More Division Over Ukraine On The US Right

The amount of grandstanding on the US Right against aid to Ukraine is disturbing -- I've got to hope it's cynical, because if people like Rand Paul actually believe what they're saying, it's even worse. The good news, though, is that even combined with the tankies on the Left, they're a minority. Here's a piece at the pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine Breitbart News:

The Senate on Thursday passed legislation to give $40 billion to Ukraine in economic and military aid, while Americans suffer from food shortages and inflation.

The Senate voted on H.R. 7691, the Ukraine Supplemental Aid Package, which passed 86-11. The vote featured strong Republican and Democrat support for the bill; however, some populist Senate Republicans opposed the legislation, believing that America should focus its efforts on domestic crises such as 40-year-high inflation and baby formula shortages.

. . . Senate Republican populists could not stop the overwhelming Senate support to stop the legislation, even though it required 60 votes, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) managed to delay the passage of the bill until Thursday.

Paul told Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow that the United States would have to borrow the $40 billion to send the tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. The Senate did not vote on Paul’s proposed amendment to have an inspector general ensure the billions were spent wisely.

. . . Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also became a sharp detractor of the Ukraine aid bill, contending that it is not in America’s interests.

“Spending $40 billion on Ukraine aid – more than three times what all of Europe has spent combined – is not in America’s interests. It neglects priorities at home (the border), allows Europe to freeload, short changes critical interests abroad and comes w/ no meaningful oversight,” Hawley wrote.

In contrast, the Never Trump Hot Air reported,

A surprising meeting of the minds amid a storm of bad-faith populism.

Why are we spending $40 billion on Ukraine instead of on baby formula? the MAGA nationalists demand to know. Well, (a) the baby-formula shortage is a regulatory problem, not a funding problem. And (b) as all but the most pathetic anti-anti-Putinites understand, it’s in America’s own long-term interest to have a highly motivated foreign military smash Putin’s army on a rock for us.

Frankly, the question should be turned around. When was the last time we got as much bang for our buck on defense spending as we’re going to get from this $40 billion outlay on Ukraine? We spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan over 20 years and our reward was watching the country fall back into Taliban hands. For a little less than two percent of that amount, we’re helping the Ukrainians destroy fascist Russia’s major-power status on a global stage and set the Russian military back God knows how many years.

. . . Another populist argument against aid to Ukraine is that it’s dangerous to keep this war going given the risks of escalation. I’m sympathetic to that one; there’s no higher-stakes bet than gambling that a humiliated Putin won’t go nuclear. But yanking aid to Ukraine for fear of what Putin might do would be appeasement in its rawest form. It would incentivize him to engage in nuclear brinksmanship in all of his future foreign adventures, expecting that the quivering west will back down. “Provocative weakness” is a thing, especially to a character who obsesses over strength.

My sympathies are populist, but Rand Paul for one is not a populist -- he's a doctrinaire libertarian. Beyond that, the main issue he cites, along with Donald Trump of all people, is that we're sending $40 billion to Ukraine while there's a baby formula shortage at home. The contrast is incredible; Ukraine is dealing with ethnic cleansing on a scale approachling genocide and discovering new mass graves daily. The US has a baby formula shortage.

The Hot Air piece goes on to speculate on why Ted Cruz voted in favor of the package:

He’s a populist, and not just any populist but one who’s hoping to inherit Donald Trump’s voters once Trump retires. He tends to keep pace with Josh Hawley in the Senate, knowing that Hawley covets the same niche. Hawley voted against the Ukraine aid bill, however, while Cruz voted for it. How come?

Maybe he’s enough of a hawk by instinct that his desire to see Putin defeated trumps his electoral instincts to pander to populists. But I doubt it. Cruz always has a plan when it comes to the next presidential primary, and in this case he’s probably expecting that Republican voters will remain hawkish towards Russia through 2024. Further to that point, a new YouGov poll finds GOPers support sending financial aid to Ukrainians by a 58/23 spread and sending weapons by a 65/17 margin. If the Ukrainians win the war, those numbers will balloon after the fact; everyone wants to be on the winning side, after all. If so, it’ll be easy for Cruz to explain why he supported the bill in hindsight. It’ll be hard for Hawley to explain why he didn’t.

