How Is The Putative Ukraine Crisis Not A Boondoggle?

Boondoggle has multiple meanings, but this one from the Urban Dictionary actually seems applicable to the current moment: there's some sort of diplomatic party going on in Munich, to which President Biden has dispatched Vice President Harris, who as far as anyone can tell is incapable of doing anything but relaxing/fun stuff other than work. Yesterday she made the following remarks at the Westin Grand Munich to illustrate that:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, this was an important trip to be here at the Munich Security Conference — in particular this year, as I said yesterday.

We are looking at a moment that is a very decisive moment on one of the bases for the Munich Security Conference and certainly one of the founding reasons for NATO, which is European security and the connection and alliance between Europe and the United States.

This was a productive trip, in terms of the extensive bilateral meetings that we had that were in furtherance of the ongoing collaboration and partnership with our Allies.

It was important in that, as you all know, this is a moment that is very dynamic. If not every hour, certainly every day, there seem to be new moments of interest and also of intelligence.

Why just yesterday afternoon, the defense minister made a most illuminating Power Point presentation! Seriously, against what we're being told is a background of tanks almost rolling into Kyiv, this is the relative urgency with which our officials are actually treating the situation. New moments of interest indeed. Over the weekend I ran into this gaseous think piece in The Atlantic, Putin Has Made America Great Again:

The story of the Ukraine crisis so far has been about many things: blackmail; realpolitik; appeasement; even, apparently, Western provocation regardless of the facts. But, here in Europe, the one thing it very much has not been about is American decline. In fact, from here, the story of this latest crisis is of the reestablishment of America the Good, America the Bold, America the Supreme—and, by extension, Europe the Weak.

, , , While America itself continues to struggle with its own sense of decline, its dominions in Europe are choosing to suspend their disbelief in the imperium all over again. After years of grumbling about American power, it took only the whiff of a threat from Moscow for Europe to recommit to the old order, thrusting the battered old fasces of imperial authority back into the hands of the emperor in Washington.

Why, they all got together in breakout sessions at the Westin Grand Munich to celebrate that very development! But hundreds of words farther down, we get to the real point:

In his inaugural address, Biden’s message to the world was that America had been tested, but had come back stronger as a result. The country would, he said, “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” America, he was saying, was ready to resume its role as leader of the free world, a “trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Rereading these lines today, in light of the Ukraine crisis, you can conclude that he has partly made good on his promise, despite the debacle in Afghanistan. He has shepherded the West into a unified position on Ukraine through careful and conciliatory diplomacy. Yet Russia’s challenge to the West today, as it amasses its troops on Ukraine’s borders, is predicated on its belief that American power is retreating, and with it the power of its example. Europe’s response, however, has been to reveal how powerful America remains.

Sleepy Joe? I don't see it. President Brandon at long last elected not to spend the holiday weekend in Delaware, instead waiting anxiously in the White House for Kamala Harris's latest tidbits of interest and intelligence, or so it would seem. The puzzling thing is that the US appears to be trying to inflame the situation:

The Washington Post obtained a copy of a letter sent from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Bathsheba Nell Crocker to Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. The letter warned that the U.S. has “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the report, calling it “absolute fiction” and saying during a call with reporters: “Do you realize that this is an absolute canard, a lie? It is absolute fiction. There is no such list. It’s a fake.”

Crocker, however, wrote in her letter that the U.S. is convinced Russia would “likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”

The letter also warns that Russia would commit “human rights violations and abuses” and would use extreme force against protesters.

The inclusion of the US political buzzword "LGBTQI+" suggests this is entirely for US domestic consumption. If they're so concerned about human rights abuses, why not complain about Trudeau, Ottawa, and the Mounties, who actually did commit abuses over the weekend, rather than Russia, who just might in the future? But Ambasador Bathsheba Nell Crocker is echoed by National Security Handler Jake Sullivan just this morning:

“We believe that any military operation of the size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” Sullivan outlined. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”

“But we also have intelligence to suggest that there will be an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies,” he continued. “It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them, and that is what we laid out in detail for the [United Nations] because we believe that the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border, as we anticipate they very well may do in the coming hours or days.”

Again, he's writing Tom Clancy thrillers about imaginary wars, and he's been doing it for weeks. Each time he does it, he sheds a little more credibility, and if Putin does invade at some point down the road, people will have minimized the possibility because Sullivan's predictions failed to come true, time after time. But I'm increasingly convinced the administration is stirring up an imaginary crisis for domestic consumption.

