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...

 

A Manifesto on National Conservatism

This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist"). 

Some parts are just okay, though. 

The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts. 

The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.

See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

RTWT. 

Biden's Foreign Policy is Driven by Impulse, Not Reason

From Caroline Glick:

Almost every day, questions arise about President Joe Biden‘s ability to make presidential-level decisions. The questions stem mainly from Biden’s repeated rhetorical gaffes.

In a recent column in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr assembled a sampling of dozens of Biden’s misstatements since the start of May. Among the highlights, Biden told guests at the White House, “I thank all of you for being here, and I want you to enjoy the rest of the recession.”

In a speech before an audience of policemen, Biden asked, “How many police officers have multiple time and put a lion and had to do things that they’d have to think they’d have to do?”

Whereas Biden’s domestic policy malapropisms are generally subjects of amusement (or derision) with few consequences, the same cannot be said of his parallel misstatements when it comes to foreign policy.

Consider the war in Ukraine. In late January, as Russian troops were situated on the border with Ukraine awaiting Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s marching orders, Biden gave a press conference in which he exposed NATO‘s disagreements by noting that the alliance would be divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” by Russian forces.

Confusion, and worse, impulsiveness, have been the hallmarks of Biden’s decisions no less than his pronouncements. The helter-skelter withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last August remains the paramount example of the impulsive nature of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden ordered U.S. forces to withdraw, ending a 20-year war in humiliation and defeat without first coordinating the move with U.S. allies.

Biden gave the order without first making arrangements for U.S. citizens to depart the country, and apparently without regard to an inspector general report that warned the Afghan military would not be able to maintain control of any part of the country without supporting U.S. air control and contractors.

Biden acted in callous disregard for the safety of the U.S.’s Afghan partners, and without first making arrangements to secure the $90 billion in U.S. weapons that the withdrawing U.S. forces left behind.

Obviously, much of the failure can be laid at the feet of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. But it was obvious that in the case of the Afghan withdrawal, it was Biden calling the shots from the top.

The Afghan withdrawal devastated the credibility of the U.S. as both an ally and an enemy. Its direct and indirect consequences will haunt the U.S. and its allies for years to come.

Biden’s actions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine are similarly seen by allies and enemies alike as the product of impulsive decisions, made without sufficient consideration of easily foreseeable consequences. Three decisions stand out, in particular.

The first was Biden’s decision to freeze $300 billion in Russian dollar reserves. The decision was unprecedented. And although it harmed Russia economically, it devastated the credibility of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. In response to the move, China and Russia abandoned the dollar in their bilateral trade. Other key countries, including Saudi Arabia and India, have also agreed to sell and purchase oil and gas in local currencies, undermining the petrodollar.

In response to the U.S. move and to Washington’s decision to block Russia from the international banking system, Russia began insisting that foreign purchasers of Russian oil and gas open ruble and foreign currency accounts with Gazprombank. Germany, Italy and more than a dozen other EU member states have thus far complied.

The ruble is as strong as it was before the February invasion. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar is weak and its role as the world’s reserve currency is being questioned around the world. Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end of the dollar-based international economy. But what is already apparent is that the U.S. move on Russia’s dollar reserves was a net loss for the U.S. A more carefully crafted sanctions package might have had less deleterious consequences.

Then there are the leaks from Washington regarding the direct role the U.S. is apparently playing in Ukrainian military operations against Russia. The sources of the leaks are unclear. Biden is reportedly angry about them. All the same, administration officials have informed reporters that the U.S. provided Ukraine with the intelligence that enabled Ukrainian forces to sink the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in its Black Sea fleet, as well as intelligence that has enabled the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals.

In other words, Biden administration officials are telling the media that the U.S. is not merely supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia; rather, the U.S. is an active participant in that war. Whether it is Biden’s wish to go to war against Russia, or whether he is being led by his advisors, is unclear. But what is clear enough is that the escalatory consequences of these leaks are dangerous. Moreover, the U.S. interest in such escalation is unclear—at best.

The same can be said regarding the sudden decision to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. Is the U.S. really willing to send forces, if need be, to defend these nations? If so, where is that reflected in U.S. military budgets, training, hardware and doctrine?

Finally, there is the issue of the sanctions’ impact on the U.S. economy and on the global food supply. For months ahead of Russia’s invasion, as Putin’s troops deployed along the border grew, the Biden administration signaled that the U.S.’s primary tool for defeating Russia would be economic sanctions. Under the circumstances, Biden and his team could have been expected to calculate the sanctions for their effects on Russia and their blowback for the U.S. and its allies, as well as to consider the implications of Russian counter-sanctions on the U.S. and the global economy. But from the looks of things, it appears that the administration considered neither of these things.

Take the embargo on Russian oil and gas. Due to Biden’s decision to drastically cut U.S. energy production well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. had moved from being a net energy exporter to a net importer. Fuel prices in the U.S. had already risen precipitously. Those price rises aggravated skyrocketing inflation rates caused by a rapidly expanding U.S. money supply unmatched by a corresponding rise in domestic production.

Biden’s embargo on Russian oil and gas, therefore, took a bad situation and made it much worse.

Then there are the banking sanctions on Russian nationals. Russia is the main global exporter of fertilizer. While fertilizer exports weren’t banned, the financial sanctions on Russian nationals have impeded the ability of Russian exporters to do business with foreign purchasers, driving up the cost of fertilizers—and through them, of all foodstuff.

This brings us to the issue of Ukrainian food exports. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and corn to global markets. Ukrainian production and exports dropped by roughly 50% following the Russian invasion. And now Russia is blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in order to prevent any exports of what remains of the besieged country’s crop yield. Expectations of a global food shortage are already causing panic worldwide, particularly among poor, unstable nations that are dependent on wheat imports to feed their people.

Russia will bear primary responsibility for global famine. But a better conceived U.S. sanctions strategy might have provoked a less devastating Russian counter-response. Now, with the real prospect of global food shortages, the danger of a naval confrontation between U.S. and NATO forces and Russian forces in the Black Sea rises every day.

