Trump And The Fallout From Dobbs

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance,

To the Never Trump people: Elections matter.

. . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide.

. . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage.

Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday:

We have very big news. Maybe the biggest, right from the United States Supreme Court. Yesterday the Court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life. This breakthrough is the answer to the prayers of millions and millions of people. And these prayers have gone on for decades and decades. They’ve been praying, and now those prayers have been answered.

. . . I promised to nominate judges and justices who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written. We got almost 300 federal judges, and three great Supreme Court justices confirmed to do exactly that.

It's worth noting that although, as Trump himself points out, this was the result of a 50-year campaign by generations of people, it was Trump's instinctive willingness to go for broke in 2016 that made the final difference. But Rolling Stone, of all sources, raises questions about Trump's private views:

Republicans spent Friday celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade and praising Donald Trump for making it happen. Trump himself, multiple sources tell Rolling Stone, is far less excited.

Publicly, the former president took credit for abrogating the rights of millions of American women, putting out a statement saying Roe’s repeal was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

The rest of the story is behnd a paywall, but this site gives a summary:

However, the report quotes an associate of the former president who said he has been "sh*tting" on the decision since an early draft was leaked weeks ago.

. . . [P]rivately, the former president is anxious about what the end of Roe, and the flood of extreme Republican state-level anti-abortion laws it will unleash, will mean for the GOP’s electoral prospects — and for his own.

On that note, the Trump insider admitted, "He keeps sh*tting all over his greatest accomplishment. When you speak to him, it’s the response of someone fearing the backlash and fearing the politics of what happens when conservatives actually get what they want [on abortion]," before adding, "I do not think he’s enjoying the moment as much as many of his supporters are, to be honest with you.”

I think Trump's problem for his 2024 prospects is that new issues have come up, most importantly the economy, but also Ukraine, and now the question of what next on abortion. He's had little to say on Ukraine, except that it wouldn't have taken place if he'd been president. He needs to be more specific, and he needs to provide a realisic plan forward, especially how to deal with Russia's seriously reduced capabilities with or without Putin.

Now he also needs to provide a consistent stance on how to proceed with the abortion issue left to the states -- after all, wasn't that going to be the predictable outcome of any decision by his court overturning Roe all along? Some states were inevitably going to be stricter than others. How can that be making him anxious?

Rolling Stone, of course, has a history of fake stories, and its "insider" here is anonymous. But if Trump doesn't begin to articulate a fuller path forward in the runup to 2024, he's going to lose out.

Intersectionality Goes Only So Far

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites.

The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti-Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box.

Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortion, since pregnancies result exclusively from the male-female reproductive act, leaving aside IVF or artificial insemination, although even these in fact are intended to induce a pregnancy that is by implication desired. Thus even if drag queens, say, demonstrate against Dobbs, they're one step removed from the actual issue at hand.

And this leaves aside the subtext of a drag queen performance, which carries with it a certain cluster of feelings about women that include resentment and hatred, with an exaggerated male-oriented portrayal of female vanity and histrionics. I did a web search on "drag queen abortion" just for the heck of it, expecting to find nothing, but instead I found a sequence of images. The least disturbing is the one at the top of this post. Others, like those on the right, are more gruesome. They're anything but a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's right to choose. On the other hand, they're probably much closer to the actual intent of the whole drag queen performance, illustrating a fundamental distrust of women, particularly involving what's portrayed here as a deep suspicion of motherhood.

The elites fetishize drag queens at their peril. I've already noted here that Speaker Pelosi, vain, flamboyant, and histrionic, is just one step removed from a drag queen herself, and that's not good for women. I'm not at all sure if having drag queens in an anti-Dobbs parade would be a good idea.

But there's another issue. I've not been a Rod Dreher fan here, since I don't think his adoption of Orthodoxy or even before that Roman Catholicism was ever authentic, but he does get one thing right in this recent piece:

There is an obvious Luciferian connection between the twin sacred rites of abortion and sex change. Both assert human will over life and the generative order. Both refuse the givenness of Creation. Both insist that the autonomous choosing individual has ultimate power over life and death, male and female. Both rites are necessary to upholding the Sexual Revolution, which is the event that gives meaning to the lives of the American ruling class.