But Where's the Ukraine War?

Today is February 20, which is one of the dates National Security Handler Jake Sullivan proposed as a perhaps-as-early-as for Russian tanks to appear in the streets of Kyiv. The logic here appears to have been that the Olympics would seize the world's attention, giving Putin the opening to invade while everyone was distracted. The problem was that the Olympics turned out to be the most boring and uneventful in history, and they provided no distraction. They weren't even worth a yawn.

The distraction throughout this period has been in Canada. I'll get to that, but let's get to the more imnmediate problem of bad looks. Russian tanks in the streets of European capitals are a bad look. Always have been. Let's face it, they would immediately drown out figure skaters, no matter how good the figure skaters. The guy who's figured this out is Vladimir Putin, who in fact seems to be a world leader who learned something from the 20th century. I get the sense that he, if anyone, understands that if he can get what he wants without tanks in the streets, he'll do it. My take is that so far, he's succeeding.

In fact, he's doing so well that he's making President Biden look hysterical. Biden's been predicting tanks in the streets any day now since late last year, and his predictions keep not coming true. A growing part of the problm is that Biden's been reassuring us that his predictions are based on our intelligence:

“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week ... in the coming days,” Biden said, citing the “significant intelligence capability” of the United States.

These remarks were from Friday, as today's deadline of February 20 edged ever closer without tanks in the streets. It's getting more and more like the guys who predict the end of the world and have to keep moving the date forward, with lamer and lamer excuses each time. I'm not sasying this won't eventually happen, but if it does, it's going to be on Putin's schedule, not Biden's, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like Putin will get what he wants without a direct invasion.

Indeed, if Putin appears to have learned a thing or two from 20th century history class, Biden and US intelligence have not -- consider what they failed to predict, from Pearl Harbor to the Chinese intervention in Korea to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact to Al-Qaida. They aren't much good at all, something Truman and Reagan at least understood. No coincidence that they helped write 20th century history.

So let's move to Canada. It sounds like Prime Minister Trudeau skipped 20th century history class the day they covered how police running down peaceful demonstrators -- with horses, dogs, fire hoses, clubs, gas, whatever -- isn't a good look. You don't even need to shoot them, although Kent Sate teaches that's a bad look, too. There are far too many examples, St Petersburg 1905, Birmingham 1963, Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970, Tienanmen 1989, and so forth -- that there was an awful lot for Trudeau to ignore. And it seems to me that the lesson has been the same every time, the demonstrators are playing a long game, and as the victors, they eventually get to write the history. A few cracked heads, a few dog bites, a few put in jail for hooliganism or whatever, a few knocked down, even a few, or more than a few, shot dead -- they eventually come out on top.

I hate to say this, but the guy who paid attention in 20th century history class is Putin.

Not A Good Look

The puzzling thing to me is how quickly US civil authorities are backing off their COVID mandates even as Trudeau insists mandates even stricter than those in the US are non-negotiable, now to be enforced by horses running down the workers in the streets of the capital.

And US and Canadian COVID trends are just about identical:

US politicians are scrambling to announce they're "following the science", while Trudeau -- not even in step with his own provincial premiers -- is keeping the controls on by ukase. I don't know where this is going to end up, but it looks like we in the US owe the Canadian truckers a great deal. Events in Windsor and Ottawa have clearly concentrated US minds most wonderfully.

What's The New Narrative?

I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning: "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?"

It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate.

As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it,

But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’s the day.

Joe Biden has been very clear about that, so were the Intel agencies and of course, their stenographers in the news media. As Politico put it, quote, “Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as February 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed.” A physical assault.

The Ukrainian state media outlet Ukrinform, however, offered an opinion from the scene:

Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for eight years already. These are the eight years of daily reports of deadly shelling, IDPs, and casualties among our military and civilians.

So, my first questiom is why anyone at the New York Times thinks COVID changed anything if Putin actually made his Ukraine move almost six years before anyone had even heard of COVID. A second question would be whether anyone, even at the New York Times, thinks any world leader has been locked down like ordinary people have been, such that it would make him crazy. Heck, Biden is the one who stays locked own.

