Foreign Policy

WARSAW — On Feb. 14, Magdalena Ogórek, a left-wing candidate in Poland’s presidential race, said if she were elected, she “would pick up the phone to call the Russian president” to normalize relations between Moscow and Warsaw. As it happens, it’s an unlikely scenario: The 36-year-old historian and TV personality is polling just 3 percent. But her comment sparked the question every candidate has now had to think about in the run up to the May 10 presidential election: Would you call Vladimir Putin?

The incumbent, President Bronislaw Komorowski, dismissed it outright. “If someone thinks that peace in Europe depends on a phone call, then they’re a bit out of touch with reality,” he said in a television interview. But that didn’t stop his main rival, Andrzej Duda, from releasing a campaign video showing a snoring Komorowski being woken in the night to take a phone call from Moscow. The clip ends with the words: “Do you want to continue worrying who will answer the phone?”

Foreign policy concerns — far beyond phone calls to the Kremlin — have been more prominent in this Polish election than previous ones, says Marcin Zaborowski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM). According to a recent poll, Poles consider security the most important topic in the presidential campaign. The spotlight has been on the conflict in Ukraine and its implications for Poland and the region.

Eleven candidates, ranging from anti-clerical left to the monarchist far-right, are running for president. But there is a broad consensus between the two main candidates, Komorowski and Duda: Poland must take a hard line toward Russia and keep up support for the embattled government in Kiev, acting as its advocate in the European Union.

Where there is discord is over the details. “Disagreements tend to focus on who is the most competent to achieve those objectives and the best way to achieve them,” says Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex, who writes a blog on Polish politics. Komorowski wants Poland in the “European mainstream,” working closely with Germany and others. In contrast, Duda is calling for a more independent Polish foreign policy that steers its Western allies and not the other way around, Szczerbiak adds.

Komorowski, who served as defense minister from 2000 to 2001 and, as president, serves as the commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, has presented himself as the only candidate capable of guaranteeing Poland’s security. NATO and its eastern flank need to be strengthened, he says. And he’s clear that Poland should take its own defense seriously. He recently announced two major arms purchases — Raytheon Patriot missiles from the United States, and 50 French Airbus Group helicopters — as part of Poland’s program to modernize its army.

Poland also needs to encourage Ukraine’s westward course, says Komorowski, who believes a stable, democratic, European Ukraine is vital to Poland’s security. “The Western world must understand that it will not be safe until Ukraine is safe,” he said in speech at the Ukrainian parliament in April, the first by a Polish president since 1997. Earlier this year, Komorowski stated that Poland was ready to sell weapons to Ukraine.

But if the incumbent sounds hawkish, his challenger, who is currently polling at around 30 percent is even more so. On international affairs, Komorowski and the current government are “flowing in the mainstream,” Duda said in a briefing on Feb. 18. There, the 42-year-old lawyer from Krakow said he believes that “this is not a sovereign policy,” because it means that “someone else is creating that current.” Poland, he added, should be the one to “create that current.”

Duda wants Poland to be “the regional leader of a bloc of post-communist states trying to persuade the Western powers to adopt a more robust response to Russian expansionism,” says Szczerbiak. In this way, his vision resembles that of the late Lech Kaczynski, Komorowski’s predecessor, who died in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, in 2010.

The only other contender with double-digit ratings on the eve of the election is Pawel Kukiz, a rock musician, running as an independent. “We should act within the framework of the [NATO] Alliance, but not step ahead of the line,” he said in a television interview on March 8. Poland can send Ukraine humanitarian aid, as well as bulletproof vests — but “no Kalashnikovs.”

Meanwhile, several minor candidates are calling for a more conciliatory attitude towards Russia. Ogórek, who first raised the idea of calling Putin, said at her campaign launch on Feb. 14 that Poland “cannot afford to have the Russian media defining us as Russia’s enemy No. 1.” The agrarian candidate, Adam Jarubas, has drawn attention to the plight of Polish farmers in the wake of Moscow’s ban on Polish agricultural products last summer, which has cost the country at least $550 million, according to government estimates. “We must view the economic dimension of [Poland’s relations with Russia] cooly,” he said at a talk on foreign policy in Warsaw on April 20.

These candidates are a reminder that not all Poles are delighted with Warsaw’s current support for Kiev. But, with each carrying less than 5 percent in polls, they are not serious contenders for the presidency.

Indeed, it’s re-election for Komorowski that still looks the most likely. The timing may work to his advantage: The election comes two days after the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe on May 8. Poland decided to shun the “Victory Day” parade in Moscow and held its own events on May 7 in Gdansk, attended by several leaders from the region, including Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. These were preceded by a conference on the legacy of World War II that featured international historians — a deliberate contrast to the display of military might planned for Red Square. “Let us remember that the military demonstration [in Moscow on May 9] is not about history, but about today and the future,” Komorowski said ahead of the anniversary.

These commemorative events, in which Komorowski played a leading role, gave him a last minute chance to show that he is taking Poland’s security seriously, emphasizing parallels between the international situation seven decades ago and now, which adds credibility to his campaign’s security theme.

That may not be enough to give the incumbent the outright majority he’d need to avoid a runoff, where he’ll likely face Duda — and win. But even in the case of the unlikely, the Polish president won’t be dialing the Kremlin any time in the near future.

JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

GLASGOW — In Glasgow, there is hoary political cliché: voters would elect a monkey wearing a red Labour rosette, such is the party’s dominance in Scotland’s largest city. After Thursday, those lazy assumptions are gone forever.

