The Job of Statecraft Is to Tell Good Stories, but Ultimately Fictions

What’s the nature of our enemy in Ukraine? Is it Putin, Russia, or authoritarianism? What are the sources of the West’s strength and its capacities for revival? And how should we think about evil in the world? The political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel joins Shadi and Damir to help unpack these questions, and many others in a wide-ranging philosophical discussion.

In the subscriber-only portion of the episode, the debate intensifies around whether finitude entails a more confrontational American foreign policy or a more humble one. Will the threat of an external enemy push Americans out of their decadence and towards a new kind of proto-messianism?

Required Reading

- "Death and Morality in the War on Ukraine" by Samuel Kimbriel (Wisdom of Crowds)

- "We Need to Talk About a No-Fly Zone" by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds)

- “Putin’s Palace: The History of the World’s Largest Bribe,” by Alexei Navalny (YouTube)

- Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon)

- Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation, by Samuel Kimbriel (Amazon)

- Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon)

- "Ross Douthat on Decadence, Wokeness, and UFOs" (Wisdom of Crowds)

- "The (Aggressive) Pursuit of Happiness" (Wisdom of Crowds)