We are now seeing how much that ruling class hates those it rules.

A reader writes that he doesn’t expect mass violence over Dobbs — not an abortion-related repeat of the George Floyd riots. Those riots were carried out by black people and white antifa. The kind of demographic most upset over the fall of Roe — educated middle class women — will never risk their professional status to commit acts of criminal violence, he predicts.

There are other practical problems with protesting Dobbs. My wife notes that the biggest riots so far have been in places like California, which will always have permissive laws on abortion. Thus for women in such states, some other form of civil disobedience will be needed to make their point. The most obvious would be to get preganant, travel to a state with restrictive abortion laws like North Dakota, get a back alley abortion there, and die from it. After all, isn't that the equivalent of a sit-in?

The cartoon at left represents a return to a major pre-Roe argument for legalized abortion, that if it's not legal, it won't be safe, and women will be forced to use coat hangers to peform the procedure on themselves. Well, I was in college and graduate school pre-Roe, and friends and classmates from time to time found the need to find someone who'd do it. Being middle class or better, none needed a coat hanger, and none died, although their children of course always did.

The coat hanger argument was never sincere, it was always a way to hold someone else hostage, when the prosperous educated classes would always have an alternative, legal or not. Everyone drank underage back then, after all, and many smoked pot. The issue simply doesn't affect the educated classes no matter what law is passed in what state, but the other side of the coin is that the argument from the educated classes that the non-white poor need it is also racist: the assumption is that the non-white poor are too stupid and too promiscuous by nature to conduct their sexual activities prudently. This goes back to Margaret Sanger's eugenic purpose behind Planned Parenthood.

There's another problem with the intersectionality fallacy behind protesting Dobbs: it arises from the current movement for synthetic sexual identity. If men can have periods and get pregnant, men also can need abortions. I note that woke companies like Disney have announced they'll fund travel for women employees to get abortions in states that will permit it. But what if I'm a man who works for Disney in, say, Florida? Won't Disney say since I'm a man and can get pregnant, they'll pay for me to go to California for an abortion?

You might well answer sure, just show Disney your doctor's note or your pregnancy test. But not so fast -- the HIPAA Privacy Rule makes all medical records fully confidential. It's illegal for an employer to ask for any medical record, especially one that involves an abortion. I would have a cause of action against Disney if they refused to pay for my trip to California for an abortion on the basis that I'm a man and can't prove I'm pregnant.

This will work its way through, but it's going to take some time. But then it took time to override Roe.

More Trickles Out About The Paul Pelosi DUI

In terms of overall deliciousness, few recent events can match the DUI arrest of Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, over the Memorial Day weekend in Napa, CA. My wife and I follow it with special interest, because we frequently visit there, and when we do, we regularly pass the site.

Information about the circumstances has been tightly controlled. Thanks to near-universal use of police body and dash cameras, we may assume footage exists of the arrest and Pelosi's field sobriety test, and given the popularity of TV shows that use such footage, it's not hard to imagine what it was like even if we can't see the actual episode. This is part of the deliciousness behind the whole story.

But if the political establishment ever thought they'd be able to keep a lid on things, they're of course mistaken. The arrest and subsequent court proceedings are public records, and eventually everything will come out. The district attorney issued charges this past week, which inevitably brought out more details of the incident:

He was charged with driving under the influence causing injury and driving with a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent or over.

The DA is charging those two as misdemeanors, even though in California they’re “wobblers” and can be charged as either misdemeanors or felonies, based on the evidence and the District Attorney’s discretion. They note that the decision was based on the injury and is consistent with the way they normally charge things. Yes, it’s normal that they judge by the seriousness of the injury. So either that’s an indication that a) there was an injury, but it wasn’t serious or b) there’s a more serious injury and he’s getting a break. Now, one of the problems in this case has been that they haven’t been releasing all the information. There hasn’t been a police report released of the accident and the arrest. Prior news reports had not indicated any injury; now we’re suddenly told that there was injury. So what’s the nature of the injury? We don’t know.