The political earthquake that hit Scotland in the early hours of Friday morning was not unexpected. For months, opinion polls had predicted that the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) was set for a sweeping victory in the general election, winning almost every seat in Scotland. And yet, when the results finally arrived, the impact was no less jarring. Overnight, Scotland’s political landscape has been razed, with potentially seismic long-term repercussions for the whole of the United Kingdom.

Thursdays’ vote represented a seismic change from more than a decade of minimal change in Scotland at U.K. general elections. In 2010, not a single one of the 59 Westminster seats in Scotland changed hands. The SNP, which went into the election with six seats, now holds 56. The nationalists’ previous best general election return was 11, in 1974.

Stories of improbable victories abound: In Glasgow North East, for example, Willie Bain, who was thought to hold the safest seat in the west of Scotland, lost his Labour seat by a margin of 58.1 percent to 33.7 percent – the swing of almost 40 per cent from the 2010 election, setting a U.K. record for volatility. Similar figures were recorded across Scotland: In Coatbridge, for example, the sitting Labour MP, in office since 1982, was swept from power by a swing of more than 36 percent to the SNP. In Paisley, Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander was defeated by a 20-year-old who has yet to sit her finals at university. In the Highlands, the SNP’s Drew Hendry solidly beat Danny Alexander who had been Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the treasury in the coalition government at Westminster.

Labour lost all but one of the 41 seats it took in 2010. The party, founded by a Scot, Keir Hardie, and effectively forged as a political force in the heartlands of industrial Scotland, could struggle to regain power again.

The SNP’s general election victory was widely welcomed on the streets of Glasgow Friday. The SNP had never won a general election seat in Scotland’s largest city before, though the city voted for independence. Now, all seven Glasgow MPs are Scottish nationalist. Aiden, 25, who works in a coffee shop and had voted nationalist for the first time, was “delighted with the result,” he said. “We need a change and that’s what this is.”

On Thursday night at a sports arena in Glasgow’s East End, ashen-faced Labour activists stood solemnly watching the returning officer on stage announce the results of each of the seven seats in the city. All fell to the Scottish nationalists, with huge swings away from Labour incumbents. “We are in different territory,” Frank McAveety, a former Labour member of the Scottish Parliament and sitting councilor told me as he stood watching the returning officer declare yet another SNP victory. Labour, he said, did not offer Scottish voters a clear narrative. “We need to find a way that we are telling the story of Scotland’s future.”

But Labour’s problems in Scotland run too deep to be resolved with simply a more compelling story. The party has long dominated Scottish politics — especially at the local level, Labour has controlled Glasgow city council for all but four years since 1952. But in recent years, Labour has looked increasingly lethargic and out of touch. The party’s share of the U.K. general election vote remained strong until Thursday – it won over 40 per cent in 2010 – but Labour lost control of the devolved Scottish parliament in 2007, and was badly beaten in the 2011 Scottish elections.

Lacking resources and active members, Labour often struggled to compete with the SNP on the ground during this general election campaign. Even in Labour held seats the party was often thin on the ground, forced to reply on mailshots and phone calls to get their message across. Meanwhile, the SNP has been buoyed with the youthful vivacity of over 75,000 new members — and pre-election polls suggested that more than 70 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted SNP — since last year’s independence referendum.

The euphoria that spread among SNP supporters on Thursday night as seat after seat turned the party’s distinctive shade of canary yellow has been tempered in recent days by the wider U.K. picture: The Conservatives – widely loathed in Scotland – won an unexpected majority. Blamed for the de-industrialization that still scars much of urban Scotland, the Tories remain unpopular in much of Scotland. Many Scots are wary of another Tory administration. Thursday was the Conservatives worst ever performance north of the border, even though the party’s sole Scottish Conservative MP, David Mundell, held his seat in the Scottish Borders.

David Cameron’s success raises difficult questions for the super-charged Scottish nationalist cohort at Westminster. Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s leader, has said she will not work with the Tories, potentially leaving the phalanx of new SNP MPs effectively impotent on the backbenches. There is precedent for this in Scottish politics: During the 1980s and 1990s, the large Labour delegations Scotland sent down to London were effectively frozen out of power during almost two decades of Conservative rule. This fed demands for a local parliament that reflected Scotland’s more left wing electoral preferences.

If the new SNP intake does find itself without influence in the House they could propose another option: leaving Westminster, and the United Kingdom, altogether. Certainly the fact that Scotland has once again voted left – this time for the SNP – and has found itself governed once more by the right could add more pressure for another referendum on independence.

But Thursday’s result does not charge the basic arithmetic of independence. A majority of Scots would still vote to stay in the union, despite the ringing endorsement handed to the SNP. Sturgeon will not hold another referendum until she and her party are confident of victory.

But a psychological blow has been struck to the three-centuries-old union with England. This general election campaign has done more harm to the union than last year’s referendum: Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives’ strategy of depicting the SNP as nefarious separatists that would hold a Labour government to “ransom” was brutally efficient in key English marginal seats, but has damaged cross-border relations.

Whether Cameron is willing, or able, to find a new accommodation with Scottish nationalists is unclear – although without one, the union looks increasingly doomed.

On Friday, Cameron said he would fulfill pledges for greater devolution – that is more powers for the Scottish Parliament. But any such deal would be contingent on restricting the rights of non-English MPs in the House of Commons to vote on issues that only affected England. In exchange for dropping their opposition to this, Scottish nationalists could be offered full control over tax and spend.

Such a piecemeal approach to constitutional reform, however, is part of the reason the U.K. is threatened with disintegration. Devolution has been a largely ad hoc reaction to demands for self-government, often designed in line with the interests of major U.K. political parties rather than voting publics in the devolved regions. A fully fledged constitutional convention to discuss a new arrangement for governing across the U.K., possibly under a federal system, might solve these issues but “looks as far off as ever,” said Michael Keating, professor of politics at the University of Aberdeen.