On Ukraine, Trump is turning out to be amazingly tone deaf.

"Tankies" And Changing Political Alignments

One bit of information I've been chewing on recently is that by far the best reporting on the Russo-Ukraine war is at the uber-left Daily Kos. Up at that site yestesrday was Ukraine update: The tankies think everything—even the Ukraine invasion—is America's fault. "Tankie" was a new word for me. According to Wikipedia, "Tankie is a pejorative reference to hard-line, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Great Britain." Kos goes on at the link,

The pejorative term “tankie” comes from American leftists who defended the violent Soviet crackdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an uprising crushed by tanks. They were our allies during the Iraq War, so it may come as a shock seeing them become pathetic apologists for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reconstitute the Soviet empire.

In their telling, the Ukraine invasion is the United State’s fault because it “expanded” NATO too aggressively, threatening poor Russia. How would we like it if Mexico joined a military alliance with Russia? We didn’t like it when the Soviet Union tried to place nuclear bombs on Cuba!

In the tankie worldview, no one has agency except the United States. Poland and Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have the ability or right to choose to join NATO. Neither do Finland and Sweden. These are all imperialist provocations and machinations by the American empire. What other option did Russia have but to defend its borders by, uh, explicitly advocating for its own empire?

Well, I turned 21 in 1968, and although as a student I was generally sympathetic to the so-called New Left of the time, by the early 1970s it was increasingly plain that many prominent New Leftists had actually been "red diaper babies", which again according to Wikipedia were "child[ren] of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims", which is to say Stalinists. The New Left was simply a rebranding of the Old Left.

Oddly, Kos is calling out the remnants of those bad old days. The piece links this tweet from Glenn Greenwald:

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.

"His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

The piece concludes:

The tankies like to pretend that President Joe Biden and nearly all European heads of state begged Russia to hold off any invasion, or maybe think it was some dastardly effective reverse psychology ploy. They point to increased defense spending and new riches enjoyed by the military industrial complex and say “aha! It’s all going according to their plan!” as if this unfortunate new round of defense spending hasn’t been foisted by Putin’s actions.

But nothing galls more than their utter disregard for the choices of free nations to decide their own destiny. They have been so impacted by America’s real foreign policy sins that they have lost the ability to understand that the world is a complex place, and sometimes, other people get a say in their own affairs. And sometimes, America is on the right side.

So all of a sudden the Daily Kos is endorsing a Reaganite, essentially neoconservative foreign policy in all but name, indeed going so far as to draw a distinction between seeing the Ukraine conflict as a "proxy war" in which Ukraine is simply carrying out US imperialist designs, versus a view that regards eastern European countries as following a freely chosen course intended to forestall Stalinist revanchism. But I think Kos is also repudiating the New/Old Left of C Wright Mills, Staughton Lynd, Bettina Aptheker, Abbie Hoffman, and others, which became increasingly Stalinist in its outlook and would seemingly never have agreed to a foreign policy of Soviet containment, much less rollback.

Yet what we're seeing in Ukraine and NATO, with a new policy of explicit military alliance intended to oppose and even reverse Stalinist revanchism driven by Poland and attracting Sweden and Finland, is something leftists of even my generation would never have countenanced.

On the other hand, the current US Right that once was fully on board with what had once been a bipartisan consensus for Soviet containment, now has at least prominent skeptics highy critical of US funding for Ukraine's war. These include Rand Paul and even Donald Trump, while Biden, whom everyone had assumed would look the other way for a Russian invasion, has come out fully in favor of an essentially Reaganite policy.

So I guess it's no coincidence that the single best source of daily updates and analysis on the war is at the Daily Kos. But I'm scratching my head.

Musk Takes The Red Pill?

The Musk Twitter takeover is devolving into delicious comedy:

The CEO of Tesla had roiled the markets on Friday when he placed his Twitter takeover deal on a “temporary hold” while citing the need to gauge the exact proportion of bots or fake accounts that populated Twitter’s 229 million monetizable daily users in Q1 2022.

