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Culture Father Time Is Undefeated This NFL season, it’s difficult to ignore my advancing age. I would prefer not to be reminded of my age when I watch professional football games, but as the current NFL season wends its way into its second month, I am finding it increasingly difficult to think of much else. The leaves are still on the trees, but this short season has already seen several veteran quarterbacks—a gracious way to describe aging quarterbacks—struggle to such an extent that they have been benched (Russell Wilson of the New York Giants) or seem likely to be benched (Geno Smith of the Las Vegas Raiders). The latest such casualty is Cleveland Browns quarterback Joe Flacco, who, when I first became aware of him as a Browns fan who regarded with feelings of dread and apprehension the twice-yearly games against the Baltimore Ravens, was a scarily intimidating opponent. The Ravens added Flacco to their roster in the 2008 draft, and in the 11 seasons he played for the team, the impassive-looking signal-caller seemed less a man, capable of being sacked or intercepted, than a touchdown machine: I am sure it was not this way in reality, but in my recollection, every Flacco-authored throw went deep and every Flacco-led drive resulted in a score—at least when he was playing the Browns. After being cut loose from the Ravens in 2018, Flacco reemerged as an itinerant sometime-starter with the Denver Broncos, New York Jets, and, for a significant portion of the 2023 season, the Browns. (In that playoff-bound but injury-riddled season, the team was in need of passable play from a quarterback, so they summoned Flacco.) The Browns declined his services in 2024, when he played intermittently with the Indianapolis Colts, but, like the girlfriend who unwisely jilts her beau until realizing the field is limited, the club came crawling back this season. This time, though, Father Time was waiting for Flacco at Huntington Bank Field on the banks of Lake Erie: The quarterback is no longer the fearsome force he was in his 20s and early 30s. In fact, Flacco is now 40, and while age may or may not have conferred wisdom on him, it has clearly taken from him an ability to distinguish receivers from defenders: Flacco has thrown two touchdowns and six interceptions this season—his contributions to a woebegone 1–3 record. On Sunday morning, playing the Minnesota Vikings in London, the Browns will start backup quarterback Dillon Gabriel, a third-round pick whose skills at the professional level are unknown but who, it must be admitted, at least looks to possess more vim and vigor than Flacco, who, in his dotage, has adopted a gray-speckled beard that more readily suggests a member of the PTA than a top-flight athlete. Yet, each time I am tempted to joke about Flacco’s advancing age and atrophying abilities, I stop myself: I am nearly two years older than Flacco. In the past, when the Browns have leaned on past-their-prime quarterbacks, I had the luxury of freely opining about their skills (or lack thereof) from the vantage point of my relative youth: Trent Dilfer, Jake Delhomme, Josh McCown—these guys were all older than me. By contrast, Flacco is a contemporary, and in calling him that, I am being generous to myself. Evidently, I have reached the age when most quarterbacks are widely considered to be in irretrievable decline. (Don’t mention 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers’s present success with the Pittsburgh Steelers—we don’t talk about that team in this home.)  To state the obvious, I am not a quarterback, and I have never played organized football at any level. I know my limitations; to invoke a more successful quarterback than any who has played with the Browns since the Clinton administration, I am not Josh Allen. Yet I have followed the game for much of my life, and in the back of my mind, I suppose I like to think that, if athletic ability, height, and speed were not essential for the position, I could have played—at least in my backyard or among friends. I would rather be told that I could not play due to lack of talent than due to age. Now I face the reality that even if I possessed the gifts and track record of Joe Flacco—the MVP of Super Bowl XLVII and the longtime irritant of Browns defenses—I would likely be headed for the bench. This is sobering: I am now at the age at which some dreams, even fantastical ones, can no longer even be considered dreams. In fact, I should be so lucky as to be Flacco’s 40 rather than my 42. I have no idea how Gabriel will fare at the helm of the Browns’ purported offense. But even if Gabriel follows in the footsteps of fellow rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart—who, upon being elevated over the newly-benched Russell Wilson, conjured a win for the Giants—I would suggest that he humble himself by looking at his colleague Flacco. Take it from him—and from me: Time will catch up with you, too. The post Father Time Is Undefeated appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Tomahawks Cannot Save Ukraine Kiev’s military suffers from a shortage of manpower, not missiles.  