Russia’s conventional forces have performed far below expectations. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal is both larger and more advanced than its U.S. counterpart. And unlike the U.S., Russia has built extensive and credible defensive systems to protect its cities and military bases from nuclear attack. Putin and his top advisors are openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if they feel it is necessary. Under the circumstances, any military exchange between the U.S. and Russia has the potential of becoming a nuclear war.

In response to the Ukrainian grain crisis, India announced last week that it is suspending its wheat exports to secure its domestic food supply. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has repeatedly flummoxed the Biden administration with its unwillingness to join the U.S. and NATO in their campaign on behalf of Ukraine. India’s early decision to maintain its oil and gas purchases with Russia while moving the trade from dollars to rupees and rubles was the first clear sign that New Delhi was staying loyal to its Cold War ally and moving away from the U.S.

India’s decision to distance itself from the U.S. poses grave consequences to the U.S. in its rising superpower struggle with China. President Biden, like President Donald Trump before him, rightly views India’s participation in a U.S.-led Pacific alliance as a key component of the U.S.’s strategy for containing China.

This brings us to Biden’s latest foreign policy gaffe with strategic implications. In response to a reporter’s question on Monday during his visit to Tokyo about whether the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan from China, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

But that isn’t the commitment the U.S. has made. For decades, U.S. policy with respect to the defense of Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” The context of Biden’s remark, made from Tokyo at a time of heightened Chinese aggression against Taiwan, was significant. And while Biden’s advisors worked feverishly to present his remark as inconsequential, and U.S. policy as unchanged, the president has now “misspoken” numerous times on Taiwan.

Biden’s many gaffes and whispers of possible dementia have led many to wonder whether he is really the one driving U.S. policy. But to the extent he is, Biden’s foreign policy is a bundle of impulsive actions, whose economic and strategic implications have been disastrous for the U.S. and destabilizing to the world as a whole.

 

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...

Keep reading.

 

Vladimir Potemkin: Putin's Disaster and What Could Happen Next

At Der Spiegel, "The world has overestimated Putin's power. His army is much weaker than thought, his intelligence services have failed and sanctions are starting have an impact. Will all this weaken the Russian president or make him more dangerous?":

May 9, 2022 – what a victory celebration it should have been! Just imagine: Vladimir Putin, Gatherer of the Russian Lands, greets the victorious returning troops on Red Square. Ukraine shattered as a country, its capital Kyiv taken in a surprise attack, its government exiled. Along with the battlefield triumph, Russia also celebrates its ruler, who boldly changed the course of history, triggering the biggest celebration since the 1945 parade held to celebrate the victory of Stalin's army over Nazism.

Given the events of the past few months, that was likely what Putin had been hoping for. But the reality has turned out rather differently. On May 9, Russia will again celebrate Victory Day with a military parade, as it does every year, but the army that will parade through Red Square this time will be a humiliated one. Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's armed forces are no longer the feared power they once were.

Putin's troops have experienced a military and moral fiasco in Ukraine. Poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and poorly equipped, they have failed against an enemy thought to be much weaker. They had to retreat from their positions near the capital city of Kyiv. And what had been planned as a blitzkrieg has turned into a tough slog, a war of attrition.

Russia's military pride has turned out to be something of a sham, like the village backdrops that Prince Grigory Potemkin once allegedly set up for his czarina to fool her into thinking he was settling empty territories.

It is all just as surprising as it is devastating to the system Putin has built. The Kremlin leader has spent years preparing his country for a major confrontation with the West – in military, economic and political terms. His declared goals are maximum sovereignty and autonomy, for Russia to be an independent pole of power in the world. Now, it has turned out that the highly equipped army is unable to overrun its poorer neighbor. Russia's economy – dependent on imports. Most of its vast foreign reserves – blocked by Western sanctions. Its intelligence services – unable or unwilling to properly inform the ruler.

Is Putin's system of power itself a Potemkin village, without the world, including Vladimir Putin himself, having noticed? What does it mean when this system's weaknesses are suddenly exposed? And does that make it more dangerous?

A pet project of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is located an hour's drive west of Moscow: the army amusement park called "Patriot." At the park, you can ride in toy tanks, shoot with real AK-47s, watch re-enacted World War II battles and buy army souvenirs. Since 2020, it has also featured a church co-designed by Shoigu in olive green – the "Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces." House-sized mosaics depict Russia's armed victories through the centuries – all the way up to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia's intervention in Syria. A mosaic featuring Putin and Shoigu and the country's political elite had also initially been planned. In the lower church, a spacious baptismal font allows for the baptism of troops, and weapons looted from the Nazi Wehrmacht have been melted into the steps.

The church's inauguration is symbolic of the new prestige the army has acquired during Putin's rule – in part attributable to the ambition of Defense Minister Shoigu. He brought glamour to the military, a new level of self-confidence and societal status. He gave the army not only its church, but also dashing new uniforms, a youth organization (Yunarmiya) and political officers for the kind of ideological indoctrination conducted in Soviet times. He kept the troops busy with large-scale, snap exercises. Russia's air force operation in Syria could even be seen as a patriotic film in theaters.

With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply.

Moscow prefers to keep silent about the number of Russians who have actually been killed in Ukraine. The latest official figures are about a month and a half old. In April, the British government said it estimated 15,000 soldiers had been killed, whereas the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces cites nearly 25,000 fallen. One military analyst in Brussels estimates that the Russians have lost close to 1,000 tanks. At least seven Russian generals have been killed. The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva sank, apparently after being fired upon by anti-ship missiles.

The first days of the invasion, in particular, when the Russian army advanced on the Ukrainian capital, baffled Western analysts. "The strategic mistakes are completely crazy," John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare at the Madison Policy Forum think tank, told DER SPIEGEL at the time. Many observers now agree that the strength of the Russian military has been overestimated.

One of the most visible weaknesses is logistics. Overstretched, poorly secured supply routes turned into easy targets for small, mobile Ukrainian units, especially in the early weeks of the war. Just a few days after the war began, a U.S. official said that 70 percent of Russian forces would soon run out of fuel and food, or had already.

