The War Is Right And Just. But Is It Prudent?

From Andrew Sullivan, "A year later, the end-game of the war in Ukraine is dangerously murky":

There are so many ways in which the West’s defensive war against Russia is a righteous cause.

It is right and just to defend a sovereign country from attack by a much larger neighbor; to fight back against an occupying force committing war crimes on a massive scale; to oppose the logic of dictatorships and defend the foundations of democracy; to uphold a post-Cold War international order which forbids the redrawing of borders by force; to unite democratic countries in Europe against a resurgence of imperial Russia; to defang and defeat a poisonous chauvinism that despises modern freedoms for women and gay people.

It is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?

That’s the question I’m still grappling with, in a week which saw the conflict deepen and the two sides entrench their positions further. President Biden’s trip to Kyiv and his speech in Poland have heightened the stakes, turning this into a more obvious proxy war between the United States and Russia … edging gingerly but relentlessly toward something more direct. He’s all in now: declaring that Ukraine “must triumph” and that Russia cannot win a war that the Russian leader deems existential. NATO armaments are pouring into Ukraine at an accelerating rate. The training of Ukrainian troops is happening across the Continent. Germany is sending tanks. Pressure is building on Britain to send fighter jets.

The US is ratcheting up arms production as fast as it can, while seriously depleting our own Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems. These are good times for arms producers:

The Army is planning a 500% increase in artillery shell production, from 15,000 a month to 70,000, according to Army acquisition chief Doug Bush … and intends to double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, make roughly 33% more Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems surface-to-surface medium-range missiles a year, and produce each month a minimum of 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — which were “almost not in production at all,” according to Bush.

When Ukraine’s effective military is made up almost entirely of NATO equipment, and trained by NATO forces, there surely comes a point at which claiming NATO is not actually at war with Russia gets fuzzy.

It’s worth remembering how Biden put it less than a year ago: “the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War Three.’ Okay?” Well, technically, he’s still right. We don’t have American pilots and troops in the air and on the ground in Ukraine. But we do have them just over the horizon, along with tanks and planes and highly effective drones on the front lines in Ukraine itself. The munitions are being made in the USA — many in Biden’s beloved Scranton! And Ukraine cannot win without them.

And this is not exactly a proxy war like Vietnam — because the country involved is right on the nuclear super-power’s border and was long part of that power’s empire; and any attempt to reclaim all of Ukraine will obviously spill over into Russia proper at some point. And the logic of escalation in wartime has its own momentum, if we don’t want to seem as if we’re losing ground.

Sure enough, every time the Biden administration has said it would restrict the provision of arms to Ukraine, it has backtracked quickly, as Putin digs in. Upwards of 140 tanks are being sent from NATO, and hundreds more may follow. Long-range missiles capable of hitting Russia have also been sent — on the condition they not be used in Russia. The 2022 dynamic was summed up by the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov:

When I was in DC in November [2021], before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible. Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimeter guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM [missiles], no. Now all of that is a yes. Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be…F-16s.

The Russians are escalating as well: they now have 300,000 troops in Ukrainian territory (way more than they had for the original invasion), are ramping their economy into wartime gear, and are still on the offensive (if ineffectively so). Their economy has held up far better than anyone expected. Last March, Biden assured us that “the totality of our economic sanctions and export controls are crushing — crushing the Russian economy.” The actual contraction was 2.1 percent in 2022, according to the IMF. A crinkle, not a crush.

In fact, Russia has merely diversified its customer base: “for all of 2022, Russia managed to increase its oil output 2 percent and boost oil export earnings 20 percent, to $218 billion ... Russia also raked in $138 billion from natural gas, a nearly 80 percent rise over 2021 as record prices offset cuts in flows to Europe.” This year, the IMF predicts that Russia will have a higher growth rate than either Germany or Britain, and in 2024, it will best the US as well. Yes, sanctions will, in the long run, hurt investment and future growth in Russia and cripple technological essentials for war. And tougher sanctions on oil are underway, and could have an impact. But Russia is far more resilient economically than almost anyone foresaw a year ago.

Russia’s isolation? Not so splendid anymore. The West is indeed united, for which Biden deserves real credit; the rest, much less so. India has increased Russian imports by 400 percent. But the real game-changer is China. Its initial neutrality is clearly shifting. Yesterday, Der Spiegel reported that “the Russian military is engaged in negotiations with Chinese drone manufacturer Xi’an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology over the mass production of kamikaze drones for Russia.”

Previously dependent on Iran for these weapons, a serious and reliable supply from China will come in handy. More significantly, as Noah Smith notes, in a long war of attrition, as this is becoming, mass production of weapons matters. And China has a much bigger manufacturing base than the West. Will they use it? It must be tempting to pin the West down in Europe. We’ll learn more when Xi visits Putin this spring.

Politically, moreover, Russia appears stable, if brutally controlled. Muscovites remain relatively protected and are carrying on as if the war didn’t exist. The public sphere has become ever more subsumed in militarism, dissent has been largely crushed, and the invocation of the fight against the actual Nazis seems to have helped galvanize public support. Popular backing for the war, even among non-Russian polls, remains high.

The most intense opposition has come from the far right, military bloggers and crazed TV jingoists, wanting to ramp up the action. In the US, in contrast, the opposition is in favor of less, rather than more. The two likeliest Republican candidates in 2024, Trump and DeSantis, favor talks and a peace settlement, along America First lines. As Biden was in Poland, Trump was in Pennsylvania; and DeSantis was urging restraint. The chances of an American pivot on Ukraine seem at this point higher than a Russian one, do they not?

That’s why, I suppose, the chorus of support this past week in Washington — by almost the entire foreign policy Blob — had a slight air of desperation about it. Two Atlantic headlines blared the neocon message: a surreal piece arguing that “Biden Just Destroyed Putin’s Last Hope,” and “Biden Went to Kyiv Because There’s No Going Back.” Anne Applebaum says Biden’s trip is “putting everyone on notice, including the defense ministries and the defense industries, that the paradigm has shifted and the story has changed.” Europe is at war and there is no going back until Russia is defeated and has withdrawn from all of Ukraine. The off-ramps are being removed.

Which is a little bit concerning when the enemy has nukes. That’s why the US stood by when Soviet tanks went into Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War — a far greater incursion than a fifth of Ukraine. We held back not because it was right, but because the alternative could have been catastrophic. We can pray that nothing happens this time — but prayer is not that effective against a potentially desperate regime fighting for what it believes is its existential survival and for a leader who knows a loss would mean his possibly literal demise. In short: we’re objectively taking more of a risk now than we did for almost all of the Cold War, excepting October 1962, with far lower stakes. Has the nuclear equation changed that much since then?

Wars are dynamic and unpredictable. Will Putin invade Moldova? Will Belarus go all-in against Ukraine? Will this war cement a Russia-China alliance and deepen Russia-India ties? Or will battlefield success for Ukraine lead to some kind of breakthrough, as the current strategy seems to be aiming at? I don’t know, and none of us know. What I do know is that Russia is going nowhere; that getting it out of the Donbas may require a long WWI-style slog; that at some point, a territorial compromise is inevitable; and that the longer this war goes on, the worse the human and economic toll on Ukraine.

And as Ron DeSantis pointed out this week, the strongest argument for war — that anything less would put all of Europe at risk of Russian invasion — is a lot weaker now that the shambles of the Russian military has been exposed. A military that cannot occupy more than a fifth of a non-NATO country on its border is not likely to be entering Warsaw anytime soon. And the conflict has strengthened NATO immeasurably and accelerated Europe’s transition from carbon energy, both indisputably good things.

My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righteous but dangerous. Putin is very much in the wrong, just as Saddam was. Evil men, vile regimes. But the one thing I learned from all that, is that focusing on morality rather than prudence, and letting the former eclipse the latter entirely, can be a righteous and well-intentioned road to hell.

Tank Deliveries Could Mark Turning Point in War

I'm interested to see how this plays out. 

At Der Spiegel, "There is enormous relief in Kyiv that, after months of hesitation, the West is now willing to supply main battle tanks. But can the Leopard 2s supplied by Germany and its allies really turn the tide on the battlefield?":

It's the end of January, and the industrial city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine can only be reached by a few roads. The threat of being surrounded by Russian troops is ever present. Driving on one of these narrow country roads through the hilly landscape, the thunder of detonations already in your ears, you can make out some of the Ukrainians' old T-72 tanks between the trees – none of Panzerhaubitzer 2000 or Gepard air defense tanks sent by Germany, no American HIMARS multiple rocket launchers. That's not surprising given that, statistically, there is only one of these Western-supplied devices for every 10 or 20 kilometers of front lines?

Instead, a gun on wheels appears from behind an embankment, looking as if it had rolled out of a period film: a 57-millimeter caliber cannon, dating back to the end of World War II and mounted on trucks dating from the 1960s. Target control is adjusted from a delivery van, on whose roof a Starlink satellite link maintains contact with the reconnaissance unit that launches drones.

