Putin, Trump and MAGA love repeating the story that NATO betrayed Russia by expanding eastwards, supposedly breaking a promise never to admit countries once trapped under Soviet communist rule. There is one rather inconvenient detail they always leave out: those countries desperately wanted to join. And with good reason. They remember Soviet occupation, political executions, mass deportations to Siberia, forced collectivisation, prison camps, secret police, censorship and generations of lives destroyed by Moscow’s glorious socialist paradise. Families disappeared. Countries lost their independence. Ordinary people could be imprisoned for expressing the wrong opinion. When communism collapsed, these nations did not need NATO to persuade them to escape Russian influence. They practically ran towards the door. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and the others understood something the MAGA intellectual establishment apparently struggles with: living next to Russia is considerably more pleasant when Russia cannot decide how you live. And that brings us to Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, a leader who spent years cultivating Moscow while balancing Serbia’s European ambitions, has just been defeated by a student-led democratic movement. The celebrations in Belgrade tell their own story. Serbia has its own complicated history, and nobody should pretend this election settles every question about NATO or EU membership. But it exposes the central absurdity of Moscow’s worldview. When a European leader continually argues against Western integration while protecting Russia’s influence, the obvious question is whose interests he actually serves. There is no need to invent secret payments to recognise a politician doing Moscow’s work. NATO did not expand eastwards because Washington forced unwilling nations into an alliance. It expanded because countries with experience of Russian domination wanted protection from ever experiencing it again. Putin, Orban, JD Vance, Hegseth and Trump calls that Western aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has spent centuries discovering that keeping its neighbours within its sphere of influence generally requires threats, repression or an army. That tells you almost everything about which civilisation has something worth offering.

🇦🇺 🇺🇸 An Australian woman has a rather devastating response to Americans who insist that everyone loves the United States and secretly dreams of living there. “Australians aren’t jealous of America, we mostly feel sorry for you.” She also makes a much more interesting point. Believing that you already live in the greatest country on Earth is intellectually lazy. If you’ve been told your entire life that nowhere else comes close, why bother looking? And that is precisely what makes this mentality so limiting. Looking beyond your own borders should be a source of inspiration. Other countries do things better. Some have better healthcare, others better education, infrastructure or social protections. There is absolutely nothing unpatriotic about noticing this and asking why your own country cannot do the same. Every country has its problems. Australia does. Norway does. America certainly does. Nobody has invented the perfect society. But every country also has something worth learning from. And perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people most convinced that America has nothing to learn from the rest of the world may be the very people preventing it from becoming better.