President Biden, meanwhile,, is still giving the same message:

President Joe Biden warned Thursday morning a Russian attack on Ukraine could begin in the coming days, casting a new incursion into the country as all but certain and warning Moscow could stage events in the lead-up to generate a pretext for war.

. . . Pressed on whether he believes an attack will happen -- and when -- Biden said: "Yes. My sense is it will happen in the next several days."

So does he have a new invasion date? I've got to conclude that so far, Biden is looking ridiculous. Meanwhile, Putin has risked nothing, and he's lost nothing. He's effectively reinforced the status quo in Donbas and Crimea, someting Ukraine acknowledges. How is he insane?

The existing narrative isn't working. Someone needs to come up with a new one -- even if we accept that Putin is crazy, it simply means Biden is being jerked around by a crazy guy. Actually, for that matter, it's too bad neither Biden nor Speaker Pelosi got the name of Putin's plastic surgeon.

How Bad Are Things In Canada?

This story that I found this morning gives an indication of how strict the COVID regime has been in Canada -- and in spite of that, Quebec's premier, whose regime has been one of the strictest, is against Trudeau's invocation of emergency powers:

Quebec stepped up its “deconfinement plan” this week and began lifting coronavirus restrictions, while Premier Francois Legault rejected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s effort to crush the Freedom Convoy protest movement by invoking emergency powers.

“I think that I was very clear with the prime minister that the federal Emergencies Act should not, must not apply in Quebec,” Legault said on Monday. “We don’t have any problems in Quebec so far. The Sureté du Québec has everything under control.”

. . . CTV News reported that size restrictions on private gatherings have been lifted in Quebec, restaurants can seat more customers, four visitors a day are now permitted at old age homes if they have vaccine passports, and seniors are permitted limited outings.

Gyms and spas are now allowed to operate at half capacity, while outdoor events will be allowed with up to five thousand attendees.

Beginning on February 21, capacity limits will be removed on retail outlets, places of worship will be allowed to operate at half capacity, and amusement parks will be allowed to reopen with attendance limits. A week later, the capacity limits are due to be removed from houses of worship and all but the largest arenas, while bars and casinos will be allowed to reopen at half capacity. Most of the capacity limits are supposed to be phased out by the middle of March.

On Tuesday, Quebec announced the beginning of the end for vaccine passports, amusingly beginning with liquor and cannabis stores on Wednesday. The passports will be gone almost entirely by March 14, which is also when Health Minister Christian Dube is expected to begin distributing antiviral treatments for the Wuhan coronavirus.

“Proof of vaccination will still be required for domestic rail and air travel, as mandated by the federal government. Masks will also still be required in all public indoor spaces in the province,” CBC News noted.

In comparison, even in California, restrictions on retail and restaurant capacity pretty much ended in the middle of 2021, while the US Supreme Court effectively ended specific restrictions on houses of worship earlier in that year. The Supreme Court has also made most government efforts to enforce vaccine mandates moot. The debate in the US is now almost exclusively over masking, with most states no longer requiring masks in any environment except schools, where efforts to lift those mandates in certain specific jurisdictions are likely eventually to succeed.

Los Angeles County is one of the few holdouts anywhere for mask mandates outside schools, but the county rule was widely disregarded at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and no effort was made to enforce it.

The extreme differences between Canadian provinces and US states suggest the actual level of frustration with COVID restrictions in Canada and provides some background for the trucker protests.

But I've seen remarkably little analysis of the actual status of Trudeau's emergency powers. As far as I can tell, they don't have legal effect until Parliament approves them.

Less than 24-hours after declaring wide-ranging powers, including terror finance laws to defund the trucker, Trudeau came to parliament to persuade them to support his move.

Conservative Party interim Leader Candice Bergen [confronted Trudeau] over his invocation of the Emergencies Act.

“The Prime Minister invoked the Emergencies Act and 24 hours in, there are more questions than answers,” Bergen said. “Questions about whether this is justified, questions around if the criteria is met, questions around what this means to Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

“Parliamentary approval is required in order for the prime minister to use this unprecedented sledgehammer,” she noted. “So can the prime minister tell us when will parliament be debating this? Will it be coming to us on Friday? And does he expect that we will look at it Friday, but then rise, take a week off, and not actually deal with this until March?”

. . . Interim Conservative Party leader Bergen made one exceptional point: What if what Trudeau is doing makes things worse?