His blood-alcohol level wasn’t tested until more than two hours after the collision, at 12:32 a.m. The crash was at 10:17 p.m. So if it was .082 at that time, it was higher at the time of the accident.

Other accounts note that he wan't booked until 4:13 AM the following morning, which raises inevitable questions about the delay. It's hard not to think that once Paul came to his senses, he was on the phone to Nancy and her handlers, with a great deal of back-and-forth at the federal, state, and county level. In any case,

The Pelosis have hired some PR folk to handle this matter, including, apparently, SF politico Lee Houskeeper, and Napa-based "crisis manager" Larry Kamer. One of their first orders of business was refuting press reports that Paul Pelosi was arrested for a similar driving incident four years ago — that was apparently a different person named Paul Pelosi?

Along with the new information that the Jeep driver who hit Pelosi's Porsche was injured in the collision, there's the intriguing question of whether there was a witness to the crash. According to the RedState link above,

Fox’s Jesse Watters let loose on “Paulie P” (as he terms him) on his show after the charges were announced, including revelations from a new explosive New York Times story.

. . . As Watters says, where did the witness come from? On the side of the road in rural Napa County late at night? Watters speculates the person was in the car. We don’t know whether or not they were, though Watters has spoken to a member of the Fire Department who says they know the answer but they’re being pressured by the District Attorney’s office to keep quiet.

Several questions come up in my mind. Fire Department? That suggests that not only was there an injury, but paramedics must have been on scene. Just how many were injured if someone else was in Pelosi's car? And just who might that have been? I suspect it was an attractive female companion of the Speaker's husband. Lots to keep quiet here.

I would guess there's a great deal of baksheesh being handed around to all parties, Pelosi handlers promising it'll all be taken care of, don't worry about a thing. Well, that'd better be the case.

Biden And The Trans Agenda

One of the "incredible transitions" President Biden has sought most consistently to impose on US society is far-reaching accommodations for transgender people, an extremely tiny part of the population not even supported by much more numerous gays and lesbians, who insist they're attracted instead to same-sex people based on their existing sexual identity and don't want any sort of makeover, surgical, hormonal, or cosmetic.

Recent examples include implementing transgender-friendly airport screening procedures on the Transgender Day of Visibility last April, including unspecified "changes to scanners used for screening. . . . intended to make procedures less invasive". As far as I can tell, based on scanning images I see on media, they currently show very little flesh of any sort. but the concern appears to be that what minimal shadowy outlines the scanners now reveal could still establish that the frumpy middle-aged woman going through security is actually a frumpy middle-aged guy. So we block all that out, or something.

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced proposed changes to Title IX:

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the proposed changes would completely eliminate the concept of gender-specific sports and spaces, such as restrooms and locker rooms, and would allow students to freely use whichever facilities they feel like. The new regulations would also label any instances of someone not using proper “pronouns” as sexual harassment.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment.

. . . "A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces." said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education.

The frumpy middle-aged woman at the top of this post is Jennifer Pritzer, a member of the wealthy and influential Pritzger family, the first transgender billionaire. A little-noticed article that came out recently in The Tablet provides disturbing insight into the well-financed and well-organized plan to impose the transgender agenda on everyone:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

The author says she has

stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans. . . is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

The piece goes on to detail the history and extent of Pritzker family philanthropy, in particular to introduce and normalize the entirely new concept of SSI into universities and medical schools. The programs involved can be truly bizarre:

[Jennifer} Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists.

The conclusion to draw here is first, that the imposition of SSI is a well-organized and well-funded agenda; second, that it's top-down, driven by the Pritzgers and apparently other wealthy families. It's worth noting that other progressive developments since the 1800s have been at least nominally oriented toward the working and middle classes -- social insurance, collective bargaining, college financial aid, or civil rights. This, on the other hand, is supported by billionaires on behalf of perceived injustices toward a tiny and ill-defined group, and indeed, the implications -- ending sexual segregation in school restrooms and locker rooms, for instance -- are wildly unpopular with the working and middle classes.

