Category Archives: defense policy

A Strategic Blunder

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Or not. In his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Tunku Varadarajan cited the historian Robert Service as saying that two immense strategic blunders caused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The first supposed blunder is illustrative of how far our…intellectuals…have deviated from reason and morality.

The first [immense strategic blunder] came on November 10, when the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

No.

It’s never a blunder, large or small, to do a right thing, and acknowledging a sovereign nation’s right to pursue its own friendly, peaceful, or defensive ends always is a right thing. Beyond that, the right time to do a right thing always is right away.

If there was an immense strategic blunder, it was President Joe Biden’s (D) thinking he could virtue-signal with petty ink on a piece of paper and not actually have to back up those words with concrete support for Ukraine.

Full stop.

Dangerously Hypocritical

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And dangerous in its own right. President Joe Biden (D), even as he pays lip service to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation, is conspiring with Russia to let Iran obtain nuclear weapons. Here’s Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst and ex-senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council:

The US has partnered with Russia to get a new nuclear deal with Iran. This includes secret talks with the Russians over the last year and agreements where Russia would hold uranium enriched by Iran and give it back to Iran if a future Republican president backed out of a new nuclear deal.

This is dangerously hypocritical in that Biden is conspiring with one enemy nation to free up another enemy nation in the latter’s effort to get nuclear weapons. The agreement that Biden is so desperate to get back into (with its trivial tweaks) expires, ends sanctions against Iran, and with that expiry leaves Iran with an unrestricted path to nuclear weapons.

Biden’s dealings with Russia in this are dangerous in their own right because Russia is going to give that enriched uranium back to Iran under any circumstance—that uranium is a threat to us and to Israel, and that’s what Russia wants. This is how desperate Biden is to prevent a subsequent President—especially a hated Republican President—from canceling his precious deal: he knows Russia will give the uranium back.

In the end, any agreement Biden might enter into here becomes hard for future Presidents to undo only if Biden submits the deal to Congress for majority votes in each house, which would make the deal a statute, or he submits it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Absent those, all Biden’s agreement becomes is an Executive Agreement, which can be undone with the stroke of a pen—just as former President Donald Trump (R) did with the prior failure of an Obama Executive Agreement.

And a future President should cancel such an EA without hesitation, given that Russian return of uranium.

The West is Getting Serious

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Or so claims The Wall Street Journal‘s Gerard Baker. He spent 850 words touting the price Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay for his overrunning and destruction of Ukraine. Baker closed his paeon to Western earnestness with these two paragraphs:

But the price for him—crippling economic sanctions, Europe and North America in a rare show of unity, the strengthening of NATO, and the weakening of the pro-Russian forces in the West—will be high.
If we draw the right lesson, the biggest price he may pay is a renewed appreciation in the West of what our civilization has achieved—and a renewed determination to defend and nourish it.

And yet, having paid that price, Putin still will have Ukraine. How serious is the West, really, if it’s seriously considering accepting the vig it’s charging Putin for his conquering Ukraine, and calling the exchange a job well done?

How serious is the West in defending itself, really, if it continues to be satisfied with merely charging a price for Russian—and other tyrannies’—encroachment?

His Own Brothers and Sisters

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Russian President Vladimir Putin now seems intent on simply killing them. Putin’s clearly stated rationale for invading Ukraine is that Ukrainians and Russians are the same people and the area of Ukraine should be part of Russia.

Now, since his attempt at blitzing Ukraine and overrunning that nation has stalled, Putin has changed tactics.

Russian forces bombarded the center of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and warned of further strikes against the capital, Kyiv, as Moscow, frustrated in its plans for a quick victory, switched to a new strategy of pummeling civilian areas in an attempt to demoralize Ukrainian resistance.

And

On Monday, Russian forces unleashed a barrage of multiple-launch rocket fire against residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, killing at least 10 civilians, including three children and their parents who were incinerated in a car struck by a Russian projectile, and injuring at least 40, according to Kharkiv officials.

Starvation or total destruction seems to be the purpose of the 40-mile long train of Russian soldiers and weapons moving to encircle Kyiv, also.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has the right of it:

A missile targeting the central square of a city [Kharkiv, for one] is open, undisguised terrorism[.] It’s terrorism that aims to break us, to break our resistance.

Putin’s own brothers and sisters, his own nieces and nephews.

That’s Nice

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JPMorgan thinks the current suite of economic sanctions against Russia could shrink its economy by 20% quarter-on-quarter and by 3.5% on the year. JPM also admits that these estimates may badly overestimate the downward movement. Also,

In conjunction and cooperation with the European Union, Japan, the UK, Canada, and others, the United States has effectively frozen financial transactions of Russian central bank assets held by Americans, a senior administration official told reporters during a briefing on Monday.
The intended effect is to cripple the Russian economy and use up the country’s “rainy day fund” as its currency, the ruble, plummets in value, the official said.

However, these sanctions carefully and deliberately leave untouched the bulk of Russia’s income—its foreign sales of oil and natural gas, with Russia our second largest source of imported oil as of last August.

The European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States issued a joint statement on Saturday that “selected” Russian banks would be removed from the SWIFT financial system.

Except for the Central Bank of Russia, its central bank, and those oil and gas transactions.

Commerce Department unveiled…export controls [that] include semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, information security equipment, lasers and sensors. In addition, BIS’s [Bank of International Settlement, the bank of nations’ central banks] rule imposes stringent controls on 49 Russian military end users, which have been added to its entity list.
The European Union, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand announced that they would implement “substantially similar restrictions.”

Export controls aren’t export bans….

Some ladies from the South might say, “That’s nice,” regarding these economic moves, or even “Bless their hearts” regarding the persons making them.

However.

How many divisions, much less bullets, do those sanctions provide Ukraine in the here and now, as women and children are butchered by Putin’s barbarians as his invading horde begins increasingly to target apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods? How many divisions do those sanctions cause Putin to withdraw from Ukraine as his military prepares a Stalingrad-esque starvation siege of Kyiv or a Grozny-esque destruction of it, and begins its Grozny-esque burning of Kharkiv to the ground?

The economic sanctions actually are a good start, and they should continue in effect until Putin, his oligarch syndicate cronies, their deputies and assistants and lower down made men, and the members of the Duma are long gone from the Russian government and economy. But those sanctions are wholly inadequate alone. Ukraine will lie in ashes, its survivors existing in Russian serfdom, long before those sanctions take material effect.

Ukraine needs lethal weapons—antitank, antiaircraft, antimissile, along with anti-infantry and small arms—and those lethal weapons need to include, also, offensive weapons with which to drive Putin’s barbaric military out of Ukraine altogether. Ukraine needs tons of ammunition for those weapons and training in the use of many of them.

Ukraine needs food and medical supplies for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Kherson, Mariupol, and on and on.