At What Cost?

The headline and subheadline say it all:

Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine.
Kyiv remains far from victory, but the US is achieving its primary goal: containing the spread of Russian power

The strategy of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Number Two, Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, vis-à-vis Ukraine, far from working, is an utter failure and wholly immoral. This so-called strategy is not one of helping Ukraine win its fight for survival against Russia’s barbaric invasion; rather, it’s one of keeping Ukraine from losing its fight.

The news writer’s lede:

As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe.

By slow-walking delivery of most of the weapons Ukraine needs at the rate at which it needs them, by limiting the targets against which Ukraine is permitted to use our…largesse…and by withholding outright many other of the weapons Ukraine needs, all the Biden-Harris administration is doing is keeping the AFU in the field steadily bleeding, soldiers being maimed or killed outright, Ukrainian civilians, women, and children being explicitly targeted by the barbarian—and keeping the barbarian’s war continuing.

On top of that, this slow-walk and withhold only runs up our own costs in dollars and equipment, and that is leading to increasing disgruntlement among Congressional politicians with their concerns about what we’re actually getting for our money and equipment, and their concerns about whether we should continue those costs—even at the expense of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and to survive the barbarian’s invasion.

Containing the spread of Russian power? I wonder what impact on Russian power an outright Ukrainian victory would have.

Realistic War Aims

The first two paragraphs lay out the case, erroneous as it is.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.
Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The first mistake is the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This is false, as even the authors of this missive must know: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied Crimea and two of Ukraine’s major eastern oblasts.

Leave that aside, though. The larger and more serious mistake is that Ukraine needs a more realistic plan than the one it plainly stated when Russia began the second phase of its invasion in 2022. That plan is the ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine as a precondition to peace talks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already defined what a Ukrainian victory would be—see above. The problems that make achieving it difficult for Ukraine are Western—and mostly caused by the Biden-Harris administration, in particular. Start with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s tacit permission to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Russian buildup in Belorussia in early 2022—Biden said that a small invasion incursion would be OK (It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…). Continue with Biden’s offer to Zelenskyy, after Putin’s barbarians went in and tried to capture Kyiv on the fly, of transport out of the country, to which he responded I don’t need a ride…. I need more ammunition, therewith demonstrating far more courage and understanding of the situation than Biden and his team.

Continue to where we are now: Biden and the rest of the West, while bleating about unshakable support for Ukraine, do not insist that Ukraine win, only that it not lose. Worse, in keeping with that timidity and immoral support for only keeping Ukraine in the fight bleeding and dying, Biden and Europe are still(!) slow walking the arms and ammunition and logistics that Ukraine needs at the rate Ukraine needs them in order to fight to win. Biden even is telling Ukraine that US weapons may not be used against targets inside Russia except those just across the border and then only to break up an attack in progress.

With Biden preserving Russia as a sanctuary nation (and the left worries about Donald Trump “collaborating with” Russia), it’s the Biden-Harris administration that needs to better identify its role in Ukraine’s efforts to achieve victory.

Russia Gets Iranian Ballistic Missiles

So reads the headline on the Wall Street Journal editorial. Lots of them, too.

…a recent arms shipment from Tehran to Moscow included hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles.

There’s another, more important, side to this, though.

Tehran is learning from Moscow’s military experience….

Those are tactics. Even more important, Iran also is getting live-fire testing of its equipment during actual combat operations. Just on the eve of its coming attack on Israel.

The Good and the Bad

Chevron Corporation wants to keep operating in Venezuela. That’s not an unalloyed good thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron. Neither is it an unalloyed bad thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron.

The long and the short of these are these. The bad for the US is that Chevron’s oil production, and presumably sales, would provide revenue that a Maduro regime badly needs.

The good thing for the US is that Chevron’s oil production and putative sales would serve as an important impediment, albeit not a barrier, to the People’s Republic of China moving in and exploiting that oil for its own purposes.

It’s the balance between the two that’s hard to gauge.

A Mistaken Characterization

The mistake is in the headline:

IBM Shuts China R&D Operations in Latest Retreat by US Companies

When an American business, particularly one as important as IBM, removes its R&D operations from an enemy nation, that’s no retreat. That’s an advance; the move makes it harder for an enemy nation like the People’s Republic of China to access our technology or our intellectual property to use our technology and our intellectual property against us.

It would be a further advance and further advantageous were more American companies, large and small, to remove themselves from the PRC and to stop doing business with the PRC and PRC businesses altogether.