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Trump hosts first Board of Peace meeting
Semafor • Feb 19, 2026

Trump hosts first Board of Peace meeting

The organization is ostensibly focused on rebuilding Gaza, but critics fear it has ambitions of unseating the UN as the main forum for global diplomacy.

The Value Chain of Suffering in the Global South
Scheer Post • Feb 19, 2026

The Value Chain of Suffering in the Global South

The drug trade – and the ‘War on Drugs’ that polices it – unleashes a value chain of suffering on peasant communities in the Global South. You cannot explain such systematic brutality without anger.

How the End of the Cold War Saved the Siberian Tiger
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

How the End of the Cold War Saved the Siberian Tiger

What was it like to live at the end of the Cold War? While Francis Fukuyama mulled Kojève, Hegel, and the end of history, a KGB officer in Dresden was lamenting his leaders’ surrender and would later proclaim the fall of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” A Russian living in that country’s vast eastern territories experienced a dismantling of the state services, which, however imperfect, had guaranteed a basic standard of living—and a dismantling of law enforcement, creating opportunities for poaching. And to biologists in Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War meant a chance to study a species that they knew next to nothing about, the Amur tiger.  Amur tigers once ranged from the Pacific Ocean all the way to Lake Baikal (which is why the name Siberian tiger lingers). But by 1991, as Jonathan Slaght chronicles in his new book, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China, they were both mysterious and under existential threat. Rampant poaching and the kidnapping of cubs in the early twentieth century cut the Russian Amur tiger population to a mere 20 or 30. Lev Kaplanov, a passionate tiger biologist, sounded the alarm in 1941, and even as the world careened from world war to Cold War, the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting and cub trapping. There were still challenges—the zapovednik (wildlife reserve) system was forever being tampered with, and illegal poaching continued—but tiger populations managed a recovery: Starting from about 130 individuals in the 1960s, they rose to about 200 by the 1970s, and then to about 500 by the 1980s. But those numbers were the result of protection by a heavy-handed state. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that protection fell away too. Poachers prowled the forests again, claiming as many as 60 tigers a year. Rising incomes in China meant more disposable income to spend on tiger parts for illusory medical benefits. Economic development harmed the tigers too. Foreign companies like Hyundai were hungry for Russian timber and, in the economic free-for-all that followed 1991, consumed large tracts of tiger habitat. Korean pine was in particularly high demand. The pine nuts feed the wild boar that, in turn, feed the tiger. New roads made poaching easier and rendered tigers vulnerable to car collision. Biologist Linda Kerley spearheaded a study that found that “roads decrease the survivorship and reproductive success of tigers.” Whatever else the Soviet state was, it had been better for tigers than what immediately followed. Under these circumstances, basic questions—How many tigers are there? What do they do? How much space do they need?—acquired urgency.Slaght’s book follows the wild and delightful adventure that Russian and American biologists embarked on together to answer these questions and save the tigers from extinction. Slaght is a conservation biologist who brings a deep knowledge of Russian politics and culture to his tale. His first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was a splendid account of his time studying Blakiston’s fish owls in the Russian Far East, a blend of natural history and memoir in the tradition of George Schaller and Caitlin O’Connell. Where Owls was a personal narrative, Tigers is a sophisticated history told in the third person. But both books bring the Russian Far East and its creatures alive, and in both, there is a strong current of hope. Tigers is a book not just about animal conservation but about the bonds conservation can forge between humans. In the 1970s, Maurice Hornocker, an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was using radiotelemetry to study cougars and other big cats. Yevgeniy Matyushkin, a Russian scientist, read Hornocker’s work and promptly asked him to bring these methods to the Soviet Union, but for Hornocker, a U.S. government servant, this was not feasible. Hornocker also sought to study Amur tigers in China after the Sino-American rapprochement, but to no avail; habitat fragmentation and poaching had left the species virtually nonexistent in China. In due course, he retired, taking up a position at the University of Idaho and founding an institute for the study of carnivores. There the matter might have rested. But in 1989, a group of Soviet researchers arrived in Idaho for a visit. They sat and talked wildlife with their American hosts by a firepit, Yuriy Puzachenko, one of the Russians, holding the Americans entranced with tales of “cats built like battering rams … solitary creatures adapted to mountain and pine: ice-fringed apparitions that burst from shadow to ambush their favorite food, wild boar, prey that can weigh as much as a grand piano and can have tusks like sharpened knives.” And little was known about them because, Puzachenko pointed out, the Soviet Union lacked the VHF radiotelemetry that allowed for tracking the cats.  