Even though Musk had stated at the time that he was still “committed” to the deal, the CEO of Tesla recently revealed that he had received a call from Twitter’s legal team shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The call was prompted by a tweet from Musk where he revealed that Twitter’s in-house random sampling process used a sample size of 100. Bear in mind that Musk will have to pay $1 billion in breakup fees if the deal falls apart.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. We had noted on Friday that Musk’s suspension of the takeover deal might be a ploy to renegotiate a lower price for Twitter. Well, the latest tweet from Musk certainly adds confidence to this conjecture.

To wit, Musk has now speculated in a tweet that “over 90%” of Twitter’s daily active users might be bots or fake accounts.

There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users, which is the metric that matters to advertisers.

Very odd that the most popular tweets of all time were only liked by ~2% of daily active users.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 15, 2022

In the same news cycles, Musk has made it public that he now plans to vote Republican, despite his previous hiatory of voting Democrat.

Billionaire Elon Musk said he plans to vote Republican in the upcoming election cycle after voting "overwhelmingly" for Democrats in the past.

The Tesla CEO and founder made the remark on Monday while speaking via video link at a Miami tech conference, where he discussed his views on Twitter and free speech, among other topics.

One problem with trying to decode Musk is that his tongue never seems completely out of his cheek. On the other hand, as a few observers have pointed out, what Musk is implying in his tweets that Twitter's fake users number somewhere between 20% and 90% is that the company's business model is based on massive fraud. This goes beyond a simple attempt to talk the price down. That he would release the information that Twitter's sample size in claiming 5% bots was 100 -- an absurdly small number -- suggests he may well be on to something.

On the other hand, Alex Berenson, whose suit against Twitter for banning him survived Twitter's motion for summary dismissal, has this interpretation on his Substack:

Some of you have asked why I’m still chasing my lawsuit against Twitter, even after it accepted Elon Musk’s takeover offer.

Fair question. In fact, at the Berenson v. Twitter hearing on April 28, federal Judge William Alsup asked something similar. After all, if Musk is going to let Donald Trump back on, he’ll let me on too, right?

I have two answers, one practical and the other philosophical.

The practical one is that we don’t know whether the deal is going to happen - whether Musk will actually buy Twitter. This point may be the only one on which Twitter’s lawyers and I fully agree.

Musk highlighted the risks two days ago by tweeting (of course) that the deal was “on hold” because Twitter might have more fake accounts than it has admitted. Musk sent the message Friday morning, before the stock market opened, and it put Twitter shares into a tailspin. On a very positive day for stocks, the first in a while, Twitter was down about 10 percent.

Oh please. Like the man didn’t know Twitter had bots. Musk’s real concern is obvious: Technology stocks have cratered in the last month. If not for the deal, Twitter shares would probably be trading in the 20s. Thus $54.20 is a rich price (as Twitter’s board confirmed in its rush to take it).

At the same time, shares in Tesla, Musk’s car company, have plunged since he first made his offer for Twitter.

Musk has plenty on his plate. Tesla investors are clearly worried fixing Twitter will take more time and energy than he thinks and put an even bigger target on him. Electric cars are the reason Musk is the world’s richest person. He can’t like the way Tesla’s stock has performed since he started dancing with Twitter.

All in all, Musk may be suffering some buyer’s remorse. Offer to spend $44 billion in haste, repent at leisure! At the least, Musk might be hoping to jam Twitter’s board - which so far has shown all the spine one would expect from a company whose general counsel weeps in public - into accepting a lower price.

Twitter is now trading almost 25 percent below Musk’s offer, indicating investors think the odds are at least 1 in 3 the deal won’t go through.

Thus I cannot depend on Musk to let me back on, and the lawsuit must continue.

On this, I've got to side with Berenson -- he's coming off as a pretty shrewd guy, and he sees pretty clearly that he and Musk have completely different agendas. Nevertheless, I would bet that Musk has good reason for his suspicions about Twitter bots, and if so, we're venturing into Enron territory. At some point, Berenson may be left without anyone to sue.

