Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse.

President Joe Biden is on his first presidential trip to Asia, where he signed the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine (it was flown to him in Seoul for the signing). He also made a bit of news. Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, the president was asked whether the United States would intervene militarily if China tried to take Taiwan by force. It was a very important question given that China, which has been trying to walk a fine line between supporting Moscow and not infuriating Washington, has been eyeing the conflict in Ukraine, perhaps trying it on for size in case it decides to conquer Taiwan.

Biden said, unequivocally, that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked. This was the third time that Biden had said as much, and Politico’s Alex Ward wrote that Biden had “Beetlejuiced” the end of America’s “strategic ambiguity” doctrine. The idea, basically, is that ambiguity about whether and how America would help Taiwan brings a kind of stability: it keeps China from attacking (for fear of U.S. reprisals), and keeps Taiwan from declaring independence (for fear that the U.S. wouldn’t do enough to help it defeat China).

After Biden spoke, his surprised aides backpedaled furiously—as they often do when Biden says out loud what everyone in Washington is saying privately, like the time he said that Putin “can’t remain in power.” (I know two of Biden’s speechwriters—one current, one former—and both have endless stories about how the man is impossible to write for. He’ll torture you by forever going back and forth on drafts, only to go totally off script when he’s at the podium.) Now that he’s president, these off-the-cuff moments mean something different...

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Boris Bondarev: When you start working, you don’t even really think about it. Then you slowly get older, get more experience, and you start noticing things and start asking questions, especially when you have the opportunity to compare your system to those of others. And you see how your system is different, and not usually for the better. When I was on my third assignment in Moscow, working on disarmament, I traveled to other countries, worked with colleagues from the West, and I saw that proposals there come from the bottom up. Some American doing business abroad comes to their representative of the State Department and suggests something, asks for some kind of help. The State Department thinks it over and comes up with some kind of resolution. We don’t have this. Our Foreign Ministry just makes decisions based on nothing, with no analysis. They just come up with some initiative so that they can say to their bosses back in Moscow, we did this, we did that. No one considers whether this is needed, whether it’s helpful or harmful.

Most Americans don’t understand how important this is in the Russian state system: that everyone has to vysluzhyt’sya, manage up and brown-nose, making sure you please your bosses and that they notice you. If you’re, say, a criminal investigator, that means opening unnecessary criminal investigations so that your numbers look better and the bosses give you a promotion. What did this look like at the Foreign Ministry?

It’s extremely important. You have to constantly be showing your superiors that you’re doing a good job, that you stand out. Then you’re moved up the ladder. So, for example, I’m reading what my colleague Dmitry Polyanskii [the first deputy permanent Russian representative at the U.N.] is writing from New York. He used to be a normal, intelligent person. Now, I read his tweets and it’s insane. It’s just pure propaganda, with some notes of psychosis. But he’s doing this so that the bosses in Moscow notice him and so that he gets a big, important job in Moscow. It’s very important in our system. Because our system is very opaque and it doesn’t change, unlike the American system. I don’t know the American system too well, but it seems to me that American civil servants, when they make some kind of decision, they take into account what American voters think. In our system, no one cares about our voters. The only thing that matters is that your immediate supervisor notices you and thinks highly of you. That’s it.

And your bosses are doing the same with their bosses, and that kind of logic goes all the way up to the very top, right?

Absolutely. They know what to write [in their cables] so that the bosses are happy. There’s a saying [in the Russian foreign service], You have to write it so that Moscow likes it. And it’s not just what you’re writing, but how you do it that’s important. It’s how you make them feel, what reaction you elicit. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. If you’re a diplomat writing a cable, you should be sending information that the recipient can analyze and use it to make a decision. But here, you’re already praising them and their decision...