billbindc

If accurate...wow:

Prigozhin's ride...a year later.

I would argue that that offensive was aimed at Odessa without which it fell far short of objectives.

Has there been a single Russian offensive in this war that has gone better or even as well as expected? I can’t think of one.

Add in the 'either give me Ukraine or I nuke the world' speech and yes, you have all the fixin's for a hearty meal of Russia-is-increasingly-****ed.

Putin raising the specter of nuclear immolation again. I don’t think that the basic calculus has changed…nuclear weapons use doesn’t get Russia a win and I think that the moment Putin seriously begins to contemplate destroying the world over Ukraine is the moment someone in Moscow puts a bullet in him. My read is that things are going worse for Russia than we think from the outside. Putin making such blatant statements towards South Korea, climbing into bed with Kim almost as a junior partner, basically holding a nuclear gun to his own head…doesn’t read like winning.

It ain't a world war yet, but Vladi's trying. Trying real hard.

Interestingly, the founding generation of the American republic actually identified far more with the Spartans...viewing Britain as the epitome of the rapacious, hypocritical Athenian empire. Then we got a navy...

I think the way to approach it is that the US thinks its hegemony exists because as a nation it has a superior system...not that it has a superior system because it maintains a hegemony. For a contra example, may I suggest Russia?

I disagree with you for once. Per Jefferson: "We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace [ending the American Revolution]...we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends." In conception and execution, the American project has been imperial from it's start. Modern America has been at pains to obscure that fact but the United States has been an expansionist empire and a relatively liberal one since 1865. Where it differs from the norm signally is in the 'converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends' part. Relations with Mexico and Canada are, not coincidentally, quite close and extraordinarily friendly given how things began in both cases. Germany, Japan, Italy, Britain, Vietnam, Spain...it's hard to come up with anyone the US fought a hot war with who has not become an ally on paper or de facto. America was and still is an empire but with a big difference...it prefers friends to vassals and exerts more soft power than anyone since perhaps Rome (which makes sense given how obsessed the Founders were with what they understood of the Republic). If American wins this round of the global hegemony sweepstakes, it will be because we have leadership who understands this. If we get Trump, we will be carelessly knocking over a key pillar of our power.

Trump has said he will 'solve' the war in Ukraine if he begins *before* inauguration day. What does that mean? Well, we are not giving aid to Russia and we are already exerting about as much duress as we can short of going to war with Moscow directly. On the other hand, we are providing the lifeblood of military aid, diplomatic support and ISR to Ukraine without which it can only fight in greatly reduced circumstances. We both know Trump's track record in making deals. Do we really imagine he'll take the harder road?

There is no evidence of that yet. What we do see is China trying to build up it's own. I would imagine that the DPRK can go to China if it needs restocking but that nothing is moving until Xi really decides he isn't going to make a try for Taiwan. Kim's stocks are also already pretty gigantic and what we are seeing in Ukraine seems like he's getting Russia to over pay for the clearance rack.

Something to add is that folks should be quite clear on the reality that none of this happens without China acquiescing to it. The DPRK's banking, trade, food supplies all depend on China fairly abjectly. So..while Xi is refusing to directly provide official Chinese aid to Moscow in the Ukraine war it should be understood that he is willing to let proxies do so. This is not necessarily because he wants Russia to win but rather that he does not want it to lose either.

"Not satisfied with taking on the Ukrainians, Russia has decided to go fully suicidal and take on the Vietnamese, the Finns, the..."

Round two of the deck reshuffling in the Kremlin. It is *quite* interesting that Putin is importing his niece into that position and he's throwing a bone to the Patrushev clan. All signs of attempts to coup proof, pay off and tie potential challengers to the regime.

You don’t vote for someone based on the concept that you “wait until he gets elected” to judge him. Trump held up aid *the last year he was in office* and he’s continued to regurgitate praise for Putin, Xi, etc. He has a track record, he’s said he will “settle” the conflict before he even gets into office and he has routinely said he will force a deal on the parties. Since his leverage with Putin is virtually non-existent, we know what deal will disfavor the party he has already descried, abused and strong armed. The spending claims are the window dressing, not the reality. Please…do not kid yourself or anyone else.