I would also bet that Musk is too smart to take a pill from some old guy he just met on the web.

Congressional UFO Hearings!

I suppose that in a week where Amber Heard returns to the witness stand and the number of fake accounts on Twitter could be as high as 20%, there should be nothing unusual about congressional hearings on UFOs. But I was doing a web search on "UFO religion" and came up with an interesting piece on VOX -- interesting in how much it gets wrong:

It’s a great time to believe in aliens.

. . . According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think.

More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident.

. . . On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.

According to Wikipedia, Diana Walsh Pasulka is a writer and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. But in the interview at the link above, her knowledge of religion is pretty one-dimensional:

Sean Illing

You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?

Diana Pasulka

One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.

Which would presumably put Aquinas on the same level as Erich von Däniken -- the problem is that Jesus of Nazareth, as well as Moses and, heck, Mohammed and Buddha, are fully human, and none came from the sky. So this is your pretty standard liberal arts prof conjuring comfortable bromides from thin air. She goes on:

There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. I’m a historian of Catholicism, for instance, and what I find when I interact with people in Catholic communities is that they have faith that Jesus walked on water and that the Virgin Mary apparitions were true.

Prof Pasulka claims to be some sort of expert on Catholicism, but she misses an important distinction. According to this explanation:

Catholics are obligated in faith to accept all general or public revelation, but they are not guilty of sin if they decline to believe in particular private revelations, even if those private revelations really occurred. If you find the evidence for a particular apparition unconvincing, you’re free to disbelieve in it. In fact, you should disbelieve in it, because you’d do yourself a disservice if you believed in something you think didn’t occur.

Marian apparitions and apparitions of other saints are examples of what we call private revelations. They are given to individuals in private. General or public revelation is given to the whole Church, is enshrined in Scripture and sacred Tradition, and ended with the death of the last apostle. General revelation is binding on all Christians, but private revelations are binding only on their recipients.

So she misses the distinction between the scriptural account of Christ walking on water, a general revelation, and Marian apparitions, which are private, and over which individual Catholics are entitled to differ, especially if they find the evidence unconvincing. But then she goes off in a truly weird direction:

But there’s something different about the UFO narrative. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.

She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.

But the belief that UFOs and aliens are potentially true, and can potentially be proven, makes this a uniquely powerful narrative for the people who believe in it.

Is it fair to call this a new form of religion? I think so.

The reasoning here seems to be that Ellen Stofan is an "actual scientist", so we must give her predictions special validity. Old time religion was "based on faith in things unseen and unprovable", but now we're in a realm where actual scientists are predicting that UFOs and aliens are "potentially true, and can potentially be proven". According to Wikipedia,

The Great Pumpkin is an unseen character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. According to Linus van Pelt, the Great Pumpkin is a supernatural figure who rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween evening, and flies around bringing toys to sincere and believing children. Linus continues to have faith in the Great Pumpkin, despite his friends' mockery and disbelief.

Well, I've been to academic presentations where the latest recipient of the Professor of the Year award goes on smoothly about Science or whatever, and he or she simply ignores basic objections in the question period, and I would guess Prof Pasulka would do the same if I were to raise that sort of question. But how does Ellen Stofan differ from Linus if neither the Great Pumpkin nor any superhuman space alien has provably appeared?

I think Prof Pasulka does provide an intriguing pathway to further inquiry if we identify a popularized conception of "science" as something that's arisen in the wake of Hume, Kant, and Darwin as what we might call a replacement for naive fideism, a belief that faith and reason are incompatible, while reason is an exclsively reliable guide to living. The problem is that "science" keeps needing to reach out to the unproven to justify itself.

News On The Space Alien Front

Via the New York Post,

NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us.

The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes.

Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes.

The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA.

The man and woman are waving in an attempt to look more inviting.

NASA scientists revealed the image in a study that’s part of a project called the “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG).

The image looks like this:

But I have a bunch of questions, starting with whether this is redundant. It appears possible that the space aliens could be watching episodes of Naked and Afraid well before this transmission reaches them, after all. According to the BBC,

A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a message to the nearest theoretically inhabitable planet. But can our television and radio broadcasts already be picked up in space?

