With New Punishments, West Escalates Pressure on Russia

The latest on Ukraine.

At the NewYork Times, "West Moves to Curb Russian Coal and Trade Over Ukraine War":

BRUSSELS — Western nations on Thursday escalated their pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, with the European Union approving a ban on Russian coal and the United States moving to strip Russia’s trading privileges and prohibit its energy sales in the American market.

The new punishments came as the United Nations General Assembly took a symbolically important vote to penalize Russia by suspending it from the Human Rights Council, the 47-member U.N. body that can investigate rights abuses. Western diplomats called the suspension a barometer of global outrage over the war and the growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian forces.

That evidence includes newly revealed radio transmissions intercepted by German intelligence in which Russian forces discussed carrying out indiscriminate killings north of Kyiv, the capital, according to two officials briefed on an intelligence report. Russia has denied any responsibility for atrocities.

Together, the steps announced Thursday represented a significant increase in efforts led by Western nations to isolate and inflict greater economic pain on Russia as its troops regroup for a wave of attacks in eastern Ukraine, prompting urgent calls by Ukrainian officials for civilians there to flee.

“These next few days may be your last chance to leave!” the regional governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, declared in a video on Facebook. “The enemy is trying to cut off all possible ways to leave. Do not delay — evacuate.”

But the Western penalties were unlikely to persuade Russia to stop the war, and they revealed how the allies were trying to minimize their own economic pain and prevent themselves from becoming entangled in a direct armed conflict with Moscow.

In some ways, the efforts underscored internal tensions among Russia’s critics over how best to manage the next stage of the conflict, which has created the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. The war is also indirectly worsening humanitarian and economic problems far from Ukraine, including rising food and energy prices that are exacerbating hunger and inflation, particularly in developing nations.

It took two days of protracted talks in Brussels for the European Union to approve a fifth round of sanctions against Russia that included its first ban on a Russian energy source, coal. But the measures were softened by several caveats, highlighting Europe’s diminishing appetite to absorb further economic fallout from the war.

The ban would be phased in over four months, instead of three as originally proposed, according to E.U. diplomats. Germany had been pushing for a longer transition period to wind down existing contracts, even though Russian coal is easier to replace with purchases from other suppliers, compared with oil and gas.

European diplomats also agreed to ban Russian-flagged vessels from E.U. ports, block trucks from Russia and its ally, Belarus, from E.U. roads, and stop the import of Russian seafood, cement, wood and liquor and the export to Russia of quantum computers and advanced semiconductors.

Ukrainian officials had urged Western nations to go further and completely cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas, contending that existing sanctions would not cripple Russia’s economy quickly or severely enough to affect President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to subjugate Ukraine by force.

“As long as the West continues buying Russian gas and oil, it is supporting Ukraine with one hand while supporting the Russian war machine with the other hand,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Thursday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he urged members of the alliance to accelerate promised help to Ukraine’s outgunned military.

The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said the alliance would “further strengthen and sustain our support to Ukraine, so that Ukraine prevails in the face of Russia’s invasion.” But he did not offer details...

 

Arizona State's Power Play for California's College Students

A very interesting piece, at the Los Angeles Times, "UC and CSU deliver thousands of rejection letters. Arizona State wants to fill the void":

Kiana Tovar was all set to attend Sacramento State. Kara Smith had firm plans: enroll at Santa Monica College, then apply to transfer to UCLA. Israel Cortave had been accepted to UC Merced and UC Riverside, which both offer the computer science and engineering majors he wants to explore.

All three students are now attending college in California, mixing state-of-the-art online classes with small in-person gatherings. They’ve been able to forge friendships, stay on track with “success coaches” and learn about career opportunities from industry professionals. But the name inscribed at the entrance of the university they decided to attend is not a California public institution.

It’s ASU — Arizona State University. And its newest campus is in Los Angeles.

After years of steadily targeting California, the No. 1 source of ASU’s out-of-state students, the university has planted its first flag in the heart of downtown with a high-profile, multimillion-dollar takeover of the landmark Herald Examiner Building. The upstart program is too tiny to measure now. But California public university leaders have taken note — and are watching whether ASU President Michael Crow’s alternative vision for higher education will be a trendsetting incubator launched in Los Angeles or a failed incursion into a neighboring state.

