Monday July 24th @ 7pm ET

Why are we in Ukraine? 

Over 16 months after the February 22nd invasion of Ukraine it’s one of the questions we’re all asking ourselves. That’s the question that author and editor Benjamin Schwarz and his colleague Christopher Layne sought to answer with their article in Harper’s Magazine.

In it they lay out the conveniently forgotten history of American post Cold War triumphalism that set the stage for the current war in Ukraine. This hubris of the 1990s and 2000’s that culminated in a 2008 invitation at Bucharest for Ukraine, and Georgia, to join NATO, a longstanding red line for Russia. America amnesia, along with the simplistic good vs. evil framing of the current struggle, has led us all into an intractable situation. The end of the war is difficult to see and the risk of all out conflict between nuclear armed states is growing. By examining the history we hope to find clues that lead to a way out, and a peaceful resolution.

We invite you to join us on the evening of August 24th when we’ll host the author himself, to share his insights and answer your questions.

Benjamin Schwarz was literary and national editor of the Atlantic. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Schwarz had “reshaped the venerable magazine’s book section into the shrewdest, best-written and most surprising cultural report currently on offer between slick covers.” The writers he recruited as regular contributors to his section included Christopher Hitchens, Clive James, Perry Anderson, Joseph O’Neill, Terry Castle, Caitlin Flanagan, Jed Perl, Sandra Tsing Loh, Mona Simpson, and B.R. Myers. Articles in Schwarz’s section were National Magazine Award finalists or winners in the Criticism category from 2000 to 2009. The subjects of his articles, essays, and reviews ranged from fashion to the American South, from current fiction to the archaeology, from foreign policy to architecture, from the history of slavery to the history of childhood, and from international economics to Hollywood. The Columbia Journalism Review described Schwarz as “the magazine’s in-house intellectual.”

Before joining the editorial staff of the Atlantic, Schwarz was a national correspondent for the magazine. From 1995 to 2000 he wrote a series of provocative articles arguing that America should play a greatly diminished global role. He also wrote a celebrated group of critical essays on historical and literary subjects; in 1999 he won the the National Book Critics Circle’s award for literary criticism for his essays in the Atlantic and in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, where he was a contributing writer.