. . . Space scientist Dr Chris Davis, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, says it is possible that television and radio signals from Earth could be picked up on other planets, but it isn't easy.

. . . "Of course, no one more than about 50-70 light years away will have yet heard from us, but I figure that our earliest broadcasts are washing over about one new star system each day. So the potential audience is growing."

We're back to the remarkably blithe assumption that the space aliens can decode the binary transmission that contains this strangely puerile message. Well, yes, if they've invented the warp drive, of course they can do it, and a great deal else. But if that's the case, why haven't we heard from them already? But even if we accept the calculations that say there are n to the 25th planets with the conditions that allow life to develop, on how many of those does life evolve beyond pond scum?

I was banned from the comment section of an economics blog many years ago when the blogger posted a mathematical calculation, and I asked how math evolved from pond scum. But the problem is there: reason, with the ability to understand and manipulate the physical world, is necessary to invent warp drives or decrypt interplanetary messages in a bottle, but that's something entirely separate from the physical world itself and as far as I can see, does not necessarily come from it.

So this reflects a certain unintended Genesis bias in the transmission, which is no different from the Carl Sagan pictographs on the Voyager disks. And let's face it: the depiction of the naked earthlings on either the Voyager disk or the new transmission has nothing to do with how earthlings actually look outside of porn sites. People don't usually walk around that way. This is part of the oddly puerile vibe of the whole communication-with-aliens project, especially given the current emphasis on gender equity. Heck, why not show five earthlings in unisex space suits and leave the details for later?

The BITG project is entirely heteronormative and transphobic. I have no idea how NASA got away with this.

But the depiction in the transmission also reflects another Genesis bias, which is that the historic depictions of naked Adam and Eve represent earthlings in their prelapsarian state, at worst in the instants between the temptation of Eve and Adam's bite at the apple. The strange pixellated rendition is a peculiar parody -- earthings male and female aren't actually like that; the portrayal is so unrealistic as to be unscientific.

Real earthlings are flawed, they grow old and die, they don't look like porn stars.

Meanwhile, the never-Trump but right-wing Hot Air blog is reporting sympathetically on congress's impatience with the slow implementation of the AOIMSG (Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group), the next iteration of the Project Bluebook UFO hunt boondoggle. And indeed, Hot Air now reports with delight that the House is making progress:

I find it hard to believe that I’m actually typing this, but it’s true. After so many years of calls for more transparency from the government on the subject of UFOs (or unidentified aerial phenomena, as we’re supposed to call them now), a House subcommittee on intelligence will hold public hearings on the topic next week. This is the first time that such a hearing has taken place in more than half a century.

These people are as dumb as the goys who are sending fanciful pictures of porn stars into space. They're pleasing only themselves.

Fermi's Paradox And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

According to Wikipedia,

The second law may be formulated by the observation that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, as they always arrive at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. An increase in the combined entropy of system and surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, often referred to in the concept of the arrow of time.

According to Wikipedia,

Entropy is a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty.

It's interesting that the definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics above contains the word "evolution", since skeptics of neo-Darwinism often challenge the theory with reference to the Second Law. Somewhat restated, this will say that if you take a pot of water and cover it up, no matter how long you leave it, it won't spontaneously generate life. Even if you drop in some amino acids, if you just leave the pot alone, you won't get lfe, because that would assume the order in the pot would increase; i.e., the amino acids would somehow become more complex and regenerate themselves.

Instead, the Second Law would say that without any other input, the amino acids and any other minerals you found in the pot will instead deteriorate, to the point that even the pot itself will eventually fall apart and any remaining water would spill out, except it would have evaporated long before then.

The whole idea of life on other planets hinges on the possibility -- or indeed, the probability -- that given a certain set of preconditions on a planet, life will somehow emerge. A second question is if life emerges at all, presumably as some form of primitive pond algae, how it can become more complex or more ordered over time and "evolve" into an advanced civilization capable of telecommunications or space travel. After all, a planet or a solar system can be considered an isolated system, and the assumption is that all of its components will become more disordered over time.