The front around Bakhmut shows the extent to which Ukraine is reliant on military aid from the West. The Ukrainian military has modernized its arsenal, mainly with NATO's help. But the wear and tear of the war is so great that Ukrainians are forced in some cases to defend themselves against the Russian attackers using ancient equipment.

One of the fighters with the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, a unit of reservists and volunteers in the Donbas, introduces himself as "Blacksmith." Outside of war, he's an iron craftsman, but now he's an artilleryman. "Pilot" used to be a top manager at a turbine manufacturer. Only the youngest one still seems to have kept his real first name: Dima used to earn his money as a camera assistant on large film productions. Now, he controls the drones.

For over a month, the three milled and tinkered with recycled weapons in an old repair shop. In November, they fired the first of them. And how was it? "Very loud. But it's no big deal. I'm a punk musician on the side."

"A Game Changer on the Battlefield"

Nowhere along the approximately 1,000-kilometer-long front is the fighting in Ukraine currently as fierce as it is in the Donbas. And few cities there have been attacked by Russia's troops as often in recent weeks as Bakhmut. Wave after wave of regular army units and Wagner Group mercenaries have continuously pressed the Ukrainian defenders. Last Wednesday, the Ukrainians admitted that they had to withdraw from the town of Soledar near Bakhmut.

This makes the relief in Kyiv that Germany has agreed to supply modern Leopard 2 battle tanks, after months of hesitation, all the greater. Together with their European partners, the Germans plan to deliver a total of two battalions of 40 Leopards each. The United States announced it would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks. Shortly after that, Britain promised Kyiv 14 Challenger tanks. The development marks a turning point. Previously, the West had been reluctant to export such offensive weapons to Ukraine.

According to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian forces, his army needs 300 Western tanks and 600 armored vehicles to really make a difference against the Russians on the battlefield. Kyiv is nonetheless hoping that the European and American move will mark an inflection point in the war.

Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter that he was sincerely grateful to Chancellor Olaf Scholz and "all our friends in Germany." Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk spoke to the news agency Deutsche Press Agentur of an historic moment. He said that Berlin's decision to supply tanks is a "game changer on the battlefield." NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is also convinced that the Leopards could help Ukraine "defend itself, win and prevail as an independent nation" at a "critical moment" in the war, as he tweeted on Wednesday. Russia's ambassador in Berlin, Sergei Nechaev, on the other hand, described the planned delivery as "highly dangerous" on Twitter. He said the move would "take the conflict to a new level of confrontation."

Thus far, tanks have played a largely secondary role in the war. They have primarily been used to provide support to artillery efforts and haven't really been used in direct combat. Military experts believe this could now change. Because of their mobility and range, the Leopard tanks are among the best in the world. They are also more effective than Soviet models at firing accurately while traveling at full speed.

According to a report by CNN, the Americans have already suggested to the Ukrainian military that they should change tactics. Instead of getting bogged down in battles of attrition like Bakhmut, they believe the Ukrainians should make quick, unexpected advances. The Western allies are already providing modern armored personnel carriers and troop transport vehicles for this purpose, as well as additional artillery and air defenses.

In a future advance, the Leopards could ideally attack Russian positions while the transports carrying the infantrymen break through into enemy territory. Mobile flak tanks like Germany's Gepard would protect against air strikes and at the same time create more space for Ukraine's own fighter jets. Artillery support would come from the the rear with, for example, Germany's self-propelled Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzer.

The Ukrainians already successfully tested a surprise strategy, even with their limited resources, in late summer during their counteroffensive in Kharkiv. Since then, however, the Russians have become more attuned to the enemy and have reinforced their positions...

Keep reading.

 

Putin’s Plot Against America

It's Julia Ioffe, at Puck, "There is a growing fear in Washington that Russia will resort to hybrid tactics to inflict pain on Western powers in ways that it can no longer achieve through conventional warfare alone":

From Moscow’s vantage point, it isn’t simply the gross incompetence of its military and intelligence services that prevented Russia from seizing Ukraine in a flashy blitzkrieg last February. It was the fact that Ukraine was armed with NATO weaponry, its troops trained by NATO advisors, its intelligence services constantly fed information by Western intel agencies. Moscow has made no secret of this frustration or its assertion that the battle for Ukraine was a proxy war against the West, itself. This is why, from the very beginning, Moscow has framed this war as one not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather one between Russia and what Vladimir Putin and his coterie love to call “the collective West.” And, according to this consensual ideology, it is this collective West—not the incompetence of any generals or advisors—that has thwarted Putin’s aims of swallowing Ukraine and fulfilling his dream of a pan-Slavic super state with Moscow at its capital.

The Ukrainian military, which has come to be known as the MacGuyver army in defense circles, has fought bravely and with great flexibility, able to deftly outmaneuver what was once considered the second most potent army in the world, doing so with a patchwork of various weapons systems from all the various countries of Europe and the U.S. That’s not as easy as it seems. But Putin is not totally wrong. And, indeed, while Russia has punished the Ukrainian people a bushel and a peck and a noose around the neck, what about the West?

Yes, there have been inflationary pressures but that’s not enough: on the whole, the West is wealthy enough to withstand them. Last summer and fall, the West worried about a hard, cold winter exacerbated by the potential twin punch of high energy prices and Moscow’s ability to weaponize Europe’s dependence on Russian energy. As I explained in my dispatch last week, Russia originally thought it could punish the collective West, but that gun didn’t fire. Europe quickly diversified away from Russian oil and gas, depriving Russia of its main energy market.

The nuclear threat? Well, that worry seems to have abated a bit for now, too, mostly because, as I noted before, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have made very clear to Putin that they will wash their hands of him if he goes nuclear. Right now, isolated from the West, Putin needs them too much economically to risk his own isolation.

So what is left? People in the Biden administration are worried that this leaves Putin with one remaining option: unleashing a wave of asymmetric chaos across the West. Think political interference, cyberattacks, assassinations. “The Russians wrote the book on this but they haven’t turned it on,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Europe, countering the Russian threat. “Why is that?”

Keep reading.

 

With House Majority in Play, a New Class Takes Shape

It's just a matter of getting all the ballots counted. When it's done, the GOP majority will take over in the House, possibly with some Republican outliers.

At NYT, "The Republican ranks grew more extreme and slightly more diverse, while Democrats added several young liberals to their caucus":

WASHINGTON — Whoever holds the House majority in January, the new lawmakers will include a fresh crop of Republican election deniers, including a veteran who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a handful of G.O.P. members of color; and a diverse group of young Democratic progressives.

As vote counting continued across the country on Wednesday, with Republicans grasping to take control and Democrats outperforming expectations in key races, the contours of a new class of lawmakers began to emerge.

It featured a sizable contingent of Republicans who have questioned or denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, many of them hailing from safely red districts, adding to an already influential extreme right in the House. At least 140 of the House Republicans who won election this week are election deniers, at least 15 of them new additions.

A handful of Black and Latina Republicans also won, adding a touch more diversity to a mostly white, male conference — though far less than leaders had hoped as many candidates they had recruited for their potential to appeal to a broader set of voters in competitive districts fell short.

For Democrats, the election ushered in younger, more diverse members to fill the seats of departing incumbents. Many of those candidates had held state offices or previously sought seats in Congress and are expected to back many of the priorities of the Democratic left wing.

Here are some of the new faces:

The Republicans

Jen A. Kiggans, a Navy veteran and state senator.

As a woman with military experience, Ms. Kiggans was regarded by Republicans as a prime recruit to put up against a centrist Democrat in a conservative-leaning area. She defeated Representative Elaine Luria on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, propelled in part by state redistricting that tilted the district more decisively to the right.

She focused her campaign narrowly on inflation and public safety, and was bolstered by top Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader who is running to become speaker should his party retake the House, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin. That suggested that she would be more likely to serve as an acolyte to Republican leaders than a thorn in their sides.

But though she ran as a mainstream candidate, Ms. Kiggans declined throughout her campaign to say whether she believed Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.

Derrick Van Orden, a veteran at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A retired Navy SEAL who rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Van Orden flipped a key seat for Republicans in western Wisconsin, in a largely rural district currently held by Representative Ron Kind, a 13-term centrist Democrat who did not seek re-election.

Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:

The House. Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. There are still several key races that remain uncalled, and in many of these contests, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count them.

The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to three states: Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.

How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. Read our five takeaways and analysis of why the “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.

Mr. Van Orden, who emphasized his military service on the campaign trail, largely ducked questions about his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally. He has said he did not go into the Capitol, and wrote in an opinion essay that he left the grounds outside the building when violence began, watching “what should have been an expression of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our nation.”

During his race, Mr. Van Orden leaned heavily into culture war messaging, accusing Democrats of “taking the nation rapidly down the path to socialism” and railing on a podcast against what he described as “woke ideology” seeping into the military.

John James, an Iraq veteran set to expand the House’s ranks of Black Republicans.

West Point graduate who commanded Apache helicopters in Iraq, Mr. James was personally lobbied for months to run by party leaders including Mr. McCarthy, who were convinced that his victory would keep this Michigan seat safely in Republican hands for years to come.