Glaring failures have also emerged in equipment maintenance – a result of sloppiness or corruption: Expensive air defense systems are getting stuck because their tires are defective, some missile launchers still have tires with "Made in the USSR" labels on them. "Their logistics have been disastrous throughout," says military historian Phillips O'Brien. "They just assumed they would steamroll the Ukrainians and they wouldn't have to worry about supply." Since Russia began concentrating its attacks on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, these massive logistics problems have been less frequent, in part due to the fact that supply routes are shorter and the advance has faltered...

Keep reading.

'Apocalyptic' American Nationalist Tucker Carlson (VIDEO)

I quit watching Tucker sometime last year --- and mind you, this was after months of watching his show religiously during the thick of the "pandemic spring" 2020.

First, I was just bored. But then I saw people freakin' out about how he'd become a "New Right" extremeist. Once he went to Hungary to air his program with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, all of my interest tanked. I can take a lot of populist nationalism, up to a point, but Tucker crossed the line.

So now, it turns out, the New York Times has published the first part of an investigative series on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," now trending at Memeorandum. 

Here, "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable":

Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.

Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.

The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.

In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.

His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”

That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”

A Fox spokeswoman rejected those characterizations of the network’s strategy, pointing to coverage of stories like President Biden’s inauguration and the war in Ukraine, where a Fox cameraman was killed in March while on assignment. In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Mr. Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored. Stories in ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ broadcasts and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ documentaries undergo a rigorous editorial process. We’re also proud of our ongoing original reporting at a time when most in the media amplify only one point of view.”

Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.

Mr. Carlson is powerful at Fox not merely because he is the network’s face but because he is also its future — a star whose intensity and paranoid style work to bind viewers more closely to the Fox brand, helping lead them through the fragmented post-cable landscape...

This is what the Times does, publish these lurid portraits of basically someone who is right now totally mainstream --- *the* mainstream. I mean, there's a reason he's the most popular cable host on T.V. 

And the Times will float off leftist conspiracy talking points and half-baked attacks that don't pass the most rudimentary fact checks. 

For instance, when asked during Senate testimony if there were chemical weapons biolabs in Ukraine, Victory Nuland --- the Biden administration's Undersecretary of State for Affairs --- confirmed Ukraine's research facilities, saying, "Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, ah, gain control of --- so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials to fall into the hands of, ah, Russia forces..."

You don't get more high-up confirmation on that unless it's coming out of the president's mouth himself. 

This woman is a State Department veteran going back two decades, and was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She knows *exactly* what's going on over there, and in fact, she's been one of the most important U.S. governmental officials entangling U.S. foreign policy in the Ukraine-Russia crisis' long-running morass. 

All of this is fresh-baked propaganda for the politicos and party hacks of the Democratic Party left. It's all battlespace preparation ahead of November. Fuck 'em.

Whatever, there's more at the link.

Also, "Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’." 

Russia's Easter Offensive

From, Timothy Snyder, on Substack, "Jesus in east European political thought":

Today Easter is celebrated by western Christians; a week from now it will be celebrated by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine, and by the Orthodox in Russia. By then, Russian troops will be engaged in their Easter Offensive, a new Russian attack on Ukraine in the Donbas.

The coincidence of the most important holiday in the Christian tradition with a war of atrocity gives an occasion to think about what Easter means, and how the life and death of Jesus has been interpreted.

One way of thinking about the life and death of Jesus is to connect them. Jesus of Nazareth took risks in life. He had things he needed to say about love and truth, but he did not deliberately provoke the state. That he died for his convictions adds an unforgettable dimension to them.

On such an interpretation of Easter, Jesus would be exemplary as an ethicist and truthteller who understood that commitments involve risks. His example would not be one of seeking death, or seeking meaning in death. The instruction would be to accept that some risk of death follows, in certain circumstances, from commitments to values such as love and truth.

“Love and truth.” Once, after a debate in 2009 in Bratislava, I looked over at the notes that the Czech thinker (and by then former president) Václav Havel had been keeping for himself. He had written "love and truth" on a sheet of paper, and then doodled flowers around it.

Havel was the author of a famous secular east European statement about risk in politics. He wrote "Power of the Powerless" in communist Czechoslovakia, three decades before that debate, under the shadow of the death of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who had died after police interrogation. In that essay, Havel maintained that one takes risks for one's own truths, not because punishment brings some meaning, but because risk inheres in truth. To "live in truth" means accepting a measure of existential danger.

The Soviet Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych, who admired Havel, said something similar. The risks that he and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. They were just an inseparable element of what Myronovych called a "normal Ukrainian life." In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

Both Havel (who was secular) and Marynovych (who experienced an epiphany under interrogation) were part of an international human rights movement that saw its main activity as the chronicle. A prominent form of resistance to communism was the attempt to record arrests, trials, deportations, sentences, and abuses. "Human rights" meant telling the truth about a moment when a life was interrupted. This tradition was continued after the end of the Soviet Union by investigative reporters who took risks to write about post-communist oligarchy and war.

I was reminded of that truthtelling tradition this Easter week when I read Nataliya Gumenyuk's reporting from Ukrainian territories from which Russian troops have withdrawn. Gumenyuk is one of an admirable group of Ukrainian reporters who have taken their share of risks reporting the inequality and conflict of the twenty-first century. (Russian reporters, such as those working for Novaya Gazeta and Ekho Moskvy belong to this tradition as well. These media have been forced to shut down by the Russian government.)

During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror.

I also hear something of an older east European tradition in the way that Volodymyr Zelens'kyi addresses Ukrainian losses. In an interview also published on Good Friday, Zelens'kyi speaks of suffering and death involved in resistance to invasion as a result of a risk that had to be taken to preserve the life of a society. Zelens'kyi does not glamorize combat or death. He gave a speech the other day which recalled Havel: he defined living in a lie as the source of Putin's aggression, and spoke of truth as a form of courage.

That is one broad way of thinking about politics suggested by Easter: the values of life are affirmed by a risk of death. Life is full of values, but attached to each one is risk. The risk is attendant upon the value. If the risk is realized in death, the value is affirmed. But death is not the point.

In a rival interpretation of the death of Jesus, to which Christians are vulnerable, death is the point. It is the suffering and the dying, rather that the acting and the living, that creates the meaning.