This is certainly borne out when we look at Mars or Venus. We might assume that Mars at one time had a more complete atmosphere, or that at one time it had surface water, but following the Second Law, Mars has become more disordered over time. There's no evidence of life there now, at least so far, and the best we can do is speculate that at one point it could have emerged, but under the Second Law this is unlikely, and it must in any case have succumbed to the increasing disorder we would expect on the planet as an isolated system.

The idea that there is some high statistical probability of alien life, and indeed not just life, but intelligent alien civilizations, emerged in the late 1950s. Again according to Wikipedia,

In September 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal Nature with the provocative title "Searching for Interstellar Communications". Cocconi and Morrison argued that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Such messages, they suggested, might be transmitted at a wavelength of 21 cm (1,420.4 MHz). This is the wavelength of radio emission by neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, and they reasoned that other intelligences might see this as a logical landmark in the radio spectrum.

Two months later, Harvard University astronomy professor Harlow Shapley speculated on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, saying "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns (10 followed by 18 zeros) similar to our own. One in a million has planets around it. Only one in a million million has the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it. This calculation arrives at the estimated figure of 100 million worlds where life has been forged by evolution."

There have been numerous attempts to detect alien transmissions following the criteria set by Cocconi and Morrison, but in the 60-odd years since, no such signals have been detected. One basic problem is the Second Law: even if you have a planet with "the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it", things on that planet as an isolated system can only get more disordered over time; over billions of years, that planet, like Mars, can lose its atmosphere, lose its surface water, lose its chemicals, or whatever else even before lfe has a chance to develop, much less evolve into a civilization capable of radio transmissions.

What's The End State?

I was watching a Ukrainian's comment about the war on YouTube, and he made a key point: various political leaders have worried about "starting World War III", but it's important to be realistic: we're already in World War III. Right now, there's a massive tacit allied effort to wage a new war against Soviet revanchism, with Ukraine as the proxy, but the tacit alliance recognizes to one extent or another that the fate of Europe hinges on its outcome. The only remotely clear policy statement on allied war aims so far has come from Secretary Austin, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

That should be at least relatively uncontroversial -- as Jennifer Rubin says in the link, "In reality, Austin simply stated the obvious." But what does this mean in context? I've already said here that the end of this war, even if its immediate cease-fire result is just a reestablishment of Ukraine's existing borders, will nevertheless mean some additional set of measures that will weaken Russia enough to keep it from re-invading Ukraine. That's the closest thing to an allied territorial war aim that we have for now.

This leaves aside the question of how Russians can be tried and punished for war crimes, which is also an expressed aim of many allied leaders. But an international authority with the effective power of the Nuremberg tribunal will be needed within Russia, able to override former national police power to the degree that suspects can be effectively located, arrested, brought to trial and subject to punsihment. This would place the existing Russian state or its successor under some type of superseding international control. This in turn suggests that a full achievement of allied war aims would involve a reconstitution of the Russian state similar to what happend in Germany and Japan after 1945, and proposals for a postwar Russia that fall short of that are unrealistic.

Allied discussion before the end of World War II addressed these same problems. France and Poland were liberated, but what would protect them from re-invasion if Germany were able to rebuild as it had been and reassert itself? After all, the evidence was clear that the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty had failed to accomplish the same objectives a generation earlier. The practical solution was the occupation of Germany, reduction of German territory, its partition into four temporary occuparion zones and two eventual successor states, and the political reorganization of those states under great-power supervision. These principles were agreed prior to and during the Yalta Conference.

It seems reasonable to expect that some type of international agreement similar in extent to Versailles or Yalta will need to establish conditions following the conclusion of the Russo-Ukraine war. On that basis, it's hard to assert that "World War III" hasn't already been started, and its resolution will lead to territorial relignment, as well as a new Russian constitution.

Unanticipated consequences following Yalta, however, were reification of postwar Poland under revised borders that awarded the eastern part of the country to the Soviet Union, which kept what Stalin had gained in the 1939 partition pact with Hitler, and which in turn transferred East Prussia and Silesia back to Poland from Germany. This will have serious implications that will now play themselves out in a new settlement with post-Ukraine Russia. Will eastern Poland remain Russian? What about Kaliningrad?