Mr. James, who unsuccessfully challenged Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, in 2020, ran a more moderate campaign than many of his colleagues in safe seats. He presented himself to voters as “an open-minded, freethinking conservative,” and focused on kitchen table issues like lowering prices and bringing back manufacturing.

His victory will nudge up the number of Black Republicans in the House to at least three from two.

Monica De La Cruz, the conservative from the Rio Grande Valley.

Ms. De La Cruz emphasized her conservative ideology in flipping a seat in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas abandoned by an incumbent who switched districts after the state legislature handed him an unfavorable gerrymander.

Ms. De La Cruz, who owns an insurance firm, had campaigned heavily on the influx of illegal migrants at the southern border, emphasizing how her family had immigrated legally to the United States from Mexico and pledging to “finish the wall” started by former President Donald J. Trump.

Republicans had enthusiastically pointed to her candidacy, as well as those of two other Latinas running in the Rio Grande Valley — Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia — as evidence that they were finally making inroads with Latino voters. But both Ms. Flores and Ms. Garcia lost, according to The Associated Press.

Andy Ogles, a hard-right former mayor.

A former mayor, Mr. Ogles flipped a Democratic-held seat in central Tennessee thanks to a drastic redrawing of the district that all but guaranteed a Republican victory.

Outspoken, hard-right lawmakers like Mr. Ogles could cause headaches for Republican leaders as they try to keep the government funded and prevent the country from defaulting on its debt.

After triumphing in his primary election, Mr. Ogles called for the impeachment of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as “treason” charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, over the administration’s handling of immigration at the southern border. And a video released by his Democratic opponent showed him at a G.O.P. candidate forum following the repeal of Roe v. Wade arguing that the “next thing we have to do is go after gay marriage.” ...

 

Economic Issues Outweigh Concerns About Rights in Midterm Vote

Well, you would think. (*Eye-roll.*)

From Monmouth, "Biden gets poor marks on handling pivotal issues":

West Long Branch, NJ – Economic issues are a bigger factor in this year’s midterm elections than concerns about rights and democracy, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll. Democrats prioritize a fairly wide range of issues from climate change to abortion, while Republicans focus on a more limited set including inflation, crime, and immigration. Independents, though, tend to hone in on one issue above all: rising prices. Further dampening Democrats’ prospects are the poor numbers President Joe Biden gets for his performance on the issues most important to independents.

Republicans have made slight gains in the public’s preference for party control of Congress since the summer. Currently, 36% of Americans say they want the GOP in charge and another 11% have no initial preference but lean toward Republican control. Democratic control is preferred by 34% with another 10% leaning toward the Democrats. The combined 47% who choose Republican control is up from 43% in August, while the 44% support level for Democratic control is down from 50%.

A majority (54%) of Americans say it is very important to have their preferred party in control of Congress. This control importance metric is slightly higher among those who want Republicans (62%) than those who want Democrats (58%) leading Congress, which is a flip of the partisan result for this question in last month’s poll. Similarly, those who want Republican leadership (65%) are somewhat more likely than those who want Democrats in charge (58%) to say they are extremely motivated to vote this year.

“Because the congressional map favors the GOP, Democrats need to do more than ‘keep it close’ in order to hold onto their House majority. One roadblock for them is that the issue picture favors Republicans,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The poll asked about the importance of 12 issue areas for the federal government to address. Those rated either extremely or very important by the largest number of Americans include inflation (82%), crime (72%), elections and voting (70%), jobs and unemployment (68%), and immigration (67%). The next tier of issue concerns includes transportation and energy infrastructure (57%), abortion (56%), racial inequality (53%), gun control (51%), and climate change (49%). The least important issues for federal government action right now are the Covid pandemic (32%) and student loan debt (31%). About 8 in 10 Republicans put inflation, crime, and immigration at the top of their issue list. A similar number of Democrats prioritize climate change, racial inequality, elections and voting, gun control, and abortion, with about 3 in 4 also giving emphasis to jobs and inflation. However, the only issue which more than 3 in 4 independents place high importance on is inflation. Additionally, independents are more concerned about overall economic issues along with crime and immigration than they are by other issues.

When asked which group of issues is more important in their support for Congress this year, concerns about the economy and cost of living (54%) outpace concerns about fundamental rights and democratic processes (38%) among all Americans. Republicans prioritize the economy (71%), while Democrats prioritize rights (67%). Independents are more likely to give preference to economic issues (61%) than concerns about rights and democracy (29%).

“Democrats are all over the place when it comes to their key issues. This makes it difficult for the party to create a cohesive messaging strategy to motivate its base. Republicans, on the other hand, just have to hammer away at rising prices and ‘the wolf is at the door’ to get their voters riled up,” said Murray. He added, “A major problem for Democrats is their base messaging doesn’t hold as much appeal for independents as the GOP issue agenda does. Even though truly persuadable independents are a rather small group these days, this small difference can have a major impact given the expectation that congressional control will hinge on a handful of very close contests.”

Perception of President Biden’s performance on these key issues is not helping the Democratic cause. The only issue where he gets a net positive rating is handling the Covid pandemic (50% approve and 47% disapprove) – which is one of the public’s lowest priority issues right now. Only 3 in 10 Americans approve of the job Biden has done on the nation’s top concern – inflation (30%) – as well as other concerns that Republicans are focused on – i.e., crime (32%) and immigration (31%). Biden also gets similarly low marks on abortion (31%) and gun control (30%) – two issues that are important to Democrats. About 4 in 10 approve of the president’s performance on other issues covered in the poll.

Democrats are about twice as likely as independents – and many multiples more likely than Republicans – to give Biden high marks for handling each of these issues. Still, Democrats are relatively less prone to approve of the president’s performance on crime, inflation, abortion, immigration, and gun control – between 61% and 69% – when compared with the other seven issues covered in the poll. Biden gets between 77% and 82% approval from his fellow Democrats on these issues, except for Covid where he earns nearly universal approval (91%).

“Obviously, the Republicans are hitting away at issues where Biden – and by extension the Democratic Party – is weakest. But it’s also worth noting that Biden does not provide a rallying point for Democratic voters on some of the issues, such as abortion, that his party is leaning on to motivate its own base,” said Murray...

Keep reading (via Memeorandum). 

Fighting the Culture War Through Christ

 Allie Beth Stuckey makes the case:

There are plenty of practical, scientific, & secular reasons to oppose progressivism, but Christian theology alone is sufficient to combat it. Without Christianity, we have no ultimate “why” to oppose abortion, gender confusion, or state overreach. Here’s what I mean.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) September 25, 2022

I know this is going to be controversial, even (especially?) for many conservatives. Sorry. This is Twitter. You have to endure my takes & I have to endure yours 😜 Anywho -

We can say, scientifically, that a unique human life is formed at conception. This is a fact. But that fact doesn’t tell us why that human is valuable, why she should be protected, and why it’s wrong to kill her.

We can employ logic & look at history to tell us that dehumanizing any person based on arbitrary reasons like size, age, or location leads to dehumanization of other kinds of people. But this doesn’t tell us why dehumanization or even murder is wrong.

We can look to biology to tell us that humans are sexually dimorphic, that the categories of male & female are fixed. But this doesn’t tell us why these facts are more important than how a person feels.

We can talk about the negative consequences of men identifying as women on girls’/women’s rights, safety & fairness, but we still don’t know why these rights matter more than the rights of men who want to enter women’s spaces.

We can point to economics & history to tell us why socialism and communism are failures. But we are defining “failure” with the assumption that mass starvation & poverty, the murder of dissidents, etc. are evil. Where does that assumption come from? We can say the state shouldn’t go after political opponents. Justice should be impartial. Bad behavior should be punished, good people should be left alone, & the innocent should be protected. But every single one of those words must be defined. Where do we get those definitions?

Admit it or not, our “why” behind the above arguments is the Bible. It’s wrong to kill a baby in the womb because God, who is the creator & authority over the universe, says he made us in His image & therefore it’s wrong to murder (Gen 9:6). There is no substantive, ultimate reason for the existence of human rights of humans are just accidental clumps of matter. The basis for innate humans rights is that humans are uniquely valuable above plants & animals. Christianity insists we are because God says we are.

This God says He made us not only in His image, but as male & female. Feelings don’t override physical reality because we were God-created, not self-created. We don’t have the power to self-declare & self-identify, because God told us who we are when he made us. The right to & legitimacy of private property comes from God (“you shall not steal,” “you shall not covet”). The authority of a government comes from God & He gives its duties to punish evil & reward good (Romans 13).

Good & evil exists because God says that they do and He defines them. “Murder is bad because it is” “women’s rights & privacy matter because they do” will not ultimately be enough against secular progressivism, which is a religion in itself with its own rigid doctrines.

You don’t have to be a Christian to acknowledge the necessity of its worldview in holding together everything that has ever made the West or any civilization lastingly good. There is ultimately no secular way to justify any anti-progressive or conservative argument.

Progressives understand this in a way conservatives don’t. They’re constantly attacking Christianity, because Christianity is and always has been the fundamental threat to their total control. We’ve always been a boil on the back of wicked tyrants and we still are.

