has become well-known over the past decade, as has her involvement with the “Richard III Society,” an eccentric group of “Ricardians” dedicated to disputing the negative reputation Richard has developed over the centuries. They even got onboard to crowd-fund Langley’s “Looking for Richard” campaign when the Leicester Town Council dropped out—even though the council members liked the publicity. In telling Langley’s tale, the filmmakers have leaned into the underdog aspect of the narrative, complete with Hawkins bringing to life a character who overcomes a number of obstacles in a male-dominated world in her quest for Richard, while yearning to be taken seriously. With its roots in a real-life story, focus on social class consciousness, and light-and-lively blend of drama and comedy, The Lost King is an agreeable entry in director Stephen Frears ever-expanding canon. With credits dating back to his 1969 debut helming episodes of the Yorkshire-based cop drama Parkins Patch, Frears remains one of the U.K.’s most consistent and prolific creators of film and television content for over a half-century. Right out of the gate, Frears proved himself to be adept at taking on the kind of reality-based stories and idiosyncratic characters that would define so much of his work over the subsequent 50 years. Frears focused primarily on television in the ’70s, helming a slew of TV movies and numerous dramas for the BBC and ITV’s highly regarded anthology series. He moved on to such lauded British arthouse features in the ’80s as The Hit (1984) My Beautiful Launderette (1985) and 1987’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Prick Up Your Ears. The latter pair secured him his first Hollywood gig for 1988’s period romantic drama Dangerous Liaisons. Since then, it’s been an assortment of both high-profile and specialized film and TV productions on both sides of the pond, including the films The Grifters (1990), High Fidelity (2000), The Queen (2006) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) and TV’s The Snapper (1993), a live adaptation of Fail Safe (2000), and the miniseries A Very English Scandal (2018). Frears, Coogan and co-writer Pope previously collaborated on the 2013 serio-comedic bio-pic Philomena about adoption-rights advocate Philomena Lee. Tha movie also features “a woman battling against big vested interests,” as Coogan put it during a press junket. Picking up that film’s distinctly light dramatics and bittersweetly comedic tone, The Lost King is a very comfortable watch with charm to spare, most of it provided by the always-reliable Hawkins and her soft-spoken presence. And unlike the contemporary takes on Shakespeare’s Richard III that popped up across New York last year, Frears’ film doesn’t make any tough demands on its audience save for getting behind the lady at its center and the king she feels it is her duty to honor. Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

March 19, 2023 | #NYTimesReadAlong