Credit: image via Shutterstock Days after President Donald Trump predicted that Ukraine could win a war it has been losing for the past three years and regain “the original borders from where this war started,” Vice President J.D. Vance announced the possibility of sending Ukraine Tomahawk missiles that it could use to strike deep inside Russia. Even if the White House doesn’t send Tomahawks, the U.S. continues to fuel the proxy war with American weapons, albeit indirectly through a weapons pipeline the Trump administration established with NATO.  The Trump administration’s change of course has been applauded by Western pundits, who lately have begun to sound less like strategists than like social-media influencers, posting lofty affirmations in the hope that if they repeat them enough, they can “manifest” a Ukrainian victory. But that long-impossible outcome cannot be conjured through rhetoric—it depends on manpower and other indigenous capabilities, none of which Ukraine possesses in greater measure than nuclear-armed Russia, a country with triple the population of Ukraine.  To convince Americans that the failed Ukraine proxy war is still winnable, the establishment pundit class has launched a propaganda effort to depict Ukrainian capabilities and morale as stronger than they really are. Of course, these Western analysts say that the idea of Russian military superiority is propaganda. In the Financial Times, Yuval Harari writes that any assertion of inevitable Russian victory is a propaganda strategy aimed at “attacking the will of the Americans and Europeans.” The Ukrainians, Harari writes, will win because they have “the biggest and most experienced fighting force standing between the Russian army and Warsaw, Berlin or Paris.” But far from having an elite, patriotic volunteer force, Kiev is sustaining its war effort through a coercive mobilization regime—what even the New York Times calls “people snatchers”—bands of government thugs who abduct unsuspecting young men off the street to be deployed against their will to the front lines. That the Ukrainians even want to fight is an idea that has been refuted by polling since November 2024, yet one that continues to be affirmed on cable news. Though largely omitted from corporate media coverage of the war, Ukrainian Telegram channels are flooded with videos of draft officers wielding violence and other coercive methods to recruit conscripts for a war that has already killed an estimated 70,000–100,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In November 2023, former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovich claimed that at least 30 percent of Ukraine’s military units—and perhaps as much as 70 percent—were draft dodgers. Whatever the true number was then, it likely has only increased as the conflict has ground on and the need for manpower has grown more acute. Desperation among conscription-age men has spawned an entire black market for survival. Schemes like “fake divorces” are engineered so fathers can claim sole custody of a child and thereby secure an exemption to leave the country. Others buy forged medical certificates or bribe doctors for disability papers. Even more rely on smugglers or border guards, who openly charge between $10,000 and $15,000 for safe passage. Thousands attempt to cross mountain rivers and backcountry trails to Romania, Hungary, or Poland; dozens have drowned in the Tisza or frozen in the Carpathians.  Far from the picture of national unity painted by Western pundits, NATO war demands have fueled a two-tiered draft system: Working-class men are chased off the streets and funneled to the front lines, while the children and relatives of Ukraine’s political elites evade service through loopholes, bribes, or foreign university enrollment that place their families safely abroad.  Ihor Shvaika, deputy head of the 4th Territorial Defense recruitment center, labeled children who went abroad to study as “rats fleeing a sinking ship,” calling for military training to begin at age 5 for all Ukrainians. Meanwhile, his own children are in Belgium. Taras Batenko, a parliamentarian who has attacked the Ministry of Education for ignoring the exodus of students, quietly enrolled his daughter in a prestigious Dutch university with tuition approaching $17,000 a year, no small sum for the average Ukrainian. American war planners have long understood Ukraine’s conscription crisis and the corruption it has enabled. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan conceded last November what many Western pundits will not: Ukraine’s most important needs relate to “mobilization and manpower,” not Western weaponry. When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte boasted last week that America had “opened the floodgates” for a constant flow of weapons, he neglected to mention who would be holding them: a generation of Ukrainian men who would rather flee their country than fight over who rules its eastern provinces. Pundits can applaud the administration’s new hopes for Ukraine and Vance’s talk of Tomahawk missiles. They can repeat their affirmations of “victory” and celebrate the heroism of Ukraine’s military. But that military relies on troops forced into service and a society desperate to avoid the front. And that’s no way for a nation to win a war, no matter how many Tomahawks America may send them. The post Tomahawks Cannot Save Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.