God is a God of order, and progressivism constantly seeks disorder. Christians are always to be agents of order, in every place & age. Therefore we will always be - & rightly so - enemies of progressive ideology.

So - while I am happy to link arms with people of all backgrounds to push back against the chaos of today’s leftist lunacy, at the end of the day, simple anti-wokism will never, ever be a match for the threat this ideology poses. No secular movement will. The biggest failure of the conservative movement is thinking we are fighting for neutrality. Meanwhile, the left is playing for keeps knowing every space is for the taking, and nothing is neutral. Everything will be dominated by a worldview. The question is only ever, which one?

 

Why Ukraine Will Win

From Frances Fukuyama, at the Journal of Democracy, "The country’s military is advancing on the battlefield. If Ukraine defeats Russia’s massive army, the ripple effects will be felt across the globe":

The war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month, marks a critical juncture that will determine the course of global democracy. There are three important points to be made about its significance.

First is the question of why the war occurred in the first place. The argument was made, even before the Russian invasion, that Vladimir Putin was being driven by fear of NATO expansion and was seeking a neutral buffer to protect his country. While Putin doubtless disliked the idea that Ukraine could enter NATO, this was not his real motive. Ukrainian membership was never imminent. NATO expansion was not a plot hatched in Washington, London, or Paris to drive the alliance as far east as possible. It was driven by the former satellites of the former USSR, which had been dominated by that country since 1945 and were convinced that Russia would try to do so again once the balance of power turned to Russia’s favor. Putin, moreover, has explained very clearly what was at stake. In a long article written in 2021 and in a speech on the eve of the invasion, he castigated the breakup of the Soviet Union and asserted that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” artificially separated. More broadly, Russian demands in the leadup to the war made it very clear that Moscow objected to the entire post-1991 European settlement that created a “Europe whole and free.” Russian war aims would not be satisfied by a neutral Ukraine; that neutrality would have to extend across Europe.

The real threat perceived by Putin was in the end not to the security of Russia, but to its political model. He has asserted that liberal democracy didn’t work generally, but was particularly inappropriate in the Slavic world. A free Ukraine belied that assertion, and for that reason had to be eliminated.

The second critical point concerns Western solidarity in support of Ukraine. Up to now, the continuing supply of weapons and economic sanctions have been absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian power. Most observers have in fact been surprised by the degree of solidarity shown by NATO, and particularly by the turnaround in German foreign policy. However, the Russians have now cut off a large part of the gas they supply to Europe in retaliation for Western sanctions, and there are huge uncertainties as to whether foreign support will continue as the weather gets colder and energy prices continue to rise all over Europe.

In this respect, the most critical variable to watch is the outcome of the current military conflict. Political analysts typically believe that military outcomes reflect underlying political forces, but in Ukraine today the opposite is true: The country’s political future will depend first and foremost on its battlefield success in the short run.

Over the summer, when Russia had withdrawn from its initial effort to occupy Kyiv and the fighting was centered in the Donbas, a conventional wisdom emerged that Ukraine and Russia were locked in a “long war” (featured on the cover of the Economist). Many asserted it was inevitable that there would be a stalemate and war of attrition that might go on for years. As Ukraine’s forward military momentum slowed, there were Western voices arguing that peace negotiations and territorial concessions from Ukraine were necessary.

Had this advice been followed, it would have led to a terrible outcome: Russia keeping the parts of Ukraine it had swallowed, leaving a rump country unable to ship exports out of its southern ports. Such a negotiation would not bring peace; Russia would simply wait until it had reconstituted its military to restart the war.

By contrast, if Ukraine can regain military momentum before the end of 2022, it will be much easier for leaders of Western democracies to argue that their people should tighten their belts over the coming winter. For that reason, military progress in the short term is critical for the Western coalition to hold together.

The prospect that Ukraine can actually regain military momentum is entirely possible; indeed, it is likely in my view and unfolding as we speak. The Ukrainian general staff has been extremely smart in its overall strategy, focusing not on the Donbas but on liberating parts of the south that were occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war. Ukrainian forces have used NATO-supplied weapons, particularly the HIMARS long-range rocket system, to attack ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics hubs all along the front. They have succeeded in attacking supposedly secure Russian rear areas deep in the Crimean peninsula. At the moment, 25,000 to 30,000 Russian troops are trapped in a pocket around the southern city of Kherson, which lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out the bridges connecting Kherson to Russia, and have been slowly tightening the noose around these forces. It is possible that the Russian position there will collapse catastrophically and that Moscow will lose a good part of its remaining army.

More broadly, morale on the Ukrainian side has been immensely higher than on the Russian side. Ukrainians are fighting for their own land, and have seen the atrocities committed by Russian forces in areas the latter have already occupied. The Russian military, by contrast, has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to replace the manpower it has already lost, recruiting prison convicts and people from the poorer ethnic minorities to do the fighting that ethnic Russians seem unwilling to do themselves.

Thirdly, a Russian military failure—meaning at minimum the liberation of territories conquered after 24 February 2022—will have enormous political reverberations around the world...

 

The Underappreciated Risks of Catastrophic Escalation

From Johm Mearsheimer, at Foreign Affairs, "Playing With Fire in Ukraine":

Western policymakers appear to have reached a consensus about the war in Ukraine: the conflict will settle into a prolonged stalemate, and eventually a weakened Russia will accept a peace agreement that favors the United States and its NATO allies, as well as Ukraine. Although officials recognize that both Washington and Moscow may escalate to gain an advantage or to prevent defeat, they assume that catastrophic escalation can be avoided. Few imagine that U.S. forces will become directly involved in the fighting or that Russia will dare use nuclear weapons.

Washington and its allies are being much too cavalier. Although disastrous escalation may be avoided, the warring parties’ ability to manage that danger is far from certain. The risk of it is substantially greater than the conventional wisdom holds. And given that the consequences of escalation could include a major war in Europe and possibly even nuclear annihilation, there is good reason for extra concern.

To understand the dynamics of escalation in Ukraine, start with each side’s goals. Since the war began, both Moscow and Washington have raised their ambitions significantly, and both are now deeply committed to winning the war and achieving formidable political aims. As a result, each side has powerful incentives to find ways to prevail and, more important, to avoid losing. In practice, this means that the United States might join the fighting either if it is desperate to win or to prevent Ukraine from losing, while Russia might use nuclear weapons if it is desperate to win or faces imminent defeat, which would be likely if U.S. forces were drawn into the fighting.

Furthermore, given each side’s determination to achieve its goals, there is little chance of a meaningful compromise. The maximalist thinking that now prevails in both Washington and Moscow gives each side even more reason to win on the battlefield so that it can dictate the terms of the eventual peace. In effect, the absence of a possible diplomatic solution provides an added incentive for both sides to climb up the escalation ladder. What lies further up the rungs could be something truly catastrophic: a level of death and destruction exceeding that of World War II.

AIMING HIGH

The United States and its allies initially backed Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory and help negotiate a favorable end to the fighting. But once the Ukrainian military began hammering Russian forces, especially around Kyiv, the Biden administration shifted course and committed itself to helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. It also sought to severely damage Russia’s economy by imposing unprecedented sanctions. As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin explained U.S. goals in April, “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.” In effect, the United States announced its intention to knock Russia out of the ranks of great powers.

What’s more, the United States has tied its own reputation to the outcome of the conflict. U.S. President Joe Biden has labelled Russia’s war in Ukraine a “genocide” and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being a “war criminal” who should face a “war crimes trial.” Presidential proclamations such as these make it hard to imagine Washington backing down; if Russia prevailed in Ukraine, the United States’ position in the world would suffer a serious blow.

Russian ambitions have also expanded. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the West, Moscow did not invade Ukraine to conquer it and make it part of a Greater Russia. It was principally concerned with preventing Ukraine from becoming a Western bulwark on the Russian border. Putin and his advisers were especially concerned about Ukraine eventually joining NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made the point succinctly in mid-January, saying at a press conference, “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.” For Russian leaders, the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO is, as Putin himself put it before the invasion, “a direct threat to Russian security”—one that could be eliminated only by going to war and turning Ukraine into a neutral or failed state.

Toward that end, it appears that Russia’s territorial goals have expanded markedly since the war started. Until the eve of the invasion, Russia was committed to implementing the Minsk II agreement, which would have kept the Donbas as part of Ukraine. Over the course of the war, however, Russia has captured large swaths of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, and there is growing evidence that Putin now intends to annex all or most of that land, which would effectively turn what is left of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state.

The threat to Russia today is even greater than it was before the war, mainly because the Biden administration is now determined to roll back Russia’s territorial gains and permanently cripple Russian power. Making matters even worse for Moscow, Finland and Sweden are joining NATO, and Ukraine is better armed and more closely allied with the West. Moscow cannot afford to lose in Ukraine, and it will use every means available to avoid defeat. Putin appears confident that Russia will ultimately prevail against Ukraine and its Western backers. “Today, we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield,” he said in early July. “What can you say? Let them try. The goals of the special military operation will be achieved. There are no doubts about that.”