Crow sees California gold in the tens of thousands of students each year who are delivered rejection letters from the University of California’s and California State University’s most popular campuses — the annual heartbreak happening now. He gives both systems due respect, but says they’re stuck in old models of enrollment tied to availability of physical space and are failing to embrace technology to deliver education. And UC campuses have responded to surging demand mostly by becoming more selective, rather than more inclusive.

“They’ve bought into the logic of exclusion as a part of the measure of success,” Crow said of UC. “I don’t think a public university can do that. Our mission as a public university is to serve the public wherever they are and whatever they need.”

At UCLA — the most sought-after university in the nation — the average GPA of admitted first-year students last year rose to 4.5 and its admission rate dropped to 10%. In 1990, UCLA’s admission rate was 43%.

Crow lays out a different vision at ASU: broad access over selectivity, with an 88.2% admission rate for first-year students entering in fall 2021 and guaranteed acceptance to those with a minimum 3.0 GPA and completion of required college prep courses. ASU has vastly expanded its capacity to become one of the nation’s largest universities today — doubling its total enrollment in the last dozen years to 136,000 in fall 2021. The biggest growth has come in online enrollment, which now accounts for 43% of ASU students, with a growing share at several satellite sites outside the main Tempe campus in Phoenix, Mesa, Lake Havasu and elsewhere.

Californians made up 14% of ASU’s total enrollment of 129,000 in fall 2020 — two-thirds of them enrolled in online programs. They represented more than 10% of the 14,350 first-year, on-campus students in Arizona in fall 2021 — a record — and nearly one-third of those from out-of-state. Overall, that first-year class grew 12% over fall 2020, as ASU bucked national trends of declining enrollment at community colleges and some Cal State campuses.

UC officials say they don’t see ASU’s latest entry into the state as a competitive threat as much as an opportunity to learn. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ says she regards Crow as “one of the most interesting thinkers in higher education today” and last year invited him to address her top advisors to spark ideas about how to expand capacity, which she views as one of the university’s most pressing needs.

In a recent interview, Christ lamented a 2013 study by two UC researchers that found that California enrolled a lower proportion of its college students at four-year campuses than any other state.

ASU has used online instruction, technology tools and satellite campuses to increase enrollment, all measures Christ is considering for Berkeley. The UC system is vowing to add at least 20,000 more students by 2030.

Christ describes Crow as “not being so much of a gatekeeper in selective admissions, but really trying to find ways of serving more students. The time has come for some very creative rethinking” at UC.

Cal State leaders, however, are acutely aware of Crow’s moves and wonder what they will mean for their own enrollment — which declined systemwide by 13,000 students last year — since the two universities draw applicants from similar academic profiles versus the more selective UC.

Cal State isn’t so concerned that ASU will siphon off students who want a full college experience — one leader called the ASU Los Angeles center a “stripped down version of a college education” without sports, clubs and other popular on-campus attractions. San Diego State, for instance, drew a record 77,000 first-year applicants for about 5,500 seats for fall 2022 — and those students want an on-campus, residential experience, said Stefan Hyman, associate vice president for enrollment management.

UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley recently told fellow board members that UC needed to up its game in expanding online learning and access to nontraditional students because “we have our friends at Arizona State University chomping at the bit to take California students.” Oakley later told The Times that he doesn’t “begrudge” ASU for targeting Californians.

“But I also think it’s a lost opportunity for our own institutions because these are California students that are ready and willing to get into higher education and we’re just not providing them enough access,” said Oakley, chancellor of the 116-campus California Community Colleges system...

Still more.

David Horowitz, I Can't Breathe

At Amazon, David Horowitz, I Can't Breathe.

Ukraine Learns the Israel Lesson

From Lahav Harkov, a really sweet lady who writes for the Jerusalem Post, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Zelensky said his country will emerge from the rubble a 'big Israel.’ What did he mean?":

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky declared Tuesday that, when the war is finally over, Ukraine would emerge from the rubble a “big Israel.”

He meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.

It said something heroic about Ukraine, which has gone from pleading with NATO to save it from imminent destruction to fighting—forcing—the Russians into peace talks in a matter of weeks.