In such thinking about Easter, the significance of the dying can crowd out the living message of love and truth. The Polish Romanticism of the nineteenth century veered in this direction. The vision of Poland as a "Christ of Nations" was less about Christian comportment and more about the willingness to die for a cause. A century later, Romanian fascists identified strongly with Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), and had an exuberant cult of death and martyrdom.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action. One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent. And then the question arises as to who "we" are. Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do.

The Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin, a Christian (Orthodox) fascist, advanced such a doctrine of national innocence. Ilyin's view was that Christ's teachings about truth and love were to be understood in a particular way, with respect to a particular nation. The world was broken, and could only be healed by Russians, and in particular by a fascist Russian leader. That was the truth that mattered. Only Russia had the chance to become a Christian nation, and that was by way of a totalitarianism that eliminated the differences between people and ruler. A restored Russia that could lead humanity would be without national minorities and without Ukraine, which Ilyin claimed did not exist. Christ commanded the love of God and the love of neighbor, but this meant for Ilyin the hatred of the Godless, which is to say those who did not understand Russia’s destiny.

On Ilyin's view, anything a Russian leader did to create a fascist, imperial Russia was by definition innocent of sin, since it was a step towards the redemption of the entire world. There is nothing wrong with lying and killing in a flawed world. Indeed, lying and killing are good when done by a Russian leader on a crusade to restore wholeness to the world.

The last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014, Putin was in the habit of citing Ilyin to legitimate Russian empire. And to justify that war, a living Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, supplied the image of Russia as a crucified boy (in “news” about an event that never took place).

Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework. In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle. He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before...

Still more.

 

Attacks Rock Ukrainian Cities, as Mariupol Nears Full Russian Control

At the Washington Post, "The port city’s fate hung in the balance after weeks of bombardment and siege by Russian forces":

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Deadly attacks rocked numerous cities and leveled buildings across Ukraine on Saturday, serving as ominous signals of how close destruction remains even in areas where Russian forces have recently pulled out.

Russia moved ever closer to controlling the already devastated port city of Mariupol as its invasion of Ukraine continued into its eighth week. In Russian-occupied Kherson, satellite imagery that showed the digging of hundreds of fresh grave plots held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there.

U.S. officials and military experts are expecting that in the next phase of the war, Russian forces will concentrate their might on capturing the eastern region known as Donbas and the southern cities that provide crucial access to the Black Sea and beyond. But the latest barrage demonstrated that Russia is still capable of wreaking destruction well beyond where its forces are situated or have recently vacated, such as the capital of Kyiv and its suburbs.

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, said in an interview to air on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Putin “believes he is winning” the war.

“We have to look him in his eyes and we have to confront him with what we see in Ukraine,” Nehammer said, according to a transcript of the interview.

One person was killed as a result of a rocket strike near Kyiv, and several injured were taken to a hospital in the capital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Saturday. The mayor urged residents of Kyiv who are away from the city not to return at present but to “stay in safer places.”

Blasts were also reported outside Kyiv on Friday. Russia said in a statement on Friday that its forces fired missiles at a suburban factory that produces Ukrainian weapons, in retaliation for what it claimed were attempted Ukrainian assaults on border towns inside Russia.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said a military plant was destroyed in the Kyiv attack, one of 16 targets hit in cities including Odessa, Poltava and Mykolaiv. The ministry claimed a repair shop for military equipment in Mykolaiv was destroyed.

In Lviv, an air raid lasting more than an hour was carried out by Russian Su-35 planes, the country’s more advanced fighter jets, according to regional governor Maksym Kozytskyy. Four guided missiles were destroyed by antiaircraft defenses, he added.

In Ukraine’s northeast, one person was killed and 18 were injured after a rocket strike in Kharkiv on Saturday, according to the provincial governor. Images captured after the attack showed Ukrainian servicemen walking amid the rubble, firefighters trying to extinguish multiple fires, and emergency workers treating an injured woman.

The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, said on the Telegram messaging app that a rocket fired by Russian forces “hit one of the central districts of Kharkiv again” early Saturday. He pleaded with residents to be “extremely careful” at a time when Russian forces “continue to terrorize the civilian population of Kharkiv and the region.”

Russia appeared to be on the verge of capturing the devastated port city of Mariupol, which a regional leader mourned had been “wiped off the face of the earth.” According to a top Russian military official, the only remaining area under Ukrainian forces was the Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest metallurgical factories in Europe.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to acknowledge as much on Saturday. In an address to the nation, a translation of which was posted on an official government website, Zelensky said that “the situation in Mariupol remains as severe as possible. Just inhuman.”

He said that Ukraine had continually sought military and diplomatic solutions since the blockade of Mariupol began, but that finding one had been extremely difficult.

Zelensky added: “Russia is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there in Mariupol.” On Saturday, Russia gave a deadline for surrender in Mariupol of 6 a.m. Moscow time on Sunday (11 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday), Russian state news reported.

Zelensky told Ukrainian media outlets that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could end if Russian forces killed all of the Ukrainians defending the city. He noted that the situation in Mariupol is “very difficult,” acknowledging that “many people have disappeared” from the city. He reiterated that the wounded who remained blocked from leaving Mariupol needed to get out.

Mariupol has been under weeks of heavy bombardment and siege by Russian forces, and analysts are predicting it will be the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the coming days. Control of the Sea of Azov hub is strategically important to the Kremlin because it would connect Russian-annexed Crimea with Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said nine humanitarian corridors were to have been open Saturday, linking urban areas in the country’s south and east to relatively safer areas deeper inland in the north and west.

More than 1,400 people were evacuated through humanitarian corridors on Saturday despite persistent Russian shelling that made it difficult to carry out efforts in various parts of Ukraine, Vereshchuk said.

Those seeking to flee shelling in Mariupol and other cities had to use their own transportation because bad weather is preventing the use of evacuation buses. Parts of the roads leading to Zaporizhzhia, a city farther up the Dnieper River, have been washed out, she said.

Zaporizhzhia received nearly 1,400 people from hard-hit areas of the southeast who traveled in their own vehicles, Vereshchuk said through Telegram.