Another detail worth noting is that the SSI agenda isn't completely separate from the new COVID-based public health agenda. The most prominent transsexual in the US government, of course, is Dr Rachel Levine, who prior to her appointment as Assistant Secretary for Health imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown measures in the US as Pennsylvania state secretary of health. Jennifer Pritzger's cousin, Illinois Gov J B Pritzker, also imposed extreme lockdown measures there, some of which were removed by the courts.

But here's the big question: why is Scranton Joe, the putative champion of the working class, so firmly attached to this agenda? He's managed to become most closely identified with transgenderism/SSI and the Green New Deal. SSI in particular isn't a vote-getter; it isn't even popular with the traditional gay and lesbian Democrat base. I can only assume there's money involved, big money, over and above the political process.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism":

[T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense.

Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!

So, of whom specifically does the Holy Father speak? Well, a prominent conservative Catholic has piped up and given us an example. Anthony Esolen on Monday published an essay, "I Am a Restorationist". As a Catholic convert, I've got to say this presents me with a dilemma in my understanding of Catholicism. In his remarks, Pope Francis makes it clear in so many words that "restorationists" have never accepted the Second Vatican Council. As the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, his opinion on this matter should carry great weight.

The idea that there are Catholics who haven't accepted the Second Council isn't a figment of Francis's imagination. Prof Esolen has simply stood up and, apparently fully accepting Francis's terms, identified himself as one of them. That a conservative US Cathollic magazine would publish this essay simply confirms Francis's observation that there are many "restorers" in the US, i.e. people who do not accept the authority of an ecumenical council.

As Bp Barron has said, you don't get any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. You don't find any clearer voice in the Church than a pope endorsing an ecumenical council. So for a prominent conservative Catholic to come out publicly to say by clear implication that he's against an ecumenical council and against the pope is, at minimum, problematic.

In fact, recognizing that Esolen is an Ivy Leaguer who has made his career as an academic, I would expect a closely reasoned, heavily footnoted case in support of his position, but this is precisely what we don't get. His argument, as far as I can piece it out, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholics obeyed the Church's authority without question, but look where it got them:

When our pastor removed the marble communion rail with its mosaic inlays of Eucharistic symbols (a basket of five loaves, two fish, a bunch of grapes, the Lamb of God), we figured he knew what he was doing, and we submitted. When he whitewashed the church walls, eliminating stenciled patterns of the fleur-de-lis, so that what had been warm and shady was now bare, with no color connection between the stained-glass windows, the mural paintings of figures from the Old Testament, and the painted ceiling above, we figured he knew what he was doing, and we obeyed. When he covered the hexagonal floor tiles, white and dark green in cruciform patterns, with a bright-red carpet, we wiped our feet and obeyed.

So, er, does this mean Catholics no longer need to accept Church authority? Prof Esolen doesn't like vernacular mass or versus populum celebration. Speaker Pelosi wants abortion to be OK. Who's right? He's proven absolutely nothing.

But also, his argument is, first, emotional, and second, anecdotal. We may regret unjustifiable redecoration in specific cases, and reaction may be along the line of, "My parents were married in that church! I was baptized and confirmed there! Look what they've done!" But that isn't an argument against the Second Council. The Council documents -- I've read them in an edition Bp Barron sponsored with the aim of having them available to contemporary Catholics -- have nothing to say about carpet or whitewash.

Bp Barron in his commentary there himself cites examples like a priest who rode a motorcycle down the aisle to the altar and makes the point that there have been lots of misunderstandings, which are in the process of being corrected. But here Pope Francis suggests it takes a century for a Council to take root in any case.

In many ways, Esolen's argument is post hoc propter hoc.

Sexual morality was the obvious candidate for progress. I understood nothing of it when I was a schoolboy, but when we high school freshmen had a “values clarification” class instead of a real study of Scripture or the catechism, I figured the sister knew what she was doing. It was a feature of the new Church—the Church knew more and better about sex than she used to.

Though most of us in that high school bore an old residue of moral sense, by the time I went to college in 1977, the Church in her ordinary life—in her preaching and her obvious practice—offered us no guard rails, no direction. I never thought of myself as disobedient because the Church, in her practical life, did not think of me so, either. Love pastes over a multitude of sins.

