billbindc

Pretty clearly a blunt message from somebody to the mail bloggers. There’s virtually zero reasons Ukraine would bother with someone like this.

This. Rice's biggest handicap is that nobody in DC is particularly impressed with her judgement and it goes back to 2000-2001. When the Bush administration came in, the Clinton folks and the DC policy wonks were telling them incessantly to worry about AQ and terrorism. Rice and her coterie had been out of power for 8 years and still had essentially a Cold War mindset. So they came in talking about missile proliferation and little else while expressing open disdain for the advice they were getting. Then when it blew up in our faces they pretended that none of that happened. So sure, she's not the immortal, immoral husk that Kissinger is but she'd need a buck to get a cup of coffee from actual policy people in DC.

Concur. Also, recent events have shown that the PRC gov't is a lot more susceptible and sensitive to public outcry than Putin's Russia. Chinese civil society has a lot mor energy than Russian civil society does...even if it's too nationalistic and anti-American for our taste. The leadership in Beijing can't just ignore it...their overt messaging notwithstanding. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-chinas-new-no2-hastened-end-xis-zero-covid-policy-2023-03-03/

What Rob Lee wonders about often turns out to be a fairly important theme of the war later on. In this case, he seems to be thinking that GLSDB's will be available for the upcoming Ukrainian offensive. If so, Russia is going to be dealing with the equivalent of the HIMAR's campaign and the Kherson/Kharkiv offensive all at once. I suspect we are going to find out how brittle Russian formations may have become.

And looming over all of this are the semiconductor factories. They are jewel in the crown of global tech and they simply cannot function without the cooperation of a whole slew of democracies that won't go along with a hostile takeover by Beijing. In fact, in a shooting war that Taiwan looked like losing, it's fairly certain we would reduce them to rubble forthwith.

res·sen·ti·ment rə-ˌsäⁿ-tē-ˈmäⁿ : deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these feelings directly Recent Examples on the Web "But in between justice and ressentiment is a rich, gray area where schadenfreude can serve a valuable political purpose." —Lee M. Pierce, The Conversation, 14 Oct. 2020 "This weaponizing of ressentiment — a term borrowed from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, capturing the deep grievance produced by feelings of both envy and humiliation — is possibly the defining theme in global politics right now." —Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 26 June 2018 Tharoor, Washington Post, 26 June 2018

"There I was, in the Congo....working out the declination, signal processing and backscatter energy analysis required for the band radar UAV op....as I considered what would be the best movies to have on hand for a winter deployment. Btw, these boots might work for you but they're hell on this old Nam Marine recon sniper's feet."

It's realistic and there's plenty of research out there you can find on the intertoobs. It's stretching the limits of absurdity to be reading a technical discussion about it from some Vietnam era Sgt Slaughter idly talking about it from a muddy trench behind Bakhmut though.

Looks like Ben Hodges has been reading a post or two around here.

Trump has routinely and publicly said the US gets a bad deal out of NATO and was privately planning, according to numerous people in his administration, on pulling out if he won reelection. Not to coin a phrase but you should believe people when they repeatedly tell you what they plan to do.

Make no mistake...Trump will end support for Ukraine and NATO the minute returns to the White House...God forbid.

With all due respect to Haass...he clearly isn't talking to a lot of progressive Democrats if he thinks they are unenthusiastic about supporting Ukraine. And in general, the analysis is bad as it treats the issue in political terms as zero sum...in other words, that what Democrats/Republicans will necessarily feel about an issue is only in relation to what their partisan opponents do. That's an understandable take given our recent polarization but simply wrong. Outside of the extremists, most voter have particular cultural/political/self interested reasons for leaning a particular way. Many Republicans are strongly committed to American hegemony. That Russia is self evidently challenging it leads them to be sympathetic to countering Putin. Many Democrats are strongly committed to what they see as a values based foreign policy. An unprovoked invasion, Bucha and all the rest have cemented their support for the war. And underlying virtually all of mainstream American political thinking on foreign policy is the experience of the 1930's and 40's. Quite literally 75% of Americans think we are doing enough or not enough to help Ukraine, Less than a quarter think too much.

This one's better: https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-wouldnt-win-a-war-of-attrition-nato-west-weapons-ukraine-resolve-china-peace-deal-crimea-sanctions-7ca7f128

Given my reaction to other examples posted around here, you won't be surprised to find that I have been skeptical of most of these guys from the beginning and from Nance on down. The brutal rule of thumb is that if they have achieved notoriety before they are a casualty then you should exercise great restraint in accepting anything they say at face value. And all of this is a good development. It is a symptom of the fact that the Ukrainian Army is growing up at mach speed before our very eyes. Militaries significantly dependent on more or less ad hoc 'international legions' (see Republican Spain, Nazi Germany, the Vatican State, Mexico in 1848) tend to be states that are losing their wars. Ukraine is past the point of needing these units and it shows.

