US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
It’s like that saying, I don’t know if it was Carl Sagan or who it was who said it, and I paraphrase- our technological development vastly outpaces our cultural development.
These old power structures cannot hold 8 billion people in a modern society run on digital communication, they were never designed for it. We need a new system, a whole new model, and then some way to spread that model organically, grass roots like. I have been thinking about it a lot.
Thanks for sharing- if I may ask you, what kind of society do you envision? What form and shape would it take? Do you have a realistic idea of what you would want to see?
For me, specifically it would be a society that is just more tolerant and cooperative. Enabling people to chase their curiosity and passion. Finding ways to harness it for the benefit of society. What ever form it takes. It will be slightly different for everyone.
Yeah cooperation is kind of important for humans, I agree that there’s not enough of it and that we are governed by a financial system that actively promotes competition and strife instead.
I think what you say, you are listing in a sense ideals. “More cooperation, more tolerance, encourage curiosity and passion”, basically “cut people some slack”, and I agree with that. I started out going to say, if you ask any person of any political conviction what kind of society they would want, they would all say something along the same lines- peace and understanding.
But then I thought about it for a moment and decided that in fact, people would answer very differently. Not in the goals but in the definitions and paths- “I would like to see more cooperation between multinational businesses and trade agreements allowing them to merge, I would like to see more tolerance for my personal bigoted beliefs, I would like people to be curious and passionate about the Nation’s path to racial supremacy”.
I believe that people like you and I, let’s say idealists, see the goals of cooperation and equality as ends in themselves. I believe that other people, the salt of the Earth kind, you know, morons, only see goals as instrumental for the agency of expressing their own personal dispositions.
I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m kind of drunk.