Advertisement Nearly 70 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk in the face of Russian shelling. Vereshchuk said the density of shelling prevented the evacuation of people from the eastern city of Lysychansk.

The United Nations has renewed calls for safe passage out of Mariupol, which the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, called “an epicenter of horror.” As many as 100,000 people are believed to still be in the city, which had a population of roughly 450,000 before the war began.

In Kherson, a city that was quickly seized by Russian forces during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine, recent satellite imagery showed that at least 824 grave plots were dug between Feb. 28 and April 15, according to an analysis by the Center for Information Resilience, a London-based nonprofit. The burial site is on the city’s outskirts, just east of the airport.

Advertisement Kherson is about 400 miles south of Kyiv and is home to a port on the Dnieper River close to the Black Sea, making it a strategically important site in the conflict.

Many of Kherson’s 280,000 residents have fled the city since the invasion. But the occupying Russian forces have also faced resistance and civilian protests in the city and appeared to have lost control of part of it late last month, according to the U.S. Defense Department, which said Kherson had become contested territory.

In areas that Russian forces have withdrawn from, a gruesome portrait has emerged of the horrors that residents faced...

 

#Noam

Noam Chomsky is trending on Twitter, over this (below). 

Glenn Greenwald has more.

The Fast-Gathering Storm

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "How close are we getting to a full-on war between Russia and the West?":

“The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness,” opined a certain Austrian maniac. And what we are discovering about Putin’s Russia as this brutal war continues, is something extremely dark.

The rhetoric in Moscow is now outright eliminationist toward not just Ukraine, but Ukrainians as a people. The more bogged down the Russian military, the more intense the “de-Nazification” memes. With each defeat, from the failure to take Kyiv to the sinking of the Mockva, the sense of humiliation and anger grows. In the words of one Kremlin propagandist: “It’s no accident we call them Nazis. What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.” Ukrainians are being dehumanized — deemed not just victims of a “Nazi” regime but somehow Nazis themselves. It’s hard not to recall Aleksandr Dugin’s 2014 remark when asked his view of Ukraine: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion. This is my opinion as a professor.”

The rhetoric on Russian TV is about ending Ukrainian identity, as well as Ukraine, altogether. “Ukrainianism, fueled by anti-Russian poison and all-consuming lies about its identity, is one big fake,” pronounced Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s mini-me. And the tactics — mass rapes, wholesale flattening of cities such as Mariupol, profligate torture, mass-murder of civilians — are those of a country seeking some kind of psychic purge of its ungrateful and traitorous Ukrainian subjects. The removal of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia proper is yet another sign of Putin’s genocidal mania.

As this sinks in, Europe is instinctually, understandably rallying to support Ukraine. Because Europe proper is next in line for Russia’s aggression if Ukraine loses. Boris Johnson has grasped the crisis as a way to play FDR (BoJo) to Churchill (Zelensky), sending arms to Ukraine, arriving in Kyiv for a photo-op with Zelensky, with whom he seems to have bonded. The UK alone has sent 4,000 anti-tank weapons, including Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, or NLAWs, and Javelin missiles. More are on the way. They have had a real effect.

And the EU is now doing something no one expected only a couple of weeks ago: considering a ban on Russian oil imports. Finland and Sweden may join NATO in a matter of weeks. The US is now funneling arms and training to Ukraine, as Russia menaces from the east: “The training will focus on using 155mm howitzer cannons, counter-artillery radar and Sentinel air defense radars, and will take a few days each.” This comes after years of NATO training of Ukrainian armed forces, which helps explain their remarkable early success in nimbly thwarting Russia’s onslaught.

The emergency spending from Congress a month ago for military and other foreign aid to Ukraine amounted to $13.6 billion. The aid is a culmination of deep support from the US since 2014. It’s getting more and more aggressive. Just this week, the Biden administration offered another “$800 million in additional security assistance for Ukraine, including artillery, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees ... The new package includes heavier weaponry than the U.S. previously had provided and — for the first time — American-made artillery pieces.”

But the demand for this sum to grow even further is becoming the conventional wisdom in DC. Fareed Zakaria explains why: “the world is expected to pay $320 billion to Russia this year for its energy.” $16 billion doesn’t seem so impressive. Fareed also notes what is evident: the Russians are doing far better in the south than in the north, and could throttle Ukraine if they manage to capture Odessa. So what should the West do?

[NATO] should enforce an embargo around those waters, preventing Russian troops from entering to attack Ukraine’s cities or resupply Russian forces. NATO ships would operate from international waters, issuing any approaching ships a “notice to mariners” that NATO forces are active in the area and warning them not to enter.

No risk elevation there!

Let’s be real: This is a Europe-wide war, fast becoming a global one. And as Putin gets more isolated, and his war drags on without a breakthrough, Russia is upping the ante too. The CIA director, Nicholas Burns, just worried out loud about Putin’s possible reach for chemical or nuclear weapons: “His risk appetite has grown as his grip on Russia has tightened … Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.”

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country.

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country...

 

China Accelerates Nuclear Buildup

Well that's just great. *Eye-roll.*

At the Wall Street Journal, "China Is Accelerating Its Nuclear Buildup Over Rising Fears of U.S. Conflict":

China has accelerated an expansion of its nuclear arsenal because of a change in its assessment of the threat posed by the U.S., people with knowledge of the Chinese leadership’s thinking say, shedding new light on a buildup that is raising tension between the two countries.

The Chinese nuclear effort long predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the U.S.’s wariness about getting directly involved in the war there has likely reinforced Beijing’s decision to put greater emphasis on developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent, some of these people say. Chinese leaders see a stronger nuclear arsenal as a way to deter the U.S. from getting directly involved in a potential conflict over Taiwan.

Among recent developments, work has accelerated this year on more than 100 suspected missile silos in China’s remote western region that could be used to house nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the U.S., according to analysts that study satellite images of the area.

American leaders have said the thinking behind China’s nuclear advance is unclear. Independent security analysts who study nuclear proliferation say they are also in the dark about what is driving Beijing after exchanges between Chinese officials and analysts mostly dried up in the past few years.