Ukraine continues to be the most bipartisan issue in American politics.

In terms of power distribution, this version of the Russian dictat is much more highly centralized than it's predecessors the USSR and the Tsarist era. What is different is that it a highly demobilized state. There are no popular rallies, no Black Hundreds, no katorga or gulag. The social contract is that as long as you shut up and do your job the state won't notice you. But within that settlement resides the same imperial Russian mentality. So to Muscovites, the 'us v them' isn't just experienced with Ukrainians, Americans or Poles. It's toward Ingush, Chechens and Kumyks too. What does that mean for a direct invasion of Federal Russia? I think it would mean theater nukes quite quickly to obliterate the threat before it reached deeply into core Russian territory but would be much less likely in areas considered peripheral to it.

Apparently, Seymour Hersh's super duper secret source in the Deep State is....Joe Biden. Where angels fear to tread...

Compared to the way in which the Putin regime convinced itself that invading Ukraine was a great idea, Nordstream is barely a chip shot.

Not permanently. They left part of Nordstream alone. But when Gazprom and Lukoil execs are dropping like flies from hotel windows (to egregiously mix a metaphor) at the same time, it's not a stretch to assume some regime consolidation is going on. The reasoning would haven't have been just that as I noted above but certainly it seems like Putin had to go to some effort to lock in his oligarchs. And remember, your logical approach to the problem isn't the same as a dyed in the wool silovik who cut his teeth in the DDR. He's not crazy...he just starts out from very different assumptions and more or less rationally goes from there.

It's not that simple as explained here: https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/gas-contracts-central-to-nord-stream-pipeline-mystery/ In any case, the motivation to do it would have been complex. In part the above but also to forestall regime elements looking at maneuvering to have talks with the West against Putin (8 major Russian oil executives have died under suspicious circumstances in the the last 13 months). In part to show willingness to kill an economic hostage to communicate political will toward Germany especially. In part to demonstrate the ability to hit other similar targets key to European energy and communications. And lastly of course to create the political furor in which Hersh so willingly allowed himself to be a tool. None of those goals is in any way alien to previously observed goals/actions of the Putin regime. Nobody else was that motivated, in that way.

1. There's zero evidence of any sort that the US did it. Hersh's claims didn't stand up to the lightest scrutiny (i.e. boats were not in service he claimed were involved) and the logic of destroying the pipelines that the US had already caused to be cut off doesn't hold up. 2. It turned out that the "Ukrainians did it" came from intercepts of Russian comms. Since Russia has had enormous evidence in the last year or so that their comms are compromised, it's not unlikely an attempt to muddy the waters. In addition, it was an oddly professional job yet the folks who supposedly did it then left explosives traces all over the boat they used to do it. In the end the motives, means and bad judgement all at this point all look like Moscow or a proxy thereof until we get some legit evidence otherwise.

This is one of those ho hum things that it actually kind of significant. It's the EU acting as a single entity in activity just adjacent to fighting a war. Imagine, if you will, a Russian negotiator's reaction working in that light on a final agreement to the idea that Ukraine will forego NATO but be in the European Community. That gives you a sense of the phase change that just occurred.

China could affect things greatly if it simply provided significant arms and ammunition to Russia. But…that would almost immediately have huge outcomes in regard to 77% of its overseas trading volume (meaning the EU and US). So…would everyone look? Sure. But China has a limited ability to actually contrain anyone. If it did, we would already be talking about Taiwan a lot more than we already are.

What's happening in specific is that both Trump and DeSantis are entirely concentrated on winning the MAGA base to the detriment of all other goals. Trump obviously really means it while DeSantis seems to have decided that it is a useful political strategy. I've been watching this unfold pretty closely and so far, there has been a lot more reprobation aimed at DeSantis than praise. The bottom line is that MAGA just doesn't rate this issue as high as they do many others. They *are* driven...largely for exactly the reasons you'd imagine...by the idea of confrontation with China. Russia is seen as a distraction rather than a burning issue. And that's the problem for both Trump and DeSantis. Aiding Ukraine is a highly emotive issue for their domestic opponents and merely a tepid one for their supporters. Put bluntly, it's decent primary politics and very bad national politics. Edited to add: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/ron-desantis-supported-ukraine-russia-kfile/index.html

From everything I can see, DeSantis' response to Carlson is rebounding against him. Sure, it's an issue with the MAGA folks but it's far down their list of priorities. For everyone else, including a significant swathe of Republicans, it's a red alert appeasement warning. And today, the latter folks are already pointing at Russian aggression in international waters and saying "There. See? Russia is the aggressor.". There's also a clear chain of events here that strongly indicate that this was a harassment maneuver that was botched. If Russia wanted to simply take down the drone, that's pretty easily done. Instead fuel was spilled on it, hazardous maneuvers were attempted, etc until the pilot made a mistake. If Russia was really trying to send a message to MAGA of it's stone cold escalation dominance, there are simpler ways.