billbindc

India is responsible for less than 1% of global wheat exports. Yes it's going to be a tough year but it is one factor among many

Also, I think a pretty accurate summation of the state play in the Russian government by Aslund.

The article Krugman linked is quite interesting on the economics of Russia sanctions but the thread gets at something more interesting. Well worth reading.

Answering two of your points: 1. This is one pretty large reason why Russia is unlikely to use a nuke in Ukraine. It's seat on the Security Council would revoked, China wouldn't be inclined to protect them and the UN then would become a fairly useful conduit of power directed at containing Russia. Freedom of navigation for the Black Sea grain ports would be an obvious mission. 2. Don't believe the hype on world food stocks: https://asmith.ucdavis.edu/news/russia-ukraine. Yes, prices will rise and countries with marginal ability to cope are going to get hurt but it's one factor among many (as you note) in regard to Sri Lanka and many others. There's a global recession beginning to shape up and that's a much bigger factor.

A general officer of my acquaintance likes to talk about this. His father fought in the Bulge and would describe to him what it was like to be under a sustained 12 hours of bombardment. He'd say "Nobody in a modern military has any idea what that's like". Now, they are finding out.

China and India are the two largest countries and economies that are semi-friendly to Russia...and they are both strong no-first-use states. He loses them immediately if he drops a nuke. Ukraine is a huge country with an in depth defense. A tactical nuke somewhere doesn't win the war. Indiscriminate use destroys the aim of the war. Any use at all brings in NATO in a variety of ways that Russia cannot handle. Nuclear Armageddon is clearly not very useful to anyone. None of he cases above change the calculus in a way that overall benefits Putin. Until someone can map out a solid path for using nukes that redounds in any significant way to Putin/Russia's benefit I think it highly unlikely and if then an accident rather than a planned escalation.

Exactly. Reactions to Russian aggression need to be carefully calibrated to minimize the possibility of nuclear war without ceding regional or global interests to nuclear threats. From the facts on the ground that I can see, it's obvious that Russian leadership has been more cognizant of the weak state of its conventional forces than we realized and so has used it as a crutch to threaten into being outcomes it preferred without any real planning or announced doctrine that it would ever do otherwise except to avert the military collapse of the state. Until that changes, I think we can sleep easier at night.

What's interesting about the cesmonkey links is that the commentators run from Ross Douthat to a CATO guy to a woman from Brookings...who has a solid history of being on the alarmist side of nuclear weapons use (one prominent article "Would China Use Nuclear Weapons In A War With The US"). You can find folks across the spectrum politically who tend to take that view and the more I've seen of them the more I think their view is set by a basic affinity for a pessimistic approach on the topic. They expect what their basic affinity suggests. The problem is that their analysis depends on something essentially unknowable (a; is Vladimir Putin so irrational that he doesn't see or care that Russia itself would be destroyed in a general nuclear exchange b; is Vladimir Putin so irrational he cannot see that a smaller use of nuclear weapons doesn't change the trajectory of the war and instead will simply make that trajectory lower and longer?) while what we do know points in the other direction (as in, Russia verbally rattling the sabre and then carefully leaving their readiness state exactly where it was).

It is also very important to remember how central state action is to state propaganda in Russia. Putin's strongman image is inextricably tied to the idea that he gets things done. Each phase of action is then dutifully trotted out in the approved form by state media (which is now virtually all of it) with appropriate glorification of the chief. In the current situation, it's pretty clear to everyone that the chief muffed the war in Ukraine. It's also clear that he's up to his elbows in the actual day to day disasters that are filtering their way by word of mouth and VPN to the average person on the street. So what's a propaganda chief to do? Well, the reaction is often to scramble for actions that are achievable and glorify them. In this case, the Russian state has begun to comprehend how solidly the world is against it and so are attempting to make a virtue out of the the shambles. "You think we don't belong in the G7? Then **** you, we are quitting the WHO!" It's idiotic in the long run but there's a certain logic to it immediately. Besides, Putin knows that any real return to all of these venues entail him taking up residence in hell or the Hague and he has a regime to buttress today.

Putin has put Russia and his regime in an incredibly difficult spot. In essence, it has become clear to the decision makers and anyone who is in the know even tangentially that they cannot win at the current trajectory and no amount of escalation is likely to change that. But...and this is the biggie...Russia also can't lose without putting the entire power structure at risk. Official Russia is losing, knows it can't win, that it has no friends and that they are more than likely to be cannibalized economically for the foreseeable future. It's quite a big fall from what they thought they were getting into. The flailing about for something, anything to do in reaction is simply the external symptoms of that realization. Call it the "denial phase" and you won't be far off.

A friend tells me that the joke in Moscow is that Putin's policy is "To get back at the West, we will bomb Voronezh". And it gets better: As a wise man once said:

#JucheMir

Exactly.

A friend who was watching Polish developments early in this war told me something interesting: the Polish government was *not* favorable to accepting Ukrainian refugees when it all began but it was rocked on its heels by the intense outpouring of support for them by the Polish public and had to reverse course immediately. Outside of Hungary, similar sea changes in opinion have happened across the EU.

