Looking More Closely At Blinken

I've become more interested in Antony Blinken over the past several months, since he appears to be an independent policy actor within the Biden administration. In early March, less than two weeks after Putin invaded Ukraine, the White House and the Pentagon publicly contradicted Blinken over a plan to send secondhand Polish Migs to Ukraine:

But the proposal isn’t as simple as it seems and apparently caught US diplomats off guard when Poland announced the plan Tuesday. Previously, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had indicated that Poland sending jets to Ukraine would get “the green light” from the Biden administration, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, also supported the plan in an appearance on ABC’s This Week last Sunday.

However, the report said, "Biden administration concerns about escalating US involvement in the conflict appear to have stalled the deal." According to Politico,

[S]keptics inside the Biden administration pushed back on the idea of green-lighting the transfer of Poland’s MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine, and President Joe Biden sided with those skeptics, three U.S. officials said.

But by mid-April, Ukraine was nevertheless receiving "Mig parts" of unspecified provenance, while at the same time, the March fiasco with the White House fostering public internecine disagreements on Ukraine policy hasn't been repeated.

US Defense Department spokesman John Kirby, without wanting to go into details about the type of aircraft supplied to Ukraine or their operational status, commented as follows; "They have more fighter aircraft at their disposal today than they did two weeks ago. Without going into details about what other countries are supplying, I would say they have received additional aircraft and spare parts to augment their fleet," he then added.

My sixth sense tells me somebody got spanked, and Blinken emerged the eventual winner. Why? Let's to to Wikipedia. The first observation to make is that the Blinken family has been a member of the US upper class for generations. Consider Antony's father, Donald Blinken (1925-2022):

Blinken was born on November 11, 1925, in Yonkers, New York, the son of Maurice Blinken and his wife, Ethel (Horowitz). His father and mother were of Jewish descent and his father was originally from Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine). His grandfather was author Meir Blinken. Blinken had two brothers, Alan and Robert.

The brothers grew up both in New York City and Yonkers. They attended the Horace Mann School. Blinken graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1948, after serving in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II in 1944.

Although Jewish, considering Donald's father was able to send his sons to an exclusive prep school -- a clearer class marker than even an Ivy degree -- and then send Donald to Harvard at a time when Harvard still had a Jewish quota, it seems plain that the Blinkens were "Episcopalian Jews", who had been admitted to New York society since at least the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia doesn't go into the source of the family's wealth or standing, but it certainly seems to have given Donald a head start:

Blinken met Mark Rothko in 1956 and became an art collector. He was president of the Mark Rothko Foundation from 1976 to 1989. In 1984, the foundation distributed 1,000 art pieces to museums, including to the National Gallery of Art.

In 1966, Blinken co-founded E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York. He served as a director for Warburg Pincus, and served as chairman of the board of directors. From 1970 to 1976, Blinken was president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He was appointed to the board of trustees for the State University of New York by Governor Hugh Carey in September 1976 and was appointed the board's chairman in 1978. The board clashed with Governor Mario Cuomo as Cuomo wanted the board to cut spending. Blinken announced his resignation from the board in October 1989, which took effect with the confirmation of his successor in 1990.

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Blinken served on a special nomination panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1994, President Bill Clinton nominated Blinken to be the United States Ambassador to Hungary. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and served in the role until 1997. From 2000 to 2004, Blinken was the secretary-general of the World Federation of United Nations Associations.

We may assume that his nomination as Ambassador to Hungary was on the same basis as other ambassadorships to major countries, typically awarded to highly wealthy and influential political donors. In fact, his brother Alan Blinken , a Harvard alum as well, was also Ambassador to Belgium during the Clinton administration. While Donald was not a career diplomat, he nevertheless was in a position to further his son Antony's career:

Antony John Blinken (born April 16, 1962) is an American government official and diplomat serving as the 71st United States secretary of state since January 26, 2021. He previously served as deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under President Barack Obama.

During the Clinton administration, Blinken served in the State Department and in senior positions on the National Security Council from 1994 to 2001. He was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 2001 to 2002. He advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq while serving as the Democratic staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008. He was a foreign policy advisor for Joe Biden's 2008 presidential campaign, before advising the Obama–Biden presidential transition.

From 2009 to 2013, Blinken served as deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to the vice president. During his tenure in the Obama administration, he helped craft U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran. After leaving government service, Blinken moved into the private sector, co-founding WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm.

There can be little question that the Blinken family is a locus of power in US political and financial circles and has been, apparently since at least the 1930s. In the period after 2017 and before 2020, he

co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda. WestExec's clients have included Google's Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI, which signed a $7.2 million contract with the Air Force, and "Fortune 100 types". According to Foreign Policy, the firm's clientele includes "the defense industry, private equity firms, and hedge funds". Blinken received almost $1.2 million in compensation from WestExec.

In an interview with The Intercept, Flournoy described WestExec's role as facilitating relationships between Silicon Valley firms and the Department of Defense and law enforcement; Flournoy and others compared WestExec to Kissinger Associates.

But also,

Blinken, as well as other Biden transition team members Michele Flournoy, former Pentagon advisor, and Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense, are partners of private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners, a strategic partner of WestExec. Pine Island's chairman is John Thain, the final chairman of Merrill Lynch before its sale to Bank of America. Blinken went on leave from Pine Island in August 2020 to join the Biden campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor. He said he would divest himself of his equity stake in Pine Island if confirmed for a position in the Biden administration.

My preliminary estimate is that if anyone is in a position to spank Joe Biden, it's Antony Blinken. Blinken in fact strikes me as someone who may well determine Biden's eventual fate.

Biden, Trump, And Blinken

There was a big news pseudo-event yesterday when President Brandon, in yet another gaffe, asked during a speech at a White House conference, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” He was referring to the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who passed away this past August in an auto accident. The explanation appears to be that apparently, his notes (or the teleprompter) told him to make sure to honor the late representative, but weren't specific enough. Thus

In fact, Biden’s teleprompter was cueing him to speak about Walorski specifically because she is deceased. The man in possession of our nuclear football did not know the woman he was calling out for is dead, did not know he was supposed to be honoring her memory – because she is dead – and likely did not know what was supposed to happen after that moment.

Apparently, a memorial video was supposed to play, but the White House aides shut down the President and never played the video in a desperate attempt to erase his doddering cluelessness.

But as I've been saying all along, Biden isn't really "doddering", which is "moving in a feeble or unsteady way, especially because of old age". He's been this way all his life, and Barack Obama's handlers were acutely aware of this. The bottom line is that he is, and always has been, both dumb and lazy, but consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect, he doesn't think he needs to be told anything. So if his notes tell him be sure to mention Rep Walorski, he knows exactly what to do. Period.

This is nothing new, as even the conservative blogs now point out. The question for me is why his highest-ranking handlers -- Susan Rice in this case -- are constantly in reactive mode. He makes another gaffe, and yet again Rice, Ron Klain, or Ms Jean-Pierre has to clean things up.