But by 1992, the Church had published a new comprehensive Catechism that contained a full explanation of traditional Catholic moral theology, including sexuality. The priests in our parish often discuss the sacrament of reconciliation, including the need for examination of conscience with reference to Church teaching. Has Prof Esolen attended a diocesan mass at all lately? Has he gone to confession in a diocesan parish? Last I checked, if I confess to a sin, the priest will still give me advice on how to avoid it and prescribe a penance before he absolves me.

The problem with Esolen's argument is that it parades out the traditionalist cliches -- tasteless redecorations, bad architecture, pride flags in the sanctuary -- without addressing them as either outliers or aberrations that are largely in the process of being corrected by a current generation of mainstream priests and bishops like, for instance, Bp Barron. Barron, a fully qualified theologian, is attacked by conservatives who have no particular qualifications as somehow a popularizer or a Bp Feelgood. (Indeed, I've had e-mails from restorationists who say the same about Fulton Sheen.)

Nobody attacks the Council documents themselves. Beyond that, the implication in their resistance to Pope Francis is that he's in some way illegitimate; indeed, the most extreme version of this position is that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope.

The problem with all this is that if Francis isn't a legitimate pope, or the Second Council was illegitimate, these are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. If these proofs can be made, an Ivy Leaguer like Prof Esolen ought to be able to make them. But he falls back on the same old chestnuts, the whitewashed walls or carpeted floors in specific parishes, the sister who bore a child out of wedlock, the divorces, the pedophiles. But how do any of these directly illegitimize, say, Sacrosanctum Concilium? Lumen Gentium? Gaudium et Spes? Does an illegitimate Council also delegitimize the 1992 Catechism?

I'd be curious to know if Prof Esolen has even read them, or if he's read the commentary on them by Bp Barron in his recent edition. Or do the documents somehow not matter, since although Prof Esolen identifies himself as someone who rejects the Second Council, he has nothing to say about them in this version of hier stehe ich? Wouldn't a serious, well-footnoted refutation of the Council documents and, just for starters, Bp Barron's interpretation of them in his edition, be a miniumum starting point?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Reaction To The EU's Move On Kaliningrad

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC:

Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is.

“Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted.

“A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted.

Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockade on Lithuanian trade although again that would be seen as a huge escalation by both NATO and the EU. “It would then be a fine dividing line whether that would trigger the NATO Article 5 defence,” however, he noted.

When asked on Wednesday whether Russia’s response would be exclusively diplomatic or would go further, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said “the answer is no. They will not be diplomatic, but practical.”

“As for retaliatory measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format. It was stated to both Lithuania and the EU through their diplomatic missions in Moscow about the inadmissibility of such actions and the need to change the steps taken and return the situation to a legitimate course,” she said.

“If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”

Following the initial announcement, Lithuania extended its ban to include highway traffic.

Yesterday I quoted Reuters concerning EU envoy Markus Ederer's visit to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he is reported to have asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric". The relative rhetorical stance here is intriguing: the EU appears to be giving Putin a parental pat on the heard, telling him to calm down. As far as anyone can tell so far, Putin has few options that woud not trigger NATO Article 5, when his own military is pinned down in Ukraine while NATO's forces aren't engaged there and free to act over Lithuania and Kaliningrad if needed.

But the current Kaliningrad crisis is just a follow-on to an earlier Russian srategic loss. According to CNN:

In 2002, the EU and Moscow reached an agreement on travel between Russia and Kaliningrad, ahead of Poland and Lithuania joining the European Union in 2004. When those countries joined, the exclave became surrounded on three sides by EU territory. Russia says the 2002 agreement has now been violated.

In other words, since 2002, there's been an uneasy equilibrium on the Baltic that effectively finessed a Russian strategic loss with the entry of Poland and Lithuania to the EU and NATO. (Poland joined NATO in 1999; Lithuania in 2004.) The botched Russian invasion of Ukraine, by revealing Russian military weakness and proccupying Russia there, shifted this equilibrium out of balance and resumes the long-term trend of Russian strategic decline.