Regardless of what happens in Westminster, the SNP look set to consolidate their power in Edinburgh, a city far more central to their eventual goals – that is, independence. If there is to be another referendum, the nationalists will need to win another majority in Scottish parliamentary elections, slated to take place next May.

Their chances are looking bright. On Friday, at a press conference Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was defiant, telling journalists that his party would “bounce back” from its most disastrous performance in history. But with just a single seat in Westminster and their lowest poll ratings in decades, Labour is a long, long way off regaining its mantle as the party of Scotland.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images

The dust is starting to settle on Britain’s Thursday elections, and a few aspects of this moment in British politics are now coming into clearer view. Heads are rolling and history is being made: Strap in for five key points (and a bit of needlepoint) to consider.

‘I am William Wallace!’ Sorta?

This was the election where the Scottish National Party rewrote the UK’s electoral map. By nearly completing a clean sweep of Scotland’s seats in the House of Commons, the SNP did more than anyone else — besides Ed Miliband himself, but more on that later — to ensure that Labour would go down in flames. Alex Salmond, the former head of the party, said the Scottish lion had roared, and Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s current head (and, no, not all of SNP-ers have fish-related surnames, as delightful as that would be), said the tectonic plates of Scottish politics had shifted.

The situation in play now is effectively that Scotland is a one-party state and that there exists a complete divide in political representation between Scotland and the other three nations in the U.K. — England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Scottish independence referendum may have failed, but the consequences are that the basic rules of U.K. politics have been rewritten. The immediate challenge for Prime Minister David Cameron is how to draft a political pact that addresses the forces that threatens to pull apart the United Kingdom. He has said devolution of political power will continue, but there are many in Britain now calling for a constitutional convention as to how powers are going to be shared between national legislatures and Parliament in London.

In his remarks on Friday, Cameron emphasized that he planned to be a prime minister for all of the United Kingdom. But one glance at the electoral map reveals his predicament. The Conservatives lost in Scotland. They lost in Wales. They lost in Northern Ireland. It was only in England that they won. England just happens to be larger than the rest, and the Conservatives seat-totals there were sufficient to outweigh their losses elsewhere. One might describe Cameron as a colonial leader ruling fractious imperial subjects to the north and west of the capital. Others have called him Benjamin Netanyahu, which just makes one wonder who are the Palestinians in that analogy.

No Moules Frites, Just Kidney Pie, Thanks.

Separately but also relatedly to the previous thought about Scotland, the UK Independence Party put on quite a showing on Thursday — and managed to get nothing for it. The party is the third-largest by vote total — winning 12.6 percent of all ballots cast, a rather incredible figure — even if it managed to win only one seat in Parliament. That speaks to the depth of suspicion that now exists in Britain toward the European Union.

Beset by Euroskeptics in his own party and the rise of UKIP, Cameron has promised a referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the EU, and that may be the next cataclysmic vote we have to look forward to in British politics. Britain has always had a conflicted relationship with the union, but a British exit would be a true catastrophe for the political pact. The EU’s power lies in the collective clout of its membership, and a so-called “Brexit” would call into question the EU’s future and may spur a rush to the exit from other members.

Given Cameron’s ability to pull a rabbit from an electoral hat on Thursday, there’s good reason to believe that he would win such a referendum, but the immediate question is how EU leaders will now approach the question of giving up some powers in Brussels (where, for the uninitiated, the moules frites are excellent) and returning them to London. The union’s heavyweights have so far driven a hard bargain and argued that Britain must act with the interests of the EU in mind, but UKIP’s continued share of the vote is only increasing. Cameron has to figure out a way to blunt UKIP’s argument that British sovereignty is being stripped away by the EU. How he does so is a key question for his premiership moving forward.

Whither the Global Left?

Poor Ed Miliband thought he could win this election by shifting the Labour party back toward its roots and away from the centrist policies that brought Tony Blair to power in the 1990s. Suffice to say, Miliband was wrong, and now he’s out of a job. That opens up some rather interesting questions about the state of the global left.

Just go through the following exercise: Name a successful left-wing leader in power today in the developed world.

…

You’d think that would be an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. Francois Hollande’s administration is up in flames. The left-wing vision of Ed Miliband was just utterly rejected by British voters. In Brazil, the political project of the Workers’ Party is coming under intense pressure because of popular dissatisfaction with corruption and scandals. In Greece, Syriza is rapidly backtracking on its promises to rip up austerity and challenge its creditors. For the American left, the administration of President Barack Obama has been one long exercise in lowering expectations.

(Ok, so there’s the Scandinavian welfare states, but until some country outside of that frigid peninsula figures out how to replicate their experiences, they’re the exception that merely proves the rule.)

The global left might look to popular movements such as Occupy and the Indignados in Spain for inspiration in popular mobilization, but those movements have struggled and mostly failed to translate popular energy into political power.

Which all just goes to show that….

We Live in Maggie Thatcher’s World

The first election after the death of Margaret Thatcher just goes to show her continuing influence on British politics. It’s an incredible feat that the Tories managed to increase their seats and share of the national vote while embarking on a program of cost-cutting. The Tories have continued their patron saint’s policies of strangling the spendthrift British state, depriving many of their government benefits and forcing students to pay higher fees for their university education. Somewhere in her crypt, Thatcher’s corpse is doing calisthenics readying itself for its return as the Tory candidate of 2024.

When Tony Blair’s New Labour was an embrace of market economics, and that was a vision that Miliband and many died-in-the-wool leftists saw as a betrayal of the party’s patrimony. Miliband distanced himself from Blair and his thinking, and Thursday’s results are the price he paid. Blair’s realization, one might argue, was that Labour had to do battle with the Tories on their own turf, one that Thatcher had both defined and occupied.

