Another subtext is that the rise of Biden to the Presidency in 20 made a hot conflict in Ukraine all but inevitable.
This is because in 2014-15, there was a conflict of opinion inside the Obama administration about how to respond to what Putin was doing in Crimea and Donbass. Biden (and Nuland at State) were advocating for an aggressive response to assist the newly-installed Ukrainian regime militarily against the Russians at that time. Obama disagreed, based on his idea (correct, in my view) that Ukraine is an existential issue for Russia in a way that it is not for the US, and should not be for anyone else in the West -- his phrasing was that Russia will always care more about the result than we will, and therefore will prevail in a conflict. Biden, an old cold war hawk, bitterly disagreed.
But when Biden became President, all of that came back into play. Biden took a much more aggressive tack regarding Nato enlargement and support of Ukraine, prior to the war, than Obama had done. Trump 1 similarly had not indicated to the EU/NATO or Ukraine that the US was even tacitly supportive of taking an extremely hard line against greater integration into the EU (although Biden did state at least initially that NATO integration was not in the cards ... something the Russians didn't trust, almost certainly correctly).
Much of what happened in 22 can be explained by the aggressive positioning the Biden administration was taking with Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine in 21, and this was at least in part because Biden himself was an old cold war hawk, especially on Ukraine, and someone who thought Obama erred in 2015 by not supporting a war against Putin then. And so there was no conciliation when the Russians approached requesting guarantees of Ukraine's neutral status -- ie, that it would not be integrated into the West's institutions. The response was that this was up to Ukraine to decide -- something that plays well in Peoria, as they say (and was intended for that purpose), but which is frankly irrelevant geopolitically for all sorts of very obvious reasons for anyone who has studied the region and its history.
And so we ended up here.
At this point this will be a hard one to unravel. Even with Trump fairly aggressively trying to move everyone toward a ceasefire, it will be hard to maintain, because neither the Ukrainian regime nor the NATO countries want a ceasefire right now.
It's now coming out that Congressional democrats met with Zelenskyy and got him to sabotage the deal.
He is now issuing statements saying they won't agree to the mineral rights without security guarantees.
We need to cut Ukraine loose. Let's let Europe deal with Europe's problems. We've been saving their asses for a century, and all it gets us is more hassle.
It's weird to agree so much with Obama, but he was dead on.
The striking thing for me is how domestic and international policy/politics have now become fused. And it isn't just in the US -- the EU is similar now, as well. It used to be that foreign policy was kept separate from domestic political ideologies (something we saw as recently as the relationship between Tony Blair and GWB). That isn't really possible any longer, because all policy is now ideology, and parties are ideologically aligned across national boundaries, too.
Steve, this is top notch writing. I think it hits the bullseye on where a lot of Americans (myself included) are on this debacle.* Many of us were sucked in by the early war propaganda and social media blitz (who remembers the Ghost of Kyiv?) and the simple fact that we Americans love a plucky underdog asserting its independence.**
But we inevitably sober up a bit from all that and remember Sherman's admonition that the glory of war "is all moonshine" and Cicero's observation that "the sinews of war are infinite money" and start to come to terms with the reality that the situation is absolutely grim. We also realize that every war isn't WW2, and maybe the lines of good and evil aren't as clearly demarcated as we first thought, and perhaps we shouldn't be bankrolling the slaughter of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of young men when we can't even balance our own budget, and a stroll down Main Street in Anytown USA reveals slew of vacant real estate interspersed with "Everything must go! Going out of business!" signs and the price of eggs just hit $8 a dozen. Then the war on the Donbass starts to feel very distant in our hearts and while no one would say its unimportant, perhaps it dawns on us that it's not as vital to our national interest as we first thought, and towns like Kharkov and Kiev seem suddenly altogether far away and entirely unrelated to the problems we're facing at home in our daily lives. And then the president of that plucky little underdog shows up to the White House looking like he just finished a few sets at the gym, but without the endorphins, dour and evidently ungrateful for everything we've done for his plucky country on the other side of the world. Yet he still has the audacity to demand that we hand over a few hundred more billion dollars with no strings attached and tells our president that we're going to "feel it" too. Maybe I'm just a simple Midwesterner who lacks the etiquette and sophistication of my Ivy League betters, but that attitude just doesn't play where I come from. I recall the line of the inestimable Lawrence from the movie "Office Space", "I believe you'd get your ass kicked for sayin' something like that, man."
