Our Man at the Press Club — Issue 4

The word I keep hearing this week, in corridors and at the bar and once, memorably, in a lift between the second and fourth floors of a building I will not name, is “kompromat.” Nobody says it loudly. It is always offered as a possibility rather than a conclusion, with the careful hedging of people who work in institutions that have legal departments. But it is being said. The Trump-Putin telephone call, the fuel sanctions waiver that followed it, the ICC sanctions issued the same day as the Nobel Peace Prize — these are, I am told by people who spend their professional lives reading such things carefully, consistent with a pattern. Whether the pattern has a cause is a question nobody will answer on the record. Off the record, in lifts, between floors, the word is kompromat. Commissioner Myrmidon, when I mentioned this to Madame Graticula, was said to be in consultations. She did not say what kind.

The Brazilian election is producing a different kind of anxiety in the bubble — quieter, longer-term, the anxiety of people who have seen this film before and know which reel comes next. The possibility of a victory by Flavio Bolsonaro is being discussed not as a Brazilian domestic matter but as a European problem: another government in the Western Hemisphere aligned with the forces that are currently remaking the international order, another voice in multilateral forums, another relationship to manage. A person I have known for some years, who works on Latin American affairs and is not given to alarm, told me over coffee that the question was no longer whether the liberal international order was under pressure but whether it still existed in any meaningful sense. I nodded and finished my coffee. Outside, on the roundabout, the traffic was going in circles. I found this, as I always do, enormously consoling.