It said something not so heroic about the West, which had failed to admit Ukraine to NATO and, more recently, to wean itself off Russian oil and gas.

But mostly it said something profound about Israel—a country whose behavior over the past seven weeks has confused and confounded. How did the Israelis—scrappy, abrasive—become the convener of presidents and nations?

Zelensky has repeatedly suggested that the Russians and Ukrainians could meet in Jerusalem to hash out a peace agreement. It’s an amazing suggestion, even if he’s just floated it. Not Washington, not London, not Brussels or Paris. Jerusalem. The Israeli capital, which, until just a few years ago, the United States did not even recognize as the Israeli capital.

It wasn’t Joe Biden who was shuttling to meet with Putin, but Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, an observant Jew who jetted to Moscow on Shabbat to meet with Vladimir Putin in the early days of the war. (He is the only Western leader to have done so.) Since then, Bennett has had countless separate phone calls with Putin and Zelensky, who repeatedly asked Bennett to mediate in the first place, and he has sought to remain as diplomatic as possible—the better to keep the Russians and Ukrainians talking to the Israelis.

All this has raised the increasingly burning question: whose side was Israel on?

Israeli politicians and the public overwhelmingly support Ukraine, but Zelensky, who is Jewish, was frustrated with what he saw as Jerusalem’s inaction. In an address to the Knesset last month, he tried to prod Israel into taking a greater stand by comparing the invasion of his country with the Holocaust. Noting that the invasion happened February 24, exactly 102 years after the Nazi Party was founded, Zelensky went on to rail against Russia’s “final solution,” repeating the Holocaust comparison so much that some Israeli politicians accused him of distorting its history.

On the one hand, Israel has flown plane loads of medical supplies, water-purification systems, winter coats and sleeping bags to the Ukrainians. And it is the only country that has built a field hospital in Ukraine. On the other hand, it won’t send military aid, including its famed Iron Dome anti-missile system. (Israeli officials say Iron Dome won’t work against Russian missiles.)

On the one hand, Israel has barred Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich from using Israel as a safe haven. On the other, it has not sanctioned Russia—as the United States, the European Union and many other countries have done. (Israeli lawmakers have noted that they lack the legal mechanism to impose sanctions.)

On the one hand, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has repeatedly condemned Russia’s attacks, and on Tuesday, while discussing the Bucha massacre, he accused Russia of “war crimes.” On the other, Bennett has only expressed a more general sorrow about the loss of life. Reacting to the slaughter at Bucha, the Israeli prime minister said, “We are shocked by what we see in Bucha, horrible images, and we condemn them”—but he refrained from explicitly condemning Russia or Putin.

How did Israel end up walking this tightrope? In part, it’s because Israel exists to be a safe haven for Jews everywhere, and there are still nearly half a million in Ukraine and Russia. Israel wants to make sure it doesn’t alienate Putin—and complicate things for the Jewish community in his country. (Since the war began, over 10,000 Jews have applied to immigrate to Israel from Russia. The country has prepared to absorb as many as 100,000 refugees.)

But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward—and away from the rest of the world. As the United States backed away from its “red line” in Syria and pursued a nuclear deal widely viewed in Israel as an existential threat, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted Israel away from relying on the vaunted special relationship, forging new ones with China, India, and Russia, among others. Israel’s position in the Ukraine war has brought the Jewish state’s new geopolitical reality into stark relief.

When did the realignment begin? It’s a complicated story, but there are two years that matter most: 1989 and 2015...

Keep reading. 

Marine Le Pen Upends French Presidential Election

Sunday is France's first round of the presidential election. 

Marine Le Pen, daughter to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front, is posing a serious threat to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. She lost badly in the second round in 2017, but who knows this year. Anything could happen.

At UnHerd, "The resurrection of Marine Le Pen: Macron has enabled her remarkable comeback":

Three months ago, Marine Le Pen’s political future seemed smashed into irrelevance by the rise of Eric Zemmour. She was past it, a tired war horse with no project and a quasi-bankrupt party, watching her closest National Rally associates being shaved off one by one by Zemmour’s seemingly irresistible promise of rebuilding the French Right in his image, a mix of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and De Gaulle’s 1950s RPF.

The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.

Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.

“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”

What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.

She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.