What the F*&! Is Up With Political Polling?

For weeks, the polls in Britain had indicated that we would wake up Friday to a hung Parliament. That didn’t happen, and the Tories secured an outright majority. This is now the fourth major election in recent memory that pre-election polls have badly botched the final outcome:

1. Underestimating the extent of Lib Dem and Labour losses Thursday.
2. Underestimating Likud’s victory in Israel’s March elections.
3. Underestimating the GOP’s performance in the 2014 midterms.
4. Predicting a close, final outcome to the Scottish independence referendum, when the final result was a resounding victory for the “no” campaign.

There are many structural reasons for why it is harder to carry out accurate political polling today. The decline of landlines and increased use of cellphones has made younger voters harder to reach. Pollsters, more broadly, have had a hard time applying rigorous statistical methods to the digital communications revolution.

But the current state of affairs is unacceptable. Polling inevitably has an effect on the final outcome of an election by encouraging voters to cast their ballots tactically and influencing perceptions as to who is up and who is down. When that polling isn’t grounded in reality, the public opinion industry begins to make a mockery of the democratic process. In retrospect, the entire British election campaign now has a sheen of unreality to it, as we realize that most of our underlying assumptions had been completely wrong.

The British Polling Council says it will investigate what went wrong. We eagerly await their findings.

The Most British Thing Ever

Throughout the election returns on Thursday, Tom Katsumi was heroically needlepointing the results. Take a moment to appreciate what must be the most British thing ever. He apparently was none too pleased with the outcome.

Not my best stitching, but my fastest… Now to take it outside and BURN IT!#UK2015GeneralElectionResultsLiveStitch pic.twitter.com/4kLh7nJEJS

— Tom Katsumi (@tomkatsumi) May 8, 2015

And a more lowbrow take:

#GE2015 = Maggie Simpson pic.twitter.com/jOBg3cPban (^@alexmclaughlan)

— Shreyas Panse (@shreyaspanse) May 8, 2015

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

“The Desert Blues” by Joshua Hammer, the Atavist Magazine.

In 2001, two unlikely friends created a music festival in Mali that drew the likes of Bono and Robert Plant. Then radical Islam tore them apart.

“When Mohamed Aly Ansar studied international law at the University of Bamako, in the capital of Mali, he spent his days thinking about how to bring development to his impoverished nation. But at night he had a much different dream, one that came to him over and over: He saw himself standing in the middle of the desert near a stage, watching as a helicopter descended. The chopper was carrying the Swedish pop group ABBA, and Ansar was there to receive them.

Thirty years later, on January 12, 2012, a version of that dream came true. Ansar stood on the tarmac at the airport just outside Timbuktu, searching the dark sky for the lights of a private jet. Ansar was the founder of a three-day concert series called the Festival in the Desert, sometimes referred to as the African Woodstock, and on this cool night, he was waiting for Bono to arrive.”

“The Price of Nice Nails” by Sarah Maslin Nir, the New York Times.

Manicurists are routinely underpaid and exploited, and endure ethnic bias and other abuse, the New York Times has found.

“On a morning last May, Jing Ren, a 20-year-old who had recently arrived from China, stood among them for the first time, headed to a job at a salon in a Long Island strip mall. Her hair neat and glasses perpetually askew, she clutched her lunch and a packet of nail tools that manicurists must bring from job to job.

Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage. It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.”

“Lusitania: The Biggest Battle Over Its Biggest Mystery” by Richard B. Stolley, Fortune.

Retired venture capitalist Gregg Bemis owns the salvage rights to the Lusitania — and he thinks he can solve the 100-year-old mystery of why it sank so quickly. His biggest obstacle: The Irish government, which has fought him for years over his plans to explore the wreck.

“In the battle between preservation and property rights, preservation is currently winning: Bemis has been unable to convince the government to let him explore his ship his way. And the current dispute is just the latest in a series of legal battles that has enmeshed Bemis and the Lusitania for almost 30 years. Bemis has won some fights and lost others; along the way he’s become a minor celebrity in Ireland, thanks to coverage of his lawsuits and his knack for colorful, unsparing criticism of the country’s cultural mandarins. Even one of his own attorneys says that Bemis can come across as “an undiplomatic pain in the ass,” and Bemis is proudly unapologetic about that. To authorities’ insistence that their only priority is to protect the Lusitania, Bemis replies: “Protect it from what? They are not protecting it from the ravages of the ocean, nor the fishermen’s nets, nor the pirates, but only protecting it from the owner and historical truth.”

“Ghosts of Iguala” by Ryan Devereaux, the Intercept.

Investigating what Mexico’s government really knows about disappearance of dozens of students.

“Though there is still little clarity on the questions of why the students were disappeared, or where they were taken, statements in the federal investigation map out a criminal takeover of the region, exposing the corruption that has swallowed many of Guerrero’s governing structures. Coordinates provided by one detained gang member, for example, led authorities to a fetid swamp in an area called La Laguna, where the rotting corpse of a former Iguala police chief was recovered. The suspect also described a ranch known as Los Naranjos — The Oranges — a patch of property where gangsters dumped bodies. Another burial site, described by two suspects, stood out early in the case. There, the men said, they had buried some of the students from Ayotzinapa. When investigators examined the site they indeed found bodies — 28 of them in mass graves — but none were the students.”

“The Short Life and Speedy Death of Russia’s Silicon Valley” by James Appell, Foreign Policy.

In 2009, Moscow unveiled an ambitious plan to build a world-class technology incubator. Then corruption, brain drain, and Putin killed it.