The people close to the Chinese leadership said China’s increased focus on nuclear weapons is also driven by fears Washington might seek to topple Beijing’s Communist government following a more hawkish turn in U.S. policy toward China under the Trump and Biden administrations.

American military officials and security analysts are concerned China’s nuclear acceleration could mean it would be willing to make a surprise nuclear strike. The people close to the Chinese leadership said Beijing is committed to not using nuclear weapons first.

China plans to maintain an arsenal no larger than necessary to ensure China’s security interests, they said, adding that the Chinese military believes its nuclear weapons are too outdated to present an effective deterrent against a potential U.S. nuclear strike.

“China’s inferior nuclear capability could only lead to growing U.S. pressure on China,” one person close to the leadership said.

Nervous international reaction to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s call for his nuclear forces to be put on alert following his invasion of Ukraine has offered Chinese officials a real-world lesson about the strategic value of nuclear weapons. So did Ukraine’s decision in 1994 to turn over the nuclear weapons left in the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union in return for security assurances from the U.S. and Russia.

“Ukraine lost its nuclear deterrence in the past and that’s why it got into a situation like this,” said a retired Chinese military officer with ties to the country’s nuclear program.

The people familiar with the Chinese leadership’s thinking said Beijing hasn’t conveyed any adjustments to the country’s nuclear policy as a result of developments in Ukraine. China’s Ministry of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The people have knowledge of Beijing’s thinking about nuclear policy through their work with various agencies involved in security issues. None are directly involved in the setting of nuclear policy. They didn’t preclude that future developments might change Beijing’s approach and said other factors may also be influencing the leadership’s approach to nuclear weapons.

Their observations nevertheless bring greater clarity to a shift in Beijing’s thinking that has far-reaching consequences globally. Rising tension between the U.S. and China over nuclear weapons could throw the world back into a Cold War-style nuclear standoff similar to that seen in the decades following World War II between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

The risk of miscalculations this time could be higher, however, because while the U.S. and Soviet Union communicated about their nuclear weapons during arms control talks from the late 1980s, the Chinese program and Beijing’s thinking on the role of nuclear weapons has been shrouded in secrecy. China has declined to engage in nuclear arms control talks with the U.S., saying Washington should first reduce its nuclear inventory.

U.S. government and private sector estimates put China’s nuclear arsenal in the low hundreds of warheads, far below the roughly 4,000 warheads held by both Russia and the U.S. The Pentagon says it now expects China to have 1,000 warheads by the end of this decade.

Satellite images taken during January show the last 45 of the temporary covers over each of 120 suspected missile silos near the city of Yumen have been removed, suggesting the most sensitive work at all of the silos has been completed, said Matt Korda, a senior research associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. At two other smaller silo fields in western China, work is at earlier stages.

The silos at each of the sites are large enough for a new long-range Chinese missile known as the DF-41 that was put into service in 2020 and is capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, analysts say. Tests of missiles that are launched from aircraft and can carry nuclear warheads also give Beijing a stronger chance of being able to retaliate if it is hit first in a nuclear attack.

In public, China has played down its nuclear pursuits.

“On the assertions made by U.S. officials that China is expanding dramatically its nuclear capabilities, first, let me say that this is untrue,” Fu Cong, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control department, said earlier this year. He said that China is working to ensure its nuclear deterrent meets the minimum level necessary for national defense.

Chinese leaders had seen nuclear weapons as being of limited value because they don’t offer realistic options for fighting most wars. A major shift occurred in early 2020, according to the people familiar with the leadership’s thinking, as the U.S. government hardened its stance toward Beijing in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Strong criticism of the Communist Party from senior Trump administration officials spurred a consensus among Chinese leaders that Washington was willing to take greater risks to stop China’s rise, some of the people said.

A May 2020 speech in Mandarin by former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger was particularly alarming, they said. Speaking on the anniversary of a pivotal 1919 student protest in China, Mr. Pottinger said: “Wasn’t the goal to achieve citizen-centric government in China, and not replace one regime-centric model with another one? The world will wait for the Chinese people to furnish the answers.”

“The speech was obviously calling the Chinese to topple the Communist Party,” one person familiar with the Chinese leadership’s thinking said.

In response to a request for comment, Mr. Pottinger said that such an interpretation was “a profound admission that the Communist Party knows it has failed to deliver citizen-centric governance, and it confirms what everyone already suspected: What Beijing fears above all is its own people.”

At the same time, increased support from the U.S. for Taiwan, a democratically self-ruled island that Beijing views as a part of China and has vowed to put under its control, prompted Chinese leaders to debate the prospect that the U.S. might be willing to use nuclear weapons in a conflict over the island, according to the people close to the leadership...

 

The Price of Hegemony

It's neoconservative author and columnist Robert Kagan (who is married to Victory Nuland, part of the "neocon cabal" Glenn Greenwald's been wailing about), at Foreign Affairs, "Can America Learn to Use Its Power?":

For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries or whether Moscow’s actions were simply unprovoked aggressions. That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia’s sphere of interest, and that U.S. policies created the feelings of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin’s invasion has suspended the 2022 version of Americans’ endless argument over their purpose in the world.

That is unfortunate. Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.

For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle, and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe and focus the United States’ attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans. But there is a core of unrealism to this “realist” prescription: it doesn’t reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post–Cold War era and that still governs the world today. The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances. The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony—and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow’s weakness. Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States’ combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy. The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence.

What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence. Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades—or, in some cases, centuries—of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans.

Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike. They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and by President Xi Jinping’s China. Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively. They failed to do this in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war. They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine. After Putin’s latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson. But they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don’t examine what happened with Russia, and that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power.

BY POPULAR DEMAND

So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east. Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany “contained within European structures.”

Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West. Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half, leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a cost-saving measure. It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it.

His judgment was sensible. The United States and its allies had no interest in the independence of the Soviet republics, as U.S. President George H. W. Bush made clear in his 1991 speech in Kyiv, in which he denounced the “suicidal nationalism” of independence-minded Ukrainians (who would declare independence three weeks later). Indeed, for several years after 1989, U.S. policies aimed first to rescue Gorbachev, then to rescue the Soviet Union, and then to rescue Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the period of transition from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Russia—the time of greatest Russian weakness—the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration were reluctant to expand NATO, despite the increasingly urgent appeals of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Clinton administration created the Partnership for Peace, whose vague assurances of solidarity fell well short of a security guarantee for former Warsaw Pact members.