But there's a dog that isn't barking. The one guy who never seems to have to run out with a mop and bucket is Sec Blinken, and that seems to be because somehow a basic ground rule has been set up that says Biden is not to make freelance utterances about Ukraine. This may have something to do with former Pentagon spokesman John Kirby's move to the White House press office, and there may also be an understanding that his handlers are simply not to allow any situation where the president is even able to make any but the most rigorously circumscribed remarks on the conflict.

Certainly this is not how the White House operates day to day, and I'm still really curious how this has come about. All I can say for now is that Sec Blinken has been rising in my estimation. But this brings up another problem, Donald Trump.

In a remarkable turn of events, former President Donald J. Trump offered to “head up [a] group” of peace negotiators between Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday morning, cautioning that the United States must act prudently in the wake of the suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

. . . Only Trump is demanding that the war end through negotiations.

“The Russia/Ukraine catastrophe should NEVER have happened, and would definitely not have happened if I were President,” Trump added on his Truth Social platform. “Do not make matters worse with the pipeline blowup. Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW. Both sides need and want it. The entire World is at stake. I will head up group???”

The biggest obstacle to any sort of negotiations over Ukraine for now is President Zelensky.

There will be no peace talks between Ukraine and Russia as long as Vladimir Putin remains Russian leader, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday night.

. . . Zelenskyy said Russia’s attempts to annex new Ukrainian territories were a “Crimea scenario,” referring to the Moscow-initiated referendum on the peninsula joining Russia in 2014, which has never been recognized by Kyiv or its Western backers.

“Russia’s implementation of the so-called Crimean scenario and another attempt to annex Ukrainian territory will mean that there is nothing to talk about with this President of Russia,” he said.

. . . According to Zelenskyy, the West should meet Putin’s escalation with defense, financial and sanctions support for Ukraine.

As an amateur strategist, I don't think it's difficult to conclude that Putin, or any likely successor, will simply negotiate in bad faith, use whatever cease-fire or partial withdrawal is achieved in negotiations as an opportunity to rearm, and resume his effort to occupy the whole of Ukraine at the first opportunity. For now, Sec Blinken is the one with a clear understanding of the situation, and on this issue, Trump has got it wrong.

I'm hoping Trump can clarify what his objectives would be if he had the opportunity to negotiate, but for now, the best case is Biden has been kept from interfering in Ukraine, Trump is out of power, and Blinken is in charge where it matters.

Parsing The Right's Case Against Aiding Ukraine

Recently I ran across two essays that outline what I take to be the right-wing case against aiding Ukraine. I have some suspicion that neither is completely ingenuous, but I'll take their points at face value. The first is by Michael Walsh, 'Not Worth the Bones of a Single Grenadier' at a site called The Pipeline, which seems to carry National Review types like John O'Sullivan. He begins with an argument we'll see again:

Bismarck was right about the Balkans, but he might as well have been speaking of the Ukraine, a troubled land (its name means "borderland"), oft-conquered, rarely independent, generally restive, and almost always miserable. Like the Kurds, the Ukrainians are for reasons of geography basically a people without a country. . .

But the same might be said about half of Europe; Poland wasn't a country at all throughout the 19th century; Belgium didn't emerge until 1830 and has been twice invaded since then by Germany, which itself didn't exist before 1871. Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, was partitioned by Germany in 1938, reemerged in 1945, but split into two separate states in 1993. Does Walsh propose some sort of exemption for Ukraine from the ongoing process of European national development? Does he think there might be a way to declare a timeout for Ukraine from history?

The Ukraine won its independence after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. As part of the deal, the Ukrainians were persuaded/coerced by Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, among other signatories to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, to surrender the nuclear weapons stationed on their soil. The key point for Russia was that the Ukraine, as a buffer state between itself and the West, should never be allowed to threaten the Russian homeland. . . . The idea was that Russia wouldn't threaten its former Warsaw Pact states and in return NATO wouldn't edge up to Russia's borders.

That may be, but a search in the text for the number "2014" brings no hits before the comments. But according to Wikipedia,

In February 2014, Russian forces seized or blockaded various airports and other strategic sites throughout Crimea. The troops were attached to the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Crimea, which placed Russia in violation of the Budapest Memorandum. . . . After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and US stated that Russian involvement was a breach of its Budapest Memorandum obligations to Ukraine and in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For some reason, omitting Putin's 2014 breach, Welsh claims it's the West's fault:

The West, of course, welshed on the deal, and has gradually been impressing other satellite countries near Russia's western border into the service of a now-explicitly anti-Russian (as opposed to anti-Soviet, as it was formerly). North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, more recently, the military powerhouses of Montenegro and North Macedonia. More are likely on their way, including Finland and Sweden, historically both enemies of Russia.

But isn't it the case that Putin's 2014 invasion of Crimea, and now his invasion of the rest of Ukraine, has made all these countries nervous not about the old Soviet Union, but about contemporary Russia? This in fact is the substance of Walsh's argument -- the rest of his essay is a general denunciation of Biden in thoroughly predictable terms:

The biggest cheerleaders for the Ukraine in the current war have turned out to be, surprise, Joe Biden and his always-wrong, America Last foreign policy establishment, headed by secretary of state Anthony Blinken, a retread from both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Biden and his noxious family have long used the Ukraine—the most corrupt country in Europe—as their personal piggybank and money laundromat, and in the recent past he has openly boasted about his ability to legally blackmail Ukrainian officials into doing his bidding. His word as a Biden!

The mention of Blinken, though, is worth pursuing, which I'll do in a moment. But let's move to the second essay from the right-wing perspective, Putin’s Last Laugh by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. After reviewing European doomsday predictions about the economic consequences of the war, Dreher sums up:

[W]hen Western leaders responded to Putin's invasion with an open attempt to destroy the Russian economy -- I quoted some of the statements by EU figures here yesterday -- what did they think Russia would do? It's incredible that seemingly intelligent people in the West live under the illusion that because Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal and immoral, that Russia should sit back and allow the West to destroy its economy without retaliating.

As far as I can tell, what he's saying is that although Russia broke every norm from the UN Charter to the Budapest Memorandum, Western leaders should have been aware that a guy who would do that would also turn off the gas piepelines. Or something like that. So what's his point, exactly? That because Putin would retaliate, the West should do nothing? He goes on,

So, how can we be surprised that Russia is using its energy weapon against the West? Again: we in the West have been waging economic war on Russia since the invasion (as well as sending Ukraine weapons and intelligence). You may think that waging economic war was and is the right thing to do morally, but you surely cannot be such a hypocrite as to say that Russia has no right to do what it's doing to the West now -- and you surely cannot be such a fool as to believe that this was not inevitable.

So he acknowledges Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international norms and intenational law, BUT:

To be clear: none of this excuses Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The loathing of Putin and Russia over this invasion, though, made it impossible for very many people in positions of leadership to think clearly about what was at stake in this conflict.

And that's essentially the end of his argument. He cites the example of an Irish cafe that may need to close if its electricity bill skyrockets. Well and good. Does this mean the West should not have imposed economic sanctions on Russia? He basically says Putin is despicable, but we shouldn't let this cloud our judgment. So what is his policy prescription? I will even grant him the possibility that sanctions, as in cases like Cuba or Iran, often don't have much effect, but Dreher must be aware that the US and NATO are doing much more than boycotting caviar -- they're sending tens of billions in direct military aid.

