Truce after truce

Recently: Why hasn’t Ukraine collapsed into autocracy? Serhii Plokhy on what’s keeping a young democracy together under the strain of war.

Today: Tehran is asking mediators to work things out with Washington, while publicly vowing it never will. … After vigilantes drove migrants out of South Africa, two men are taking its government to the International Criminal Court. … &c.

For members: Has politics really killed the humanities in America? Chad Wellmon on a red herring in public debate about the universities—and what you see when you start following the money. … & What is “rent,” anyway? Matthew Costa’s new book, Mother of Capital: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity.

+ New music from Swapmeet …

Peace and war

This week, for the first time since the U.S.-Iran war resumed, American B-1 heavy bombers were back over the Islamic Republic. U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to take down the country’s bridges and power stations; off the coast of Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s Houthis attacked Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea; and the price of oil topped US$100 a barrel.

Theoretically, none of this should be happening. In June, Trump signed a 14-point “memorandum of understanding” at Versailles to end a 100-day war, as Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, held up his own copy for the cameras in Tehran: The fighting was to end, the Strait of Hormuz—the channel for about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil—was to reopen, and Washington was to put $300 billion into rebuilding Iran after a season of bombing it. This week, through four separate mediators, Tehran was reportedly looking for another truce—even as it swore in public to fight on. The pattern: The two sides keep signing truces, but the war keeps widening. Why?

The Versailles memorandum bound Washington and Tehran—but just Washington and Tehran. Israel never signed it and has kept striking Iran’s militias in Lebanon and Iraq; the Houthis are fighting their own war in the Red Sea; and the Gulf states now taking Iranian fire were never directly at the negotiating table in the first place. Even the memorandum’s main promise—to reopen the strait—depended on Iranian restraint, not on American leverage: One drone can still shut the strait, and Iran has plenty of drones. … See “‘Shells within shells’.”

Meanwhile

• Paper and fuel. On Thursday the European Union agreed its 21st round of sanctions on Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It fixed the Western ceiling on the price of Russian crude at $44 a barrel so it can’t rise, blacklisted the Moscow stock exchange, cut more banks out of the SWIFT money-transfer network, and identified more of the tankers in Russia’s shadow fleet—the aging, obscurely owned ships it uses to move oil around Western sanctions—along with the Chinese, Turkish, and Indian traders that keep its oil on the global market. All while Ukrainian drones have started doing what sanctions hadn’t: leaving Russia short of fuel. … See “Buyback.”
• Crimes of omission. Two Ghanaians—Palgrave Boakye-Danquah, a former Ghanaian government spokesman, and the counterterrorism analyst Emmanuel Kotin—asked the International Criminal Court to investigate years of anti-migrant violence in South Africa as crimes against humanity, saying the government in Pretoria has done nothing to stop it. They point to Operation Dudula, the vigilante movement behind the June 30 deadline for migrants to leave, which has pushed foreigners out of clinics, schools, and jobs. South Africa’s government dismissed the filing, saying it falls well short of anything the court would investigate. … See “Out by Tuesday.”
• Breathing room. Having cut military aid to Ukraine over the past two years, Washington moves to buy its combat drones. … The American president says a nuclear pact he just signed with Saudi Arabia now hinges on the Saudis recognizing Israel. … Gunmen with pipe bombs kill five paramilitary rangers at a checkpoint in Thailand’s insurgent south. … Moroccans rally at a Casablanca court for Mehdi Lyoubi, a rapper prosecuted over his lyrics. … & For the first time, astronomers find an atmosphere around a rocky planet where life could exist.

Feature

Humboldt’s gift

Has politics really killed the humanities in America? Chad Wellmon on a red herring in public debate about the universities—and what you see when you start following the money.

In 2010, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the best thing about America was its universities—above all, its public universities, which had no equal in his Europe. He described what it was like to come upon one:

You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears … a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

Today, American universities are cutting back—pushed by state legislatures, their own administrators, and the federal government. Last year, Indiana University Bloomington began consolidating or closing more than 100 academic programs—many of them in the humanities—to satisfy a new state law that sets minimum thresholds for how many degrees a program must produce. The same logic has gone federal. A new U.S. Department of Education rule, finalized in June, will strip federal student loans from programs whose graduates don’t out-earn a worker with only a high-school diploma.

Harvard has done the same to its graduate ranks. Last October it moved to cut Ph.D. admissions in its Faculty of Arts and Sciences by more than half, the arts and humanities down about 60 percent and the German department projected to lose every one of its Ph.D. places.

Last year, too, the chancellors of Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University convened a commission to examine what they called “the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials,” along with “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” in those fields. The commission reported back that humanistic scholarship had indeed been corroded by “politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”

What’s going on?

Chad Wellmon is the Commonwealth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia and the author of After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work. Wellmon says most humanistic scholarship isn’t incurably politicized—you can always pick out an egregious example, but the bulk of it is neither poor nor brilliant, just ordinary and a little dull. And the humanities are too small a part of American higher education, he argues, to carry the blame for what’s gone wrong across the whole system. That’s not to say the field hasn’t had its share of stridently political faculty; but the deeper point, Wellmon says, is what the complaint about politicization exposes—a university no longer able to shield its scholars from political pressure while still convincing the public that their work serves it. The scholarship is being squeezed inside the university, and that squeeze may be pushing intellectual life out of it altogether—which might not be a bad thing …

Books

Present at the creation

What is “rent,” anyway? Matthew Costa, Mother of Capital: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity.

“I’m suing myself,” U.S. President Donald Trump said last October, when he sought US$230 million from the federal government in compensation for past investigations into his conduct. And only this week, a U.S. judge voided another of his creative ways of turning political power to personal gain—his immunity settlement with the Internal Revenue Service.

In Britain, they call that sort of thing “sleaze.” The best-known recent examples are the Covid-19 contracts the government there handed to politically connected firms. In one, it gave an exclusive £252 million contract to supply personal protective equipment to a firm with no experience procuring it—a firm that, it turned out, belonged to a cabinet member’s adviser.

Seen one way, this is common fare: politicians looking out for their friends. Seen another, it’s part of a larger trend—the growing use of political and market power for private gain.

Many Americans think so. As Justin Callais has put it here in The Signal, a large share of Americans believe capitalism is defined by “crony” or “rentier” structures rather than “free-market” ones—a view Callais thinks drives a lot of today’s criticism of it.

Is there something to this?

New music

‘I Know!’

1990s-style alt-rock is alive and reverberating in Adelaide, South Australia—home of the young four-piece Swapmeet. Here’s the opening track from their new album, Mount Zero.