In thinking about a post-Ukraine War settlement, I discovered there are already numerous maps on the web from well before this year depicting potential partitions of Russia following a theoretical World War III. One goes so far as to represent itself as the outcome of the "2037 Treaty of Delhi". The one above is similar, though all these are fanciful and likely not predictive -- but they do reflect a consensus even before the current war that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union would not be the end of the story, and a realistic assumption that World War III in whatever form would reflect a major revision to Russian territory.

One factor that I've already discussed has been the rise of Poland, which has been taking a leadership role in supporting Ukraine in this war, transferring its own tanks and other arms, as well as being a key transport corridor for other countries' contributions. In yesterday's post I discussed this issue at greater length.

But there are other territorial disputes that have been on the back burner since at least 1945 but would become pressing with a weakened Russia -- and again, a "weakened Russia" is now an implicit war aim for the US and other allies. Japan would almost certainly regain control of the disputed Kuril Islands and possibly Sakhalin. Stalin seized Karelia, several areas along the Finnish border, after the Russo-Finish war. Although Finland's policy has not been to claim these territories are disputed to avoid antagonizing Russia, its attitude appears to be changing, and a weakened Russia would be in less of a position to object to their return.

China and Russia have had a series of relatively minor border disputes, which have been at least theoretically resolved as of 2008. However, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, begun in 2013, envisions a series of possible rail connections between the Chinese rail network and Europe that could be economically threatening to Russia, especially considering the proposed route between China and Turkey running south of both the Caspian and the Black Seas. Both the Chinese and European rail networks, of which Turkey is a part, use the same rail gauge, which is not compatible with the Russian network. An international commission settling the Russo-Ukraine War could conceivably allocate Russian territory to China or other countries to allow completion of this standard gauge rail link, which would stimulate Eurasian trade while excluding Russia.

Other divisions of Russian territory, like those illustrated in the map above, more fancifully allocate wider swaths to China and even the US. At this point, they seem unlikely, put we simply don't know how the war will turn out, and we don't know what a post-Putin Russia will look like after a major military defeat. If, as in the map above, eastern Siberia is annexed by the US, this would make a Bering Sea rail tunnel a practical possibility, something that's been mooted since before World War I. Ths would, among other things, allow a standard gauge rail connection from North America to China, since both also use the standard European track gauge.

In addition, a weakened Russia and now a schism within Orthodoxy, along with a strengthened Catholic Poland, also means a renewed Catholicism in Ukraine. I don't think it's a coincidence at all that Pope Francis is increasingly involved in trying to settle the war.

Pope Francis said he has asked for a meeting in Moscow to help bring about an end to the war and warned that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a key backer of President Vladimir Putin's fight against Ukraine, should not become Putin's "altar boy."

The pope's remarks came in an interview published on May 3 in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

In it, the pope revealed that 20 days after the war began, he asked the Vatican's top diplomat, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to communicate with Russia that Francis was ready to travel there in an effort to bring about an end to the conflict, which he likened to what took place in Rwanda 25 years ago. Although the pope did not use the word, the Vatican has recognized the 1994 violence by the Hutus against the Tutsis, which left more than 800,000 people dead, as a genocide.

"We have not yet had an answer and we are still insisting," the pope said of his request to meet with the Russian leader.

Francis has spoken with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky twice since the outbreak of the war and, in a break with diplomatic protocol, left the Vatican on Feb. 25, the day after the war began, to travel to Russia's embassy to the Holy See to register his concerns against the conflict.

. . . The pope also offered further details on his March 16 video conference with the Russian patriarch, saying that during their 40 minute discussion, "I told him: we are not state clerics."

Consider that Pope St John Paul had a major role in supporting Polish resistance to Soviet domination, the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Warsaw Pact. This in turn set Poland on its current course to become a regional power comparable to its position before the Partitions . I would guess that Francis sees a reason to continue the Church's role in the region.