The military aid is having direct effect, forcing Putin to call up reserves to the point of potentially destabilizing his regime. If Dreher is against economic boycotts, is he also against military aid? Oddly, he isn't clear about this at all. So what should the West do? He actually has no prescription other than to suggest anything it does that actually has enough effect to make Putin retaliate is a bad idea. But hasn't there been a consensus since Hitler and the Sudeten crisis that appeasing dictators is a a bad idea, and avoiding small sacrifices in the short run means making much bigger ones later?

Walsh brings up Anthony Blinken as the enabler of current policies on Ukraine that date back to the Clinton administration. Indeed, Anthony Blinken's father, who passed away only this past week, was apparently a key figure:

Donald Mayer Blinken (November 11, 1925 – September 22, 2022) was an American businessman and diplomat. He served as the United States Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997. His son, Antony Blinken, is the current Secretary of State to United States President Joe Biden. . . . His father and mother were of Jewish descent and his father was originally from Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine). His grandfather was author Meir Blinken.

I've been wondering where current US Ukraine policy originated, and this may be a partial answer. My developing view is that the Blinken family represents an unaccustomed strain of at least partial competence in the current administration, and it is somehow consistent with the George Kennan-Averell Harriman policies of an earlier generation. The right-wing objections to it amount to appeasement.

I've also been wondering who's powerful enough behind the scenes to prevail on Biden not to interfere in Ukraine, and conversely, to say only what he's told to say about policy. The Blinkens may be at least a lead.

Russia's Problem Is A Problem For Orthodoxy

I've noted here now and then that there's a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox denomination, arising from the dissolution of the Soviet Union but recently exacerbated by the Russo-Ukraine War. The Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) says,

Prior to May 2022, the Primate of the UOC-MP was the most senior permanent member of the ROC's Holy Synod and thus had a say in its decision-making in respect of the rest of the ROC throughout the world. On May 27, 2022, the UOC declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate due to Patriarch Kirill's support of the invasion of Ukraine. Before its decision for full independence, more than 400 parishes had left the Moscow Patriarchate as a consequence of the invasion.

Most recently Patriarch Kirill has tied the Orthodox faith directly to fighting in Ukraine:

While celebrating the Divine Liturgy on Wednesday at the Zachatyevsky Monastery, which is traditionally considered the oldest convent in Moscow (a historically dubious claim), the Patriarch begins his sermon by recalling, not the birth of the Holy Mother, but the birth of the Fatherland at the Battle of Kulikovo.

. . . He declares that while retreat might be possible from worldly things, it’s impossible to retreat “from faith,” a powerful line, now a standard in his sermons, which draws an equivalency between Russian aggression in Ukraine and defending and living the Orthodox faith.

He then goes on to once again erase Ukraine from the historical map, saying that the people ought to pray that “Holy Russia would be reunited.” As he’s made clear before, Ukraine is not, to his mind, an independent nation, but a rogue territory within Russia. And keeping Ukraine as part of Russia is a sacred obligation. It’s also apparently what victory looks like for the Virgin Mary (she does get a shout out at the end).

Reading about individual parishes leaving a denomination reminds me of the "continuing Anglican" and related movements to leave the US Episcopal Church, and it's simply a bad sign, since it means an inevitable loss of prestige for the denomination as a whole, both the parent body and its contentious children. In the case of Russia, it ties the denomination to an unpopular war. During the Viet Nam war, most Christian denominations or people claiming to represent them were publicly against US policy, which on one hand protected the denominations from loss of face when the war went badly.

On the other hand, both the government and the denominations were also protected by the US constitutional ban on establishment of religion, so that no denomination of any stripe was forced to defend the government. The problem for Russian Orthodoxy is that it has been an agency of the Russian state in one form or another since 1721 under Peter the Great. In many ways, the Russian Orthodox Church's history in the 18th century echoed the history of the Church of England, with the government seizing monastic lands and influencing church governance.

Catherine even made sure that the salaries of all ranks of the clergy were paid by the state instead of the Church, resulting in the clergy effectively becoming employees of the state.

Even after 1917, while the communist government seized church valuables and for a time executed priests, religion was never fully abolished, and by the time of the 1941 German invasion, Stalin came to see the church as a convenient ally in the war. Thus Russian Orthodoxy has been tied to the state and specific state policies, including war, ever since the establishment of modern Russia. It's recognized that both Patriarch Kirill and his predecessor were KGB agents during the Soviet period:

Forbes reported on February 20, 2009 that, "Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies."

The difficulty for Russian Orthodoxy is that even through the disruptions of the 20th century, the denomination has continued as an agent of the Russian state, and the patriarch at this point is still a convenient puppet of the Russian autarch. It doesn't help that Russian Orthodox clergy have been not just state employees, but KGB agents, which compromises both their motives and their standing as ministers to the faithful.

In his recent sermon, Kirill tied Russian Orthodoxy to a founding event of the Russian state, the Battle of Kulikovo (1380). The problem for Russia generally is that its impending loss in Ukraine is bringing to mind other key historical events like the First (1410) and Second (1914) Battle of Tannenberg, which have also been cited as turning points in Russian history, and with them, Russian Orthodoxy.

This is also a problem at the core of Western right-wing support for Russia in the war, since many such supporters favor Putin for promoting conservative values in Russia, as opposed to Western countries that support Ukraine, when those governments also pursue policies that undermine sexual morality. The difficulty will increasingly be that Putin will lose prestige as events continue to develop, while at the same time evidence emerges of Russian policies that are nearly as destructive in Ukraine as either Hitler's or Stalin's.

While I was an Episcopalian, and since then as well, I noticed an incresing trend among their clergy especially to affect Orthodox forms -- for instance, to refer to the Virgin Mary as the Theotokos -- in an effort to borrow Orthodox prestige as the prestige of Anglicanism faded. I don't think that strategy will last much longer.

Trump's Latest On Ukraine

Via the UK Daily Mail -- there's not much on this in the US.

Former President Trump said he hopes is 'wrong' about the possibility of World War III because the U.S. is being run by 'stupid people' at a rally in Wilmington, N.C. on Friday.

'I was right about Ukraine. I was right about what, Taiwan and I'm hoping I'm not going to be right about World War Three, because we have stupid people dealing,' the former president said, as he predicted the U.S. would lose a conflict to Russia.

. . . 'Putin mentioned the N word,' Trump told the crowd. 'You know what the N word is? It's-- no, no, no, it's the nuclear word. You mentioned the N word yesterday. The nuclear were not supposed to be mentioned,' Trump continued, as he claimed the Russian invasion 'never would've happened' under his presidency.

As far as I can tell, Trump's remarks in Wilmington mainly covered US domestic politics and focused on endorsements of his favored list of North Carolina candidates -- the mentions of Ukraine and nukes were offhand and non specific. However, I've got to question what's up with two of his implications.

