Also, depending on the magnitude of MAGA failure, if you are a smaller European country, you might reckon that new insanity from AfD or National Rally is more likely than resurgent insanity from MAGA in the medium-term.

I mean, it sounds like the real difference is, "these other countries are not nuclear superpowers, so the impact globally when they elect a right-wing authoritarian is less" which, yeah, sure, absolutely true. But that would be true even if the USA had a parliamentary system.

Orban dominated Hungary for 16 straight years! Trump will be lucky the manage just 8 in office. Netanyahu has been in office almost non-stop for seventeen years. Both had a pretty substantial impact on their countrys' policies.

Everyone says this and yet the counter-examples of these kinds of leaders emerging in parliamentary systems (Orban in Hungary, Bibi in Israel, the PiS in Poland) are hardly scarce. It's not clear to me that parliamentary systems are an effective inoculation here.

So for instance if you are a small country without a blue sea navy, you want *two* potential blue sea navy buddies, not just 'USN or bust.'

It is more or less a plea to 'make sure you have *two* minimally viable partners providing a given security capability.'

Though I'd argue that policy here for Canada vs. the rest of NATO is different. Canada's security policy is about managing the USA, one way or another, because it is right next door. Europe has more opportunities for balancing and diversification.

Well, yeah. The United States' interests here diverge because it *is* defense self-sufficient. Being without allies sucks (as currently shown), but the US defense complex is almost entirely internal. Smaller countries do not have this luxury.

If you are a NATO state, you also need a plan for 'What if AfD takes power? What if ReformUK does? What if Rassemblement National does? and so on. Because one suspects this is going to keep happening from time to time.

That doesn't mean 'assume the coalition will collapse' - most coalition members will not be relapsing into authoritarian at any given moment - but going forward, countries serious about defense need to be serious about a minimum defense that isn't pinned on one load-bearing security dependency.

So 1) yes, but 2) I think there is a danger here in assuming that 'authoritarian relapse' within the Status Quo Coalition is a USA-exclusive problem. *Most* coalition members have a major right-wing authoritarian party. Your defense policy should assume any one state could relapse at any time.

One of those lines of scholarship I think all of us who teach this period quote to our students.

1. RM is of course entirely right. Sulla wiped out his enemies and totally remade all of Rome’s institutions, and it *didn’t work* 2. I think it’s also extremely important to understand *why* it didn’t work, as Ronald Syme memorably put it…

That's my expectation.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump doesn't understand that for Ukraine an 'energy truce' also involves not striking Ukraine's powerplants, heating infrastructure, etc. I'd bet he only thinks in terms of oil export infrastructure and so is missing why Putin won't agree to a real energy truce.

Zero, it turns out, because no one seems to have actually agreed.

We're already at war with Russia, exhibit 2342:

Though, cards on the table, in my ideal world we would have shifted those interceptor stocks and then told Ukraine to absolutely keep blowing the crap out of Russian oil infrastructure until every last Russian soldier was either off Ukrainian soil or buried in it.

The grim irony is that if Trump hadn't started his damn fool war with Iran, we could have shifted much of those interceptor stocks over to Ukraine to protect Ukrainian civilians and then we would actually have the leverage to ask Zelensky and Ukraine not to kinetically sanction Russian oil.