If the existing restrictiinos in Canada are as bad as they are -- and even the provinces that are relaxing them are taking their time to do it -- I wonder if Trudeau, his supporters, and legacy media are badly misreading the national mood.

Did Putin Win?

With the predicted morning of the Ukraine invasion come and gone without the spetsnaz parachuting in, there have been remarkably few after-action reports in any media. Of the few, this summary at the never-Trump Hot Air blog seems to give the most favorable analysis for Biden's handlers:

“February 15, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted. If they really have called off the invasion and they need to huff and puff about western propaganda to save face, have at it. Barring some major secret concession to Putin, it’d be a momentous victory for the White House and NATO to have stopped the biggest war in Europe since World War II without any bombs falling.

Has the invasion been called off, though, or merely postponed?

Ukraine’s president had been warned by western intelligence that tomorrow, the 16th, was the day Russia planned to attack. He decided to make it a “day of unity” for Ukrainians, calling international attention to the date. Maybe Putin looked at that and concluded he’d appear foolish if he followed through by invading on the schedule the west predicted, essentially confirming that western intel knows the moves the Kremlin intends to make before they’ve been made. So he stepped back and called for more diplomacy, altering the timeline for war.

That's under the peculiar assumption that Putin had set a mid-February deadline for unspecified concessions from maybe Ukraine, maybe Biden, or there would be a war. But a February 16 deadline was entirely the creature of Jake Sullivan, Biden's handler. All the other players, from NATO to Ukraine to Putin himself, were at best skeptical. So in effect, Sullivan created a diplomatic straw man and then claimed victory when the straw man did nothing (as straw men are wont to do), interpreting the inaction as "blinking".

The story speculates about potential demands from Putin, primarily that Ukraine never join NATO, but Putin himself never articulated any particular demand as a condition along the line of "if my demand for X is not met, we will invade Ukraine on Febvruary 16". President Kennedy, on the other hand, did articulate specific demands with Khrushchev and did set an effective deadline by instituting a quasi-blockade of Cuba on October 24, 1962. When Soviet ships didn't challenge the blockade, that was an important sign of Soviet concessions.

In contrast, Russian troops performed "maneuvers" near Ukraine with no particular diplomatic reason specified and no particular conditions articulated for their withdrawal. Any conditions or putative deadlines were the creatures of US media and politicians. The Hot Air story continues to put thoughts into Putin's head:

. . . for all the hype about Putin being a master strategist it’s hard to see how he’d gain more from invading Ukraine than he’d lose. The Russian army would take casualties, Putin and his country would face punishing sanctions and economic boycotts, and NATO might end up more united than it’s been in years.

White House sources fleshed that out in conversations with David Ignatius: “The sanctions that would follow an assault on Ukraine would make it hard for Russia to sell its energy abroad or to buy the technology it needs to supply its defense industry, let alone the rest of the economy. Russia’s financial reserves are large, but they would quickly be depleted as it sought to bolster its currency and pay its bills. U.S. officials reckon that under sanctions, Russia would be starved of inputs, and China, its only major ally, couldn’t fill the gaps.” To the extent that retaking Ukraine is a legacy play for Putin, maybe he realized that his legacy from this war wouldn’t be what he expects.

David Ignatius is a Washington Post editor and thoroughly vetted member of the Establishment, a graduate of St Albans School and Harvard, the son of a former Secretary of the Navy and president of The Washington Post. He has been a reliable CIA mouthpiece for generations. The pros and cons he outlines for Putin are entirely his own imputations, or more likely those of some deep stater in Langley, couched entirely in woulds, ifs, reckons, and maybes, but concluding that Biden was somehow the winner in a chess game that was entirely hypothetical.

On the other hand, if we go with the National Interest article theory I've cited, that Putin was responding to moves by Sullivan to push back Russian advances in Crimea and Donbas, it looks like he was entirely successful while reinforcing a picture of Biden as out of touch, unstable, and unreliable even with his Ukrainian and European allies.

It looks like there's a minor effort to make Ukraine look like Biden's Cuban missile crisis, following on an effort to create a wartime atmosphere a la Bill Clinton's desultory cruise missile attacks and intervention in Serbia, all designed primarily to distract attention from his scandals. It doesn't look like this will do Biden any equivalent good on the domestic front, either.