So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.

She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.

Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).

Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”

“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors...

Keep reading.

Record-Breaking Heat in Southern California (VIDEO)

It was 100 in Irvine today. 

I stayed in, lol.

At the Los Angeles Times, "100-degree temps on tap as heat wave comes to SoCal":

The punishing heat wave in Southern California will deliver triple-digit temperatures, elevate fire danger and increase the chance of heat-related illnesses Thursday and Friday, officials said.

A heat advisory in the Los Angeles area is in effect until 6 p.m. Friday for the coastal plains and valleys, the Santa Clarita Valley and the Santa Monica Mountains. Temperatures could soar at least 15 to 20 degrees above normal, reaching 100 degrees or higher in some areas.

Burbank, for example, is expected to climb to 100 degrees Thursday and Friday, according to Kristen Stewart, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. A normal high temperature for the area this week would be about 72 degrees.

Stewart said several temperature records may be broken Thursday and Friday in areas such as Long Beach, Burbank, downtown Los Angeles and LAX.

Anaheim on Wednesday broke its temperature record for the day at 96 degrees — 5 degrees higher than the previous April 6 record set in 2005, the weather service said.

A heat advisory is also in effect until 6 p.m. Friday across large swaths of San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties, where similar conditions are expected.

Officials said heat-related illnesses are possible among the elderly, infants, outdoor workers and the homeless population, as well as those participating in outdoor activities. Residents should take extra precautions, seek shade and air conditioning and stay hydrated. Children and pets should never be left in cars...

Still more.

 

Amber Athey Fired from News Talk 105.9 WMAL, Washington (VIDEO)

She made fun of Kamala Harris. A mob came after her and called the radio station. The radio station caved to the mob. 

For nothing. It was funny joke and totally unobjectionable. 

At the Spectator World, "I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit: A ‘conservative’ radio station caves to the mob."

And on Tucker's the other night. She very funny:

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. 

 

Federal Reserve Expected to Raise Rates at Half Percentage Increments to Help Cool Inflation

The Fed folks are freaking out. 

Inflation is battering consumers, home owners, businesses, travelers, and agriculture, industrial, and manufacturing concerns, to name a few. Fuel prices remain at record levels, generalized inflation is spilling over to the rest of the economy, and continuing supply chain pressures (especially from China amid a new coronavirus crackdown) are crimping the availability of a variety of foods, consumer products, and basic industrial inputs, etc. As noted preciously, it's getting so bad consumers are even cutting back on basic necessities.  

People are hot and mad too. Inflation is the number one concern of regular Americans. And depending on how fast the Fed pulls the switch, there's some alarm that a recession could be coming down the pike.

Things aren't likely to cool off before the November midterms either. President Biden's so rattled and confused he's been cursing at members of the White House reporting pool.  

At the Wall Street Journal, "Fed Signals Faster Pace of Rate Increases, Bond Runoff Likely":

Minutes show central bank officials in March spelled out plan for shrinking $9 trillion asset portfolio next month to help cool inflation.

Federal Reserve officials signaled they could raise rates by a half-percentage point at their meeting early next month and begin reducing their $9 trillion asset portfolio as part of their most aggressive effort in more than two decades to curb price pressures.

Minutes from the Fed’s March 15-16 meeting, released Wednesday, showed that many officials last month were prepared to raise rates by a half-point but opted for a smaller, quarter-point increase because of concern over the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Stocks fell and bond yields rose in the midst of expectations of a more aggressive Fed policy tightening process than previously anticipated. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which rises when bond prices fall, climbed to 2.606%, a three-year high, from 2.554% on Tuesday and 2.409% on Monday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.2%, while the S&P 500 fell 1% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.4%.

Officials last month approved their first interest rate increase in more than three years, raising their benchmark rate to a range between 0.25% and 0.5%. They also penciled in a series of additional rate increases this year to take rates closer to 2%, with inflation having surged to a four-decade high.

The minutes revealed for the first time how officials expect to shrink their asset holdings much faster than they did last decade, which would serve as another key tool for tightening monetary policy. Officials neared agreement on a plan that, after a roughly three-month ramp-up, would allow up to $95 billion in securities to mature every month without being replaced.