Ukraine, for its part, has the same goals as the Biden administration. The Ukrainians are bent on recapturing territory lost to Russia—including Crimea—and a weaker Russia is certainly less threatening to Ukraine. Furthermore, they are confident that they can win, as Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov made clear in mid-July, when he said, “Russia can definitely be defeated, and Ukraine has already shown how.” His U.S. counterpart apparently agrees. “Our assistance is making a real difference on the ground,” Austin said in a late July speech. “Russia thinks that it can outlast Ukraine—and outlast us. But that’s just the latest in Russia’s string of miscalculations.”

In essence, Kyiv, Washington, and Moscow are all deeply committed to winning at the expense of their adversary, which leaves little room for compromise. Neither Ukraine nor the United States, for example, is likely to accept a neutral Ukraine; in fact, Ukraine is becoming more closely tied with the West by the day. Nor is Russia likely to return all or even most of the territory it has taken from Ukraine, especially since the animosities that have fueled the conflict in the Donbas between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government for the past eight years are more intense than ever.

These conflicting interests explain why so many observers believe that a negotiated settlement will not happen any time soon and thus foresee a bloody stalemate. They are right about that. But observers are underestimating the potential for catastrophic escalation that is built into a protracted war in Ukraine...

Still more.

Ukraine's Southern Forces Wage a Slow Campaign to Wear the Russians Down

The war in Ukriane is inching back up in the news. Ukrainian forces launched mysterious bombing strikes in the Crimea, taking out a number of Russia warplanes. 

More at the Wall Street Journal, "Ukraine’s Southern Forces Wage a Slow Campaign to Wear the Russians Down":

A VILLAGE IN KHERSON REGION, Ukraine—Until recently, Russian artillery pounded Ukrainian forces on the front lines of the war in the south.

But today, just 3 miles from the Russian line, incoming shells have become far less frequent since Ukrainian forces started taking out Russian ammunition depots and bridges in the Kherson region and Crimea.

“There’s about half as much incoming as three or four weeks ago,” says Yevhen, a Ukrainian infantry squad commander, who hasn’t fired his rifle in more than a month.

This is what Ukraine’s offensive to retake occupied territory in the south of the country looks like: not a dramatic ground assault, but a series of artillery strikes designed to cut Russian supply lines and isolate Russian troops in the region.

Using U.S.-supplied long-range Himars rocket systems, Ukrainian forces have disabled several bridges across the Dnipro River and the smaller Inhulets River in recent weeks. The Ukrainians have also taken out a series of ammunition depots, including one this week in Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Moscow seized in 2014 and has used as a staging ground for its assault on the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

As a result of these strikes, Russian troops west of the rivers are now being resupplied by ferries and pontoon bridges, military analysts say, and keeping them supplied is already a challenge. Ammunition depots are being moved further away, out of artillery range, meaning supply trucks now run longer routes than they were designed for.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s Southern Command, said the Russians pulled their command centers back to the east side of the Dnipro River several days ago.

By starving the Russians of supplies, she said, the Ukrainians hope they can force an army with far more troops and greater firepower to retreat.

“There are more of them. They have more weapons. They’re more powerful in the air,” Ms. Humeniuk said. “So we have to find a way to beat them under these conditions. It’s not easy, but it’s doable.”

Kherson is the only regional capital that Moscow has taken since the full-scale invasion began in February, and the Kremlin has signaled its intention of holding on to the city. Russian-installed officials in Kherson and other occupied territories indicated they plan to hold a public vote on joining the Russian Federation as early as September. Kherson is also crucial to achieving what Western officials say was one of the Kremlin’s original aims: to take the coast from the Kherson region all the way to Odessa, thereby cutting off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

When an ammunition depot is hit, a Ukrainian special-operations commander in the south said, the special-operations teams inside Russian-held territory work to pinpoint where the Russians moved their bases. “We’ll say, ‘Soldiers come between 6 and 8. Hit it then,’” he said. “Then we see who from the Russian side comes to check, and how they’re going to regroup.”

Partisans inside Russian-occupied territory have also helped the Ukrainian cause, Ms. Humeniuk said, sending the military information about logistics centers they want to target. On Tuesday, an ammunition depot in Crimea, more than 100 miles from the front, was blown up by Ukrainian saboteurs, according to both Russian and Ukrainian officials—a tactical blow and a warning to Moscow that even logistics centers far from the battlefield could be at risk.

Military analysts say the Ukrainian strategy takes advantage of existing weaknesses in the Russian military. The Russian army, they say, is far more reliant on rail transport than other modern militaries. As a result, it has a smaller fleet of trucks equipped to move ammunition and heavy weaponry. And with trains no longer able to get close to the front, those trucks are having to travel further than they were designed for to resupply troops west of the river.

Earlier this month, the Ukrainians hit an ammunition train, disabling the primary train line between Crimea and Kherson, according to the British Defense Ministry... Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, said international sanctions have also put pressure on Russian supply lines, because the occupying forces can’t order replacements for certain parts and precision weapons. “The Russian logistics system is exhausted—it was never designed to sustain a long conflict outside of Russia,” he said. Gen. Hodges said the Russians would eventually have to pull back from their positions west of the Dnipro River—including the city of Kherson, which sits near where the narrow Inhulets River joins the wider Dnipro River, which Russians must cross to resupply the city. “If you can’t keep the required inflow of supplies, at some point you have to give ground,” said retired Maj. Gen. Edward Dorman, the former director of logistics and engineering for U.S. Central Command. “Wars have been lost because of logistics.” Along the southern front line, Ukrainian troops say they can feel the Russian supply problems. “Before we blew the bridges, when we’d hit their artillery positions, they’d replace it in the next moment,” said Roman, an infantry company commander in the same regiment as Yevhen. But in a sign of how difficult the Ukrainian campaign remains, he said there was still more incoming artillery from Russian forces than outgoing Ukrainian fire...

War With Russia Enters New Phase as Ukraine Readies Southern Counterblow

The Ukraine war grinds on.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Ukrainian offensive to reclaim key port city could be pivot in conflict, with success reinforcing support for Kyiv’s fight in parts of the West":

After months of Russian forces making painfully slow gains in Ukraine’s east, the focus of the war is moving to the south, where a potentially decisive phase of the conflict will play out.

Ukraine has used long-range artillery and rocket systems, including the American M142 Himars, to halt Russia’s grinding advances in the east, destroying ammunition dumps, command-and-control centers and air-defense systems that appear to have limited Moscow’s ability to supply its front lines. Now, with the help of these Western weapons, Ukraine says it is mounting a counteroffensive to take back the Southern port city of Kherson.

Russia continues its bombardment of cities across Ukraine including in the early hours of Sunday, when it launched an assault on the port of Mykolaiv, killing a prominent businessman. But for Ukraine, Kherson is an important strategic objective as the largest population center occupied by the Russians and the first city to fall. As a port, it is economically important to the Ukrainians and taking it back would deny Russian forces access to the southern coast toward Odessa.

Mick Ryan, a military strategist and retired major general in the Australian army, said the offensive will force Russia to make hard decisions about keeping troops in the Donbas or moving them south to protect Kherson.

If the Ukrainians retake the city, he said, they could be in a position to threaten Russia’s main Black Sea naval base, 150 miles away, at Sevastopol.

The Ukrainian effort to retake Kherson represents a significant development in the conflict, said Gen. Ryan. “If the Ukrainians can take that back, that will be a turning point,” he said. “But we’re not at a turning point yet.”

Symbolic importance Eliot Cohen, a military historian and strategist with the bipartisan policy research group the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Kherson carried great symbolic importance.

“Taking back the original city that the Russians took without much effort in the beginning, would be psychologically very significant,” he said. It would be a bigger deal than either Ukraine’s recapture of Snake Island in June or the sinking of Russia’s flagship, the Moskva, in April.

Military offensives are more challenging than defensive operations. Analysts caution that Ukraine shouldn’t—and likely won’t—rush into the fight in the south because it must continue to check Russian advances in the east. But demonstrating that it can retake ground in the south would provide an important victory for Ukrainian morale and show its backers, particularly those in Europe as the continent faces a tough winter with likely energy shortages, that their support is yielding results on the ground.

If Ukraine’s push to dislodge Russians from Kherson fails or falters, however, it could weaken support for Kyiv’s fight in some Western capitals. Ukrainians are likely to continue fighting whatever happens, but an unsuccessful campaign could prompt more calls for a negotiated settlement, particularly from parts of Western Europe facing reduced flows of Russian natural gas.

U.S. officials say Ukrainian forces are advancing in the south, and public assessments from British defense intelligence suggest the counteroffensive in Kherson is gathering momentum. The British intelligence said Thursday that Ukrainian forces have likely established a bridgehead south of the Ingulets River, which forms the northern boundary of the Kherson region, and have damaged at least three bridges that Russia uses to deliver supplies to the area. One—the 1,100-yard Antonivsky bridge near Kherson city—is now probably unusable.