The first is that the US would "lose a conflict with Russia" as reported. At the moment, the Russo-Ukraine War is a proxy conflict with Russia in all but name, and the takeaways for now include:

• Ukraine fought Russia to a standstill within days of its initial invasion even without US weapons.
• Once largely obsolete second-hand weapons from former Warsaw Pact countries began to be supplied, Ukraine scored battlefield victories.
• US intelligence did provide a major advantage to Ukraine.
• Russia never achieved air superiority at any point in the invasion and has kept its strategic bombers well away from the area.
• Putin's recent mobilization suggests the invasion has drained its armed forces of trained manpower, and Russia will need to recruit and train new forces even to continue the Ukraine conflict, much less prosecute a wider war.

These circumstances reinforce the observations I've seen that had Russia invaded Poland rather then Ukraine, the result would likely have been immediate rout rather than a stalemate. So I've got to conclude that Russia simply doesn't have the capability to prosecute a major conflct even in a wider European theater -- it's being defeated in detail in Ukraine alone without any direct confrontation with any NATO power. So I simply have to conclude Trump is wrong on that assumption about World War III, at least if he means any sort of conventional war.

If instead he means Putin could push the doomsday button and just try to vaporize major cities without otherwise sending military forces abroad, I'm just not sure how that would work. Given how poorly the Russian weapons systems we've seen have performed, I'm not sure how his missiles would do much better, but even the short-term result of any such exchange would likely be the end of the Russian state.

Trump's next position is that the US is being run by "stupid people". In cases like Secs Mayorkas, Buttigieg, and Grantholm, and Attorney General Garland, I have no disagreement. The puzzles are Secs Blinken and Austin. It almost seems as though they've been able to work out some sort of deal with Biden's handlers whereby in exchange for promoting wokeness in military training and general diplomacy, they've received some type of firm carveout in Ukraine policy, whereby on on hand, Biden promises not to interfere, and on the other, as in his UN speech, he says exactly what he's told to say with no wandering off script.

At this point, as I've said here now and then, US Ukraine policy is achieving positive results in a remarkably cost-effective manner. This is, however, given the circumstances the US and NATO were handed as of late last year, that Putin made a reckless and destructive decision to invade Ukraine, followed through on it, and is currently doubling down to the point that a negotiated outcome short of complete Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 borders is unlikely.

What would Trump have done differently to avoid this? But whatever he might have done, how would Russia not invading Ukraine have led to a better outcome for the world, if the current more likely result of the war will be the disintegration of Russia as a geopolitical force? What are Trump's plans for this outcome now, if any?

"She Was 12 -- I Was 30"

Here's just another data point on the condition of the big guy's mind:

President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12.

“You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.”

Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard.

Videos of the remarks show a remarkably animated Biden as he recalls whatever the episode might have been:

As opposed to his normal affectless. squint-eyed expression, he's flirty and even devilish as he alludes to some mutual memory that had to have been at least a bit naughty. A few commentators have noted that the audience, teachers' union members, giggled and tittered with the big guy. It's all a big in joke. (As I review the video, though, I note the women behind Biden are the ones who are yukkin' it up. Most of the men, who seem to be Latin, aren't even smiling, and they look uncomfortable. I think they actually see the same point the women do, but it isn't funny to them at all.)

This goes to the question I raised in my post about Biden's visit to the UN: he goes off script at will, often to his detriment, and at times when a normal adult would be expected to show restraint. It's a problem Barack Obama and his advisers recognized. The man seems to have no self-control, and this goes back at least to the photo at the top of this post, which is with his daugher, Ashley. She was born in 1981, so this must have been taken around the time of his first presidential run in 1987-88.

Somehow, some adult somewhere is able to sit on the guy and make him focus on the program, as he did at least for 20 minutes or so at the UN. Otherwise, he does exactly as he pleases, and he gets away with it. It looks as though he's been able to do this all his life, and I would guess that people who've known him for many years can recount episodes of him wandering aimlessly around a dais that go back a long way as well.

This isn't dementia, this is lifelong habit borne of entitlement.

What Is Colonel Reisner's Real Message?

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war.

Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones.

Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with secondhand, obsolete Warsaw Pact weapons augmented with second-tier US artillery; this phase culminated in a repetition of the Kyiv rout, with the Russians forced out of almost all the Kharkiv region.

The current phase of the war has been characterized by the Russian recognition that its handling of the war has depleted its manpower, requiring a mobilization to replenish its army. While I'm an instinctive contrarian, there's a near consensus that the mobilization can accomplish little more than to send untrained and ill-equipped forces into confrontations that have no better prospects for success than the ones to date -- the pattern of stalemate punctuated by key Russian routs will continue until it can't.

The implications are dawning only slowly, but they're inevitable: Russia as a factor in geopolitics is simply disappearing as we watch. The one commentator who seems to be missing this is Col Reisner. His latest presentation is titled in English, Cognitive Warfare -- The Fight for your Heart and Mind. In German, it's Der Kampf um unsere Meinung.

Now, my German won't win any prizes, and the colonel's is quite good, but I did have a graduate-level course in how to translate German into English, and I don't like his English version of his German title. German Meinung is usually English "opinion", so the literal meaning of the German title would be "The Struggle for our Opinion". "Hearts and minds" is a mistranslation, since this is at best a US counterinsurgency term dating back to Lyndon Johnson's strategy to secure the loyalty of the Vietnamese against the Viet Cong -- but in subsequent years, it's also acquired a heavy irony, since the effort failed, and it carries a connotation of Johnsonian bombast. The colonel misses this. And unsere is "our", not "your"; that simply changes the meaning as well.

Why is the colonel, a sophisticated guy with a PhD, so obtuse? What I note about his three most recent YouTubes is that he focuses on the war from the Russian point of view, and even there, he omits almost any but the most optimistic takes. For instance, he focuses on the Russian threat to cut the natural gas supply and its potential for turning Western opinion against the war in the impending cold season. But this is simplistic; on one hand, this was thought to be a potential problem a few months ago, but more recently, things have leveled off:

Russia is a big player in world energy markets — not just in oil, but also natural gas and coal — with Europe being particularly vulnerable to changes in Russian energy supplies. Markets for oil and gas have been roiled since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributing to rising prices and inflation around the world — although energy prices are now coming down after those initial shocks. . . . the softening of prices alongside the decline in export volumes spell trouble for Russia.

The colonel doesn't mention social media, or even much Western news commentary at all, but Ukraine has actually dominated social media, both with proxy channels on YouTube that effectively portray the official line without identifying themselves as such, with independent Ukrainian YouTubers who simply speak as citizens, and with independent military analysts in any number of third countries on their own YouTube channels. The reddit /r ukraine conflict threads have an enormous international following that's almost entirely pro-Ukrainian. In contrast, pro-Russian social media is derided as amateurish and heavy-handed. The colonel either misses this completely or chooses not to mention it.

Nor does he mention the pro-Russian milbloggers who are themselves highly critical of the war's conduct, even though the Institute for the Study of War has been following the implications of what they say closely for weeks. For instance, in just its most recent report,

The quality of Russian bureaucrats and military trainers are [sic] also raising fears among the Russian pro-war crowd that the partial mobilization effort may not succeed. Milbloggers noted that employees of the military enlistment centers are unmotivated and underpaid, reducing their enthusiasm to adhere to the envisioned mobilization plan. Milbloggers also pleaded with officers and commanders in charge of preparing mobilized men for war to train them before deployment.