My argument is definitively *not* that we can push for maximalist victory. My argument is simply that Putin sits atop the system but he is not the system personified. Ergo, if we behave in a sober manner, chances are more likely that the internal incentives control for behavior. What discourages China is the degree of will/power/military force the US is willing to commit to vis a vis Russia and what that suggests about a response to a seizure of Taiwan (which is far less likely than a blockade).

I would point out that Prigozhin proved the weakness of Putin but the strength of the systema and nobody is going to be in the position Putin was in early 2022 for a very long time. Yes everything is contingent and bad bounces happen but in general countries remain within the ruts of the road their wheels already know. Russia was a weak, declining power with a rapacious elite most interested in self aggrandizement before this war began and it's more likely to revert to that norm than anything else. Call me an optimist.

It's a legitimate concern but we have to look at what happened when a table flipper did show up. Prigozhin started out trying to defend a losing hand to Shoigu but the *cause* he took up was a hard war, no holds barred approach to Ukraine and to mobilizing the Russian state. And it was popular with the people! What happened? Once it looked like he might actually succeed, the passive support he received evaporated pretty quickly and his silent partners were quite happy to bank their winnings (in terms of greater current freedom of action and positioning for a post Putin state) and let him hang. So while we don't know what we are going to get next we do know that the structure of the Russian state as currently constituted is conservatively oriented towards avoiding the kind of cataclysmic change that could threaten the health and wealth of the top rungs. And let's be honest, the Russian people en masse have almost zero power. Until that structure changes...and it would likeliest take an actual regime collapse to accomplish it...I'm going to sleep pretty well at night.

I think it's worth considering this in terms of the Galeotti analysis I posted above. Putin's two modes are to either prevaricate or over react...with what I would argue is a very strong lean towards the former. How he reacted to the challenge Prigozhin presented illustrates the dynamic well. He literally disappeared for a while when it began and then negotiated a bad deal for himself which he revised later with the assassination of Prigozhin and Wagner's core leadership. Putin did not "go nuclear" in any way during the entire episode. No purges, no mass arrests, no lashing out. He did the bare minimum to protect himself without unleashing forces that might get out of control. The war in Ukraine so far shows a similar mix of aggression and timidity. Yes Russia invaded and yes it is struggling mightily to win but it is quite difficult to find anything Russia has done outside the lines that goes beyond nuisance value. Dragging a Norwegian data line or paying some clown to toss a firebomb at some vans in Prague are not exactly attempts to dramatically broaden the strategic scale of this war despite the fact that Western aid has killed Russian troops in windrows and is very effectively destroying the Russian military. And why not? Because the elites under Putin as a group simply must have stability to safeguard the control they exert over power and money in Russian society and his primary job is to ensure it. Dropping a nuke, in any context, destroys that compact and as we have seen Putin now certainly knows that large sections of the security state will remain on the sidelines if he is challenged on that basis. So while I would never entirely deny the possibility of Russia doing something idiotic, I think the invasion itself has used up Putin's allowance on that front unless and until dropping a nuke is seen as the only way in which the current internal order can be defended. That is only comprehensible in the case of a civil war...which goes a long way towards explaining American policy in this milieu.

This seems quite on point to me:

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Peng to be born?"

Of interest: https://puck.news/will-putin-root-for-trump-again-in-2024-election/ I'm particularly interested in the mismatch between what is being said in Saint Petersburg and the actual military strategy in Ukraine which is very clearly aimed at keeping an offensive foot down on the increasingly watered down gas of the Russian military in the hopes that when/if Trump comes in Ukraine is Sudeten-ed.

Russia is effectively switching to the yuan from this point forwards. I would put this down as not decisive in and of itself but more just another stress on an already heavily loaded system. And of course, effectively Russia becoming a Chinese economic satellite.

$50 billion looks like a done deal. And now there is a dollar run on Moscow banks in response to the foreign exchange sanctions.