This has exposed Russia’s 49th Army, stationed on the west bank of the Dnipro River, and has cut off Kherson city from other occupied territories, the British intelligence said. On Saturday, they said Russian forces were highly likely to have established two pontoon bridges and a ferry system to compensate for the bridge damage.

‘One bite at a time’

This phase of the war will look different from the first one, when Moscow unsuccessfully mounted an effort to strike at Kyiv and topple the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the second that continues in the east, where grueling exchanges of artillery fire have yielded modest advantages for Russian forces at great cost.

Mr. Cohen says this phase will likely have parallels with what happened in the last year of World War I, when the Germans on the one side and the British and Australians on the other sought to “break in” past the front lines, exploit weakness and infiltrate forces.

This requires “meticulously planned operations, which take one bite at a time out of the enemy’s front line. And then you move artillery forward, you consolidate your position, let them counterattack if they want to, and then you take another bite,” he said.

Analysts point out that this phase won’t depend on artillery alone. Konrad Muzyka, president of Rochan Consulting, military analysts based in Gdansk, Poland, said, “Himars cripple Russia’s ability to conduct offensive operations, but they won’t force the Russians to leave Ukraine. For that you need manpower and armor.”

This requires “meticulously planned operations, which take one bite at a time out of the enemy’s front line. And then you move artillery forward, you consolidate your position, let them counterattack if they want to, and then you take another bite,” he said.

Analysts point out that this phase won’t depend on artillery alone. Konrad Muzyka, president of Rochan Consulting, military analysts based in Gdansk, Poland, said, “Himars cripple Russia’s ability to conduct offensive operations, but they won’t force the Russians to leave Ukraine. For that you need manpower and armor.”

This brings in the big unknown: “We don’t know what the structure of the Ukrainian army is, we don’t know its number of troops or the state of their morale,” he said. Ukraine has lost thousands of soldiers in recent months and many good leaders.

Chris Dougherty, a former U.S. Defense Department strategist now at the Center for a New American Security, said that, despite all the materiel the West has given to Ukraine, it probably still lacks the equipment and trained forces to retake ground successfully and quickly.

“The worry I have is we give advanced equipment to the Ukrainians and they use it to stop the bleeding,” he said. “That makes sense if you’re bleeding to death. But what’s the next thing you do?” He said Russia has been unable to capitalize on its massive artillery blitzes to take significant ground, and Ukraine risks falling into the same trap...

 

War of Attrition

At WSJ, "Russia’s Tactical Shift in Ukraine Raises Prospect of Protracted War":

Kyiv says it needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia’s steady advances in eastern Ukraine, relying on superior firepower and larger numbers of troops, are grinding down Ukraine’s military and setting the stage for a protracted war of attrition in which Kyiv needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

After early missteps, Russia has found tactics that are working. In the invasion’s opening phase, Moscow’s armies tried to make daring thrusts deep into Ukrainian territory. They largely failed and lost elite units in the process. Now, Russian forces are advancing by increments under the cover of artillery.

Russia is massing “a very heavy concentration of artillery and armor in every square kilometer that we are unable to cope with,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is giving them the advantage.”

Ukrainian forces are seeking to slow the Russian advance, wearing them down and preparing to counterattack when they can bring more Western weapons to bear.

Ukraine has landed some counter-blows in the past few days with long-range rocket launchers from the U.S. and other Western allies. But Russia’s tactical shift raises questions for Ukraine’s backers, who must now confront the possibility of a long, drawn-out conflict.

Russia seized the city of Lysychansk at the weekend, completing the takeover of the Luhansk region, and is now bombarding Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in neighboring Donetsk.

Despite narrowing its immediate objectives to taking Ukraine’s east, Russia’s strategic goal of controlling Ukraine remains unchanged. The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said Tuesday that Russia is aiming to demilitarize Ukraine and force it to adopt neutral status, according to Russian state news agency RIA.

Such statements suggest “that the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted war with the intention of taking much larger portions of Ukraine,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in an analysis Tuesday.

Moscow’s success in the east recalls some of Russia’s previous wars. As in Chechnya in the 1990s, Russia is offsetting the shortcomings of its ground forces by using massed firepower.

Ukraine is trying to impose high costs on the advancing Russians with fierce resistance, while also preserving troop strength by slowly falling back to more defensible positions as it awaits flows of heavy weapons from the West. It took Russia two months to take the city of Severodonetsk.

Some Western leaders say they fear Ukraine won’t be able to win, despite its fierce determination, as the conflict further erodes the country’s economy and its military struggles against Russia’s advantage in sheer numbers.

While the West has extended military aid to Ukraine, Kyiv says it needs more and warns that it will take time to train soldiers to use the multiple new weapons systems being delivered by the U.S. and its allies.

In a report this week, the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute think tank said Ukraine needs long-range artillery systems and electronic warfare equipment to counter Russia’s own advanced systems.

The report said that Ukraine’s allies are capable of making up the shortfalls. But, in a nod to the complications of operating too many different weapons systems, the report said success “cannot be achieved through the piecemeal delivery of a large number of different fleets of equipment, each with separate training, maintenance and logistical needs.”

Mr. Danilov said that the Ukraine army has used so many of its Soviet-era armaments and ammunition that it is gradually becoming a force that will have to rely on NATO weaponry.

He said the arrival of U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, last month has enabled Ukraine to strike precisely at Russian targets beyond the front lines that were previously beyond the reach of Ukrainian guns.

Mr. Danilov said nine mobile Himars and similar rocket-launch systems donated by the U.S. and its allies are now operating inside Ukraine with deadly effect. The Russians “are defenseless against them,” he said. “They are very worried.”

A Himars strike devastated a command post in the east Ukrainian town of Izyum last week, and on Monday a top Ukrainian official confirmed that Himars were used to bombard Snake Island, a small but significant outpost in the Black Sea that Russia abandoned last week.

But Mr. Danilov said Ukraine would need dozens more Himars launchers to shift the fighting in eastern Ukraine. For now, he said, Ukraine must fight a defensive war.

The Royal United Services Institute report noted that Ukraine’s paucity of skilled infantry and armored-vehicle operators limit its abilities to launch serious counteroffensives. Russia’s artillery is also successfully targeting the Ukrainian military so that it is unable to mount attacks, the report said.

Mr. Danilov said Russia’s own arsenal is showing signs of running low four months after launching its invasion, saying that it no longer has the strength to launch attacks on more than one front.

Moscow has also increasingly been sending lower-precision Soviet-era missiles deep into Ukrainian territory, with less regard for whether they hit civilian targets, he said. Last week, one missile landed in a neighborhood in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa, where Ukrainian officials said at least 21 civilians were killed.

Mr. Danilov said the missile campaign was intended to blunt support for the war among the Ukrainian public, an overwhelming share of whom still say it would be unacceptable to reach a peace deal with Moscow by ceding territory lost to Russian forces.

Mr. Danilov said that the high level of support for some kind of Ukrainian counterattack may be a rubbing point with some of Ukraine’s allies, who have pledged to support Ukraine until it wins, without specifying what victory means...

More:

The Ukrainian PM dropped the number in a presentation yesterday.

Ukraine's entire GDP is $150 billion.

One of the biggest shakedowns in world history, only second to COVID Mania.https://t.co/mVaZtPvToM

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) July 6, 2022

 

Supreme Court Ruling on Roe v. Wade Further Polarizes a Divided Nation

You'd think it couldn't get any worse. We've been viciously divided for years, but yeah, the Dobbs decision was like throwing gasoline on the fire.

At the New York Times, "Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis":

On abortion, climate change, guns and much more, two Americas — one liberal, one conservative — are moving in opposite directions.

Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.

Call these the Disunited States.

The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. and voting rights.

On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism.

Even where public opinion is more mixed, like in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, the Republican grip on state legislatures has ensured that policies in those states conform with those of the reddest states in the union, rather than strike a middle ground.

The tearing at the seams has been accelerated by the six-vote conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which has embraced a muscular states-rights federalism. In the past 10 days the court has erased the constitutional right to an abortion, narrowed the federal government’s ability to regulate climate-warming pollution and blocked liberal states and cities from barring most of their citizens from carrying concealed guns outside of their homes.

“They’ve produced this Balkanized house divided, and we’re only beginning to see how bad that will be,” said David Blight, a Yale historian who specializes in the era of American history that led to the Civil War.

Historians have struggled to find a parallel moment, raising the 19th-century fracturing over slavery; the clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court in the New Deal era of the 1930s; the fierce battles over civil rights during Reconstruction and in the 1950s and early 1960s; and the rise of armed, violent groups like the Weather Underground in the late ’60s.

For some people, the divides have grown so deep and so personal that they have felt compelled to pick up and move from one America to the other.

Many conservatives have taken to social media to express thanks over leaving high-tax, highly regulated blue states for red states with smaller government and, now, laws prohibiting abortion.

Others have transited the American rift in the opposite direction.

