My DC bunker

Washington, DC

My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein.

One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances of
the Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said. He meant to lay his sword before Putin, like Lancelot before Arthur, condemning all those other varlet knights at Putin’s Round Table, becoming first among equals in Russia’s military- industrial complex, and maybe even its financial-industrial complex. But how, I asked, could Prigozhin not know that Putin wouldn’t go for it? Because Prigozhin was crazy, he tells me. He was coked up. Zelensky is coked up too, apparently – at least, he was when he was an actor. The whole war is fueled by drugs and Nazis – on both sides. That makes sense, I say. That’s totally 2025.

Prigozhin was a producer as well as a mercenary. He made a full-length feature war film, Best In Hell. It’s maybe the best war film ever. All the weapons – going up to heavy artillery and even a jet – are real Wagner munitions, and all the actors are real Wagner operators. You can find Best In Hell online but don’t watch it – it’s probably a sanctions violation.

I have a radical solution to the Ukraine problem – defining the American sphere of influence. The natural American sphere of interest is: the whole Anglosphere, and nothing else. The continental United States; Great Britain, plus the Old Commonwealth. In your heart you know it’s right. Hawaii should have the same status as American Samoa or Puerto Rico. Grant all three their independence – just because we set them free doesn’t mean we can’t colonize them again later.

For more than 200 years the purpose of Washington has been to reward clout with office. No country in the West is more democratic – measured by the number of jobs awarded, directly or indirectly, by election. My problem is: I have no clout. I have been trying to get one person appointed for one extremely unimportant job for which he is the only perfect candidate. Exactly nothing has happened and I assume nothing will. Maybe the libs who are always accusing me of running the world will listen.

I met an Armenian-American law student who worked with refugees after the fall of Artsakh (also Nagorno-Karabakh). With someone like this I check my local intel. I am a person who wants to know. I got into the habit of knowing in the 1980s, when my dad was a diplomat in Cyprus and he used to bring home the International Herald Tribune, always two to three days late, and it was often all I had to read in English. (The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.) Now it’s 2025 and I’m 51, but I still like to know. I explain that, as I see it, the American and Russian diplomatic establishments competed to offer Armenia, faced with the Azeri menace – the ancient enemy, the Turk – what in Russia they call a krysha, a “roof.” A protection racket. It’s not clear what Russia wanted to charge for its protection. I bet it wasn’t nothing. I know the deal the Americans offered: they would do it for free, and even throw in some USAID grease. So Armenia elected Nikol Pashinyan, the pro-American candidate. Of course it rained and the “roof” did nothing at all. At least the grease was real. America’s checks don’t bounce. The law student confirmed this and added something funny: the net effect on Armenian public opinion is to blame the Russians. Democracy, never change. Or at least: Armenians, never change. He left his gold chain at the office.

The problem is, as Hitler once pointed out, no one cares about the Armenians. You’d think all the “Deus Vult” Americans would care as much about Armenia (fellow Christians) as Israel. You’d think all the “No Justice, No Peace” Americans would care as much about Armenia (an obvious victim of aggression) as Palestine. But it’s crickets all around.

Next up, a nondescript, self-effacing young IC bureaucrat who worked at a “counterterrorist” center for a number of years. Isn’t it astounding, I tell him, how the 9/11 fight against the jihadis turned into the American Stasi? Didn’t the libs warn us that this is exactly what would happen – but with them as the targets? Lol. But now it’s us. History is always predictable in retrospect. He’s like: it’s, uh, it’s, it’s kind of worse than the Stasi. I dispute this. But not with any real conviction. I ask: is the Trump administration turning any of this stuff off? No. It’s still all theater from where he sits. They don’t even see the government well enough to know where the bodies are buried, or the real secrets live – often not in the most secret place, another spook tells me, but somewhere less secret no one would look.

We agree on the root of the problem: Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care about power. They’re there to govern, not to rule. And as Plato says – those
who do not accept their duty to rule are punished by the rule of their inferiors. Sad!

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.