Elon Musk Solves Ukraine!

For a smart guy, Elon is sometimes pretty dumb. Not only did he date Amber Heard, but he apparently froze embryos with her, whatever that was about. But just yesterday he got lots of attention when he solved Ukraine, whatever that was about:

Ukraine-Russia Peace:

- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

- Water supply to Crimea assured.

- Ukraine remains neutral.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022

If he was just trying to get attention, well, maybe he accomplished something, but at least as far as Ukraine is concerned, I'm still left with the question my co-worker used to blurt out in meetings, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

Recognize that even as of this past May, when Henry Kissinger made an equivalent proposal, he was thought even then to be behind the times, and by July, he'd reversed himself. To judge from yesterday's tweet, Elon still buys into last year's conventional wisdom that a balance of power must be maintained between NATO and Russia, and that balance hinges entirely on an uneasy ongoing game of appeasing Putin in Ukraine -- otherwise we "start World War III".

One reason I follow the Russo-Ukraine War with such interest is that it feeds my instinctive contrarian nature; conventional wisdom blows up there as frequently as the turrets fly off Russian tanks. Musk's views, and the views of the US right that still agrees with him, have been overtaken by events. Even so, as of this morninig, Tyler Durden continues to argue,

Bloomberg has observed that Musk's tweets are "drawing the wrath of Ukrainians" for his proposing a negotiated solution which would involve ceding Crimea for good, and for suggesting that citizens in occupied areas should "decide if they want to live in Russia or Ukraine," per the report.

Just the evening prior, journalist Michael Tracey pointed out the following, which is aptly demonstrated in Monday's Elon Musk Ukraine Twitter controversy...

"The media should do a much better job explaining to Americans that the reason they're at heightened nuclear risk right now is because the US government **knowingly chose to put them at heightened nuclear risk**," Tracey said. "Pro-war ideological zealots deliberately imposed this risk on them."

There are two issues here. One is that a referendum on Ukrainian independence was held in 1991, in which 92.3% of voters approved the parliament's declaration of independence from Russia. The voters in occupied areas after 2014 had approved independence in 1991 as well. You don't re-litigate such plebiscites every decade or two; there'd be chaos.

The second issue goes to the heart of the "start World War III" question. Durden's position is that Americans have been put at "heightened nuclear risk" due to US policies of arming Ukraine, which it is doing simply because Ukraine has demonstrated the ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield on one hand, but on the other, the conflict has illustrated Russian military weakness and incompetence at a level Western policymakers can't ignore.

The difficulty for the right's position is that World War III has already started, at least in the sense that there is now a near-direct live-fire confrontation between NATO and Russia, with Ukraine government spokesmen pointing out that Ukraine and NATO are in a de facto alliance. Indeed, Russian domestic propaganda is already explaining its battlefield defeats by claiming they're fighting NATO, not Ukraine.

But whether the conflict will ever become nuclear and thus officially "World War III" is currently an open question. The retired generals, who'd apparently been advised to stay quiet for several months, are back again on the talk shows indicating that Russia has been warned that any use of tactical weapons, which would be the first step in nuclear escalation, would be met by the US directly wiping out all Russian ground forces in Ukraine, as well as the Russian Black Sea fleet.

Realistically speaking, given the proven Russian battlefield weakness up to now, this would mean a complete military defeat for Russia that would render it innocuous as a geopolitical force. In fact, the retired generals are saying this will be the inevitable consequence of the current war, either in the short term if Russia goes nuclear, or in the longer term if it doesn't. Defense and diplomatic policymakers would be derelict not to recognize this completely new state of affairs.

In fact, to ignore this now would be to ignore the increasing evidence of mass civilian deaths in places like Mariupol, where current totals apparently exceed 100,000, with smaller but significant numbers everywhere in areas from which Russia has withdrawn. There seems to be general agreement that ignoring atrocities at such near-genocidal levels in return for "peace" is immoral.

Elon in particular, as far as I can see, isn't paying attention and has long since been overtaken by events.