As far as I can see, Putin risked nothing, since he demanded nothing specific and likely never intended an invasion. Biden, on the other hand, created a crisis and set up an atmosphere in which, after much dither and disagreement with President Zelezny, he appeared to have been undermined with his ally and effectively stalemated with Putin. If Putin's actual message was, "Don't even think about Ukraine regaining Crimea and Donbas", then, with never even having to articulate it as a demand, Putin got what he wanted without even appearing to ask.

Ukraine And Intelligence

Here's what I still don't understand about what we're being told in the Ukraine crisis. The claim from National Security Handler Sullivan is that US intelligence says Putin is going to invade tomorrow, maybe, sorta. My first question is that with all the intelligence resources available to him, satellites, drones, signals, bugs, spies on the ground, and everything else, that's the best he can do? Maybe tomorrow? A sub-question to my first question is that the Ukrainians and NATO have equivalent resources, but they don't seem on board with the Sullivan version, especially not the Ukrainians, who are not dullards.

The second question is this. The normal policy with intelligence on when and where an enemy will attack is to conceal that you know it. In 1942, the US broke the Japanese naval code and learned they planned an attack on Midway. They secretly moved a carrier force to intercept the Japanese fleet. They last thing they wanted to do was to reveal that they'd broken the code or that they knew when and where the Japanese would attack. That would have forfeited the whole advantage of surprise.

So why is the US now loudly telegraphing just that? It seems to me that if there were credible indications of an invasion, the US, NATO, and Ukraine would all be strictly concealing their actual knowledge of troop concentrations and anticipated lines of attack, just as was done in the example of Midway.

There's another puzzle. US presidents, or their handlers, only very rarely make global moves while revealing intelligence. The best recent example is President Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, where he announced that Cuban overflights showed the presence of Soviet missiles aimed at the US. In that case, he turned out to be correct. But the other example that comes to mind is Colin Powell's 2003 address to the UN as George W Bush's secretary of state, where he relied on flawed intelligence that claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion of Iraq. This is almost universally regarded as a blunder.

Frankly, if I were a US president, I would not be relying on the predictions of the deep-state organs absent a thorough purge and reorganization. The alternative is simply to come out of it like Powell and Dubya.

As of yesterday, there was a brief flurry in the headlines with a claim that Ukraine President Zelensky had come around on the likelihood of the Russian invasion tomorrow, but this quickly disappeared.

“We are told that February 16 will be the day of the attack,” Zelenskyy said in a video statement posted on Facebook.

However, after his comments were taken by many at face value, his spokesman, Sergii Nykyforov, said that the president, who is a former comedian, was only saying what has been reported elsewhere.

“The president referred to a date that was spread by the media,” the spokesman told NBC News.

Some observers said Zelenskyy appeared to Ukrainian speakers to have been sarcastic when discussing the possible date of an attack.

But an alternate story seems now to be gaining momentum. As of yesterday,

In a televised exchange on Russian TV, the Russian foreign minister told Vladimir Putin that diplomacy still has some potential and should continue to be pursued before the military option for Ukraine gets ordered[.]

Surely this was calculated. And as of this morning,

Russia said on Tuesday some of its troops were returning to base after exercises near Ukraine and it mocked repeated Western warnings about a looming invasion, but NATO said it had yet to see any evidence of de-escalation.

Russia did not say how many units were being withdrawn, and how far, after a build-up of some 130,000 Russian troops to the north, east and south of Ukraine that has triggered one of the worst crises in relations with the West since the Cold War.

But the interpretation in the National Interest story I linked yesterday is that the crisis emerged as the result of a US policy overreach at the start of the Biden administration, where the intent was to push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea. Putin ordered the "exercises" as a warning of what would happen if the US followed through.

The result, it seems to me so far, has been an elaborate face-saving charade on the part of Sullivan and Biden, trying to sell a story that the focused and resolute President Brandon, with his key handler Sullivan at this side, faced down the reckless adventurer Putin. So far, it hasn't worked, but lame duck Speaker Pelosi has nevertheless signed on:

It's about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the President has made it very clear: there's a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So if Russia doesn't invade, it's not that he never intended to. It's just that the sanctions worked.

No, as far as I can see, Putin made a calcutated set of moves throughout 2021 to get the Brandon administration to back off its own adventurist gamble, which Brandon's handlers did in an elaborate and clumsily handled charade.