US generals have noted in interviews, however, that such training will almost certainly not take place. But even beyond the colonel's misreading or omission of the evidence on social media, the problem for Russia is simply that legacy media reports of missile attacks on hospitals, mass graves in the forest, or civilians shot in the head with hands tied and left unburied on the streets are bad press and will only strengthen Western popular support for Ukraine. This is another factor in the information war that the colonel simply omits, even though reports of atrocities, real or fabricated, have been key to wartime propaganda for more than a century.

For whatever reason, Colonel Reisner wants to stick to wishful thinking on Russia's ability to sustain its standing as a world power. One explanation may be Austria's continued national policy of neutrality, a Cold War artifact that realpolitik has abandoned in much of Europe for a generation -- but it may be in the colonel's career interests to endorse it, at least in his current political envioronment.

But otherwise, it's harder and harder to take him seriously.

I'm Not Weeping For Scott Adams

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news:

“Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers.

Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News.

“It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories.

I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at the time, and he also noted that he was in print media, an industry where it was harder and harder to make a buck. The syndicates were cutting back then as well, and the reason was simply that there were more and more things they couldn't afford.

Nevertheless, he still gave us YouTubers tours of his brand new mansion. It suited him at the time to point out how well he was doing, notwithstanding he was already having his income cut. But according to Wikipedia, he just turned 65 in June. Wikipedia also says,

In 2020, Adams said: "For context, I expect my Dilbert income to largely disappear in the next year as newspapers close up forever. The coronavirus sped up that inevitable trend. Like many of you, I'm reinventing my life for a post-coronavirus world."

So he predicted what would happen to him this year two years ago, but now he's talking as if this is new and maybe a result of him criticizing wokeness. Beyhond that, he has an MBA and had at least an average MBA career before he hit the big time as a cartoonist in the early 1990s. He must be aware that comic strips have a shelf life; The Far Side was a cartoon series that lasted 15 years and ended with its creator, Gary Larson, retiring at age 44 in 1995. According to Wikipedia,

By late 1994, Larson thought the series was getting repetitive and did not want to enter what he called the "Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons." He retired the strip on January 1, 1995, when he was 44 years old. . . . For the most part, he has also retired from public view: "He refuses to have his picture taken and avoids being on TV", Time magazine wrote in 2003. To Larson, "cartoonists are expected to be anonymous."

That's not Scott Adams, huh? Seems like he's creating an ongoing public drama about how his income is going down and he's practically destitute. But out of curiosity, I went looking for his recent takes on wokeness in the Dilbert strip, and if the one at the top of the post here is any indication, I don't think they're all that funny. I would also hazard a guess that if you're going to go political in a comic strip, you'd better be smart, although Adams claims to have an IQ of 187. Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, had better moves:

Senator Joe McCarthy’s appearance in the strip in 1953, as a malicious wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey, was a particular “hot potato.” In October of 1954—just before the actual McCarthy would be censured by the Senate—Malarkey made another appearance. This time, the editor of the Providence Bulletin told Kelly that if Malarkey’s face appeared in the strip again, the paper would drop the strip.

Kelly finessed this by introducing a character from Providence, giving Malarkey the line “nobody from Providence should see me!” before he pulls an empty bait bag over his head. This had the double effect of getting rid of Malarkey’s face and making him look like a Klan member. “Now we find we are kidded” the Bulletin’s editor admitted, moving the strip to the op-ed page, where satire was evidently permitted.

What I'm seeing with Scott Adams is more that he's at least smart enough to have known that everything has a sell-by date, but he's having a hard time dealing with it. Even so, whatever his financial situation with the big mansion, he now has payments not to one ex-wife but two, having divorced his most recent one this past spring.

I guess that's what an IQ of 187 gets you

Biden At The UN

I'm convinced there's a latter-day George F Kennan now at the State Department who, like the one who wrote the Long Telegram, has the ear of some contemproary Averell Harriman, who in turn can tell important people what to do. Consider that the one area in which President Brandon has effectively recused himself in recent months has been Ukraine. Either Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, or Gen Milley articulates US Ukraine policy and says (or carefully omits to say) what weapons we are sending there. Early in the game, it seems the big guy contradicted Secretary Blinken on whether Ukraine would get third-party surplus Migs, but somehow the Migs happened anyhow, while the big guy effectively stopped talking about Ukraine. At all.

Biden's tendency to ramble and interfere has been fairly well documented, for instance:

The veteran Senator, as Obama saw it, had a tendency to “ramble, clearly loving every minute of it".

The would-be President is said to have confided in his advisor David Axelrod: “Joe Biden is a decent guy but man, that guy can just talk and talk. It's an incredible thing to see.”

In Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearing during George W.Bush’s presidency, Obama is alleged to have passed a staffer a note saying: 'Shoot. Me. Now,' as Biden addressed the hearing.

The book also claims, “The biggest insult to Biden was how little his input mattered to Obama's inner circle.

This tendency to go off script and run his mouth was displayed just this past weekend, when he variously declared in an interview that COVID was over, contradicting Dr Fauci, announced US troops would defend Taiwan, against established State Department policy, and gave a muddled and unconvincing reply to Putin's nuclear threats that discomfited the generals. Yet, since the business of the Migs, he's stayed out of Ukraine, pretty much except for yesterday, when he addressed the UN. But there was nothing freelance or prolix about that.

His address to the General Assembly was not, shall we say, vintage Joe Biden. He simply does not normally talk this way.

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, my fellow leaders, in the last year, our world has experienced great upheaval: a growing crisis in food insecurity; record heat, floods, and droughts; COVID-19; inflation; and a brutal, needless war — a war chosen by one man, to be very blunt.

Let us speak plainly. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor, attempted to erase a sovereign state from the map.

Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter — no more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force.

Elevated diction. Parallel structure. Stately rhythm. Four-syllable words. And minimal stuttering and stumbling. This wasn't written by his normal handlers. It presumably came from the mandarins at State whose predecessors wrote the same material for John F Kennedy. Somebody not only got it written, but somebody else was able to tell the big guy to shut up, sit down, read this through more than once before you deliver it, and follow the teleprompter. You want to ramble and interfere? Tough. Do it the way we tell you.

And he did. It wasn't perfect, but the garbling and misspeaking were much more under control than usual. And I can only contrast this with his behavior only hours after the address:

Joe Biden spoke to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, but the most disturbing part of his day happened afterward. The president took that stage at an event sponsored by The Global Fund, which does work regarding AIDS and other diseases, and things went off the rails. In this case, quite literally.

A video is circulating showing Biden appearing to be completely dazed and confused, fumbling around the stage as his handlers attempt to talk him down. Meanwhile, another man is speaking, trying to thank him for being there while the president appears to have no idea what’s happening.

Here's a version of the video:

There was nothing particularly new about this episode; he's become well known for wandering around the stage and shaking hands with people who aren't there. What's intriguing is that it came so soon after his performance at the General Assembly, where this sort of thing in fact did not happen. What was the difference? Donald Trump has suggested in the past that he gets some sort of shot before debates and other such events that keeps him alert and on the ball for some period of time. If so, it may have worn off by the time he spoke at the Global Fund. On the other hand, we have no direct evidence of anything like this.