“I did everything I could to put my mouth where my money was, to bridge the divide with my own actions,” said Howard Garrett, a Black, gay 29-year-old from Franklin, Tenn., who ran for alderman in recent years, organized the town’s first Juneteenth celebration and worked on L.G.B.T.Q. outreach to local schools, only to be greeted with harassment and death threats.

Mr. Garrett moved to Washington, D.C., last year. “People were just sick in their heart,” he said, “and that was something you can’t change.”

On abortion, history seems to be riffing on itself.

Both supporters and opponents of abortion rights see a parallel to the abolition of slavery.

As states like Illinois and Colorado vow to become “safe harbors” for women in surrounding states seeking to end their pregnancies, abortion rights advocates see an echo of past efforts by antislavery states in the North. But abortion opponents see themselves as emancipating the unborn, and often compare the Roe decision’s treatment of the fetus to the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that denied Black people the rights of American citizenship.

Conservatives are not resting on their victories: The anti-abortion movement, long predicated on returning the issue of reproductive rights to elected representatives in the states, talks now about putting a national abortion ban before Congress.

Roger Severino, a leading social conservative and senior official in the Trump administration, invoked the struggle of Black Americans for equality, saying the 10 years that passed between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ending “separate but equal” segregation and Congress’s passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 mirrored the struggle ahead on abortion.

“I cannot see us living in two Americas where we have two classes of human beings in this country: some protected fully in law, some who are not protected at all,” said Mr. Severino, now the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank...

 

To Trump's True Believers, January 6th Was an Act of Faith, Ashli Babbitt's a Martyr, and White Is Not Only a Race, But a Spiritual State

Following-up, "Georgia Election Worker Shaye Moss, And Her Mother and Grandmother, Terrorized by Trump Followers After 2020 Election (VIDEO)."

At Vanity Fair, "January 6 Was Only the Beginning":

"Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it…" — Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, recalling 1860.

1. It’s Cool

We watched her die before we knew her name. We watched almost in real time, or soon enough after, her death looped and memed before the fight was over. But then, the fight’s still not over. A video gives us a crowd throbbing against two wooden windowed doors, one reinforced glass pane spiderwebbing, three Capitol Police officers, standing between the glass and members of Congress on the other side. We don’t yet know to look for her, but she’s there on the screen, the only woman, up front (“a firecracker,” her friends will say), screaming at cops. (“Joking,” her defenders will claim.) There’s a knife in her pocket. She shouts: “Just open the door!” It’s barricaded. “Break it down!” chant the men. One screams at the cops, “You lied!” The cops said there was nobody on the other side. They can see them. Congressmen. Traitors. A young man wearing a black T-shirt and $325 Canada Goose aviator fur hat, shouts “Heyyy!” He stretches out his arms, pulsing veins—he has already punched the glass, hard—and opens his hands. “Fuck the blue!” shouts the crowd. A man wearing a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag tied like a bib beneath his MAGA hat hands Goose a black helmet with which to hit the glass.

Goose lines the helmet with his hat, to cushion his fist. The cops slide out of the way. (“Escape route,” one will later tell investigators; they thought they were going to be killed.) “Go! Get this shit!” the videographer shouts. They get that shit—pounding the reinforced glass.

“Gun!” the videographer yells. Two hands emerge from behind a pillar on the other side, aiming.

Fourteen seconds left. Does she hear them shout “gun”? Can she make out the warnings Michael Byrd, a plainclothes lieutenant in the Capitol Police, will say he delivered? That the man standing beside her will say, “She didn’t heed”? “Please,” Byrd will say he shouted. “Stop! Get back!” She doesn’t. He aims. There are more videos. There she is, bobbing up and down, straining. Her long, smooth face, her dark golden hair, her golden skin. She has come to this moment—seven seconds—from Ocean Beach, California, where she lived in a bungalow beneath avocado and lime trees. Little woman. Five foot two, 115 pounds, her mother will say. One hundred ten, according to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who’ll make her name into a martyr song, “#onemoreinthenameoflove.” She’s 35; or in her “20s,” one witness will say; or “16, supposedly,” guesses another man, each aging her backward, into the imagined innocence of girlhood.

Goose smashes the glass.

“Go!” she shouts. She’s boosted up. She crouches on the sill, her Trump flag like a cape tucked under a red-white- and-blue backpack, like some absurd American bird.

The gunshot sounds like a cannon. Glock 22, .40 caliber. Big gun. One boom.

She falls back. Her hands fly up, open, empty, raised to her temples. As if rather than a bullet there’s an unsettling thought.

Nobody tries to catch her.

“#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their appropriation of a campaign created for Black women. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing. So, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She wasn’t a hashtag. As a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was a scrapper. “She just did boy things,” her brother will say. She joined the Air Force at 17. Two wars, eight deployments, 14 years. Her favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Her thing was the shaka. “Hang loose,” thumb and pinkie. (Her last words, as she bleeds on the Capitol floor, according to a witness: “It’s cool.”) She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt, and there was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. Trump. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. “She was all in,” says Aaron, who did not share her devotion. She believed Trump was “one of gods greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they had a girlfriend; she had four younger brothers and parents who loved her, and in the end, she left them all. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram, where she dies on permanent repeat for a man who won’t, in fact, say her name for half a year, until the day it proves useful, when the Trump Organization is indicted for tax fraud. He’ll issue a one-sentence statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” That he knows is beside the point. Who shot her? They did. The enemy.

2. Sacramento, California

The Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally opens with a prayer, asking God to bless Ashli’s family, sitting in a row of white “Justice 4 Ashli” T-shirts, and to work on the hearts of the “opposition,” which, whether I like it or not, is me. Ashli’s mother, Mikki Witthoeft, has already told me this morning that she wouldn’t talk to me. “Media,” she’d growled. “Goddamned media,” she’ll clarify when she takes the podium.

Leading the prayer is a “patriot” pastor called JP. He looks like an especially dangerous mushroom. JP wears a black floppy sun hat, mirrored shades, a stars-and-stripes gaiter, green half gloves, and utility-belted jeans that puddle around his ankles. His black T-shirt features in golden letters a “battle verse” popular with patriots, Joshua 1:9. “Be strong and courageous,” the Lord instructs Joshua as he readies to storm Jericho and, at God’s command, to slaughter all—“man and woman, young and old.”

We’re on the west side of the California State Capitol. The rally was called by a group named Saviors of Liberty, hatched in a pickup truck three weeks prior by a couple of white dudes drinking beer and thinking about all that was wrong in the world and how they might fix it by building a supergroup of right-wing fraternal organizations. They’d need new T-shirts. Lady Liberty bleached white on a field of black, looking in sorrow on a red-and-black American flag, vertical so that its stripes appear to bleed. Packed into these T-shirts are muscle-bound men, some bulked up by bulletproof plates, many flexing studded leather gloves. Many are Proud Boys.

A rally organizer keeping a lower profile is a woman named Chelsea Knight, an administrator of Placer County, California, for Trump and a co-administrator, with her husband, Victor Knight, of a Telegram chat group called 1488, which surely has nothing to do with the “14 words” embraced by white supremacists—prattle about protecting white children—and 88, as in the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which times two in the idiot math of fascism equals “Heil Hitler.” That’s Victor’s thing. He’s the one with an SS Totenkopf skull tattooed on his left fist. Victor’s here too, and that plus the 90-something-degree heat on the sunblasted concrete, plus antifa’s promise to disrupt, may explain the low turnout.

Antifa does arrive. A column of mostly black-clad, black-masked protesters coming from a rally on the other side of the Capitol for what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 28th birthday. The Saviors are ready. A Savior in a skull mask takes the first shot at the tallest antifa, a beanpole in black but for his fists and the pale skin around his eyes. Saviors call him Nosferatu. He’s skinny but he knows how to take a punch; it bounces off his head, and you can almost hear him smile beneath his mask. “That’s a pussy-ass move right there,” Nosferatu says.

Another Savior throws a punch. The cops observe. Then an antifa protester takes a swipe. The cops charge—at antifa. An antifa cries to the police even as they shove her backward.

“Shut up, fat ass!” a right-wing streamer screams.

“Fuck yourself, faggot!” she answers.

“These cops want to let us go at ’em,” comments the man next to me. It’s one of the speakers, Jorge Riley, an indicted J6er.

“They don’t have any worries about what the outcome would be,” says a Savior.

Riley smiles. He wears his black hair in a ponytail and a black leather vest over a black T. “I’m a French-speaking Native American Jew,” he likes to say. “For Jesus,” he sometimes adds. He waits for a laugh. He invaded the Capitol with three white feathers braided into his hair, three streaks of black paint running down each cheek. In a video, he boasts: “I may or may not have rubbed my butt on Nasty Pelosi’s desk.” Before January 6, Riley held positions in the local Republican establishment. Two days after the insurrection, he posted his address on Facebook: “Come take my life. I’m right here. You will all die.” The FBI, he thinks, didn’t get it. The “joke,” the threat, was for antifa. “I got six charges,” he crows. He says he likes cops, except the cop who shot Babbitt.

“You feel like the cops are on your side?” I ask.