“Of the world’s major economies, Russia’s had fared the worst in the aftermath of the global downturn. GDP shrank by 7.9 percent across 2009, including a record 10.9 percent in the second quarter. Unemployment hit a peak of 9.4 percent in February of that same year. Going into the crisis, oil and natural gas had accounted for some two-thirds of exports. Many had already long recognized that Russia’s dependence on commodities exports was making it vulnerable, but Medvedev was the first Russian president to actively engage with the problem.

His solution was a set of reforms, sketched out in a 4,000-word treatise titled ‘Go Russia!‘ The reforms were designed to harness technology in order to equip Russia for the 21st century, and they covered industries ranging from nuclear power to space technology to pharmaceuticals. Medvedev’s reforms called for, among other things, a 40 percent reduction in Russia’s energy consumption by 2020, and the commercial generation by 2050 of power by thermonuclear fusion.”

VALERY HACHE/AFP/GettyImages;  ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images; Wikimedia Commons; EPA/EKATERINA SHTUKINA/RIA NOVOSTI/KREMLIN POOL

MOSCOW — When prosecutors and police officers from the anti-extremism division showed up at Dmitry Lazarenko’s antique shop in Sochi a few months ago, they took him by surprise. After rummaging through the wares in the small space he keeps with two other collectors, they accused him of spreading Nazi propaganda before seizing a World War II-era German uniform hanging in the corner.

“There was a price tag on the swastika on the cap, but sometimes it falls off,” Lazarenko told me, as if still searching for an explanation for what befell his business. The officers said he violated a law forbidding Nazi propaganda. A local court sentenced him to a 1,000 ruble (about $20) fine. The affair left him shaken and puzzled — and angry about losing an expensive antique. “Some people collect Red Army uniforms and others German uniforms,” he said.

“It’s an historic article, it’s intended for collectors. We don’t go waving it around,” Lazarenko said. “What sort of extremist am I?” Lazarenko told me he’s a patriot who frequently gives Soviet army paraphernalia to local museums; he planned to wear a Soviet uniform for Russia’s celebration of its 1945 victory over Nazi Germany on May 9.

The raid on Lazarenko’s shop was not unique. As Russia gears up to mark 70 years since the end of World War II — and the Great Patriotic War, as the country calls its own four-year struggle against the Axis forces — the Kremlin’s fight against the specter of Nazism, fascism, as well as any perceived insults to the war’s memory has been revived with a fervor unseen even in Soviet times.

The law banning Nazi propaganda, which has existed in some form since the 1990s but was significantly amended last November, now has toy stores, book sellers, and museums trembling with fear. Previously, the law forbade “propaganda and public demonstration” of Nazi insignia. In the new version, lawmakers changed the “and” to an “or” — formally making any depiction of the swastika a punishable offense. Panicking bookstores went through their stocks, removing anything that had a swastika on its cover in a purge that swept from shelves even anti-fascist books, such as Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, the son of a Holocaust survivor. The law’s wording was so broad that one over-cautious exhibit of wartime posters in the Russian Far East covered up the Nazi insignia with fluorescent stickers.

The new law was one in a raft of measures phased in not long after the conflict in Ukraine began. Russian lawmakers called for a wider interpretation of Nazi propaganda that would include any extremist groups, including some Ukrainian nationalists who were fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to Moscow’s official line, they are fascists because some take inspiration from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its leader Stepan Bandera, who fought the Red Army in the 1940s.

“Fascist youth flaunt these symbols daily and call for genocide,” deputy speaker of the State Duma — Russia’s lower house of parliament — Sergey Zheleznyak, who authored the amendments, said last May. “These groups are what led Ukraine to chaos, disintegration and de facto civil war.”

In the same vein, a law against “rehabilitation of Nazism,” passed last spring, calls for up to three years in prison for those who deny Nazi crimes, “disseminate disrespect” about Victory Day, or desecrate monuments of wartime glory. While in Russia almost nobody — with the exception of a tiny faction of fanatics — deny Nazi crimes, the law is being used to launch nominal probes into incidents of vandalism of Soviet war memorials in Ukraine. In Russia, people like Lazarenko are unfortunate casualties of Moscow’s widening definition of support for Nazism and of law enforcement officials who are only too willing to crack down.

In many Russian circles, the narrative surrounding the conflict in eastern Ukraine borrows from the rhetoric of World War II, with talk of “liberating” cities now under Kiev’s control and even retaking Kiev from U.S.-backed “Ukrofascists.” The mythology of the Great Patriotic War is woven tightly into the narrative of the two “people’s republics,” and their fighters frequently adorn their uniforms and Kalashnikovs with the St. George’s ribbon, the orange and black stripes that appear on military medals and which have made a comeback in recent years as a government-backed symbol of Soviet World War II glory.

Speaking to local veterans this week, the separatist leader in Luhansk, Igor Plotnitsky, promised to “defeat Nazism for good and raise the Victory Banner over the new Reichstag of Banderites.”

With the conflict in Ukraine, Victory Day is changing in Russia, said Andrei Kolesnikov, who heads the Russian domestic policy program at Carnegie Moscow Center. “There is additional aggression, hysteria, and one-sidedness of interpretation of historical events, when any sort of critical discussion about what happened before during and after the war is unacceptable,” he said.

World War II has always been a symbol of perseverance and unity for Russia, and looms large in the collective consciousness. Even today, over half of Russians say they lost at least one close family member in the war. That public memory is used as a tool to boost the “personalistic regime” of Vladimir Putin, Kolesnikov said. “It works in favor of Putin’s charisma. In this way, the regime accomplishes the goal of consolidating most of the population around itself, and it is very effective.”