The Fed’s plans have sent tremors through the mortgage market, where the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose last week to 4.9%, the highest rate since late 2018, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

In the three weeks since they last met, many Fed officials have indicated that they could support raising rates by a half-percentage point instead of the traditional quarter-point at their next meeting. The Fed hasn’t raised rates at consecutive policy meetings since 2006 and hasn’t raised rates by a half-point since 2000.

Investors in interest-rate futures markets now anticipate half-point increases at the Fed’s next meeting, May 3-4, and at the following gathering, in June.

On Tuesday, Fed governor Lael Brainard, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve as the Fed’s vice chairwoman and has previously been an influential voice warning against prematurely pulling back stimulus, underscored in a speech the importance of reducing high inflation.

Ellen Meade, a former Fed economist who is now a policy consultant, said that based on those remarks there is no reason not to expect a half-point increase. “It would have been an opportunity to push back at this point in time,” Ms. Meade said. “She really laid out the progressive case for why inflation fighting needs to be front and center.”

Consumer prices rose 6.4% in February from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the Commerce Department’s personal-consumption expenditures price index. Core prices, which exclude food and energy, climbed 5.4%. Those readings were the highest in around four decades.

Fed officials a year ago described higher inflation as transitory. They backed away from that characterization last fall, as the labor market healed rapidly and price pressures broadened to a range of goods and, more important, labor-intensive services.

Still, as recently as January, the Fed had expected inflation to diminish this spring as supply-chain bottlenecks improved. The war in Ukraine and potential lockdowns in China to deal with more-contagious variants of the coronavirus have ended any expectation of near-term relief from improving supply chains.

“That story has already fallen apart,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said March 21. “To the extent it continues to fall apart, my colleagues and I may well reach the conclusion we’ll need to move more quickly. And if so, we’ll do so.”

The central bank is still counting on inflation slowing later this year as supply-chain problems ease and as more workers return to labor markets. But unlike last year, Mr. Powell said the central bank could no longer set policy by forecasting that such relief would materialize.

“As we set policy, we will be looking to actual progress on these issues and not assuming significant near-term supply-side relief,” he said...

 

New Tony Hawk Documentary on HBO: 'Until the Wheels Fall Off' (VIDEO)

I watched this last night, "Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off (Official Trailer)."

Awesome documentary. 

Brought back so many memories. I was there at most (if not all) the skateparks and contests in the first third of the film. I skated with Tony Hawk many times. Not like friends. Just all the guys skating the same contest, same pool, practicing at the same time. He was just a kid, literally 10-years-old.

I'm a professor now, and I tell people, for a time I used the be the top amateur contest skater in SoCal (and then briefly pro) in the early 1980s. I say to folks, 'Oh, I used to skate with Tony Hawk," etc. I don't think folks realize the significance of that. They might've heard of him or played the old PlayStation Tony Hawk video games, but to know the real guy, and back then, to have no idea he'd go on to be the world's most important skateboarding icon of all time. Sheesh, who'da thunk it?!!

At the screenshot, the standings from early 1981. 

You can see at top "Tony Hawk --- 12 and Under." My name is further down below. I was a first in the rankings in "Unsponsored Open." (17 and over; zoom in.)  About 17-years-old at the time, I used to go by my middle name Kent.  

Source: Thrasher Magazine, 1981, Volume 1:3:

That's me at the Upland Pipeline Skate ASPO Contest, about 1982, taking first place in the pool event. The move is a "layback." I'd never done one it that pool. It was twelve feet deep with straight vertical walls. Completely intimidating. Totally scary. But I wanted to win, and just went for it. What a memory. I was just a kid myself.

Jonathan Pie: How Putin Weaponized London's Greed (VIDEO)

Previously hilarious Jonathan Pie, "Boris Johnson, Under Fire, Apologizes for Pandemic Party (VIDEO)." 

And here he comes again:

For the New York Times: 

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich Attacks Oil Companies, Calls for 'Windfall Tax on Higher Profits' (VIDEO)

Secretary Reich is a smart guy --- and he's always been a man of the left --- but he used to be more free-market, more for regular labor union agitation and better wages, etc. 

Nowadays, he sounds more and more like a doctrinaire Marxist. He's a Professor of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley, so he's being marinated in the nasty stew of woke campus leftism. 