But an interim result will leave Russian satellite Belarus surrounded on three sides by Poland, Lithuania, and a west-facing Ukraine, whose membership in the EU and de facto NATO membership are inevitable. The problem for Putin is this domino, as well as others, is still to fall.

Nobody's Noticed Kaliningrad

Most of the aggregators missed yesterday's biggest story, but CNSNews had it: Russia Claims NATO Ally Lithuania Is Blockading Kaliningrad, Warns it Will Respond. Over the past week or so, I've begun to think the biggest outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be in the Baltics, and Kaliningrad has become the locus. According to Wikipedia, following its capture by the Red Army ihn April 1945,

The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it under Soviet administration. The city was renamed to Kaliningrad [from Königsberg] in 1946 in honor of Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is governed as the administrative centre of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost oblast of Russia.

As a major transport hub, with sea and river ports, the city is home to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy, and is one of the largest industrial centres in Russia. It was deemed the best city in Russia in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in Kommersant's magazine The Firm's Secret, the best city in Russia for business in 2013 according to Forbes, and was ranked fifth in the Urban Environment Quality Index published by Minstroy in 2019.

The problem is that Kaliningrad Oblast is an exclave, Russian territory outside Russian borders. Land connections between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia must transit Lithuania. Per the CNSNews story,

A new potential flashpoint between Moscow and NATO emerged when Lithuania, citing incoming European Union sanctions on Russian steel and other ferrous metals, said those items could no longer be transported across its territory to Kaliningrad.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it summoned a senior Lithuanian diplomat and informed her Russia viewed the actions as “openly hostile.”

It said the ministry had informed charge d’affaires Virginija Umbrasiene “that if in the near future cargo transit between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of the territory of the Russian Federation through Lithuania is not restored in full, then Russia reserves the right to take actions to protect its national interests.”

. . . The governor of Kaliningrad, Anton Alikhanov, claimed earlier that the restriction would impact 40-50 percent of goods moving between the region and the rest of Russia.

. . . [O]ver the coming months more and more goods will be affected: E.U. bans on Russian imports will target wood, cement, fertilizers, seafood, and liquor from July 10; coal and other solid fossil fuels from August 10; and crude oil from December 5.

The EU disputes Russia's claim that this is a "blockade", but given the context that Kaliningrad is one of the largest industrial centers in Russia as well as a naval base, the EU sanctions on Russia will turn into a major handicap, "blockade" or not. And as of earlier this month, via an official NATO release:

Fourteen NATO allies along with two NATO partner nations, Finland and Sweden, are currently participating in the exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS 22) with over 45 ships, more than 75 aircraft and 7,500 personnel.

This premier maritime-focused annual exercise kicked off from Stockholm, Sweden, on 05 June. It takes place in the Baltic region from June 5-17 and provides a unique training opportunity to strengthen combined response capabilities critical to preserving freedom of navigation and security in the Baltic Sea. This is the 51st iteration of the exercise series, which began in 1972.

Let's ask a question here. Sweden applied to join NATO only this past May 15, and only three weeks later, they're hosting NATO's premier maritime-focused annual exercise? I'm sorry, things in the real world don't happen justlikethat. Pope Francis is no dummy when he speaks of "the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented". The Baltic is a key inflection point here, and it's been part of Western strategic thinking all along. According to Reuters,

Moscow summoned EU envoy Markus Ederer to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday. EU spokesperson Peter Stano said Ederer asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric".

The standoff creates a new source of confrontation on the Baltic, a region already set for a security overhaul that would hem in Russia's sea power as Sweden and Finland apply to join NATO and put nearly the whole coast under alliance control.

I'm starting to think what's really going on is that the West was completely surprised by the Russian inabiity to succeed in its Ukraine invasion, and there's been a hasty recalculation -- Russia has committed and largely squandered a major part of its military force in Ukraine, and it's now vulnerable in the Baltic and likely elsewhere. Lithuania is a NATO member and in particular has closely aligned its military planning with Poland. Any Russian military threat against NATO is now simply idle.

Putin is in serious danger of losing important Russian territory and is likely unable to do much about it. This is an interesting development indeed.