A decade ago, Putin stood over the military parade on Red Square attended by foreign leaders from the United States, Germany, France, and many other countries. Putin, then in his sixth year in power, delivered a message of friendship and peace. “We have never divided Victory into ours and someone else’s and we will always remember the aid of the allies,” he said.

This year, with almost no Western leaders planning to attend Victory Day celebrations, his message is bound to be different. In recent months, Putin has repeatedly accused the West of revanchism: rewriting the history of the war in order to “weaken the power and moral authority of modern Russia, to rid it of the status of victor.”

Victory worship went into overdrive this year as Putin attempted to further legitimize his rule, said historian Pavel Aptekar, a columnist for the daily newspaper Vedomosti. “It’s easy to say: if you are against us, then you are against victory and against our grandfathers who died in the war,” he said. “Our leaders are parasitizing on victory” in a way that is similar to “early Mussolini, who parasitized on the Great Roman empire.”

As the Kremlin uses the memory of World War II for political expediency, the interpretation of the 1945 victory put forward by officials is “less bloody and more presentable than it really was,” Aptekar said. Few people in today’s Russia understand the nature of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, though more people than in the post-Soviet period believe that the secret protocols to that pact, which carved Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence, were fake. And today, more Russians than ever before blame the start of war on France and Britain’s inking of the Munich Agreement, which permitted Germany to annex some provinces of Czechoslovakia.

With fewer and fewer Russians alive who remember World War II, its legacy is shifting. What in Soviet times was unequivocally a “holiday with tears in our eyes,” in the words of one well-known Soviet song, now inspires jingoistic messages of conquest and tone-deaf marketing. The Great Patriotic War has been featured everywhere from body art contests to cake-baking competitions, while ribbons and medals are plastered on store promotions — even in sex shops.

Meanwhile, the “never again” message of the older generation is getting lost, at a time when Russia has positioned itself as the great power challenging American unilateralism in world affairs. Pro-Kremlin youth sport T-shirts boasting nuclear missiles, and Putin has said openly that he was ready for nuclear war over Crimea during last year’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

Bumper stickers reading “To Berlin!” — the Soviet Red Army’s counter-offensive slogan sometimes painted on tanks and missiles — have been popular in Russia for years. But this year, new bumper stickers have appeared, bearing even more provocative slogans. One boasts, “1941-1945. We could repeat it again,” illustrated with a stick figure with a hammer and sickle for a head sodomizing another stick figure representing the Nazis.

To the people who remember the war, in which the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, such statements are unfathomable. “There is no need to repeat that triumph. War is human blood and loss, and we don’t need it,” said Galina Golovlyova, 95, who spent the war in the Moscow region digging trenches, scouting for enemy warplanes, and surviving on a small daily ration of bread. While she likes seeing the return of Soviet symbols and the red flag at the May 9 celebrations, “much of them are for show,” she said. She would rather see the money go to helping poor veterans with housing, medical care, and pensions.

“I don’t like the attempts to make Victory Day into some cartoonish holiday, with trite posters, ‘patriotic’ products, and tons of St. George ribbons, all while moving to flatten the past. Negating the swastika is precisely in the flow of this aggressive window-dressing,” said Polina Danilevich, a Russian journalist who also fell afoul of the “Nazi propaganda” law this spring.

Danilevich, who hails from Smolensk — a city in Western Russia that was occupied by the Nazis after some of the most devastating combat on Soviet territory early in the war — was browsing through archived images when she came across a photo of her own house. A Nazi flag flapped over a group of soldiers assembled in front of their commanding officers. “Found a picture of my yard,” Danilevich wrote when she posted the black and white photo on her social networking page, VKontakte. She was found guilty of Nazi propaganda and paid a fine.

“It was like finding a picture of a great-grandfather or some lost family relic,” she told me. “But our anti-extremism officials only saw the swastika and in it, Nazi propaganda…. They ignore the full picture, the historic memory, to focus on the particulars.”

Aptekar, the historian, is so fed up with the historiographical mistakes and exaggerations in state media that he has stopped watching state channels at all, only tuning in for sporting matches. “Leave history to the historians so that they look into the difficult and complicated details,” he said. “As long as history is made into ideology by all sides, it will be a constant reason for insults, resentment, and the squaring of accounts.”

Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images

Most Americans have never heard of Edward Miliband. And given this week’s result in the U.K. elections it is very likely they never will. After a crushing defeat he has already resigned as leader of the Labour Party and is poised to return to the Wallace & Gromit animated films from which he seems to have been discovered. His electoral failure and that of his party once again proves the old electoral adage that unappealing leaders and incompetent campaigns often produce bad results.

That’s not to take anything away from David Cameron, whose Conservative Party won a resounding victory that was so surprising that not only has it left Miliband out of a job, but in all likelihood he has taken scores of U.K. pollsters with him. Cameron stunned the pundits to a degree that echoes the recent electoral victory of Bibi Netanyahu in the elections in Israel, the country that along with the U.K. has historically had the greatest claim on having a special relationship with the United States.

Both elections however, suggest on several levels that those special relationships, neither of which has been what it used to be during the past several years, are in for a period of further decline.

In part, the decline in the relationships has been due to historical reasons that have made both countries less important to the United States. The United Kingdom is a shadow of its former self, the sun long ago having defied the old saying and actually having set on the former empire. British school children no longer study maps that show a quarter of the world in red or pink to depict the lands loyal to their monarch. Even Britain’s last great claim on global domination — in the area of TV car shows — suffered a devastating blow this year when “Top Gear,” broadcast in 214 countries with an audience of hundreds of millions, saw its blowhard, politically troglodyte host Jeremy Clarkson unceremoniously booted off the air for behaving like an ass, thus shutting down production.