No field biologist could resist such a pitch. Howard Quigley, one of Hornocker’s graduate students, suggested cooperation and reported the conversation to his supervisor. The Soviet Union was now open to joint ventures with the United States. Thus was the Siberian Tiger Project born. An initial reconnaissance trip led the scientists to pick Sikhote-Alin—a vast, mountainous nature reserve—as the field site. Hornocker found funding for a year and hired as the American lead Dale Miquelle, whose job description was to “inject himself fully into the tiger’s environment, feel the changes in the weather, struggle up the mountain slopes, and feel everything a tiger did.”The premise of the cooperation was simple. The Americans would bring their expertise in tracking technology, the Russians their field knowledge. That knowledge did not come solely from scientists. When initial attempts to trap tigers using dogs as bait failed, it was a wandering park ranger, Viktor, who explained that healthy tigers were indifferent to dogs and suggested where snares might best be laid. Trapping a tiger proved hard, but eventually, a yearling named Olga was caught, collared, and released. Her collar provided the team with her locations, creating a picture of where she went, what she did, and how she lived.Other successes followed. And something curious happened. As they worked together, poring over VHF data or figuring out why darts were misfiring, the Americans and the Russians found themselves drawing close. Miquelle, whose initial three years in Russia bloomed to 30, became tight friends with Yevgeniy (Zhenya) Smirnov, his Russian counterpart. Slaght’s book abounds with the human moments of which work and international relations are made: celebratory vodka when the team catches three tigers in a day; Smirnov and Miquelle mourning a poached tiger, before rescuing her orphaned cubs; Mariya Ivanova, a Russian woman, looking after Miquelle as a mother might (Miquelle named a tiger after her). In one such moment, a Russian farmer recognizes Olga:The farmer raised his rifle out of habit … then … he stopped. He knew this tiger, he realized. He saw Olga as an individual. Dale and Zhenya had spent many nights at the farm while out tracking her, telling him tales of Olga—the places she went and the things she did. Olga shared these forests with the farmer, walked the coastline as he did, and skirted his field, where she left his cattle to graze in peace. They were neighbors. And this was what he’d wanted to tell Dale, that he understood this.To Miquelle, the moment was stunning because it showed that humans and tigers could live together. But it also showed that a tiger could bring a Russian and an American together, despite all the propaganda and suspicion of the Cold War. “We are all the better for having been soaked in the camaraderie of that collective,” notes Miquelle. That camaraderie was a gift the tigers gave to people. The moment was stunning because it showed that humans and tigers could live together. But it also showed that a tiger could bring a Russian and an American together, despite all the propaganda and suspicion of the Cold War. To save tigers, one has to know where they are and what they require. Data point by data point, a picture began to emerge. In 1996, the first tiger census since 1985 was carried out: a Herculean task, funded by USAID and Exxon Mobil (trying to compensate for the Alaska oil spill of 1989), in which different counting methodologies and agendas had to be wrangled into a cohesive performance. The results found between 415 and 476 tigers. Tigers in protected areas did better than tigers in unprotected areas. That was unsurprising. More interesting was that what seemed like a vast reserve to a human trudging through snow was not sufficiently large to protect a tiger. Tigers were roaming beyond the boundaries of the reserves, where protection for them lapsed. Miquelle, who was on loan to USAID (his successor as Siberian Tiger Project field lead was John Goodrich), worked with the Russian Academy of Science to recommend expanding protected areas. The Sikhote-Alin reserve got an additional 800 square kilometers. Three new reserves were established. This still did not cover the tigers’ full range, but it was a step in the right direction. The government set up an anti-poaching team, Inspection Tiger, which helped stem the losses to poaching. Forests got protection too. Officials, scientists, nongovernmental organization workers, and locals were uniting to conserve tigers. The tigers now had a chance. By 2005, their numbers seemed stable.There were two other indicators of success. The first was that lessons learnt from tiger conservation in Russia went global. Kerley and a Russian partner, Galina Salkina, pioneered the use of dogs to locate tiger scat and match it to known individuals, a technique that Kerley would bring to the study of tigers in Cambodia. Bart Schleyer, who was crucial to the capture efforts in Sikhote-Alin, took his craft to Bangladesh and Thailand. China too had seen Amur tiger populations fall (a better fate than that of the South China tiger, which went extinct). In 1975, a survey