Before the war, the tendency was to over credit Putin with strategic nous. I think at the moment, there's a very understandable tendency to believe he has no long term strategic vision at all. My take is that you can see from the decision not to take the risk of mobilization, the successive reductions in the goals and scope of Russian offensives, the backdown from demands for payment in roubles for oil contracts and the payments to avoid default (inter alia) that Putin is being rational (if not reasonable to us). And all of those decisions were made after a pretty logical assessment of the costs/benefits of taking the more drastic route that would complicate things in the future for the Russian state. In short, there's clearly evidence that Russia has not decided to go full North Korea and any nuclear use would make that a given. They might do it and they are certainly signaling as hard as possible but so far that's all they've done. Let's hope that trend continues.

Russian doctrine says nuclear weapons could be used by Russia "in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it or its allies, and also in case of aggression against Russia with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened". It's very big step from that caveat to nuking Ukraine over Crimea. Forgetting the strictly military effects, I think it's a given that Russia would be ejected from its Security Council seat and the gloves would come completely off for aid to Ukraine, economic embargo, directly subverting Lukashenko and Putin's regimes, etc. And China's position would be, to put it mildly, unfavorable. China's no-first-use policy is very clear: "China undertakes not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon States or nuclear-weapon-free zones at any time or under any circumstances." As with every other scenario for using nukes, it's certainly possible but there's simply no case in which such a step makes things easier rather than harder for Putin and his kleptocracy.

All of this. The Turks are going to work the diplomatic situation to get some benefits. That's how it works. But everybody knows that Turkey has an enormous political/strategic stake in stopping Russia from dominating the Black Sea and Turkey has been quite helpful to the US and Ukraine though out this conflict. I would watch Orban more than Erdogan.

Note, I was for the Afghanistan withdrawal for pretty much exactly those reasons. But it's really important to not apply a one-size-fits-all approach to strategic policy. Afghanistan/Iraq/etc were peripheral conflicts of choice. The outcome was never going to affect the global order or our preeminent place within it in any significant way. In fact, those conflicts oriented the US away from peer threats and more important theaters and so could cogently be argued to have actually weakened that order which we lead and from which we reap the benefits. Ukraine and the Russian invasion are not in any way peripheral. It's on the border of NATO, on the border of the EU and uncontested Russian taking and control of that space would have profound global effects. Not least of those effects would be the immediate collapse of the rule that European states cannot violently settle disputes or borders. So, I have some sympathy for your argument but it's simply not applicable on this central of a challenge. P.S. I hope the above is not seen as political per se. It certainly is a very bipartisan position in DC at the moment.

Since Ukraine doesn't exist in a bubble and neither do we, we are involved whether we like it or not. That means we need to put our political power and money where it counts to produce a resolution that works to maintain a global order that's quite significantly canted in our favor. Ukraine did work mightily to prepare for this scenario but they were limited by innate capability, the then state of interstate politics in the EU, the ability/willingness of American administrations to help. For our part, the strategic goal should be to a; recognize that Russian aggression on this scale is highly destabilizing to the international order, b; pursue what means are feasible to put a stop to that aggression now and c; ensure that such aggression in the foreseeable future is not going to reoccur. We created the global order and benefit enormously in a myriad of ways large and small. $40 billion is a small price to pay to maintain it.

Betting on Russian aggression towards its near neighbors might be the safest bet going.

Biden's support actually took a big hit on the Afghan pullout from which he's never recovered. I was and am a supporter of the Afghan withdrawal but in DC politics walking away from virtually any military commitment is a very, very fraught business. Entire swathes of the media here made their careers on covering it, politicians buffed their images selling it and of course large corporations made billions upon billions supplying it. Withdrawing from the Ukraine commitment (much less NATO) will not be something that can now be easily done without enormous political risk...the antics of the fake ophthalmologist from Kentucky notwithstanding.

Generally a pessimist on this front but the one area in which American unity has distinctly improved is on the subject of Russia and Ukraine. In essence, there's simply not much of an internal opposition to helping Ukraine fight and win this war: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/04/06/seven-in-ten-americans-now-see-russia-as-an-enemy/

Yep. Xi has always seen Russia and Putin as a useful tool for China's ambitions. There's no entente cordiale between the two and never will be. China was told to expect a quick resolution to Ukraine in Russia's favor and planned accordingly with an extensive internal propaganda campaign to support the move. Russia didn't deliver, the reality is seeping into Chinese public consciousness and now China is adjusting.

There was a live feed with audio running from a cam near Maidan Square during that first week. I never heard a sustained gun battle near there (the Presidential offices, iirc is nearby) and only occasionally heard distinct gun fire (distant artillery and airstrikes were pretty common). I don't think anyone else did either or it would have been all over social media immediately. Additionally, Zelensky himself has never said in any interview that there was any kind of pitched battle for the building. It was obviously an intense situation and there was obviously a pretty large operation to kill off the Presidential office but it doesn't seem like it every got very close to doing the job. Yet another early indicator I missed at the time that the Ukrainian government really had it together.