It is easy to see why Washington felt no great compulsion to drive NATO eastward. Few Americans at that time saw the organization as a bulwark against Russian expansion, much less as a means of bringing Russia down. From the U.S. perspective, Russia was already a shell of its former self. The question was whether NATO had any mission at all now that the great adversary against which it was aimed had collapsed—and given just how hopeful the 1990s felt to most Americans and western Europeans. It was thought to be a time of convergence, when both China and Russia were moving ineluctably toward liberalism. Geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics, the nation-state was passing away, the world was “flat,” the twenty-first century would be run by the European Union, and Enlightenment ideals were spreading across the planet. For NATO, “out of area or out of business” was the mantra of the day.

But as the West enjoyed its fantasies and Russia struggled to adapt to a new world, the nervous populations lying to the east of Germany—the Balts, the Poles, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians—viewed the end of the Cold War as merely the latest phase in their centuries-old struggle. For them, NATO was not obsolete. They saw what the United States and western Europe took for granted—the Article 5 collective security guarantee—as the key to escaping a long, bloody, and oppressive past. Much like the French after World War I, who feared the day when a revived Germany would again threaten them, eastern Europeans believed that Russia would eventually resume its centuries-long habit of imperialism and seek to reclaim its traditional influence over their neighborhood. These states wanted to integrate into the free-market capitalism of their richer, Western neighbors, and membership in NATO and the European Union was to them the only path out of a dismal past and into a safer, more democratic, and more prosperous future. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin loosened the reins in the early 1990s, practically every current, and soon former, Warsaw Pact member and Soviet republic seized the chance to break from the past and shift their allegiance from Moscow to the transatlantic West.

But although this massive change had little to do with U.S. policies, it had much to do with the reality of the United States’ post–Cold War hegemony. Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational pull. Even if the United States was not aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and its democratic allies. Their prosperity, their freedom, and, yes, their power to protect former Soviet satellites, when combined with the inability of Moscow to provide any of these, dramatically shifted the balance in Europe in favor of Western liberalism to the detriment of Russian autocracy. The growth of U.S. influence and the spread of liberalism were less a policy objective of the United States than the natural consequence of that shift.

Russian leaders could have accommodated themselves to this new reality. Other great powers had adjusted to similar changes. The British had once been lords of the seas, the possessors of a vast global empire, and the center of the financial world. Then they lost it all. But although some were humiliated at being supplanted by the United States, Britons rather quickly adjusted to their new place in the firmament. The French, too, lost a great empire, and Germany and Japan, defeated in war, lost everything except their talent for producing wealth. But they all made the adjustment and were arguably better for it.

There were certainly Russians in the 1990s—Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for one—who thought that Russia should make a similar decision. They wished to integrate Russia into the liberal West even at the expense of traditional geopolitical ambitions. But that was not the view that ultimately prevailed in Russia. Unlike the United Kingdom, France, and to some extent Japan, Russia did not have a long history of friendly relations and strategic cooperation with the United States—quite the contrary. Unlike Germany and Japan, Russia was not militarily defeated, occupied, and reformed in the process. And unlike Germany, which always knew that its economic power was irrepressible and that in the post–World War II order it could at least grow prosperous, Russia never really believed it could become a successful economic powerhouse. Its elites thought that the likeliest consequence of integration would be Russia’s demotion to, at best, a second-rank power. Russia would be at peace, and it would still have a chance to prosper. But it would not determine the fate of Europe and the world...

Keep reading. 

 

Biden, Blinken, Nuland Have Led Us Into a Dead-End Crisis

The dreaded neocons. 

It's David P. Goldman, at Pajamas, "Putin Won't Go, Russia Won't Collapse — So What Will Biden Do About Ukraine?"

PREVIOUSLY: "'So Clearly There's an Intention for the United States to Be in Ukraine...' (VIDEO)," and "Victoria Nuland, Biden's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Claims Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities' (VIDEO)."

USS Harry S. Truman Flexes Muscle in the Mediterranean

At Poliitco Europe, "‘The only thing Putin understands is strength’: US aircraft carrier flexes muscle in the Med":

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-only-thing-putin-understands-is-strength-us-aircraft-carrier-flexes-muscle-in-the-med/With Russian ships and submarines patrolling the Mediterranean, the USS Truman teams up with French and Italian carriers.

NORTHERN IONIAN SEA — The flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman was covered with jet engine gas vapor as F-18 Super Hornets rocketed into the sky one after the other. Watching takeoffs and landings at close quarters “is one of the most dangerous things you will ever do,” claimed my minder, an officer with 28 years of experience in the Navy.

In the sound and fury of the flight deck, this didn’t feel like hyperbole: The experience was jarring. Despite ear-defenders, the growl of the throttle from an aircraft that travels at 1.8 times the speed of sound makes your chest cage rattle and your heart race. More than once we were yelled at with drill-sergeant intensity to “GET BEHIND THE LINE!” as aircraft constantly taxied, took off and landed around us. Welcome to the danger zone.

While the high tempo was business as usual for the crew of the USS Truman, the backdrop, both geographically and politically, was not: Accustomed to the Pacific Ocean and the seas of the Middle East, the USS Truman’s strike group is now in the northern Ionian Sea, its fighter jets and radar planes patrolling NATO’s eastern borders and looking east, to a Ukraine now under invasion from Russian armed forces.

Since the invasion almost a month ago, these jets have flown more than 75 patrol missions across NATO’s eastern flank up to the Ukraine border, from the Truman. The so-called Enhanced Air Policing mission is part of NATO’s Assurance Measures introduced in 2014, after Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and is aimed at defending NATO airspace, preventing incursions by Russians.

The 20-story nuclear-powered Truman is the flagship of a strike group, a mobile fighting force of up to 10 destroyers and submarines, eight aircraft squadrons and a missile cruiser that can move anywhere in the world’s seas, launching missile or air strikes or merely providing visible proof of American resolve.