found 161 tigers in Heilongjiang. In 1998 and ’99, the Chinese conducted surveys again—this time with the Russian-American team north of the border. There were a possible four to six tigers in Jilin and another five to seven in Heilongjiang. Prey species and habitat had been destroyed.But where the Russians saw a “wasteland,” Miquelle saw adequate habitat and political will from which to build back up. Back in 1968–9, the Soviets and Chinese had been waging war, while the Americans looked on; now, they were walking almost the same spot in search of tigers. Surely, if they could do that, they could work together to restore tiger populations. Miquelle’s optimism proved well placed. Protected habitat in China grew. Slowly, tiger numbers climbed. Between 2013 and 2018, camera traps found 55 individuals using China’s northeast.The other indicator of success was the tigers’ recolonization of former territory. The cubs Miquelle and Smirnov first rescued flew to America, where they took up residence in a zoo. But could an orphaned tiger be rehabilitated and returned to the wild? In 2012, a young tiger named Zolushka was found by hunters. She wound up at a rehabilitation center funded by Russian and foreign conservation organizations, cared for by Katya Blidchenko, who had had experience with rehabilitating wolves. Zolushka learnt to hunt prey while her caretaker watched. The plan was to release her into the Pri-Amur—once part of the tiger’s range but now bereft of the cats. Tigers roam to find new territory, but the Pri-Amur was foreboding:A tiger’s first step into this vast and largely inhospitable place was a courageous one—few tigers mustered the resolve to take it. In addition to braving the vulnerability of the floodplain, they also had to somehow cross the Amur River itself, deep and muddy, in some places nearly five kilometers across. Tigers could not see the peaks of the Bureinskiy Mountains that rose on the far side of this expanse, beacons of a better future with promise of shaded slopes of pine and robust sounders of wild boar, animals that had not smelled a tiger for generations. If tigers had their own mythology, the Pri-Amur would be a place of legend, a lost city of gold. Zolushka was released near these mountains and off she went. More orphans followed. Most proved successful at being wild tigers. Zolushka, eventually, was photographed with cubs of her own. The lost city was lost no more. Success comes with the seeds of its own destruction. The Siberian Tiger Project won fans among locals, but at a national level, tiger conservation became Putinified: The cats came to be seen as nationalistic symbols rather than cats. Why, Russian officials grouched, were foreigners doing tiger conservation? The Severtsov Institute began its own tiger program, inviting Vladimir Putin to collar a captured tiger. (Putin’s tiger, it emerged to much gleeful mockery, was a zoo animal.) Nationalism spelled an end to the days when a bunch of scientists were in it just for the tigers. With foreign organizations now suspect, there was no room for the Siberian Tiger Project to participate in the 2015 tiger census. (One Russian who worked for the project, Sasha Rybin, was asked to join the census but to take temporary leave from his employer. Rybin refused.) By 2022, Putin’s war on Ukraine rendered working in Russia fruitless. So Miquelle and his Russian wife left for Montana. They left a blueprint for tiger conservation behind. But the gift the tigers had given—that joy in a shared project for Russians and Americans—had been spurned. Tiger conservation became Putinified: The cats came to be seen as nationalistic symbols rather than cats. Why, Russian officials grouched, were foreigners doing tiger conservation? Slaght quotes a Russian proverb: “Hope dies last.” These days, Russians telling stories by a fireside in Idaho or an American spending 30 years in Russia seem like tales of a mythic past. And yet, in the saga of the Amur tigers, hope flickers alive at the unlikeliest moments. One of the most memorable stories in this book is that of a tiger named Kristina. Desperate for prey, Kristina killed a horse in Orlovka. She was captured and outfitted with a GPS collar, then released near Terney, where she killed deer. It appeared she was dead: The collar signals suggested she had not moved in hours. A team went out to find the corpse, only to find that she had been sleeping, the collar not reporting on slight movements. Another mortality scare followed—but she was still alive, still moving. “Christ in stripes,” went the wry description; here was a tiger perpetually resurrected. Hence the name Kristina.Kristina wandered far. A man tried to poach her. He paid with lost fingers, but Kristina was wounded. She retreated into the forest. The team tracked her for a bit; she moved with her old fluidity, but hunting seemed harder for her. Her collar eventually stopped giving a signal. It was about time for its battery to fail, and Kristina’s last location had been encouragingly far from human proximity. It was fair to imagine that she still lived “deep in aromatic forests filled with plump, naïve prey.” Hope was never quite dead when it came to Kristina. And in that, perhaps, her example has something to offer humans too. “Amur tigers,” writes Slaght, “move freely across the Sino-Russian frontier; governments, NGOs, and civil society should follow suit, taking their lead from the tigers.”