But even if we stipulate that this is the explanation, we still have the question of who's able to make him get that shot, because he clearly doesn't get it before every appearance. Even if the shot is the explanation, someone decides when he absolutely has to take it. On the other hand, if there's no shot -- and so far, there's no real evidence there is one -- someone still seems able to sit him down, tell him to serious up, read this damn speech before you deliver it, and pay attention to the teleprompter. But Barack Obama himself was never able to do this, from informed accounts.

So, if it isn't Barack Obama, who is? And let's face it, our Ukraine policy has been about the wisest and best-executed of any, from any administration, probably since Reagan. Someone has been able to tell Biden to stay out of it and make that instruction stick. In that one area, no other.

Isn't that odd?

US Presidents And The N-Word

The N-word in this case is "narcissism". Last week I ran across this more or less typical piece of pop psychology:

Based on an analysis of the 19 presidents who served between 1897 and 2009 (from William McKinley to George W. Bush), the degree to which a commander in chief exhibited grandiose narcissistic personality traits is correlated with the duration of any wars they presided over.

. . . [Ohio State political scientist John P Harden] used data pulled from the Correlates of War database, which tracks conflicts involving at least 1,000 deaths in battle within a one-year period – so 11 operations for the US during the study period.

This was cross-referenced with previous research that analyzed the characters of US presidents, in part through their biographers. High levels of assertiveness and excitement-seeking, and low levels of modesty, compliance and straightforwardness were used to measure narcissistic tendencies.

US chiefs who scored lower on narcissism, including McKinley and Eisenhower, tended to put the interests of the state first. Wars were pursued only as a last resort, and were ended as quickly as possible – see Eisenhower's quick exit from the Korean War, for example.

Those presidents who ranked higher for narcissism, such as Roosevelt and Nixon, were less likely to separate personal and state interests, carrying on conflicts for longer. For example, Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, and continued it for another four years.

So I'm puzzled. McKinley, apparently thought not to be a narcissist, or at least not a big one, waged the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most attention-seeking of US presidents, won the Nobel Peace Prize and pursued a foreign policy of mediating international disputes. No wars began during his administration. The same might be said of Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, even though Coolidge was a "highly visible president":

During his 67 months as President, he held 520 press conferences or an average of nearly eight each month, "bringing himself almost daily," wrote a reporter in 1927, "into the American home." He spoke on the radio at least monthly to national audiences. Coolidge also enjoyed having himself photographed. To the delight of cameramen, the President posed in old-fashioned overalls (when working on his father's farm), full Indian headdress (speaking to a crowd of ten thousand Sioux), and cowboy chaps and hat (on vacation in South Dakota). He was the first President to appear in a talking film--a recording of one of his speeches.

On the other hand, regarding his highly ambitious and self-satisfied successor,

Coolidge thought Hoover boastful and derided him as "Wonder Boy." "That man," he said, "has offered me unsolicited advice every day for six years, all of it bad."

Yet neither started a war. Franklin Roosevelt had the Second World War effectively forced on him and followed policies aimed at shortening the war, such as aiding the Soviet Union against Hitler. He appears to have followed Eisenhower's advice of avoiding unnecessarily expensive maneuvers to secure Berlin, leaving that to the Soviets. His successor Truman, as much a publicity seeker as any other president, accepted the atomic bomb as a means of hastening Japanese surrender.

What can anyone say about Nixon? He's as much a nebbish or a neurotic as a narcissist. This goes to the problem that "narcissist" has become a meaningless term. I've been culling my bookshelves for books that are long out of fashion and that I'll never read again, and I came across two by the once-popular psychiatrist M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie (out they went). Although Peck does use the term, he wrote before "narcissism" became the effective universal descriptor for nearly any personality trait.

In fact, just ten years ago, a young and ambitious "continuing Anglican" priest who had discovered Peck while in seminary (I can only think belatedly; People of the Lie was published in 1983) decided the problem with a more senior priest he wanted to edge out in the transition to the ordinariate was that the senior man was a person of the lie and denounced him in Peck's terms to all who would listen. It says something about the whole situation that he must not have understood the current expression should be "narcissist", not "person of the lie", and neither, apparently, did his listeners -- and it says something about the ordinariate that the older man was passed over in favor of the younger with those advanced ideas.

Getting rid of books I'll never open again is turning out to be a big job. So far, though, I haven't run into any books about narcissism.

The Pandemic Is Over!

As the saying goes, you don't have dementia if you forget your keys. You have dementia if you forget what your keys are for. President Brandon seems to have stepped all over not just his allies but his diplomatic advisers in Sunday's 60 Minutes interview , but I see no signs of dementia.

The reaction at the Daily Kos was predictable to his announcement that the pandemic is over: 'You’re counting votes.' We are 'counting bodies': Experts outraged at Biden deeming pandemic over. But nobody seems to dispute that he was aware of his surroundings, knew this was a television interview, and was more or less aware of the questions and giving answers that reflected the overall context.

The problem was that he basically hadn't done the prep. The public health establishment is at the very best deeply divided over what to do next with the pandemic; over the summer, it became clear that the public is fed up with vax and masks, and it quietly backed off on threats to reimpose indoor masking in LA County. On the other hand, the FDA has just authorized yet another set of COVID boosters, and the CDC is beginning the push for a new round of vax. From the redoubtable Dr Walensky:

“The updated COVID-19 boosters are formulated to better protect against the most recently circulating COVID-19 variant. They can help restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination and were designed to provide broader protection against newer variants. This recommendation followed a comprehensive scientific evaluation and robust scientific discussion. If you are eligible, there is no bad time to get your COVID-19 booster and I strongly encourage you to receive it.”

Think of the hit to Big Pharma's bottom line if COVID goes away! Nobody seems to have briefed the big guy about this, or if they did, he didn't listen, or he didn't think of it when it came up. He forgot the keys, but he didn't forget what the keys were for. The same applies to his remarks on Taiwan:

President Joe Biden in an interview that aired Sunday said US military personnel would defend Taiwan if the Chinese military were to launch an invasion of the democratically ruled island, in comments that yet again appear to venture beyond the longstanding US policy on the issue.

The comments on CBS’s “60 Minutes” reiterate a pledge to defend Taiwan that Biden has previously made, though Sunday he specified that “US men and women” would be involved in the effort.

In an interview, Biden was asked whether “US forces, US men and women, would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” a prospect US officials privately fear is becoming more likely.

“Yes,” Biden said.

It’s not the first time Biden has gone further in his public comments than the longstanding US approach of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to the defense of Taiwan. Most recently, during a visit to Tokyo in May, Biden said the US would intervene militarily if China attempts to take Taiwan by force.

The White House has been quick to downplay Biden’s previous comments on Taiwan, reiterating that US policy hasn’t changed, and on Sunday, “60 Minutes” reported receiving a similar response to Biden’s answers in their interview.

