The Global Fight for Freedom

In 1997, President Clinton moved to open NATO's doors to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. George Kennan, the legendary Cold War diplomat who designed containment, called it a fateful error, warning of “the beginning of a new cold war."

We in the West saw nations freed from Soviet rule choosing democracy. Moscow, broken and humiliated, saw the beginning of a siege against its faith, its traditions and its vital interests. Watching from inside the Kremlin was a rising KGB veteran named Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin has seen itself locked in an existential conflict with the West ever since.

In recent weeks, a spate of attacks across Europe has made Kennan’s warning look prophetic. Today’s episode examines what Putin hopes to accomplish.

Next week, we explore how he sees the West through one of the Russian thinkers he reveres most — and why Xi Jinping shares much of that vision.

Editor’s Note: I enjoyed double the daughter time this week. Next week returns to the full slate of three stories.

Flashpoints

1. "Sleep Well, European Partners"
2. Cuba: Billions for a Banana Republic?

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

Just before 5 a.m. on Sept. 13, a train carrying statesmen home to Europe rolled out of Ukraine's Yahodyn station, the last stop before the Polish border. Aboard were former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt and security officials from across Europe. Ukraine's railway monitors had spotted a Russian drone threat and sent the train toward Poland ahead of schedule.

Fifteen minutes later, former CIA Director David Petraeus heard drones overhead, then a blast. He was still at the station, having been evacuated from his own train. “For those who have not been under fire, this was terrifying,” he told the New York Times.

The strike hit another passenger train, evacuated just minutes earlier. Another hit a nearby gas station, setting it ablaze.

Was Putin hunting Boris Johnson? Moscow implausibly claims it hit railway infrastructure carrying military cargo. Ukraine's state railway said it was “entirely possible” Putin’s intended target was the high-ranking European officials.

Kyiv has incentive to frame it as such, and it’s difficult to imagine what Putin would have to gain by killing a former British PM. Those two kilometers matter: It’s more likely Putin believes anybody aiding Ukraine within the theater of war as fair game.

But what is clear is the strike was part of a widening campaign. In early August, German authorities found a drone packed with explosives beside a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle airport, a hub for aid to Ukraine. Berlin blamed Moscow. The day after Yahodyn, another explosive-laden drone crashed near a German air base in Wunstorf.

Meanwhile, beneath the frigid Arctic, Russian deep-sea submersibles are rehearsing disabling undersea cables that link Norway to a satellite station serving NASA. And when Russia's Defense Ministry published a list of European factories building drones for Ukraine, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, added a caption: "Sleep well, European partners.”

So what does Putin want from Europe?

The venerable Institute for the Study of War, which has tracked this war daily since 2022, answered this week with four goals that have barely changed in Putin's quarter century of rule, and they nailed it.

First, restore Russia as a great power, which in Putin's mind requires swallowing Ukraine and Belarus. ISW calls the logic circular. Russia cannot be great without its "ancestral" lands. Russia is great, so it deserves them.

Second, regain dominance over the former Soviet states, especially the Baltics and Moldova. Putin does not need to annex them. He needs them hobbled — barred from NATO and the European Union, with Moscow claiming the right to "protect" Russian speakers by force.

Here he sees the greatest threat from NATO. In 2004, former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined the alliance. That same year, Ukraine's Orange Revolution overturned a rigged election won by Moscow's candidate. In 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members. Four months later, Russian tanks rolled into Georgia.

Third, break NATO and push America out of Europe, leaving a "multipolar" world in which Russia is a dominant player.

Fourth, preserve his regime. This is ISW's most unsettling finding. Putin and his inner circle genuinely believe the West is plotting a revolution in Moscow and that NATO might strike first.

Every drone serves these aims – choking the supply lines keeping Ukraine alive and forcing Ukrainian allies to keep air defenses Ukraine desperately needs. Poland warned residents of aerial threats nine times in the first three weeks of September. In Romania, so many alerts sound that many residents have switched them off.