As a mobile U.S. airbase, the Truman will be on the front line if NATO decides to enforce a no-fly zone, or should the worst happen and NATO forces be drawn into a direct conflict. “The role of Truman, with other allies, is to deter Russians from further aggression and to be on constant standby for orders that might be given from our president or from other leaders around the world for the protection of Ukraine and the people of Ukraine,” Secretary of the U.S. Navy Carlos Del Toro told POLITICO during a visit to the carrier...

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History Is Speeding Up: Vindication for Neoconservatism

An amazing essay from John Podhoretz, at Commentary, "Neoconservatism: A Vindication":

In 2022, the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russia would actually roll the tanks and march the soldiers across the border into Ukraine seemed so irrational and peculiar to the Western consciousness that most of us—and in that “us” I would even include the heroic Volodymyr Zelensky—were living in a kind of weird haze of disbelief and denial that it could even happen.

Then it did.

And the surprise Jimmy Carter had felt in 1979 was as nothing compared to the shock wave across Europe in 2022. It took the United States three years to double its defense budget after the Soviet invasion. It took Germany three days. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would increase its defense spending from 47 billion euros to 100 billion euros 72 hours after the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border.

History. Speeding up. And rhyming.

Will this be a hinge moment in history as well? If so, the rhymes of history may be heard in the surprising present urgency of neoconservatism.

Throughout the 1970s, the band of writers and thinkers who came to be known as “neoconservatives” had taken defiantly unfashionable positions when it came to matters of defense and foreign policy. The neoconservatives opposed negotiations and treaties with the Soviet Union, which they considered a great evil. They reviled the United Nations for its “Zionism is racism” resolution at a time when the UN was almost sacrosanct (millions of little boys and girls across America, including me, had proudly toted orange tzedakah boxes on Halloween to raise money for UNICEF). And they feared that the United States had, in the wake of Vietnam, undergone what a 1975 symposium in this magazine called “A Failure of Nerve” that would have global consequences.

The general opinion among the American cognoscenti was that the neoconservatives were hysterics and vulgarians incapable of seeing shades of gray. A more mature sense of the world’s complexity was supposedly represented first by the hard-won realism of the establishmentarians who had embraced the policy of détente with the Soviet Union—and second, by hipper foreign-policy thinkers whose worldview was encapsulated by Carter’s May 1977 declaration that America had gotten over its “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Then came 1979. The year began with the Iranian revolution engendering an oil crisis. By the end of the year, Iran’s fundamentalists had taken 52 American diplomats hostage as crowds chanted “Death to America” in the greatest public humiliation the United States had ever experienced as a nation. A thousand miles from the U.S. border, Nicaragua fell to a puppet guerrilla army of the Cubans and the Soviets while a similar puppet force was threatening to do the same in El Salvador—thus potentially creating a Soviet-friendly anti-U.S. bloc on the American subcontinent.

Suddenly the vulgarity of the neoconservatives didn’t seem quite so vulgar. But they remained prophets without much honor in the quarters in which they had traveled for most of their adult lives. Both the old and new establishments were largely impervious to the way history was vindicating their warnings and fears.

Thus began the integration of the neoconservatives into the conservative movement and the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, who became the dominating figure in both in the 1980s. What they brought to Reaganism was one simple policy approach: deterrence.

This magazine was the epicenter of foreign-policy neoconservatism. Irving Kristol’s magazine, the Public Interest, was dedicated to domestic-policy neoconservatism. COMMENTARY hammered home the flawed ideas of the prevailing consensus on world order. The Public Interest did the same on matters ranging from housing policy to urban policy to energy policy to criminal justice. What they had in common was this: Neoconservatives believed that the purpose of government was both to defend and protect our liberties from threats at home and abroad. How could this best be effected? Deterrence.

If the greatest threat to our liberty abroad from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War was the Soviet Union, the best and only effective way to face it down was to work to deter its ambitions and its influence. You could not do so by entering into agreements with it. You needed to match its aggressions with countermeasures that would make those aggressions costly.

If they invade Afghanistan, you arm the Afghan rebels. If they seek beachheads in the Americas, you arm the Nicaraguan rebels even as you support the El Salvadorean government against their Communist rebels. Install medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe to counteract the huge Soviet military presence in the East. The ultimate move in this regard was the Strategic Defense Initiative, which sought to use American ingenuity and scientific knowhow as a countermeasure against the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

These policies were wildly controversial, even though their aims were actually rather modest: Pin the bad actors down and raise the cost of their bad conduct to unacceptable levels. But for those who believed the best way to deal with the Soviet Union was to imagine that it was not an enemy or even an adversary but simply a nation with a different approach to things with which we could still do business, the neoconservative notion of matching Soviet moves pawn by pawn seemed openly belligerent and crazy.

Domestically, deterrence was achieved by countering the worst human impulses through the proper use of defensive protocols that would prevent the bad behavior from taking place. Contain the impulses and you could let everybody go on with their lives. In practical terms, that meant eyes on the street and cops on the beat.

There had been a policy revolution in the 1960s known as “911 policing” that essentially changed the nature of policing—cops were to respond to crimes after they happened, to wait for the call after the violence had been done. It was the domestic neoconservatives who laid the groundwork over more than 20 years for the crime drop that changed America for the better beginning in the early 1990s. Every one of the ideas they presented—broken-windows theory, COMPSTAT-driven deployment of police forces—was designed to enhance deterrence. So too with the way America dealt with wrongdoers: It criticized the movement toward more lenient sentencing because it limited the deterrent effect of punishment, even going so far as to say it would be dangerous to eliminate the death penalty because without the ultimate sanction all other forms of punitive incarceration would gradually be compromised.

Deterrence in domestic matters went beyond crime. The general proposition that good policy largely involved containing dangerous human impulses meant also grappling with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned social policy gone awry—as when cradle-to-grave welfare made it a benefit to be a single parent. The problems brought about by welfare policy also led to revolutionary changes no one really believed would ever take place, such as the welfare reform Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996—just as no one really believed the Soviet Union would collapse or that crime would drop by 80 percent.

It turned out that deterrence was not only simple but very powerful. And very practical...

Still more.