Perhaps the fact that puts this decline in clearest focus is the steep decline in the size of the British Army. With cuts slated to take it from 102,000 to 82,000 regulars and a recent report suggesting that further cuts could reduce it in size to 50,000 within a few years, we face the prospect that in the not too distant future the military that once conquered the world will be roughly the same size as the New York Police Department. (A promise of Cameron and the Tories was that they would stop such cuts from taking place, but whether Britain’s financial health — more on that later — will permit them to honor that pledge is another matter.)

Similarly, whereas a generation ago Israel was seen as central to U.S. Mideast policy, today, while it is still America’s most important and best-supported ally in the region, events have undercut its importance in practical terms. Once it was key to the U.S. Cold War strategy in the region, but the Cold War ended. Once the Middle East was more important to the United States as a source of energy, but that is clearly less true today than at any time since the Second World War. Once the Israel-Palestine conflict was seen as central to all the problems and geopolitical issues of the region; now that is far from being the case. Indeed, that issue, once number one among U.S. regional priorities, might have a hard time making the top ten today. (Coming in after: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, containing Iran, the Iranian nuclear deal, the spread of extremism, the current crisis in Yemen, the looming crisis in Libya, Egyptian stability, maintaining eroding support among our traditional Arab allies, and a host of other such issues.)

Further, both special relationships are fading in the minds and hearts of Americans as a new generation starts assuming power, one that has few memories of the historical reasons for the founding of Israel or of Britain’s vital partnership with the United States in two world wars.

Part of the deterioration in these two relationships has to do with policy decisions made by the governments that have just won second terms in power. The U.S.-Israel relationship sure doesn’t feel that special when the prime minister of Israel tries to politically body-slam the U.S. president. It is devalued when the prime minister of Israel appears to choose sides in the U.S. political debate, seeming to be willing to save his specialness for his Republican friends. And it is certainly deeply damaged when Israel wages a brutal and unjustifiable campaign against the people of Gaza that violates international norms and offends the sensibilities of all with a hint of conscience, as the Netanyahu government did last year.

Britain has not so much offended as it has simply slinked away from center stage. Perhaps in the wake of British public revulsion at the degree to which Tony Blair was seen to have become George W. Bush’s “poodle,” perhaps due to the degree to which national attention has been drawn to domestic problems, we have seen a reordering of the power landscape of Europe. Britain, once our closest and most important ally, now falls third on that scale behind Germany (more important) and France (more supportive of the United States in recent years). Add in the belligerent, erratic, dangerous Vladimir Putin and a newly aggressive Russia, and Britain is now only the fourth most important power with which the United States regularly deals in Europe.

The fact that Britain’s role in Europe will now be open to question for months to come, thanks to Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum regarding whether Britain should remain a part of the EU, only makes further deterioration more likely. That is because the doubt the referendum is likely to raise may have deleterious effects on the British economy. It is also because there is a possibility that Britain could choose to leave the EU. This would be economically foolish and would take the country from being an important player in the world’s largest market to being a more marginal independent actor. Further, should Scotland renew the push to breakaway from the United Kingdom, and the election results showed huge strides made by the Scottish National Party, it would clearly make a Not-So-Great Britain more likely.

Given the likelihood of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal being successfully concluded and the U.S. administration’s commitment to ensuring that is the case, the prospect for further bad relations between Netanyahu and the White House is great. This alienation will have multiple effects, many of which have already manifested themselves to some degree. The Israelis will seek to diversify their international alliances, reaching out to India, China, Russia, and others. And the United States will seek to emphasize and cultivate other ties in the region (whether that means with Iran or with GCC partners is unclear…. Both seem unlikely, but at the same time both may expect greater efforts at outreach from Washington even as Israel sees a further chill.)

None of this is improved upon by some of the behavior and policies of the Obama administration. It doesn’t help, for example, to call the Israeli prime minister “chickenshit,” or to get drawn into petulant exchanges with the Israelis more suited to the schoolyard than to statecraft. Matters have not been helped by America’s shying away from playing the leadership role that is expected of the United States nor by the inconsistent nature of Obama’s personal diplomacy with our friends abroad. And frankly, the likelihood of the Obama team spending much real time repairing these problems during their waning days in office is pretty slim.

Will the next U.S. president aggressively seek to reverse the course of these once-crucial but now-declining relationships cited here? Undoubtedly candidates for that job will certainly promise to do so in the months ahead. But the historical factors and current geopolitical trends cited above will make it very hard for anyone to restore these relationships to the special place they occupied in the past. For Cameron and Netanyahu and their new governments, this is a reality they may wish to deny but that they will find it very difficult to reverse.

BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images

In early 2014, Nigerian-Cameroonian pop singer Dencia launched Whitenicious, a line of skin-care products and lightening creams. She called the products dark-spot removers and argued they were intended not to bleach users’ entire skin tone but to address small dark blemishes that left skin looking uneven.

Her controversial product line is now one of many, including Fair & White and Divine Derrière, that will likely be deemed illegal in Ivory Coast, where the government passed legislation to ban most bleaching creams on Thursday. In addition to their social controversy, the creams have a record of severely burning skin, and medical experts widely consider them to be carcinogenic.

Ivory Coast is not the first country to take action against the products. In South Africa, products with more than 2% hydroquinone — a whitening agent — have been illegal since the 1980s.

Polls published by the World Health Organization found that in some African countries, including Nigeria and Togo, the majority of women use some form of skin-whitening product.

But even if they are increasingly popular, the reaction from Dencia’s fans proved there is a growing movement against the popularity of these products. She faced public backlash after she openly stated that she thinks “white means pure” and went back and forth in interviews on whether she herself had used lightening creams to change her look.