Putin cannot mount a large-scale invasion of Europe while his army bleeds in Ukraine. He does not need to. ISW warns that a limited strike on a Baltic state, one NATO fails to answer in unison, could fracture the alliance without a full-scale war. Each unanswered drone tests whether Article 5 is a promise or a slogan.

Petraeus left Yahodyn with a distinct impression of the Ukrainain people: "They are truly unbreakable," he said. "They are tired. But they are unbreakable."

Putin has bet his regime the same is not true of NATO. Trump (and Erdogan) may yet prove him right.

Sources: Institute for the Study of War, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, The New York Times, Der Spiegel (Germany)

Mountains of uncollected garbage clot the streets of Havana, breeding massive clouds of mosquitoes that spread dengue. Images on social media show families sleeping on cots on sidewalks, streets and rooftops to escape the heat during evening blackouts. On September 18, the entire nation went dark again – at least the sixth time since January.

“The country is totally paralyzed. People walk around like zombies,” says one Havana-based economist. “There’s no electricity for days, you don’t sleep, food spoils.”

The end is coming, and soon.

This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed a group of Cuban exiles in Miami busy drawing blueprints for what comes next: a Cuban stock exchange, an investment summit, an $8 billion overhaul of eight airports, and a transitional government leading up to free elections.

More importantly, they are debating reviving Cuba's 1940 constitution, at least temporarily.

That document promised Cubans nearly everything: a minimum wage, a 44-hour week, a paid month off for every 11 worked, and state-furnished jobs. At the time, it was hailed as one of the most enlightened, progressive constitutions on earth.

Its life was shorter than an average house cat’s.

Its framers had the enemy pegged: an overbearing president. Cuba's 1901 constitution had concentrated power in the executive. The 1940 delegates banned consecutive re-election and let Congress censure the president's ministers.

It didn't work. In March 1952, three months before an election he was expected to lose, former President Fulgencio Batista seized power with the army behind him and suspended the charter.

Fidel Castro made the fallen constitution his rallying cry. At his 1953 trial, he vowed to restore it as Cuba's supreme law. Once in power, he ruled by decree instead.

The 1940 charter carried the flaws that created the strongman. It ran 286 articles plus 44 transitional and final provisions. The U.S. Constitution has seven articles. Cuba's framers wrote growth-crushing economic policy straight into the text, capping landholdings and requiring that native-born Cubans receive most jobs and wages. Much of it depended on Congress passing enabling “dead letter” laws that never passed.

The document was too detailed to put into practice and too rigid to adapt. Most fatally, it tried to guarantee citizen outcomes when its only job was to restrain the government.

Castro exploited both failures. In 1976, he finally replaced it with a Soviet-style constitution that made the Communist Party "the superior leading force of the society and the State." The regime claims 99% of voters approved it, but never offered proof.

The final blow came from the army. On paper, Cuba's military answered to the president and Congress, just like ours. In practice, it answered to Batista, and his 1952 coup opened the door for Castro. American troops swear loyalty to the Constitution, never a party or a person.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia understood the genius of the balance of power outlined in our constitution, and how meaningless citizen guarantees become that balance is not achieved: "Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights," he told senators in 2011 testimony. The Soviet constitution guaranteed more freedoms on paper than ours, yet nothing stopped power from concentrating in one party. What sets America apart is structure: two real legislative chambers, independent judges, and a separately elected president no legislature can fire. The Framers wanted "power contradicting power," Scalia said.

​Watch Scalia's testimony and marvel at what Americans inherited. Four pages of parchment have kept a continental republic free for 237 years. Cuba's 1940 charter promised its people everything but checks on its own power.

A constitution exists to limit what government can do to its people. Providing for the people is the work of free citizens, families and markets.

If they are empowered to reconstruct Cuba, Miami’s exiles had better get it right. If they don’t, their billions will buy Cuba a stock exchange, eight new airports, and just another short-lived banana republic.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, C-SPAN
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