I would actually say that in both cases, Biden's remarks reflect sounder policy than the conventional wisdom with which he may have been briefed, and it's very likely in the interests of everyone but Beijing to have US policy on defending Taiwan a worrisome matter. And beyond any question, not only do we need to be done with COVID, but everything from the lab leak to the lockdowns needs to be thoroughly investigated to prevent it happening again, something on which Biden will never follow through.

None of the excitement, though, means there's any actual daylight between Biden and the public health or diplomaic elites. Biden isn't any sort of closet moderate. In a meeting with his handlers the next day, he'll be just as likely to insist the pandemic is raging on, and nobody with any sense would promise Taiwan will be defended with US troops. The problem is that Biden isn't much different from his vice president when it comes to reading his briefings, and when he gets out in public without his minders, he simply wings it. He's just unprepared. This applies as well to his warning to Putin about nukes:

", , , I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to [Putin] if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons."

"Don't. Don't. Don't. . . " Mr. Biden said.

"Don't. Don't. Don't," is what victims say just before they're shot. One of the talking-head retired generals, I forget which, remarked that it would have been much better if Biden had said nothing. But it was what it was.

I'm not sure if, on balance, Dubya was much smarter than Biden, but he was at least more diligent, he did his homework, and he listened to Dick Cheney, for whatever that was worth. Biden's problem is that he's dumb as a rock and lazy, and beyond that, he's entitled. He's all those, but none of them is a medical issue.

Trump On Putin

Yesterday, I noted that prior to the first weeks of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was an effective consensus that Russia was the second-strongest military power and a near peer to the US and NATO. Trump has had a fair amount of criticism for remarks earlier this year that have been interpreted as "praising Putin", but I think if we take them in context of prevailing world opinion, they don't strike me as unusual. This piece at CNN lists some of Trump's remarks on Putin from last spring:

At a campaign rally in Georgia [March 26], the former President, again, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’”

Trump added that Putin made a “big mistake,” but that “it looked like a great negotiation.”

I find this hard to fault, given the assumptions pretty much everyone in public life had about Putin up to the failure of the February invasion. He had a powerful army. Ukraine had been in the news chiefly for Burisma and its $50,000 a month payments to Hunter Biden, which suggested the country was a hopelessly corrupt backwater in the Afghan league. Putin's demand on the face of it was simply that the West provide assurance that Ukraine would enter neither the EU nor NATO and continue to serve as a neutral buffer for Russia. Putin's stick would be that Russian tanks would roll into Kyiv, and any effort by the West to stop this would be an overextension.

Earlier in the war, this position was at least arguable. In May, Pope Francis said,

“NATO barking at Russia’s doors” may have raised alarms in the Kremlin about the Western European alliance’s intentions in Ukraine. “I can’t say if (Russia’s) anger was provoked,” he continued, “but facilitated, maybe yes.”

What permanently changed the consensus on Putin's intentions was the revelation of Russian atrocities in places like Bucha following its withdrawal from the Kyiv region in April, which showed that Putin didn't in practice want Ukraine to be a neutral buffer, but instead was willing to exterminate some large part of its population and pillage its modest wealth. Even Pope Francis's public statements have hardened toward Russia since that time. However, at the time of the invasion and its runup, nobody prominent in public life foresaw that outcome. In a February 22 interview, two days before the invasion on February 24, Trump said,

BUCK [SEXTON]: Mr. President, in the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this White House is stating that this is an “invasion.” That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. (sarcastic)

So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.

Trump at that stage, before any tanks had actually rolled in, was relying on Putin's public statements as an indication of his strategy, and it's worth noting that if that was all that happened -- Putin entered disputed regions exclusively as a "peacekeeping" force -- the situation would have been far less clear and Putin's position at least more sustainable. And Trump's later remarks quoted above a month later, March 26, support this view: Putin made a “big mistake” in an all-out invasion, but in the days immediately prior, “it looked like a great negotiation.” Later in the February 22 interview, Trump said,

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, even “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd said this weekend during his show — I was watching it for a change and he said — (summarized), “How come there’s been no invasion during the period of time that the Trump administration was there but they did invade — very severely invade — with Obama and then they waited and then they invaded?”

This would never have happened if we were there. But he did. Chuck Todd asked that question. How come there was none of this happening during the Trump administration? I knew Putin very well. I got along with him great. He liked me. I liked him. I mean, you know, he’s a tough cookie, got a lot of the great charm and a lot of pride. But the way he — and he loves his country, you know? He loves his country. He’s acting a little differently I think now.

This again is consistent with observations by other prominent figures like Condoleeza Rice that Putin has changed and is not the person they worked with. And Trump is saying this two days before the actual invasion, when the extent of Putin's miscalculation was completely unknown. Some of these remarks have been taken out of context, including by President Zelensky as recently as a week ago:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was surprised by former President Trump’s continued praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin even after Moscow invaded Ukraine, given how much information Trump was privy to about the fellow world leader.

“I believe he had enough time, plenty of time, to understand who Putin is,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview aired Sunday.

. . . “Ukraine in his eyes is too far away. But this war has no distances it could not cover, so I believe he needs to look at the situation without, as we say, pink glasses on,” Zelensky said, per CNN’s translation.

However, as of March 15, a little over two weeks after the invasion, Trump said,

“I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border. I thought he was negotiating,” Trump told the outlet in a phone interview. “I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate.”

. . . “I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along,” Trump said. “And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

As far as I can tell, these remarks are the bulk of what Trump has said since the invasion. I would guess that Zelensky has been shown only what Trump said in the February 22 interview, and that's the basis for his comments this month. We'll have to see what else Trump may eventually have to say about Ukraine in light of more recent developments, but from what we currently have, once he became more fully aware of the actual circumstances, his position has been that Putin has changed and is not the negotiating genius he once thought.

The State Of Commentary On The War

The Austrian Col Markus Reisner is still highly regarded as a war analyst on reddit, but as I've noted, although he certainly looks the part, his recent commentary has been largely irrelevant, overtaken by events, and even disingenuous. On the other hand, the eponymous Kos at the left-wing Daily Kos has been consistently the most insightful and predictive throughout the war. Let's take an example. Here's last night's analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, which is actually a cut above their usual performance:

Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. . . . The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut or Donetsk City on a large enough scale to derail Ukrainian counteroffensives and appear to be continuing an almost robotic effort to gain ground in Donetsk Oblast that seems increasingly divorced from the overall realities of the theater.

There's some furrowing of the brow and stroking of the chin, but no real attempt to explain why. As of early this morning, Kos does a much better job with the same material:

It’s patently absurd that at the same time that Ukraine is notching gains in Kherson, Kharkiv, and northern Luhansk Oblasts, Russia is wasting time, men, and material pushing forward in a region that offers no strategic payoff.

Indeed, the original point of attacking this front was to form the southern claw of a pincer movement that would’ve trapped tens of thousands of entrenched Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. . . . This pincer plan was the reason Russia pushed hard into Izyum, at great logistical cost.

. . . Still, as long as they held Izyum, Russia could maintain the fiction that pushing hard in Donetsk oblast made some kind of military sense. But now that Izyum is liberated, what exactly is the military reason to continue this self-destructive behavior?