And here he's calling for a "windfall tax" on oil companies. 

Extreme tax proposals are de rigueur for Democrats these days. Bernie Sanders is calling for a 90 percent marginal tax rate on the wealthy. Thankfully, the idiot Dems will be out of power next January. President Biden's going to have to compromise on reviving domestic energy production, and if things go right, a Republican will win the 2024 general election.

Honestly, I love the guy, but please let it not be Donald Trump. One Trump term was enough.

Watch, at CNN, "CEOs at major oil companies come under fire for high gas prices."

Nice Country Gal

On Twitter.

Here, she wants to be your girlfriend.

Halsey here and here.

Germany: What if the Gas Is Cut Off?

At Der Spiegel, "German Industry Prepares for Worst-Case Scenario":

German industry and the government in Berlin are ill-prepared for a possible halt in supplies of natural gas from Russia. A new emergency plan is being developed to prevent an economic meltdown if deliveries cease.

You can find something from Hinrich Mählmann just about everywhere you look in Germany. His company, the Otto Fuchs Group, founded in 1910, literally delivers the things that make the country move. They include wheels and coupling systems for railroads, engine components for the aviation industry and even battery housings for electric cars. Mählmann also sells thermally insulated windows and doors through its subsidiary Schüco. The supplier has revenues of just under 3 billion euros annually and employs 10,000 people.

If the family business in the small town of Meinerzhagen in the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia was suddenly no longer able to manufacture its goods, the German economy would have a problem. Without Mählmann’s upstream products, manufacturing in entire industries would be at risk – from car factories to construction.

Until now, such a horror scenario seemed unthinkable. To supply what German industry so urgently needs, the company operates aluminum presses "as heavy as the Eiffel Tower," as Mählmann says, plus large furnaces and smelters. The plants consume vast quantities of natural gas, an energy source that the group, like thousands of other companies across Germany, obtains to a large extent from Russia.

Currently, Mählmann is busy preparing for the possibility of the day when natural gas from Russia may no longer flow. It would be a "catastrophe," says the businessman. Turning off a gas-powered furnace for several hours a day is virtually impossible, he says. Doing so would cool them down, and bringing it back up to temperature would consume a disproportionate amount of time and energy. And replacing gas with electric power is out of the question: It would make no sense environmentally or economically. Relocating the machines would also be impossible due to their sheer size and the cost. "The plant would have to shut down," says Mählmann.

He pleads for gas imports not to be frozen completely and for the energy source to instead be rationed if necessary to at least "keep everything running on the back burner."

Germany on the back burner, a country in emergency mode. These are the kinds of considerations Germany is making right now across all sectors, industries and trades. What if Russia turns off the gas? Or the European Union bows to the growing pressure and imposes an import ban itself? Who would then get the much-coveted raw material? Which rules would fall into place? As of today, it seems certain that private consumers and their heating systems would be given the priority. Drug manufacturers and hospitals as well as public infrastructure are also at the top of the list.

After that, things get tricky. Should those industries be supplied with gas, at least in part, whose products are urgently needed by others for further processing? Or is it really a matter of only the most urgent needs, a war economy in which it is the security of supply counts and no longer the continuity of industry?

Germany is extremely ill-prepared for this worst-case scenario. A "Gas Emergency Plan for the Republic of Germany" has been in place since September 2019. But it is based on a fundamental miscalculation: In the very first pages, it states that the natural gas supply situation in Germany is "highly secure and reliable." And that the likelihood of a massive supply crisis is "very low." ...

Keep reading. 

Tiger Woods Is Back at the Masters

Paige Sprinac in her Masters' best below.

And at WSJ, "Tiger Woods Is Back at the Masters—and Says He’ll Play to Win: A historic and embattled golf career makes an unexpected return in Augusta":

What chapter are we on in the Tiger Woods story? We’ve already had the Phenom, the Ascension, the Glory, the Night, the Comedown, the Exile, the Contrition, the Comeback, the Setbacks, the Injuries, the Redemption—and then the magical victory in 2019 at the Masters in Augusta, at age 43, after we wondered if Woods would ever win another major.

Remember that? It felt like a blissful bookend to an incredible career.

