The New Yorker:

The limits of rhetoric in Ukraine.

By Jay Caspian Kang

In gaming, a metric called “ping” measures the time it takes for information to travel from your console to the network and back again. If you’re playing online soccer and you press the button that makes your striker shoot, the ping is how long it takes for the shot to register onscreen. The more ping, the less responsive the game feels. At very high pings, the delay can cause “input-lag sickness,” an unmoored sensation that the world on the screen no longer quite matches up with what your thumbs are telling it to do. In these moments, an intense, nearly existential bewilderment sets in, usually followed by rage.

American politicians who work on foreign policy seem to be experiencing a version of input-lag sickness. They’re hitting buttons that once inspired the public, but they’re not getting the response they expect. When politicians say, for example, that we must defend the rights and freedoms of a sovereign nation like Ukraine, do those words still carry enough emotive power to persuade Americans to supply years of funding for the Ukrainian Army?

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