War Games
Earlier this week, in the Daily, I quoted a 29-year-old Ukrainian who, in remarks to The New York Times, lamented a deadly dissimilitude.
"When rockets fly in Israel, the whole world writes about it," the young man said. "Here, rockets are flying and we don't have American bombers that are saving the sky like over Israel."
If you're the White House or the US Congress, there's no rejoinder. Or no rejoinder that won't sound, in Kyiv or in Kharkiv or in Chernihiv on Thursday, like an admission th
Johnson may be noted for his courage to support an ally, his oath of office would seem to support that view. The thing is, is this really the speaker we would have chosen to save?
The thing I don’t understand why Putin is acting so destructively. What can he gain? He is destroying the ability of the country to produce anything of value, including the 20% of Europe’s gain supply it once produced. If he knocks out the power grid, the country is finished. So how can he return this nation to any useful condition after he’s done. It’s one thing to want something on principle but it’s another to kill to create a useless nothing. In a fit of pique, for the sake of a principle, the Romans did the same thing to Carthage, reducing a thriving civilization to bare poisoned dirt. When Putin is done in the Ukraine it will be only a useless and ungovernable hulk with no value and millions of pissed off starving refugees. I don’t get it.
The Ukrainian people have been at the center of clashing empires since 1200. There is a reason that the Vikings, Ottomans, Greeks, Hapsburg, Poles, Germans and Soviets have fought over this piece of land. It is the best soil in all of Europe and it will never be without value despite how much destruction is wrought or mines are strewn.
Great piece H. I will say despite the horrifying situation in Ukraine I am not EXTREMELY pessimistic, only SIGNIFICANTLY so, if that is a distinction with any meaningful difference. I was in Kyiv two weeks back meeting with old friends who have been in the fight since 2014. Good people. Some of the best of us. The reality for them is unchanged. It’s a David vs. Goliath fight. And any “hope” in the US is largely gone at this point, given our toxic politics on the right and moral cowardice on the left among the national security policy architecture. Russia’s significant advantages at present remain only twofold. One is the volume of humanity they are willing to throw into the meatgrinder on their side, without care for what happens to them. And the second advantage is near total narrative dominance over the west. The former is easiest to defeat, sadly, but not easy, through further materiel assistance (not just the US but Europe as well, with increasing urgency) and a continued cadence of violence on the front lines to diminish that volume. As irrational a task as that is, it’s an absolute continued requirement. That latter advantage that Russia has is the most pernicious. There are no shortage of narratives out there telling us to give up Ukraine (they are corrupt, they are not a real country, they are nazis, they are on the verge of losing, I don’t want my tax dollars to go to…, and even more extreme tropes, etc., etc., etc.). Our fear of a nuclear exchange with Russia is not rational. IF we have a spine to accept that that is the case. Their doctrine is that any risk to their regime is a real trigger. Nothing they are doing in Ukraine is a risk to their regime. Said differently, even their total loss on the Ukrainian battlefield is not a risk to the Russian regime, unless we are extrapolating a political effect on Putin’s control from a perspective of what kind of weakness that signals. Fair enough, but this would be the same argument if he made a subsequent move on eastern Estonia, or some other NATO-covered territory, and then was successfully beaten back. We are ceding the narrative ground, which has actual effects on the battlefield, which may be our biggest failure when history looks back at all of this…
Outside of Ukraine, it seems that Putin’s invasion and other recent events have strengthened NATO. Sweden and Finland joining, increasing defense budgets elsewhere in EU, etc.
Russia’s grip on certain US political actors is a threat to NATO, but that existed before the invasion.
Let’s not forget that Ukrainians have had since June 28, 1996 to get their sh** together.
Also, that Iran only fired 300 out of 3,000 ballistic missiles capable of traveling up to 1,300 miles.
Ah, yes. The old “you should’ve had your sh-t together” response to a country facing an invasion by an erstwhile superpower. A country which, you’re reminded, surrendered their nuclear deterrent at our request.
And Israel fired only 0 of their ~90 nuclear warheads capable of turning Iran into a very large piece of glass. (Iran fired 0 of their 0 nukes.)
On 99% of days, your comments come from a very rational place. I don’t know where they come from on the 1% of other days.
What I believe is that there is, and should be, a prioritization of where the US sends our young men and women who have committed their lives to defending and protecting the United States of America- based on the level of risk to the people of the USA from Iran and Russia.
I happen to believe that there is a greater risk to the USA from Iran, et al, than from Russia.
And by the way, you were generous with your 99/1 comment, which I appreciate. I do recognize that behind it all, you truly are a gentleman.
A greater risk to the US from Iran than Russia? On what are you basing that belief because with all due respect (and you know I mean that sincerely), that’s as close to factually inaccurate as opinions can be. That is: Opinions can’t be “wrong,” but that one’s really, really close.
And who is “et al”? Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis? What capabilities do you suppose they possess that present “a threat” to the US? If we weren’t hanging out in Iraq and Syria for no reason, they wouldn’t pose a threat to us at all.
And contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t synonymous with Israel. Obviously, Iran’s “Axis Of Resistance” has no capacity whatsoever to target the US mainland and crucially, no desire to do so (all “death to America” posturing aside). It wasn’t Shiite militants flying planes into Manhattan and running around Paris on a murder spree, after all. It’s incredible to me that Americans continue to put more stock in what Iran and its Shiite militias say compared to what Sunni militants actually do. I don’t know about anybody else, but when I lived in large cities, I never worried about being blown up by an unhinged Iranian. What I did worry about, though, was being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, around the wrong Sunni.
Anyway, unlike Iran and it proxies, Russia has all sorts of capacity to menace the mainland, and so does Putin’s “no limits” partner in Beijing.
I’m generally a pacifist, but IMO the bullets we should send Ukraine are their old nukes, and some newer ones….along with an instant membership in NATO and all that goes with it. At least the NATO part. This should have been done when, even before, the tanks first rolled. Putin is evil and won’t stop until he’s existentially threatened or stopped dead. He’s of the ilk of Tojo and Hitler, but as you say a rickety remnant – so fortunately rather less capable (at least compared to Hitler). Israel could stand strong vs. Iran without us, and Iran is barely even up to Mussolini standards as a junior troublemaker. But allowing Putin’s Russia to win a war of conquest is accepting the geopolitical ethics of the 19th Century and before. In the coming ages where evermore powerful AI and other technologies are added to nukes and bio-weapons, that acceptance is a death wish for humanity, which the justifies the (likely way overstated) risk of nuclear confrontation today to prevent.