“Obviously!” He swings his arms open. “They’re here protecting me.” He turns to a woman beside him and asks for the name of the officer who killed George Floyd. “And they only prosecuted him,” continues Riley, “because these people”—the protesters—“threw a fit.” A white cop’s nine-minute knee on a Black man’s neck? “Somebody doing their job.” A Black cop’s split-second shot at a white woman leading a mob? “Assassination,” Riley agrees with another of the speakers today.

Such is the seesaw reality of January 6. “No cops were hurt,” Riley says. More than 150 were hurt. Five would die. Riley says it was a lovefest, J6ers and cops hugging it out after a friendly tussle. Delusion? No—his smirk bespeaks self-awareness. Disinformation? Too obvious. More like lucid dreaming: a deliberately surreal assault. I think of a Telegram message one of the Proud Boy organizers sent on January 6: “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.” It wasn’t their own crimes that thrilled them, it was the prospect of drawing the many into their boogaloo vision. The city still stands. But in my mind—in the imagination of anyone who even now marvels at how close we came; how close we still are—it burns. The coup was a bust. The psyop? Victory.

Here, in Sacramento, the speaker at the podium, a former TV host named Jamie Allman—taken off the air of a St. Louis ABC affiliate after he tweeted his desire to “ram a hot poker up the ass” of a Parkland shooting survivor—declares January 6 “one of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in America.”

In the back of the crowd, protesters challenge patriots to define “Nazi.”

“We love America,” says one.

“If Ashli Babbitt were here,” continues Allman, “I guarantee you she’d be out there”—on the edge of the fighting—“talking to those people.”

“Scum!” a patriot screams at the protesters.

“Ashli Babbitt does not want you to be afraid,” Allman says, “ever again.” Present tense. Ashli Babbitt lives, in the hallucinatory. Allman says the patriots will return to Washington, to remember her. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity.

“I suffered,” says Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did. I’m like the guy from 300. I lived to be able to tell her story.”

At the podium, Allman: “What her death does, when we compare it to Crispus Attucks, is—it calls for a revolution!”

“It calls.” The myth of history is calling the patriots. The “spirit of 1776” and 300, the 2006 CGI blood opera, 300 Spartan warriors’ battle against an overwhelming Persian horde until all but one Spartan falls. Attucks, the first man to die in one war, and the fictional Spartan warrior who was the only survivor of the latter, the source material of which is a comic book. Sacrifice stripped of history. “Trial by combat,” as Rudy Giuliani promised on January 6, hours before the mob made it real. “The first Patriot Martyr of the Second American Revolution,” an Oath Keeper posted before anyone knew who the martyr was, only that hers was the mythical victimhood of a white woman, killed by a Black man, they could now claim...

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What happened to Ashli Babbitt, and the official whitewashing after her death, is the most infuriating thing about January 6th.

18 Children and 1 Teacher Killed in Texas Schoohouse Massacre (VIDEO)

I've been watching this unfold this afternoon. The death toll keeps going up. We're in Sandy Hook territory at this point, and it's devastating. 

At the video, Chris Murphy, far-left Senator from Connecticut, goes off, "What are we doing here?!!" 

He always goes off. Then, nothing changes, because the left can't get over its gun control fetish when state authorities need the power to intervene before people get killed, and that means institutionalizing those with a history of mental illness and a documented propensity toward gun violence. Elliot Rodger, who killed 7 in the 2014 U.C. Santa Barbara attacks, should have been hospitalized beforehand. He'd been under long-term treatment and his parents knew he was not right in the head. 

Mass murderer James Holmes had been under the care of a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. He killed 12 and 70 others survived their wounds. I wrote a lot about it at the time. See, "Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Can Be Isolating, Competitive, and Highly Demanding," and the links therein.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas Shooter Kills at Least 18 Children and One Teacher in Elementary School":

An 18-year old man opened fire in a Texas elementary school Tuesday, killing at least 18 students and one teacher before he was killed by police, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Police identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde is about 80 miles west of San Antonio.

Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, shot his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary School, police said. He left his vehicle outside the elementary school in Uvalde and carried a handgun inside, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Two police officers who responded to the scene were shot, but are expected to survive, the governor said.

“What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas,” said Mr. Abbott, a Republican.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting, the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed, was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S. That record stood for a little more than a week.

The Uvalde school district reported an active shooter at Robb Elementary School just after 11:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. The school, according to the district’s website, teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

All district and campus activities, after-school programs and other events were canceled. The district said parents could pick up students at regular dismissal times at their respective campuses, and officers would be there to escort the students to their parents’ vehicles.

“Parents please be patient as lines will be long,” the school district said in a post on social media.

After the shooting, Uvalde Memorial Hospital said 13 children arrived by ambulance or buses for treatment and two people arrived deceased.

University Health, in San Antonio, said it had received two patients from the shooting, a child and an adult. The hospital said the adult was a 66-year-old woman in critical condition. Hospital authorities didn’t confirm whether the woman was the shooter’s grandmother.

he child, identified as a 10-year-old girl, was also in critical condition.

Late Tuesday, authorities were in the process of notifying victims’ families, said Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s chief of police.

Armando Ramos, an uncle of Salvador Ramos, said in an interview that he doesn’t think his nephew intended to target the school, but wound up there after a police chase. Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whose name he declined to share, is currently in surgery, he said.

President Biden was briefed on the shooting as he flew back to Washington from a trip to Asia and planned to give remarks Tuesday night, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

“His prayers are with the families impacted by this awful event,” she tweeted.

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday.

Gov. Abbott said he had instructed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to investigate the shooting...

 

The World Order Reset

At the Upheaval, "China’s Ukraine Catastrophe, the Rise of Trans-Atlantis, and a New Age of Power":

What did Vladimir Putin tell Xi Jinping when they met in the cold, blustery first days of February in Beijing? In a ceremony afterwards the two leaders signed a joint-statement condemning the geopolitical audacity of the United States and NATO while declaring the China-Russia relationship to have “no limits.” This was also at this moment when, at least according to American intelligence, Putin promised Xi he would refrain from military action against Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, which were then about to commence. Whether this is true or not it is impossible to say, though Russia’s tanks did roll across the border into Ukraine just four days after the games concluded. But in either case the question remains: on the eve of war, what did Putin say was actually about to go down?

We will never know the words they exchanged, but it nonetheless seems possible to point what the two leaders probably thought was about to happen. That’s because neither of the two men has ever been particularly shy about saying what they want. And, beyond all of Putin’s personal fixations with pushing back NATO, and “regathering the Russian lands,” and reuniting the wayward Slavs of Ukraine with the motherland, and generally going down in history as the second coming of Peter the Great, these two leaders have been very transparent about long sharing an even broader dream for their countries.

That dream was described explicitly in their February joint statement, much the same as it has been in many similar previous documents: to “advance multipolarity and promote the democratization of international relations”; to put a stop to “Certain states’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries” through “bullying, unilateral sanctions, and extraterritorial application of [domestic law]”; and ultimately to see a “transformation of the global governance architecture and world order.” In other words: to finally free themselves from the hegemonic post-Cold War global dominance of the United States and the “liberal international order” that it has led since 1945.

But February 2022 came at a unique time because it was the moment, as the document put it, at which “a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world.” This was a moment in which, as Xi has described it, “the East is rising, the West declining.” The United States and its dominion appeared be on its last legs.

And it’s not hard to understand why they might have looked at the West and seen it as collectively decadent, weak, and – let’s be honest – often completely deranged. The Western core of the liberal international order was manifestly divided (internally within Europe, between Europe and America, and within Western societies), lazily comfortable with its dependence on Russian energy imports and Chinese export markets, and largely steadfast in its refusal to pay for its own defense amid what Emmanuel Macron had once labeled “the brain death of NATO.” It was easy to assume, in other words, that the West no longer had the will or capacity to fight – a hypothesis that seemed to have been recently put to the test and confirmed in Afghanistan.

The liberal international order therefore appeared to remain propped up only by, as Putin soon put it, an “empire of lies.” The reality of this only had to be demonstrated with a firm push, and the whole façade was liable to come tumbling down, exposing the rotten pillars beneath and perhaps even causing the whole edifice of the liberal international order to collapse. And, if so, then perhaps this was the moment Putin had long prepared for: a chance to break the back of this stifling Western order in one bold stroke.

And what better place to strike than Ukraine? It was, at least as far as Putin could tell, yet another of Washington’s corrupt client regimes, a fake nation with a fake American-trained military that would, like the fake Afghan National Army, immediately throw down its weapons and melt away as soon as Washington’s diplomats had fled the country – alongside their puppet comedian-president, who would speed across the border in a helicopter stuffed full of cash, just like the last guy. After which Russian forces would be welcomed, if not as liberators then at least with general resignation. With Ukraine’s major cities having quickly surrendered once the Spetznaz simply drove in and raised the Russian flag over city hall, with Kiev probably holding out about as long as did Kabul, Putin’s takeover would rapidly become a fait accompli. Their empty rhetoric about deterrence having failed, NATO would have no option but to stand by helplessly...

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