Why the Democrats Aren’t Sweating the Republicans’ Huge Cash Advantage
New Republic • Feb 19, 2026

Why the Democrats Aren’t Sweating the Republicans’ Huge Cash Advantage

If money talks, national Democrats are getting a harsh tongue-lashing from donors. “For the first time in years,” The New York Times reported last week, “Democrats are sounding the alarm about money problems.” The Democratic National Committee started the year in the red, owing $3.5 million, while its Republican counterpart was sitting on $95 million in cash. And on top of that, the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA, Inc. is sitting on $300 million, a sum no Democratic super PAC can even begin to challenge. This gargantuan cash gap, as the Times warned in its headline, “threatens to swamp Democrats in the midterms.” These figures are more than enough to shake the perpetually nervy Democratic Party base, who have been buoyed lately by polling that shows a potential blue wave in the November elections. “This is a huge deal,” Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, wrote on Bluesky. “After years of leading in fundraising, Dem small donors are (rightly) pissed off at the spam texts and emails, as well as at congressional leadership. Meanwhile, GOP billionaire money is hitting record levels. Perfect storm.” But some party strategists have a message for the rattled faithful: Take a deep breath. The situation is not nearly as dire as it may seem. The Democrats are still in a strong position to win back the House and perhaps even the Senate.Yes, donors are cranky, even angry, over having dumped massive amounts of money into Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign only to see her lose to a convicted felon, these strategists say. But the animus does not extend to the individual Democratic candidates who are seeking to flip both chambers of Congress this fall.“They’re tired. they’re still frustrated over 2024, and they don’t feel like they’ve gotten good answers about why money got spent the way it was,” veteran Democratic strategist Steven Schale said of major donors. But “when push comes to shove, and there are 20 races to decide who wins the majority in the House, not only will the grassroots money be there,” but bigger donors will step up, as well, he said. “I am not concerned about candidates who are in a race they can win in 2026 being short of money.”In fact, the money is already flowing. The candidate deemed the most endangered Democrat by the Cook Political Report this fall is also by far the biggest fundraiser: Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia raised $43 million in 2025 and started the year with a major financial advantage over his three potential Republican challengers, who have a combined war chest of only $12 million. Democratic Senate candidates in Ohio, North Carolina, and Maine are outraising their GOP opponents in those flippable states.That apparent enthusiasm extends to Senate races in some red states too. In Alaska, Democratic Representative Mary Peltola, who announced her campaign after the fourth-quarter fundraising reporting deadline passed, reported raising $1.5 million in the first 24 hours after her announcement last month (versus the $2.8 million that GOP Senator Dan Sullivan raised all of last year). In Florida, Alex Vindman, the whistleblower in President Trump’s first impeachment, raised $1.7 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign last month (versus Republican Senator Ashley Moody’s $2.6 million in direct contributions in 2025). In Texas, both Representatives Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico have raised sums that are competitive with GOP Senator John Cornyn’s haul (and far exceed that of Attorney General Ken Paxton); this week alone, Talarico raised $2.5 million over 24 hours thanks to his canceled appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show.