There's no shame in revising one's opinion in light of bitter experience and honest observation. Good on you doing it, Steve.
* There are other words that come to mind, but as this is a family-friendly Substack, I'll keep it PG.
** Unless they're communist, socialist, or we have economic interests to assert there. Then we go full bore into regime change, "Make the World Safe for Democracy", Captain America World Police mode.
Steve, can't disagree about your main argument. War is always dumb, cruel, bad, tragic, wasteful. Anything that walks us back from its precipice is good. I wonder, though if we ever had a good understanding of the $200 billion in aid and who really stood to gain, who really paid the price. Aid to Ukraine came in the form of everything the military had in their closets deemed ready to go to Goodwill. We just didn't get the receipt for the deduction. Instead we get the bills to replenish the closets. It's all well and good to reduce defense spending, but what's your confidence level that when Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman and RTX sidle up to the trough, it won't be same as it ever was at least since Uncle Dwight warned us in his farewell address?
Another thing to consider, nukes require regular, expensive maintenance, a tritium top-off, to retain their teeth: https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020/starve-nuclear-weapons-death-tritium-freeze How long has it been since Russian weapons have been replenished? Do they retain the engineering expertise to do the work? Or are the. Soviet experts all on pensions now? I bet somebody has an answer to that question given the satellite and Blackbird/Son of Blackbird capabilities available.
Finally, what if this is Z's exit strategy? For a non-megalomaniacal human, having voiced the sentence "I will resign if that's what it takes to end this war" wouldn't that thought take up residence in one's cranium and bounce around for a while?
Another subtext is that the rise of Biden to the Presidency in 20 made a hot conflict in Ukraine all but inevitable.
This is because in 2014-15, there was a conflict of opinion inside the Obama administration about how to respond to what Putin was doing in Crimea and Donbass. Biden (and Nuland at State) were advocating for an aggressive response to assist the newly-installed Ukrainian regime militarily against the Russians at that time. Obama disagreed, based on his idea (correct, in my view) that Ukraine is an existential issue for Russia in a way that it is not for the US, and should not be for anyone else in the West -- his phrasing was that Russia will always care more about the result than we will, and therefore will prevail in a conflict. Biden, an old cold war hawk, bitterly disagreed.
But when Biden became President, all of that came back into play. Biden took a much more aggressive tack regarding Nato enlargement and support of Ukraine, prior to the war, than Obama had done. Trump 1 similarly had not indicated to the EU/NATO or Ukraine that the US was even tacitly supportive of taking an extremely hard line against greater integration into the EU (although Biden did state at least initially that NATO integration was not in the cards ... something the Russians didn't trust, almost certainly correctly).
Much of what happened in 22 can be explained by the aggressive positioning the Biden administration was taking with Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine in 21, and this was at least in part because Biden himself was an old cold war hawk, especially on Ukraine, and someone who thought Obama erred in 2015 by not supporting a war against Putin then. And so there was no conciliation when the Russians approached requesting guarantees of Ukraine's neutral status -- ie, that it would not be integrated into the West's institutions. The response was that this was up to Ukraine to decide -- something that plays well in Peoria, as they say (and was intended for that purpose), but which is frankly irrelevant geopolitically for all sorts of very obvious reasons for anyone who has studied the region and its history.
And so we ended up here.
At this point this will be a hard one to unravel. Even with Trump fairly aggressively trying to move everyone toward a ceasefire, it will be hard to maintain, because neither the Ukrainian regime nor the NATO countries want a ceasefire right now.
It's now coming out that Congressional democrats met with Zelenskyy and got him to sabotage the deal.