Then, in late February 2021, Woods was at the wheel of an SUV when he had a terrifying single-car accident, badly breaking his right leg and foot and prompting serious worry over whether he’d be able to walk, much less play consequential golf.

And now here he is, back at it—in Augusta, of course.

Woods has a flair for the dramatic, this we know. He’s in the highest category of all-time athletes, but he’s also a saga, a combination of historic, groundbreaking talent, moments of personal recklessness, injury ordeals, and, of course, all that tabloid trauma. In his recent years, there has been more equilibrium—Woods seems happier, more grounded—but there remains a public fascination, and it will always be there.

He’s never boring, Tiger Woods.

And now he’s back. Get ready, because this week is going to be cuckoo. It’ll be Tiger Overload, times 10—maybe not quite as manic as his return to the Masters after his personal life unraveled, but more emotional, given how grave his health situation was not so long ago.

Woods all but confirmed his Augusta participation at a press conference Tuesday, announcing he intends to be in the field when the tournament begins Thursday.

“As of right now, I feel like I am going to play,” he said.

It’s a brave maneuver, a comeback at a high-profile major—a very hilly major, a physical challenge which Woods compared with a “marathon”—barely a year removed from a terrible wreck.

It has an echo from the past—Ben Hogan’s 1950 U.S. Open comeback, after a horror crash of his own. It’s a story Woods knows well. He talked about Hogan a few years ago, trying to dissuade reporters from describing his comeback as similar.

“[Hogan] got hit by a bus and came back and won major championships,” Woods said then. “The pain he had to endure, the things he had to do just to play, the wrapping of the legs, all the hot tubs and just…how hard it was for him to walk, period.…That’s one of the greatest comebacks there is, and it happens to be in our sport.”

Is it now a fair comparison? Woods made it clear he still doesn’t think so, considering all the advancements in treatment. Plus, Hogan was just 36 at the time of the accident, the world’s top player. Woods is 46, ranked No. 973. Last fall, he told Golf Digest his days as a “full-time” golfer are over, and outside of charming father-son hits with his younger child, Charlie, he’s kept a low profile.

Still, he’s Tiger. He said he’s in Augusta because he wants to compete on the back nine on Sunday.

“I don’t show up to an event unless I think I can win it,” he said.

Realistically, what would be a good result? Making the cut? Top 40? Top 10? Simply being on the first tee Thursday after multiple leg and foot fractures should be enough—but there will always be hope that Tiger goes Full Tiger.

“He looked phenomenal,” said Augusta savant Fred Couples, who practiced with Woods Monday.

Woods is self-aware enough to know it doesn’t really matter. His legacy is secure. Peak Tiger was a tightly-wound enterprise, but as he’s aged, he’s let us see the human behind the image—not long ago, during his World Golf Hall of Fame induction speech, he talked emotionally about his parents taking out a second mortgage to fuel his budding career, and episodes of racism he faced at some early clubs.

“I was denied access into the clubhouses, that’s fine,” Woods said in his speech. “Put my shoes on here in the parking lot. I asked two questions only: Where was the first tee, and what was the course record.”

For golf, his return is a blessing...

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing

At Amazon, Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

Zelensky in Bucha

The man looks worn down. He's aged 20 years in just one month. 

Video here, "Ukraine's President Zelensky says Russian actions make 'negotiations harder'."

And at the New York Times, "Atrocities in Bucha Complicate Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks."

And on Twitter, the grief of a nation:

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)."

Walking the Transgender Movement Away from the Extremists

This is an amazing essay.

From Jonathan Rauch, at American Purpose, "Today's radical gender ideologues are harming the transgender community the same way left-leaning activists harmed the gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1990s":

I’m ... well aware that many of the same arguments which were used against gay people are now being deployed against trans people. Gays were (supposedly) redefining marriage; trans people are (supposedly) redefining sex. We (allegedly) smeared all disagreement as homophobic; they (allegedly) smear all disagreement as transphobic. We were usurping democratic majorities, destroying privacy, defying nature, recruiting children, and politicizing science; they’re—well, you get the idea. Seeing the many parallels makes me humble about getting the trans issue wrong.

But I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.

A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false...

RTWT.

 

Corina Kopf

Corina, the beauty below.

And more here. 

Still more here.