Latin America Is Helping Argentina a Betrayal of America First? The administration is pioneering a new way of promoting U.S. influence in Latin America. As previously discussed here, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced earlier this month that the United States will be opening a $20 billion currency swap line with Argentina. “Argentina is a systemically important U.S. ally in Latin America, and the [Treasury] stands ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support Argentina. All options for stabilization are on the table,” he wrote in a post on X (although he has since clarified that “we’re not putting money into Argentina,” which would rule out a direct purchase of Argentine bonds). But is it wise for the U.S. to step in and try to inject liquidity into the shaky Argentine monetary system? Some critics have argued that it is a betrayal of the administration’s America First principles to bail out Argentina’s central bank—and its president, Javier Milei—by backing up its economy with American resources. This fails to grasp the principal American interests involved in the case. U.S. commitments across the globe have stretched our capacities thin, and Latin America—America’s back yard—has been largely neglected since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Trump administration is remedying this error, and has put a new emphasis on hemispheric security. Instability and foreign influence in the Americas has much more direct impacts on American domestic welfare and security than conflicts in the far-flung theaters of Europe and the Middle East. Additionally, the rise of China as a hostile power has provoked a serious need to reevaluate the United States’ economic posture. The country is in desperate need of retooling supply chains to avoid dependence on Chinese industry. These developments require a much stronger U.S. presence in Latin America, which presents the most convenient place for nearshoring manufacturing and acquiring alternate supplies of strategic resource inputs like lithium, which Argentina has in abundance. But after a long absence from the arena, American influence operations in the region are at a stark disadvantage compared to the Chinese, who have poured investment and easy credit into the region—cutting in on the very area most vital to the U.S. The administration has already begun rolling up some of the most egregious Chinese interventions, such as its attempt to control the ports on either side of the Panama Canal. But so far it has mostly employed negative measures: for example, threatening Mexico and Panama with sanctions and other economic punishments if they don’t go to greater lengths to cut the Chinese out of vital sectors in their national economies. And it has worked; Panama forced a sale of the Chinese ports on the Canal to American investors, while Mexico slapped a 50 percent tariff on Chinese imports just last month.  But coercion is only half of the diplomatic toolkit. In addition to the stick, the U.S. needs to have carrots to deploy to incentivize governments to voluntarily comply with American desires. An overreliance on coercive measures is often counterproductive, and produces resentment among the populace—no one likes being dictated to by a great power. But if you reward governments that cooperate on fulfilling American interests, coercive measures often become unnecessary. Here, the U.S. is deeply disadvantaged. The PRC has spent decades developing a sophisticated apparatus for foreign investment through Chinese state-owned banks and industries, in addition to credit provided by its central bank directly. It can offer interested governments major infrastructure upgrades on very cheap credit. The U.S. has little that can compare—the federal government’s Development Finance Corporation, which was created in 2018 as a response to China’s industrial diplomacy, is vastly outclassed by Chinese institutions. Bessent’s move to reinforce Argentina’s economy—and Milei’s government—is a good step towards developing a more comprehensive diplomatic program capable of countering Chinese influence in Latin America and elsewhere. It is a concrete signal to foreign governments that the U.S. will reward countries that cooperate with it to achieve its interests. This will not only draw Argentina closer to the U.S., but will also encourage other countries to voluntarily assist the U.S. in accomplishing regional security objectives. China is well aware of the utility of these kinds of incentives. In fact, China currently operates an $18 billion currency swap with the Argentine government. That piece of monetary diplomacy has been successful enough to persuade Javier Milei, who was a virulent critic of Beijing during his campaign in 2023 and has remained a committed ally of the United States, to make favorable noises about the Chinese government and even promise to visit the country later on in his term. At least part of Bessent’s aim is to cut this piece of leverage China holds over the country: the $20 billion currency swap deal will reportedly require Argentina to use $5 billion worth of the funds to close one of its swap lines with Beijing. Now, there’s no guarantee that America’s bet on Argentina will pay off in the way Bessent and Trump are clearly hoping it will. Milei’s economic project, despite its early success, is still on shaky footing. (And if there’s any country in the world that knows how to commit economic suicide, it’s Argentina.) But even in the worst-case scenario, the possibilities for losses are relatively low—a currency swap is a low-risk form of lending—and the benefits are durable. The U.S. will have demonstrated that it is willing to step in and give a hand to struggling Latin American countries that are committed to working with the U.S. to advance American interests, a development well worth the cost of the loan. The swap line for Argentina is not enough on its own to begin the serious work of consolidating American influence and eliminating the presence of China in Latin America. For that, the U.S. will need to continue expanding its financial diplomacy and building out the Development Finance Corporation into a more formidable match for China’s economic diplomacy machine. But it’s a promising step in the right direction. The post Is Helping Argentina a Betrayal of America First? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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