Fans argue that photos prove her skin has become significantly lighter since she first rose to stardom, and many saw the launch of Whitenicious as her using her fame to encourage young women to regard her chemically induced whiteness, not her natural blackness, as beauty.

And the explanation behind the name Whitenicious? Dencia offered her take in an interview with Ebony magazine last year: “When you see Whitenicious, you see the container, you see the product, obviously you’re thinking this is gonna work, right? That’s what you’re thinking.”

In that same Ebony interview, she bragged that another passenger on an international flight complimented her skin and asked if she was Puerto Rican. But when asked if she regarded dark skin to be an obstacle, she said she thought dark was “beautiful.” Her products cost upward of $150 for a small container.

The lightening creams, which in all fairness can also effectively reduce the effects of hyperpigmentation, have become so popular that the industry is now estimated to be worth billions of dollars. In January, Oprah Winfrey’s television network released a documentary about the industry, featuring those who were victims of its harmful side effects.

But ask Dencia about her product’s risk, and she’ll tell you it’s worth it.

“Guess what?” she said.  “The air you breathe outside causes you cancer. Everything in the world causes cancer.”

SIA KAMBOU/AFP/Getty Images

The bipartisan push for passage of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is akin to epic dramas where competing leaders set aside their quarrels to join forces when the fate of the realm is in the balance. President Barack Obama and Republicans have locked arms to break down barriers that threaten our economic vitality and global leadership. Both the president and congressional leaders must skillfully outmaneuver undermining forces on each of their flanks to achieve victory.

For 75 years, America has heeded past lessons that rejecting the benefits of trade prolongs economic misery. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs in 1930 sparked retaliatory duties that drove a drastic reduction in U.S. exports that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression. We cannot let their protectionist successors similarly prolong the Great Recession.

President Obama joins an unbroken string of Democratic presidents that have successfully championed trade. Both he and Republicans face hurdles in delivering the votes necessary to extend this record.

Republicans must overcome dissenters in their ranks that are loathe to grant this president any more authority or perceive a hidden plot to open up immigration.

The president must surmount determined opposition within his party. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), fabricates more trade monsters than a Halloween costume factory. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is being bipartisan in his own unique way: opposing Obama with the same zeal that he opposed Republican presidents.

While Republicans will have to carry most of the water on this deal, Democratic votes will be pivotal. President Bill Clinton mustered 102 Democrat votes for the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Obama is no Bill Clinton. Sadly, given her absence from this historic trade debate, neither is Hillary Clinton.

With 432 House seats now filled, 217 votes will be needed in the House. Recent estimates suggest that only 180 to 200 of the 244 Republicans can be counted on for support. Fewer than 20 Democrats in the House have backed TPA so far, leaving its fate in question.

With Reid’s challenges in the Senate, 60 votes will be required to overcome procedural hurdles. If all 54 Republicans stick together against Reid’s challenge, they will need at least six Democrat votes. Even though seven Democrats supported TPA in committee, most are not saying if they will reject Reid’s leadership and vote to allow the bill to proceed to the Senate floor.

With all of that math in mind, it’s essential to remember they key components of assembling for battle on any issue: determining they paramount questions of what, where, who, and how in such a way that your answer is the best conclusion for crucial audiences to draw.

What

Those who define the question at hand win political contests. Answering the other side’s question is playing on their turf. You must establish the supremacy of your question.

Opponents of trade liberalization try to make the question some particular detail of the deal. The recent refrain of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is typical, “I tell everybody the same thing: I’m pro-trade, but…” The general rule in politics is to ignore everything before a “but.”

Obama has rightly focused on taking the debate to a higher level, asserting that no matter the imperfections of this deal, the alternative is far worse.

His question from the State of the Union frames the issue well, “as we speak, China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region. That would put our workers and businesses at a disadvantage. Why would we let that happen? We should write those rules. We should level the playing field.”

The president has also rightly kept the focus on how trade benefits America’s workers and the middle class.

Where

Today’s contentiousness requires a strong outside game, speaking out publically about the merits of a deal, and a dedicated inside game through individual meetings with undecided members. This president prefers the former to the latter, but in this instance both are essential.

Who

United States Trade Representative Michael Froman has assured me that regular cabinet huddles are occurring on TPA and the entire administration’s shoulder is pressed to the wheel. That is excellent, but no substitute for presidential leadership.

Clearly Republican leadership and the coalition of groups that have historically advocated for trade must also be fully engaged if the coalition resisting passage is to be overcome.

How

Obama’s bold public statements rejecting determined opposition from within his own party are an essential element of building public support. His discussions with House and Senate members on the fence at the White House reflect this commitment to aggressively build Congressional approval. It must continue.

America’s embrace of trade following World War II drove its rise to global leadership. Continuing to push for trade liberalization is essential to preserving our ability to continue to be the stabilizing force that averts anarchy.

Completing pending trade agreements in both Asia and Europe would strengthen each region’s commitment to the global order and boost our allies’ economic prospects, while boosting opportunities for American workers, our middle class. Not passing these accords would be seen as America raising a white flag. May this epic saga instead have a happy ending!

 Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov are two of my favorite lunatics in the world right now. They travel the world and illicitly scale tall buildings, videotaping and photographing their journeys. I’ve written about their adventures before, and the climbing pair have a new video out documenting their climb of what will be China’s tallest building. It’s harrowing and totally amazing.

When completed, the Ping An Finance Center in Shenzhen will be the world’s second-highest skyscraper, behind only the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Makhorov and Raskalov’s climb took place over Chinese New Year, explaining why the construction site was totally deserted at the time of their summit. Presumably, the building’s owners will be none too pleased when they find out that these Russian daredevils made it not only to the building’s roof and then proceeded to climb to the top of the crane being used to build it.

YouTube/on the roofs