He is now issuing statements saying they won't agree to the mineral rights without security guarantees.
We need to cut Ukraine loose. Let's let Europe deal with Europe's problems. We've been saving their asses for a century, and all it gets us is more hassle.
It's weird to agree so much with Obama, but he was dead on.
The striking thing for me is how domestic and international policy/politics have now become fused. And it isn't just in the US -- the EU is similar now, as well. It used to be that foreign policy was kept separate from domestic political ideologies (something we saw as recently as the relationship between Tony Blair and GWB). That isn't really possible any longer, because all policy is now ideology, and parties are ideologically aligned across national boundaries, too.
Steve, this is top notch writing. I think it hits the bullseye on where a lot of Americans (myself included) are on this debacle.* Many of us were sucked in by the early war propaganda and social media blitz (who remembers the Ghost of Kyiv?) and the simple fact that we Americans love a plucky underdog asserting its independence.**
But we inevitably sober up a bit from all that and remember Sherman's admonition that the glory of war "is all moonshine" and Cicero's observation that "the sinews of war are infinite money" and start to come to terms with the reality that the situation is absolutely grim. We also realize that every war isn't WW2, and maybe the lines of good and evil aren't as clearly demarcated as we first thought, and perhaps we shouldn't be bankrolling the slaughter of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of young men when we can't even balance our own budget, and a stroll down Main Street in Anytown USA reveals slew of vacant real estate interspersed with "Everything must go! Going out of business!" signs and the price of eggs just hit $8 a dozen. Then the war on the Donbass starts to feel very distant in our hearts and while no one would say its unimportant, perhaps it dawns on us that it's not as vital to our national interest as we first thought, and towns like Kharkov and Kiev seem suddenly altogether far away and entirely unrelated to the problems we're facing at home in our daily lives. And then the president of that plucky little underdog shows up to the White House looking like he just finished a few sets at the gym, but without the endorphins, dour and evidently ungrateful for everything we've done for his plucky country on the other side of the world. Yet he still has the audacity to demand that we hand over a few hundred more billion dollars with no strings attached and tells our president that we're going to "feel it" too. Maybe I'm just a simple Midwesterner who lacks the etiquette and sophistication of my Ivy League betters, but that attitude just doesn't play where I come from. I recall the line of the inestimable Lawrence from the movie "Office Space", "I believe you'd get your ass kicked for sayin' something like that, man."
There's no shame in revising one's opinion in light of bitter experience and honest observation. Good on you doing it, Steve.
* There are other words that come to mind, but as this is a family-friendly Substack, I'll keep it PG.
** Unless they're communist, socialist, or we have economic interests to assert there. Then we go full bore into regime change, "Make the World Safe for Democracy", Captain America World Police mode.
Love this, David, thanks!
Steve, can't disagree about your main argument. War is always dumb, cruel, bad, tragic, wasteful. Anything that walks us back from its precipice is good. I wonder, though if we ever had a good understanding of the $200 billion in aid and who really stood to gain, who really paid the price. Aid to Ukraine came in the form of everything the military had in their closets deemed ready to go to Goodwill. We just didn't get the receipt for the deduction. Instead we get the bills to replenish the closets. It's all well and good to reduce defense spending, but what's your confidence level that when Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman and RTX sidle up to the trough, it won't be same as it ever was at least since Uncle Dwight warned us in his farewell address?
Another thing to consider, nukes require regular, expensive maintenance, a tritium top-off, to retain their teeth: https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020/starve-nuclear-weapons-death-tritium-freeze How long has it been since Russian weapons have been replenished? Do they retain the engineering expertise to do the work? Or are the. Soviet experts all on pensions now? I bet somebody has an answer to that question given the satellite and Blackbird/Son of Blackbird capabilities available.
Finally, what if this is Z's exit strategy? For a non-megalomaniacal human, having voiced the sentence "I will resign if that's what it takes to end this war" wouldn't that thought take up residence in one's cranium and bounce around for a while?