“Senate Democrats have expanded the map by recruiting top-tier candidates in key battleground races, and we’re seeing a groundswell of excitement as our candidates decisively outraise their Republican opponents,” Joe Bush, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an emailed statement.In the House, “frontline” Democratic incumbents in battleground districts outraised their GOP opponents by 3-to-1, on average, in the last three months of 2025, while multiple Democratic challengers in key races outraised the GOP incumbents there, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The biggest fundraiser among House candidates is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who drew a stunning $23 million last year—not necessary for the lawmaker to retain her safe seat, but a sign of how willing donors are to support specific Democrats in a year when the party needs to flip just three seats to take the House majority. In one race, for Pennsylvania’s 10th congressional seat, Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson has outraised the GOP incumbent, Representative Scott Perry, even though Stelson only announced her campaign last summer. In Tennessee, Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder has raised nearly four times as much as Representative Andy Ogles, the Republican incumbent, whose campaign now owes more than it has on hand. And in a North Carolina congressional race that the Cook Political Report ranks as “likely Republican,” Democratic challenger Jamie Ager—who also got into the race last summer—outraised GOP incumbent Representative Chuck Edwards in all of 2025, and collected more than twice as much in individual contributions.Joel Payne, a longtime Democratic operative who is now chief communications officer for the group MoveOn, said these numbers show that while donors may have soured on the Democratic Party as a whole, they’re enthusiastic about specific candidates. “Democrats are not lacking in candidate quality, even if the brand of the party is lacking right now,” he said. That is not to say Democrats aren’t worried about the broader money gap. They are. And their concerns are exacerbated by a looming Supreme Court decision on campaign spending, which may mean the national parties will be able to coordinate more with individual campaigns. That would favor Republicans, who would be able to use more of their national party cash to help individual candidates, and at the lower broadcast advertising rates candidate committees get. Democrats also rely more on small donors. If the coordination rules are lifted, big-money donors (who can contribute up to $44.300 per calendar year to a national party) can have more direct impact on an individual campaign.It may take a while to heal the rift with donors. Schale does not blame DNC Chair Ken Martin, though he says Martin deprived donors of “catharsis” when he refused to release an autopsy of the 2024 race. Many donors are unhappy with how their money was spent, especially since Harris outspent Trump and lost not only the Electoral College vote but the popular vote too, he says.But if history is any guide, the DNC’s cash deficit is by no means a death knell for Democratic candidates this fall. In 2018, the last time Trump was president and the Democrats were in the minority in Congress, the DNC was also at a significant cash disadvantage at the beginning of the year—but the party went on to flip the House. So money isn’t everything, a truism that extends to individual candidates. Look no further than Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat in a deep-red county in Texas who, despite having been outspent nearly 10-to-1, won a landslide victory for a state legislative seat last month.Why, though, does Trump still rake in the cash despite his abysmal approval ratings? Experts attribute it to the sheer fact that Trump is president, and his pay-to-play nature. “Democratic donors give because they believe in something. Republican donors give because they think they’re going to get something,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who was deputy press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a senior staffer for the DCCC. “For the next three years, his donors know he’s going to be there. He’s made clear he’s the most transactional president in American history. If you want a pardon, or for [the Department of Justice] to look the other way, or a regulatory change or a tax rate cut, you know exactly where to wire the money.” While those big donors to MAGA, Inc. are sure to get Trump’s favorable attention, their ability to swing the result of the upcoming elections is far less certain. “Trump’s money advantage is like putting gasoline into a car with a broken engine,” Ferguson said. “The problem isn’t the fuel. It’s the performance.”

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