billbindc

That Vladimir Putin makes bad decisions from our perspective is not the same thing as him making irrational decisions. In that light, I think you should ask yourself whether or not the Russians would have preferred the US to be still mired in Afghanistan while also trying to support Ukraine. And you should ask yourself whether or not Putin would have preferred a safely pliant Ukrainian government (being coerced not just by the Kremlin but also the White House) over the risks associated with going en banc with a full attempt at conquest. Finally, please come up with a single evidenced example of Trump giving Russia or China pause in their foreign policy behavior. This claim is often made yet nobody can point to one…though moments of pause and dismay abound among American allies during the same time period. Putin’s timing wasn’t about losing the restraining hand of what we are supposed to imaging was an intimidating Trump administration vis a vis Moscow…it was the recognition that a window of opportunity was closing. Indeed, events have shown Putin didn’t realize it already had.

To restate the points I made earlier in this thread: Bolton and others have said directly that Trump had planned to pull out of NATO in a second term and there is no evidence that he now intends the contrary. Trump has also quite publicly rejected the Pentagon’s top generals who restrained him from this direction in the first term and there is no constituency in Trump world that has a stake in European stability. Quite the opposite, in fact, as they can anticipate making enormous amounts of money off of the Russian oligarchy should the US swing into acquiescence to a Russian dominated Eastern Europe. Don’t kid yourself. If he wins, NATO is very likely to die. It is also a canard that Putin was holding back on Ukraine before Trump left office. The reality is that Putin’s regime was involved in a full court press to pressure Ukraine into subservience with the willing assistance of political appointees in the White House. Russia hasn’t gone to war because Putin didn’t think he needed to and clearly the Russian government expected Trump to win a second term. War was decided when it became clear that Biden had won and the immediate focus of American power was going to be on containing Moscow. Putin’s clique imagined that the US was still too shaken politically from the previous four years and too involved in Afghanistan to reorient rapidly while the Ukrainian military wouldn’t be able to put up significant resistance. Virtually wrong on all counts.

From what I’m hearing, deal is done but passage is not. There could and are likely to be some bumps ahead. What has changed is that it has finally gotten through to everyone but the loons that disaster is being courted and not just for Ukraine. Keep those fingers crossed.

No. Johnson is a weak speaker with weak convictions presiding over a weak majority that has strong factions whose only unifying element is that they reject whatever Democrats want. Any three loons can stall and sidetrack legislation and often do. That is slowly translating into a more or less coalition government as Democrats over time become the essential element in keeping Johnson in office.

I’ve been reading those folks pushing the idea that Iran intentionally flubbed the attack on Israel with some…restrained amusement. Us old folks remember how analysis of the USSR routinely made the same threat-inflating mistake as analysts responded, consciously or not, to pressures that essentially drove them to see every flaw, error or omission as yet another devious maneuver by those mustachio twisting apparatchiks in Moscow to lower our guard. The reality is that yes, Iran didn’t throw the kitchen sink at Israel but at the same time, the idea was for Iran to establish a higher level of deterrence against Israeli strikes directly on Iranian territory, assets and personnel. To do that, Iran need to actually show the ability to do significant damage in ways that Israel cannot address. What happened instead? Iran managed to unite Israel’s neighbors around it (despite, Bibi and Gaza!) to such a degree that they are bragging quietly how many Iranian munitions they shot down (including by the pilot/princess of Jordan) and celebrating (not very quietly) how well they can and will cooperate against Iran. Deterrence is information without the cure. If Iran had managed to get through and wallop a couple of Israel airfields and hit a scattering of other bases, that would not have set off a conflagration and would have delivered a solid deterrence message. It would have been “We send 300 and hit 20% of the time. Imagine if we send 3000?”. Now, Israel and the rest of the region can imagine it and has reason to think they can handle it (if, again more to Iran’s strategic detriment, they keep the US onside and willing to lend support). Deterrence isn’t achieved by demonstrating what you can’t do.

And just to give a sense of how early we are in this iteration of warfare, my great-great-grandfather witnessed the early use of proto machine guns at the Battle of Gaines Mill more than 150 years ago. Imagine where drones will be in 30.

This. The war in Ukraine is getting people thinking about it but the first terrorist attack on a city conducted by heat seeking, pattern recognition driven autonomous drones is going to galvanize the entire West.

Exactly. Nation-state resource allocation will upend analyses like this.

It's pretty clear Trump has told him not to do it and he's listening.

I'll be in Chiba Monday or Tuesday. I'm very excited to find out if the sky above the port is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

This is how it’s done. Respectful, illuminating and useful. Thanks, lads.

Interesting.

Democrats fully intend to forestall any attempt to overthrow Johnson...if he puts through a Ukraine bill. There will be enough Republicans to go along and make it happen. In fact, only three or four would do.

I had intended originally to add the observation that it's possible to over read Chinese intentions from news like this. Xi certainly bestrides the landscape in China but it's a huge economy with a long border with Russia. Chinese companies that are seeing complications in EU/US trade are going to be sorely tempted to make it up on the very favorable terms Russia will give. Even Xi has limits on how much of this he can control. All of that said, your point about the moderate aims of China and the US is spot on. An entirely collapsed Russia is as big a danger as the sclerotic revanchist Russia of the moment is and both powers know it.

China edging towards more direct involvement in Ukraine…and may explain Russian staying power to some extent: https://www.ft.com/content/ba524406-ee6c-4c39-9ac2-110a2549569a