Daily Archives: 16 June 2022

“Negotiate”

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French President Emmanuel Macron is at it again vis-à-vis Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Ukraine would eventually have to hold peace talks with Russia, while Ukrainian troops fought hard to hold back the Russian invasion force in the country’s east.
“At some point, when we will have helped Ukraine as much as possible to resist, when I hope Ukraine will have won and fighting will have stopped, we will have to negotiate,” Mr Macron told reporters while visiting French troops in Romania.

Whose definition of victory, though? Whose definition of what’s possible? Whose definition of fighting will have stopped?

Will the fighting have stopped because the Ukrainians have run out of weapons and ammunition because wobbly (to use a Margaret Thatcher term) nations like France have decided for Ukraine that it’s enough and stopped supporting Ukraine materially and materiel-ly?

Will Macron decide for Ukraine that fighting—or supplying Ukraine—is no longer possible? Will Macron decide for Ukraine when “victory” had been achieved?

Ukraine is in a war for its very existence as a polity and as a society, and it’s fighting a barbarian bent on destroying that polity and society. Macron apparently has forgotten his own nation’s struggles for existence in two wars in the last century, the first of which threatened its existence but for the unalloyed aid of other nations, and the second of which did erase France from the map except for one part that was a satrap of another nation and the other part that was a rump country wholly subsidiary to that other nation, an erasure undone only by the unalloyed aid of other nations.

The only victory possible for Ukraine has already been articulated by Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That victory consists of the Russian barbarian (my term) gone entirely from Ukrainian territory.

I suggest that the only negotiation with the barbarian that is possible once he’s driven from Ukrainian territory is how far back into Russia from the Ukrainian border all roads and railroads must be torn up and plowed over.

“We, Europeans, we share a continent, and geography is stubborn: it turns out that at the end of it, Russia is still there,” [Macron] said.

Macron’s cheap snark, despite itself, puts a premium on victory on Ukrainian terms and on subsequent negotiation on my term. We do, indeed share a continent under stubborn geography. However, France is still there, as I noted above, only because other nations came, without hesitation or reservation, to its aid.

So it must be for Ukraine. France above all owes this debt to Ukraine, owes this debt to Europe.

An Incoherent Biden Diktat

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It’s in the offing. This time, President Joe Biden is threatening to inflict his “emergency powers” on American oil producing companies if they don’t produce more oil.

President Biden may resort to using emergency powers if American oil companies don’t increase output at their refineries, the president told oil CEOs in a series of letters Wednesday.
Biden’s statement blames oil companies for running “historically high profit margins” even as Americans experience surging gas prices.

Never mind that they cannot just turn on the faucet and more oil comes out of the tap. It takes lots of money and quite a bit of time to reopen capped wells, and it takes even more money and lots of time to drill a new, producing well.

But Biden’s administration stands in the way of all of that, even as he threatens his diktat. His administration has already canceled large leases in Alaska. His administration has closed most Federal lands to further exploration, much less drilling. His administration is slow-walking new lease applications. His administration is slow-walking the permits needed actually to explore, and then the permits needed actually to drill, once a lease is approved.

His administration has closed major pipelines and is slow-walking construction of other pipelines so that even were a new well drilled or an existing one uncapped, the producers would have no way to deliver output to a refiner.

Given all of that, and with existing refiners already operating at near capacity, there’s no reason to open/build new refineries—they’d have no additional oil to refine.

Beyond that, there’s the matter of trust. Beyond the time and money it takes to (re)open a well, it takes more time—years—for those costs to be recouped and profit begun to be received from the proceeds of that well. Biden’s administration, though, cannot be trusted not to pull the rug out from under those oil companies and demand wells’ or pipelines’ closure once the current—Biden-created—gas price abates.

And this: oil companies’ “historically high profit margins” exist in part (not entirely) because they’re limited in where they can commit their revenues. They can’t spend them on exploration, drilling, producing, transporting, after all because of those Biden administration policies above.

Biden isn’t alone in this incoherence, though—this is typical of his Progressive-Democrat Cabinet and of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who dominate both houses of Congress. Nor is the incoherence limited to oil: there’s the environment and Party’s separate global warming mantra. See, too, our southern border, Party’s immigration “policy,” Biden’s foreign policy, defense attitude, and on and on.