This in fact is the unmentioned elephant in the room of Col Reisner's latest YouTube commentary -- in his prior July presentation, he stressed the Russian pincer strategy and strongly implied its likelihood of success. But faced with the Russian withdrawal from Izyum, Col Reisner has simply dropped any further mention of the pincers. But let's return to Kos's question, why are the Russians continuing to attack at the southern claw of the pincer when the northern claw is no longer in play?

The reason is simple: Russia isn’t actually in charge in this corner of the front.

This is Wagner PMC (private military contractor) territory. Russian forces lack a unified command: there’s the Russian army (divided into sectors led by separate military districts), VDV (airborne)corps, Luhansk proxies, Donetsk proxies, Rosgvardia (Putin’s personal army, the national guard), the Chechen Kadyrovites, and Wagner mercenaries.

So we laughed at pro-Russian sources for celebrating the capture of that hill near Kodema while the entire northern front was collapsing. Yet they were genuinely celebrating in Wagner circles. . . . Wagner’s corporate leadership apparently decided that “we’re the only group in Russia making progress” was a much better business development slogan than “we’re all in this together.”

Kos concludes that Russian strategy is a [redacted]. This is certainly a better explanation -- or maybe I should say, simply an explanation, in the absence of any from Col Reisner or the ISW -- but why is this insight still so rare and hard to reach? I think it's still reasonable to ask why US and Western strategic analysis generally saw the Russian military as a near-peer to the US and NATO. Let's keep iin mind that before February, Trump was hardly unique in seeing Putin as a negotiating genius in threatening to invade Ukraine -- Trump thought it was a legitimate trade for Putin to offer the status quo in Ukraine in return for a Western agreement to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the EU.

That assessment in turn was based on the prewar consensus that a Russian invasion would see tanks in Kyiv in a matter of days. I believe that if you'd asked anyone, Trump, Biden, Obama, Boris Johnson, Merkel, Macron, whomever, you'd have had agreement on that outcome. Yet within weeks of the actual invasion, it emerged that a third-rate power could fight the putative near-peer to the US and NATO to a standstill with improvised hand-held weapons and cheap drones.

This in fact has been a lesson for the US in misapplied spending. So far, we've spent $15 billion in the Ukraine war that's likely to end permanently any assumption that Russia is our military near-peer. In comparison, the futile Afghanistan exercise cost over $2 trillion, nearly $300 million a day. It failed to defeat the Taliban and had little perceptible impact over and above the two Iraq wars in containing Islamism. My calculator says $300 million a day is about $110 billion a year. The money we've spent in Ukraine, and the money we're likely to spend, will be far more of a bargain.

On top of that, initial hesitation on matters like supplying Ukraine with secondhand Migs via third parties or giving them heavy artillery on the basis that such moves would provoke Putin and start World War III also proved misguided, as did assumptions that Ukraine's military was just as corrupt and incompetent as Russia's. What was the source of these miscalculations on our part?

That's the real question worth pursuing.

The Ivy League Hasn't Changed

Every couple of decades I seem to run into something that conveys the essence of the Ivy League as I experienced it as an undergraduate. My wife normally removes all communications from my alma mater from the incoming mail and quietly throws them out before I can see them, but around 20 years ago, she missed an invitation from a local alumni group to attend a lecture from one of the "superstar" (their word) professors who'd be visiting. I decided to attend. The lecture was so awful that I wound up getting involved in the ill-fated Dartmouth alumni trustee movement to see what I might do to change things. At least I didn't get a heart attack, and that's a different story anyhow, but it's an indicator of why my wife normally keeps that sort of thing away from me.

Just lately, Yale has been running a series of YouTube lectures on Ukraine by one of their own superstars, Timothy Snyder. There's a link to one of them at the top of this post. I watched it, because I somehow expected worthwhile insight on Ukraine, but the puzzling thing was that there was actually almost no useful information about Ukraine in it. (In contrast, Ukraine historian Rabbi Henry Abramson's YouTube channel has far better presentations on Ukraine history and the current war.)

But if you watch any of the Timothy Snyder YouTubes on Ukraine, several strange things pop out. The first, from the context of remarks and asides he makes throughout the lectures, is that this is apparently a first-semester course for first-year undergraduates, and that's a little off, because on one hand, I would have expected (if I were a first-semester, first-year undergraduate) to be hearing insights into the current conflict based on the concrete experience of someone who's been there and been involved. Not a bit of it; if you want that, go watch Rabbi Abramson.

Instead, Prof Synder's lectures are peppered with digressions and asides that are clearly intended just to flatter the audience, who are, after all, impressionable kids who've just arrived on campus -- and beyond that, they've already been primed with the expectation that they've been selected in a rigorous, merit-based process that's filtered each one of them out as the crème de la crème -- they've been effectively told this in their acceptance letters. Snyder's lectures in fact contain a running joke that in effect,"You've been waiting to learn what special things you learn in a Yale class -- well, here it is. It's complicated!"

And on one hand, this is the great post-modern insight. What is a nation? Who knows? Philosophers just keep asking. How does a nation form? Who knows? It's complicated! And anyone who thinks he knows the answer is probably a Trumpist, which is what we definitely are not here. But then he switches to a sort of quasi-Hegelian formulation that there is in fact a universal three-phase national myth, a golden time of the founding, followed by a time when the founding principles were corrupted, which leads us to the present, when we are called to return to the principles of the founding.

Somehow, Ivy undergraduates are always expected to draw quasi-Hegelian conclusions, or maybe to have quasi-Hegelian conclusions drawn for them.

Snyder feels that Putinism represents this quasi-Hegelian national myth for Russia, which calls them to purify the Rus by invading Ukraine. But Trump also promotes this myth for the US in the form of MAGA, which is as destructive as Putinism. QED or something. What on earth does this have to do with the Ukraine war? And does this three-phase myth apply to Ukraine itself? If so, how? If not, why not? Well, apparently it's complicated, because Snyder won't go into it.

Oddly, Snyder encourages the class to interrupt him with questions, but nobody does. I think the answer is he's showing them how to be good Ivy Leaguers, and they aren't going to dispute it; they're there to drink the Kool-Aid, after all. If I had been in the class, though, here's the question I'd ask: "Physicists can differ on whether quantum physics or particle physics explains the world, but neither one affects how we drive a car. You can say everything's complicated, and there's a three-phase national myth, but how does that affect how we make policy? Is there any way we can come out of this class with a clearer idea of what we should be doing in Ukraine?"

My experience as an Ivy undergraduate, as well as an adult who's been through a graduate program and later occasionally interacted with Ivy League professors, is that the professor will become upset with that sort of question, dismiss it or trivialize it with a joke, and refuse to engage further. The subject of the lecture is not what might be the best Ukraine policy, the subject of the lecture is how to be an Ivy Leaguer.

I've remarked here now and then that a few weeks into my first semester at Dartmouth, I went to the dean of freshmen first-year and told him I thought there'd been a terrible mistake. He convinced me to stick it through, but I never thought I was wrong. And if you want to learn about Ukraine, listen to Rabbi Abramson, not Prof Snyder.